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"Fact 1: MIT has granted Full Professorships to people without degrees."

Can you cite an example, please?

I don't believe that Ed Fredkin has any degrees (except probably honorary ones, I've seen him titled as "Dr." and he is certainly deserving), but he was appointed a full professor at MIT in electrical engineering in the sixties, while on his way to becoming a pioneer in artificial intelligence (reversible computing, the Fredkin Gate, etc.) and establishing his concept ("digital physics/philosophy") that the universe can be represented as a discrete/finite cellular automata, or essentially as a computer program. He dropped out of Caltech at 19 to become a fighter pilot and built his experience at MIT Lincoln Labs and through a career as an early computer entrepreneur, working with the PDP-1. He has held other positions as a professor in physics and is currently a "Distinguished Career Professor" at Carnegie Mellon.

I'm certain there are other examples where MIT professors lacked advanced degrees particularly in the early computing days and where successful entrepreneurs have returned for appointments. Certainly this is common at Ivy league schools such as Harvard where former politicians and other notable figures frequently hold appointments. To someone's point about accreditation, certainly the qualifications of the faculty are an important component but this does not generally require that 100% of teaching or research staff hold advanced degrees, particularly if they have practical experience and/or published research.

You mean something like the Computer History Museum in - surprise - Mountain View, CA? And yes, they exhibit Google hardware...

http://www.computerhistory.org/

Specialist

Like this early rackmounted array of Google servers which was displayed at the Vintage Computer Festival in 2005 and now is (I believe) on display at the Computer History Museum (which is worth the effort to tour if you are near the Palo Alto/Mountain View California Area.

From my write-up about the rack: The rack in the picture holds 4 standard Pentium II Motherboards per level and has a total of 80 Linux (2.0) servers per rack. Since they were standard MBs they had to get creative with things such as wiring and insulation (which was, in this case, cork-board.) The panel shows the server room as well as talks about the fire dangers of doing such a design. (Google is a neighbor to the Computer History Museum BTW). (closeup)

For more detail, http://apple.computerhistory.org/discuss/msgReader $72?mode=topic

I knew this silicon thing was such a fad!

Now, the cool thing about magnetic core memory is that it saves its state, just like Flash. When the Computer History Museam restored a PDP-1, they were able to inspect the old contents of its RAM.

I knew this silicon thing was such a fad!

Now, the cool thing about magnetic core memory is that it saves its state, just like Flash. When the Computer History Museam restored a PDP-1, they were able to inspect the old contents of its RAM.

Some that I've been to (these are all excellent):
Arizona Science Center (Phoenix, AZ)
St Louis Science Center
Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose, CA)
The Exploratorium (San Francisco)

Some I have yet, even though I live in the area:
Children's Discovery Museum (San Jose, CA)
The Intel Museum (Santa Clara, CA)
Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA)

If you're looking for geeky museums, the SF Bay Area probably has more of them in a smaller radius than anywhere else in the USA.

The Computer History Museum has been on my list of places to see before I die for awhile. It's that "other" geek haven in Mountain View, CA.

Efforts should be made to capture pop culture as it goes by just for the sake of history. It is interesting to think of wikipedia as just such a repository. Provided of course, as already pointed out, a copy of it is still around in 100 years. With technology advancing as fast as it does, there is a real danger of things being left behind and forgotten. The Computer History Museum is an interesting example of trying to capture software before it is lost.

Repeat after me. The Internet is not designed to survive a nuclear war.

Chant that a few times.

Don't believe it? Look up what the effects of a nuclear bomb's EMP pulse are. One nuclear bomb exploded in the stratosphere over the middle of the USA would knock out every public computer network for the continental USA. Oops, the first shot in the nuclear war doesn't even have to kill anyone and the Internet is already down!

Now why do people believe this legend? The source of this legend is the fact that Paul Baran at RAND was one of the first to publish the idea of packet switched networks. He came up with the idea while trying to design secure networks that would withstand nuclear attack. The idea was independently invented by other researchers, including Donald Davies, who were interested in reliable communications but didn't particularly care about nuclear war. The term "packet", incidentally, is due to Davies. These groups did not become aware of each other for a few years. Significantly the groups that actually went to build packet switched networks didn't hear about Baran until after they'd actually built prototype packet switched networks!

