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30th Anniversary of the Microcomputer
FreezerJam writes "The Toronto Star is running an article on the 30th anniversary of the launch of the MCM/70, the first personal computer, complete with tape drive and APL programming environment. For those of you checking your timeline, this is over a year before the article on the Altair 8800 was published. Microcomputers? Blame Canada!" There's also a story in the Globe and Mail.
Congrads Micro. If it weren't for you I wouldn't be typing this.
Decimal just has to go. It complicates everything, especially floating point. What is simpler...more elegant, a routine to print out the decimal format of a number, or the hexadecimal format?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
And 30 years ago the microcomputer was next to useless...back then I would have rather have had one of those macro computers the size of a Costco.
It packed a fair bit of power for such a small computer. It could solve complex mathematical problems and, when the work was done, run simple video games.
The most famous game, of course, consisted of two small paddles on screen: one a forward on a breakaway, the other a goalie, and a little square of light going back and forth. Yes, who could ever forget the classic "Puckong"?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Sure buddy, blame it on the computer
The Altair was the one true first personal computer, I will not submit to this blasphemy!
*proceeding to read the article*...
.: Max Romantschuk
Just goes to show that Canada *did* contribute to the computer industry before Bioware cropped up :)
Peter M. Dodge,
Chief Executive Officer,
LiquidFire Studios
Platinum Linux - www.
Lies, all lies.
Apple invented the personal computer.
Apple invented the GUI.
Apple invented the mouse.
Apple invented the disk drive.
Apple invented the CD burner.
Apple invented the DVD burner.
Apple invented the mp3 player.
Apple invented the LCD monitor.
Apple invented BSD Unix (with OSX)
Apple invented the idea of paying money for music online.
My mac owning friend assures me this is all true, and anyone who tells you different is a dirty liar!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
One can never get tird of blaming Canada.
:)
And that phrase, 'Canuck Overlords' - that cracks me up!
The computer, brought to you by the same country that brought you Hockey, beer, and cheap healthcare, the staples of American life!
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
My PDP 11/20, which I still power up occasionally is older than that.
My 1977 PDP 11/34a, circa 1976, still runs BSD 2.9 just fine
Ahhh...you young people with yer Gooey applications... When I was young we were REAL men and toggled in the bootstrap with front panel switches and loaded the OS with paper tape.
Thomas
Of course they weren't first- Something had to be there to ignite.
So Apple ignited it. Then the whole thing promptly blew up in their faces and the whole industry (or about 95%) went to hell!
My Minivac 601 could play tictactoe using its six relays. Fortysecond anniversary approaching...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They were the first to apply monopolistic business practices to the computer industry, transforming it into the multi-billion dollar industry it is today....
It just happened in the end that Bill Gates was a better monopolist than Jobs.
Unfortunately, some of what the article says is true: many great Canadian inventors do not get the recognition that they deserve. It appears that Mr. Kutt had created the first computer, which was great.
How many other people do know that a Canadian doctor was the first man to map sections of the brain that indicate smell and other senses in an order to discover what causes seizures? (For the Canadians on here think: "Doctor, I smell burnt toast!")
There are many others worldwide who, unfortunately, do not get the recognition they so richly deserve because companies with more money and power take all of the credit and force the creators into obscurity around their own inventions. This is actually a great story about how an inventor, even though it was 30 years later, is finally receiving the recognition he so richly deserved.
Given that God is infinite, and the Universe is also infinite, would you like some toast?
I imagined a beowulf cluster of these but I was sadly disapointed :(
True, patriot love!
"He is still bitter"
He belongs here in Slashdot!
Thomas
I stared thinking... which personal computers were ever made based on the 8008? The Altair is obvious, and now I know of the MCM/70. But I can't seem to recall anything else. (OK, I was born late 79, might be relevant ;)
If I've understood corretly the IBM PC bas based on the 8016 (might be wrong here), so no help there.
What computers are there based on the 8008?
.: Max Romantschuk
hehehehe, reminds me of an old joke:
What do michael and canada have in common?
They both suck cock!
. . . all the "I used to travel 5 miles in snow, uphill both ways to buy a 500 byte floppy drive to install in a 1 Hz system"
ya hey there eh? why dontcha jump off and get us some pountine and back bacon ya knob.
da nerve of some of dem, eh? Must be from Quebec.. Ahh ya hoser...
More Beer over here Eh!
Is that better eh?
Maybe Apple Records, and Apple computer could take a page from SCO's idiocy playbook. They should retroactively sue for copyright/trademark/ip infringement for having the "APL" programming environment...
