Slashdot Mirror

According to one audience member quoted on Macintouch, Jobs "wondered aloud if computers today would have proportional fonts had he not sat in on that calligraphy course".

If the late Jef Raskin had anything to do with it, they would; he recalls lobbying for versatile bitmapped displays and not hard-wired fixed width character generators, against Jobs and Wozniak.

Sadly Jef is no longer with us to defend the account, but he left a detailed history, The Mac and Me:

In my 1967 thesis, "The Quick Draw Graphics System," I took issue with the display architecture then in vogue. ... There were only a few CRT terminals at the Penn State computer center, and these could display only letters and symbols, usually in green or white on a black background. Hamstrung by specialized electronics -- in particular a circuit called a "character generator" -- that permitted no other use, they could not display graphics. One display at the center could draw thin, spidery lines on its large screen. With it you could do drawings that now seem crude, annotated by child-like stick-figure lettering.

In this milieu my thesis was radical in suggesting that computer displays should be graphics- rather than character-based. I argued that, by considering characters as just a particular kind of graphics, we could produce whatever fonts we wished, and mix text and drawings with the same freedom as on the drawn or printed page.

[Later, at Apple...]

The other Steve, Steve Jobs, was a delight to talk to about less technical aspects of computers. His enthusiasm and business orientation were exciting. They were just starting on the design of the Apple II, and I tried to convince them that they should employ bit-mapped graphics and not have a character generator, but Woz thought that software couldn't handle the character generation task fast enough and Steve Jobs didn't understand why I thought it so important.

I had a different vision of what a microcomputer should be like, and PARC's programmers and my own work had convinced me that software could do the job. I tried to convince Woz by working out the code to put bit-mapped characters on the screen and calculating timings by counting cycles, but the Steves were not open to the idea.

The concepts I espoused were far from the mainstream of computer design and for all their mold-breaking thinking, Steve and Steve were very strongly conditioned by the minicomputers they had seen.

Later in the essay, Raskin notes that Jobs was eventually persuaded to green-light the Apple II's "high res" mode. Only Steve himself knows if an enthusiasm for calligraphy influenced the decision... but even had he not, proportional fonts were already being designed into the expensive research workstations of the day, where the hardware budget was orders of magnitude greater than an Apple II's.

I don't have a reference to it, but I thought that Admiral Grace Hopper and her crowd had done something just like this generations ago simply by hooking up the accumulator of a Univac to a D/A converter, which in those days resulted in audible frequencies! A quick search on Google found something similar was done on a CDC 3300 (search for CDC 3300 in this page).

Cheers,
Richard

It's actually a good idea of being a computer historian. However, there are a lot of books out there already covered the most important information about the changes and improvements of the computer industry, hardware and software.

You may want to look at Structured Computer Organization from Andrew S. Tanenbaum (Creator of MINIX). It covers the changes of programming languages, instruction set, computer architecture, milestones in development of digital computers (Vaccuum Tubes to Transistors to VLSI), Moore's Law, Pentium , UltraSPARC, picoJava, storage, RAM, .... to how to design your own CPU.

You may find it too advance to under the whole designing CPU chapters, but it sure gives you a general idea of the history of computer in its introduction chapters.

You can also try the Computer History Association of California, and the Computer Industry History page from Electronic Software Publishing Corp.

What I meant to say was:

Actually, there are a lot of people who do collect computers and are working to preserve the history of the computer industry.

Sorry... It was early...

It's a weird thing that computers, in this age when we record every darn thing ever done and collect cereal boxes or Band-Aid boxes, would have an unclear ancestry. Of course, I blame it on military secrecy.

Actually, there are a lot of people who do collect computers/A> and are working to preserve the history of the computer industry. For example, see if you know what the first personal computer was!

Coming up soon is the Vintage Computer Festival where collectors, historians, and enthusiasts will gather for a week-end full of speakers, exhibits, and trading. Don't miss it if you possibly can!

As was mentioned in the article, an attendee at last year's Vintage Computer Festival bought one for $2,000. (The buyer wants to remain anonymous.)

I have heard of confirmed sales in the $10K area, and there was apparently an auction some time ago where one sold for something like $30K (I seem to remember Woz being involved?)

This one will probably sell for $40K or more -- there are some very well financed collectors running around these days.

The one at Fry's in Sunnyvale, btw, belongs to the Computer History Association of California.

Shameless plug: Check out my collection as well -- I don't have an Apple I, but It's on my wanted list.

There are other contenders for "first" computer, going back to the 30's, but that's not really my area of interest, so I haven't paid much attention to them, I'm afraid.

Anyway, here's a few more British historical computing links for those who like nostaligia. If anyone would like to add some links to sites about other historical computers- of any nation- I'd be most interested.

Here are a few more links that you may find of interest:

• The Vintage Computer Festival (version 3.0 coming in October!)
• The Blinkenlights Institute
• The Computer History Association of California (Currently inactive, but still lotsa links)
• My own Classic Computer Collection (plug, plug)

There are plenty more, but those should give you enough to get started, and each has lots of links to explore.