The problem that the original ARPANET was designed to solve was much more mundane. Take a room with 3 computers from 3 manufacturers. How do you get them to talk to each other? Furthermore how do you get computers that are a ways from each other to talk? They weren't concerned about hardening the equipment for nuclear war - in the event of an EMP the computers would all be toast anyways. They just wanted them to talk under normal circumstances. Packet switching was chosen for the simple reason that it offered the best performance of the alternatives that they were aware of. In fact one can trivially demonstrate that reliability wasn't a particularly important consideration in the early network - the original backbone was linear. Cut it in one place and the network was down. Not exactly reliable, is it?

Now in fact there is an inherent reliability to packet switched networks. Stories you hear of the Internet starting to work after natural disasters faster than regular telephone lines are true. But that's an emergent property of the kind of network, not a design consideration. (And I've already pointed out that the actual Internet wouldn't survive a nuclear war.)

The moral of the story is that the Internet is not, and never was, intended to withstand nuclear war. There is a kernel of truth to the story, one of the inventors of the idea of packet switching was trying to design networks that would withstand nuclear war. But that is not the whole story and it isn't a particularly relevant piece of the history.

Incidentally for a basic timeline and the people involved, see this history.

Prior art: According to Knuth (Vol3, "Sorting and Searching"): "One of the first large-scale software systems to demonstrate the versatility of sorting was the Larc Scientific Compiler developed by Computer Sciences Corporation in 1960."

More prior art: In 1960 Quicksort was developed. Working for the British computer company Elliott Brothers, C. A. R. Hoare developed Quicksort, an algorithm that would go on to become the most used sorting method in the world.
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1960

Why is the parent poster getting modded up as informative? I'd trust Amit over what appears to be an obvious troll. I'd also trust the 6500 spec sheet and the original Apple manual that I managed to dig up.

For example, it says in the Spec sheet "Addressable memory range of up to 65K bytes", "On-the-chip clock options: Crystal time base input", etc:

6500 data sheet

"Microprocessor Clock Frequency: 1.023 MHz"

Apple I Manual

Thanks, Alan. Gamers everywhere are in your debt.

Thanks, Alan. Gamers everywhere are in your debt.

Thanks, Alan. Gamers everywhere are in your debt.

Next week's big festivities involve a restored PDP-1.

Their collection of hardware is pretty much unmatched, and is open to the public. What's on display is the tip of their collection's iceberg. Who knows what might be kicking around in the background, just waiting for a small team of geeks to restore?

And conversely, who knows what might be kicking around in your classmates' basements that's on CHM's wish list?

Next week's big festivities involve a restored PDP-1.

Their collection of hardware is pretty much unmatched, and is open to the public. What's on display is the tip of their collection's iceberg. Who knows what might be kicking around in the background, just waiting for a small team of geeks to restore?

And conversely, who knows what might be kicking around in your classmates' basements that's on CHM's wish list?

Next week's big festivities involve a restored PDP-1.

Their collection of hardware is pretty much unmatched, and is open to the public. What's on display is the tip of their collection's iceberg. Who knows what might be kicking around in the background, just waiting for a small team of geeks to restore?

And conversely, who knows what might be kicking around in your classmates' basements that's on CHM's wish list?

Next week's big festivities involve a restored PDP-1.

Their collection of hardware is pretty much unmatched, and is open to the public. What's on display is the tip of their collection's iceberg. Who knows what might be kicking around in the background, just waiting for a small team of geeks to restore?

And conversely, who knows what might be kicking around in your classmates' basements that's on CHM's wish list?

Like I said elsewhere last year,

A few days after SGI was delisted, I stumbled across an old (1994) article about SGI while I was poking around in one of my favorite places, the Wired archive.
 
(I'm a huge computer history junkie--if nothing else is happening, I can amuse myself for hours digging up old computer stuff on the web. And if you're ever in the San Francisco Bay Area, I highly recommend visiting the Computer History museum.)

Anyway, the article has this quote from SGI founder Jim Clark:

Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.

"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."

Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."

Funny how things can change in 12 years. :-)

Seems like lots of people who make the PC==Mac argument don't own an Intel Mac.

It seems to me like lots of people who make the PC==Mac argument know what PC stands for & have been using the term PC to describe Macs through Apple's motorolla, ppc and intel days.