Bow to my will and be forced to read my non sig! Ha Ha Ha...-your slashdot overlord
Well, comparing Apple to MS requires adding IBM to MS. Apple had the closed architecture, IBM opened theirs to grab market share by having many companies making the hardware, lowering prices. At one time both companies tried switching (Apple to open, IBM to closed) and both failed quickly.
In the meantime, Gates simply sat back, tugged on coattails (the original MS-DOS was free.... like a drug dealer, then once folks were hooked in, a price appeared), and made money off of everyone. Fairly smart business, actually.
The sad thing is the business model he follows to date. He has lost quite a few fans due to business practice alone. And they continue to walk away as he moves forward with awful licensing issues.... not to mention OS security flaws.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
I'm not sure you know what "monopolistic" means...
Wow the first microcompter had an APL interpretor instead of basic. Most kewl. APL (A programming langauge) was very powerful and some might consider it the first useful object oriented language as it used objects and the concept of inheritence. Also, powerful functions, greek keyboard and reading from right to left were pretty advanced ideas.
Why, we didn't even have software, we had to build our own out of zeros and ones. Sometimes we didn't even have ones, so we had to use an "L" and cut the leg off it. Ah, but you tell kids these days, and they just don't understand...
But... That was in 1981! As usual, IBM slept right through the personal computer revolution, but then caught up quite well. Seeing the sentence
in 1979, everyone would have laughed out loud.There actually was something like a personal computer from IBM before the PC, a thingy called IBM 5120 with two 8" diskette drives and either BASIC or APL as programming language.
Seems APL was popular them, even though you needed a special keyboard.
Apparently it means the latest Britney Spears CD costs too much.
Slashdot has expanded my wordiness to unrelented new layers!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You mean in Saskatchewan?
Where the wheat boards monopolize YOU!
Oh, wait... that's right. Heh.
But...Canada is at the heart of a vast, world-wide conspiracy! Canada ... the root of all evil (tm). :)
The Altair 8800, Jan 1975, is considered the first PC built for the hobby market. Before that hobbyists would hack PDP/8s or other minis. These minis cost a good fraction of year's salary at the time. The other approach- which I tried- was build your own microcomputer: add a keybad, keybaord, tape punch, BIOS, TV, etc.
The first Altair just had dip switches and LEDs for the data and address register. People then added tape punches, keypads, keyboards, TV, etc. Someone Harvard dropout even wrote a BASIC in assembly language that was tape-punched in.
The first "full PC" with a monitor, keyboard, and OS was Radio Shack's TR-80. At thei time I deplored: "Whats the world coming to when people can even build their own PCs anymore?"
These events are fairly accurately recorded, though simplified, in Mark Stephen's documentary "Revenge of the Nerds; Part 1". Also in Stephen Levy's "Hackers" gave more of a an east coast perspective.
In all our sons command!
In all thy sons command...
*tear* I am so proud! ;)
That might depend on what your definition of a PC is. This site might beg to differ.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
In case you were wondering what it looked like
With glowing hearts, we see thee rise,
Is the software on this thing available anywhere? An emulator would be neat...the 8008 would be pretty simple to emulate, and the rest is even easier.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Done growing fifty extra fingers?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
The True North Strong, and Free!
*cough* Alberto Santos Dumont *cough*
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Excellent. +5, Informative.
The MCM/70 used a port of York APL, a free APL for the IBM 360/370 that ran under TSO. Although the MCM/70 is almost forgotten, York APL for the 360 seems dead (no known soft or hard copies left). If however anyone had or finds a copy of York APL, please preserve it, it was a very nice APL system.
From far and wide, O Canada,
This site just says it was the first portable pc.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Anyone written a webserver for this platform?
I know that in the late 60's Xerox PARC was working on what later became the Alto Personal Computer. This computer, introduced outside of Xerox in 1973 had a GUI, mouse, many programming languages (fortran, interlisp, MESA, BCPL, etc.) and a number of very advanced tools. It had ethernet (3 Mbit PUP net) and later even supported color. Having wet my teeth on the Alto, I still feel that it was better in many respects than the early PCs. It was a totally TTL machine using 74181 Bit-Slice processor chips. Ah, the good ole dayz.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Learn how to speak, you fucking Newfie.
> You're in violation of our Trademark!
Yeah, but a Canadian trademark is only worth about 2/3 of an American trademark, right? And since possession is 9/10ths of the law and pi*(r^2), I see your E and raise you mc^2.
> The GRU will visit you shortly...
Is GRU Canadian spelling for Grue? I don't like that sound of that...
Apple had the closed architecture,
Uh, no. At the time Apple's hot seller was still the Apple II, a very open architecture machine. The closed-architecture Mac didn't come out until the IBM PC had been around for several years.