Have a look at these old Apple Manuals/Advertisments and you will see that Apple has been calling their products Personal Computers since day one.

It is only the post 1992 Mac Fanboy crowd that started differentiating - and quite frankly, I'm dissapointed that Apple is starting to join in.

Magazine Advertisement for Apple ][.

Reportedly, the MITS Altair 8800 also used the moniker in 1975 but I didn't quickly find documentary evidence.

I think their endowment is $52B; they haven't given that away. But, they did kick down $15M for the computer history musuem , so they're pretty much cool forever in my book.

For instance, as early as 1964, the IBM 1403 line printer was programmed to produce music. Here is a page with a song sheet. While I cannot find a reference, I remember someone else at IBM who used multiple tape drives as a kind of orchestra, also in the 1960s.

They all go to the Computer History Museum! I'm not kidding! They are just about as facinating as the exhibits.

Despite the revisionism in the phrase "Cray co-founder", he is an acknowledged HPC expert. See Burton Smith's bio at the Computing History museum. However see also the rather self-serving Seymour Cray Award he received during his tenure at Cray. Now what's a hot iron hardware guy doing joining Microsoft you might be thinking? Well take a look at his articles.

well then, obviously bill gates is the biggest visionary there is. I mean, who controls almost all business interaction and over 90% of the desktop market? MS and its software. now, of course by 80% of the music players you do mean 80% of mobile MP3 players. And of course, they weren't first in this, jsut the first to popularize it. But we don't say Windows is a revolutionary, do we? just by being the biggest doesn't always make you the visionary. every now and then, even apple just takes what others started and improves it. you are spreading outright lies about the 3 1/2 inch drive. scroll down at: http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/timeline.p hp?timeline_category=cmpnt Components Sony introduced and shipped the first 3 1/2" floppy drives and diskettes in 1981. The first signficant company to adopt the 3 1/2" floppy for general use was Hewlett-Packard in 1982, an event which was critical in establishing momentum for the 3 1/2" format and which helped it prevail over the other contenders for the microfloppy standard, including 3 1/4", 3", and 3.9" formats. let's not give credit where it isn't due. Let's do give credit where it is due. Apple was the first to give the world a PC that used a mouse and GUI that a non-business entity might buy(though equivalent to about 4700 dollars today, affordable is a little bit of an overstatement). Its specific Windowing system did become the de facto style but was not by any means the only one or the first.

Anyone notice which $15 million donor is missing from the Hall of Fellows awards? Too bad they already picked their 2005 winners.

Anyone notice which $15 million donor is missing from the Hall of Fellows awards? Too bad they already picked their 2005 winners.

I'm glad their web site is full of tiny pictures with unreadable text. Example here. I suppose I have to visit the museum in person and pay admission to find out what that diagram says. On the other hand, I could probably look at it elsewhere on the web, for free, and with much more information surrounding it.

Sounds like a job for The Computer Museum.

I tihnk the problem lies with the poster (this means you) not knowing how to make a proper link.

Haven't been to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, have you? I reccommend seeing what they have and where they're going with it.

Apple has been shipping a one-button mouse longer than anybody else currently in the computer industry has been shiping any kind of mouse.

Agreed. The key word is "shipping".

In this matter, it's not Apple that's being different. They were here first.

Correction: They weren't quite "here first". They got a LOT of their ideas from the Xerox Alto system.

Come to think of it, they didn't really ship first either because the White House and the U.S. Senate each had at least one.

...and that looks like a three (3) button mouse to me.

They've got an IMP at the Computer History Museum on Shoreline in Mountain View that I saw a few months ago... not to mention a whole bunch of other really neat machines. Check out their site at http://www.computerhistory.org/ ... mouse over "Exhibits" and click on "Visible Storage", enter the exhibit, click on the 60's-80's link, the "Significant Machines" and then "Interface Message Processor" and you'll be treated with a (small) photo of it and a bunch of info.

As a side note, anyone interested in reading more about the history of the Internet should pick up a copy of "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. It was a good read that I recommend (and not just because I learned that three people who played a significant role went to the same high school that I did).

... or, if you're ever near Mountain View, California, why not see them in person (and a whole lot more)?