Both Apple and IBM used proprietary ROMs in their machines -- Compaq reverse-engineered IBMs, and there was a brief market in Apple II clones (both name brands like Franklin and do-it-yourself clones starting from an empty circuit board and a bag of chips) until Apple clamped down on the bootleg (EP)ROM supply.
(I built an Apple II clone -- pretty easy given the 1 MHz clock (easy tolerances) and stock TTL parts. Mostly just soldering in dozens of chip sockets -- and using a scope to debug minor problems like putting a couple of transistors in backwards...oops.)
As for Gates and Microsoft -- yeah, they were supplying variations of their BASIC interpreter to all the hardware manufacturers (they got that lesson down early), and managed to cut a deal with IBM that let them independently market PC-DOS (as MS-DOS).
-- Alastair
We stand on guard for thee!
This 30 year anniversary reminds me a of a story my father told me about when pc's first became available to consumers (or customers, whatever). He was watching TV with my grandfather and a commercial came on for some IBM home pc. (I really don't know exactly, I wasn't born yet!) My grandfathers response to this advertisement: "Why would *ANYONE* *EVER* want one of those computers!" My how times have changed. I'm glad someone wanted one of those computer things, or I wouldn't writing this right now. So here's to another 30 years!
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
See http://www.his.com/~jlewczyk/adavie/mark8b.html and other sites.
I was in high school at the time and subscribed to this magazine. It was many many times more complex than the typical hobbyist project them. I remember thinking I'd have to drop out of school for six months just to find time to build it!
This was the first computer I got to use hands on (the language being FOCAL and one had to toggle in the bootstrapping code). It sure beat handing in cards for the 360!
A good starting point to read more is here
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Now we switch to the government sanctioned french verses, just like I sang it in grade school!
Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
God keep our land,
Here's my top ten list of Canadian inventions:
10. The toonie (Two dollar coin with the punch out centre).
9. The Paint Roller.
8. Trivial Pursuit.
7. Tracer Bullets.
6. Dental Mirrors.
5. Superman.
4. The anti-G suit for pilots.
3. Goalie Masks.
2. Duct Tape.
1. Handles on cardboard beer cases.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
-celine dion
-bryan adams
thanks a lot, you hosers.
Glorious, and Free!
Seems APL was popular them, even though you needed a special keyboard.
Very much so. One of the few interpreted languages around at the time, and very powerful particularly for numerical stuff (think "Perl for numbers"). IBM and Burroughs both had mainframe based versions of it, one of the few timesharing (interactive) options. As for the special keyboard, the usual solution was a set of stickers to put on a normal keyboard, and swap out the typeball on the 2741 (or equivalent) terminal to print them. At college our Math Department had a room full of such APL terminals.
By the way, you can download Sharp APL for Linux, free (as in beer) for personal use.
-- Alastair
Hey, I used to know APL! I even wrote a 3D maze game in it. That's back when I was in High School and they had that funny idea that it was the language of the future, because some government agencies were using it.
Very powerful syntax, but a bit arcane, IIRC.
Reminder: find a new sig
I have the docs from the Scelbi-8H an 8008 based computer that came out in '73 before the Altair.
:)
Bring Back CP/M !
O, Canada, we stand on guard for thee!
Oh Canada! We stand on guard for thee!
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
The GRU was the Internal arm of the KGB, Russian secret police. A reference to Buchannan's lame 'Soviet Canuckistan' comments.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Back in 1970 I spent some time in a university group that had a desk-sized underpowered oddity called an IBM 1130. It was built using the same technology as the early System/360 machines, and seemed to have been a pilot for a small business and/or scientific machine as an alternative for mainframes: it had a modified Selectric(tm) typewriter mechanism for interactive IO, and a choice of basic peripherals - paper tape, punched cards, line printers, even mass storage! (10MB plug-in-the-slot cartridges about 15 inches across, no kidding.) Ran an early version of RPG and Fortran II (yep, not even IV which was standard by that time). In other words, it was already a relic that had been overtaken by events, but I did at least get a thorough grounding in assembly programming from it.
Anyway, one of the slot-in cartridges had a stand-alone bootable APL system, so I got to play with that a bit. Very interesting language, you could do amazing things with just a single statement provided you could conceive the work in terms of vectors and matrices, and it prototyped Perl's write-only characteristics at a time that Larry Wall must still have been in diapers.
I'm impressed that the MCM/70 got an APL implementation into a transportable box with no more than a tape cartridge for storage, but the language was already seen a dead-end at that time, even in its extended mainframe implementations. Or perhaps it would be better to say a language for a very restricted range of applications: for "real" work you used Fortran or COBOL and RPG. Or, at the micro end that came along at about the same time, Basic, Visicalc, WordStar, etc.