Computer History Museum website

Uhm- Ferrite Core memory vibrated along the plane that they were magnetized in. Most of them were installed in vibration isolation enclosures. Of course, computers weighed a freakin' ton then, and did not tend to walk. They worked by hard magnetizing beads or toruses of ferrite (think iron) All that said, I think the focus needs to be on the head structures. Now I was reading the discussion, and wondered about the application of the piezo sheet concept as the head to a drive instead of the drive itself. The other key to consider has less to do with the size and structure of the hardware and more the routing and connectivity of eeny little wires. A large-track head on silicon that can decode and communicate over fewer than a gazillion wires would be better for the industry.

FTP is quite old, and was quite useful even before gopher and later http made zipping files back and forth trivial. The genius of Berners-Lee was rather like the mythical invention of the Recees Peanut Butter Cup. He figured out a way to combine a hypertext markup scheme with internet file transfer. The individual component ideas had been lying around for at least seven years (and possibly since the dawn of ARPANET) when he put them together in a limited whole. Active scripting was a bit more clever an idea, but only marginally.

I will grant that it's a good thing TELNET is dying in favor of SSH-- security (network and computer alike) has made great progress since then. So has bandwidth. So has accessibility to the general public. But it's no more funamentally different in terms of power than modern desktop computers are compared to those of days of yore.

From their "This Day in Computer History Page":

October 22, 1941
Microprocessor Co-Inventor Mazor is Born

October 28, 1937
Microprocessor Co-Inventor Hoff is Born

Odd isn't it? Although I didn't know who to credit with the invention of the microprocessor because Wikipedia tells me that Federico Faggin invented it.

Considering the page on Hoff says he invented it (without any other credits) I'm not sure who to thank. Stanley Mazor doesn't even get a page. Which Slashdot nerd will help us at Wikipedia fix this?

Dunno, but I bet you got a warm tootsie because the seat held part of the cooling system and power supply.

...Your square boxes will never look as sexy as our 'Love Seat'

Linus thinks working on small, embedded, systems is perhaps more important then massive scaleability with SMP. That said: SGI has been producing massivly SMPd machines that run Linux for a long time. Prob with MIPS first, definitly with IA32 now, and with a heavily hacked kernel, but still Linux.

I think Suns strategy of "ultraslows, but many" is much older then their "big iron" history. At least as far back as 32bit Sparcs, desktops, not to mention "workgroup" servers, were SMP capable. I dont know if it is realy a strategy so much as a necessity given RISC style processors. Of course, extending that argument, IA32/64 systems, compared to 370 arch IBM Mainframes are RISC too. And to scale up IA systems, you go SMP. Comparing Sun and Intel micro computers to a mainframe might be compleatly useless though :)

And there was actually some audio for line printers, though I don't know if anyone ever transmitted it over a modem. Surely someone RJE'd an audio program to another site?

...of Mountain View's Computer History Museum. I'm sure Chris would love to spend some time in Australia! He knows his stuff. And he obviously knows how to run a kick-ass museum.

You can see Shakey at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

It was expensive, didn't have the simplicity of HTML as a starting point and, perhaps, was a little ahead of its time. (Client/Server was still catching on.) The fact that few mainframe guys liked Macs may have been a factor, too.

Links:

"The only problem with the MacworkStation [a software program] is that instead of making it a public domain standard, Apple is licensing the source code for $1500 to 'interested' parties" - MacTech Magazine archived article

Apple Computer History Weblog

Dennis uses Aleph? Perhaps you are thinking of the old Alef language from Plan9, but that is dead! ComputerHistory.org says it is his favorite language, It was removed for the 3rd release of Plan 9, which was about 4 years ago, and replaced by a new threading library for C.

Rant mode on...But enough with the body insults! Haven't you ever seen bodies in all their glorious colors and shapes before? If yours isn't in the top 1% of bodies, do you live in a Burka? The costumer is having fun- lots of other posters here seem to be having bitter parties out of some misguided idea that if you aren't perfect- don't be visible? If you don't have the equivalent of a 2004 Mercedes M-class body, don't show up on the road? Have you ever looked at the great minds in our field? You'd really forbid them from being in your hottub (California / silicon valley style) just because they're not the most aesthetically pleasing bodies? Bah! Rant mode sputtering off...

UCLA was also, irnocially, very slow to get a Web site.

QuickTime is the API which started affordable desktop video (nor all-software video editing like Premiere, FCP, etc., incidentally).

QuickTime came out a couple of years before Mplayer, I think...