I'm not nostalgic for the technology of that age. Honest.
Ah yes. The good ol' days.
I liked computers better when I was the only one I knew who had one.
Proverbs 21:19
Well half the comedians in Hollywood are Canadians (Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Martin Short, Dan Akroyd, Andrea Martin and a bunch of others I can't think of right now...)
.
[bling bling] [bling bling]
( 3d tactical map flickers )
Computer voice of Saddam: "Comin' to getcha... comin' to getcha"
[bling bling] [bling bling]
( general opens hatch and begins playing with controls, failure continues )
General: "Fucking windows 98!"
(kicks machine, machie goes dead)
General: "Get Bill Gates in here!"
(door opens, Gill Gates walks in followed closely by two M16 toting soldiers)
General: "You told us Windows 98 would be faster and more stable, with a better connection to the internet!!!"
Gates: "It is faster, by over 98 percent f..."
BANG!
(Bill Gates fall to the floor dead)
General: "Get some rest men, for tomorrow we go to war!"
.
My very first job (at age 16) was programming business and accounting applications for an Altair 8800b. Summer of '77. The little computer tracked inventory, payroll, and did job costing for a cable manufacturing company with about 50 employees. It also sent assorted reports back to a corporate mainframe.
Believe me, at the time, microcomputers were very useful -- but only to those who needed them.
The field of microprocessors has a similar controversy. Intel frequently portrays itself as the inventor of the microprocessor because, supposedly, Ted Hoff and Frederico Faggin invented it when they were Intel employees.
In 1978, the United States Patent Office (USPTO) granted Texas Instruments a patent for a version of a microprocessor developed by Gary Boone, an employee. He had filed the patent in 1971.
In 1990, the USPTO granted Gilbert Hyatt a patent on another version of a microprocessor; he had initially filed the patent in 1970. His work pre-dates the work by Hoff and Faggin.
In 1996, the USPTO rescinded the patent granted to Hyatt and designated Gary Boone as the official inventor of the microprocessor. In short, neither Hoff nor Faggin are the first inventors of the microprocessor, yet we in the Slashdot community have heaped undeserved praise on them.
For further information, please read "Micro, Micro: Who Made The Micro?", "1970s -- The Altair/Apple Era", and "Processor Talk".
APL is still around, it has sprouted and transformed (with some other languages) into Dyalog, J etc... but it remains one of the leading numerical programming languages (still developed and used by many multinational corporations) that does the hard number crunching background tasks computers are perfect for.
I still use it now and then and can touch type the symbols (though the stick-on tabs are still on my keyboard).
APL... one of the most powerful languages ever... but only comprehendable by those who could have done a doctorate in matrix algebra standing on their head (perhaps that's why it remains very specialised as the code monkeys don't have a clue)...
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
the "ecosystem" needed to support a high-tech company likely couldn't be found outside California. Kutt agrees, adding few Canadians in finance and management could wrap their head around the idea.
Just kidding. I Love Canada (from a distance)!
It's all Hood
Aoccdrnig to a rscheeahcr at a uinervtisy, (and MIT is a uivtnresiy.) it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae.
The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Taht siad, I thnik that the sfhufnlig of the wrod caonnt be too werid, or pleope we be cesfunod. Epesclialy if a wrod can slpel mroe than one wrod.
Tihs msut hvae sieruos efeftcs on the evlotuoin of lnagguae.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
I still use it now and then and can touch type the symbols
I just loaded up the Sharp APL I mentioned and the scary thing is, even though it's been close to 20 years since I did any APL, I can still touch type (some of) the symbols. No stickers either, although I think I still have a set around in the back of a drawer.
-- Alastair
I mean, when you cut the legs of the L you have one and a half "1"'s. So it's not like it was THAT much work. Sheesh!
Besides, back then people only expected programs that you could write with several 1's and 0's. Nowadays they all want God in a box for a nickel! There are a lot of days at work when I'm in yet another day long process review meeting that sawing legs of the "L" seems like some kind of nirvana. You "L" sawers had it easy man!
Oh, to return to the days of 0's and L's and a sturdy saw at my side.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Lies, all lies.
IBM opened theirs to grab market share by having many companies making the hardware
Absolutely not. That sentence isn't even internally consistent. IBM was a hardware maker- how is inviting other companies into the business part of "grabbing marketshare"? And no, they did not intentionally "open" anything. The heroic efforts of Compaq's reverse engineers are well documented.
he original MS-DOS was free.... like a drug dealer, then once folks were hooked in, a price appeared
No, it was not free. IBM bought it from him for a set price, and shipped it with their PCs. It was from the beginning something hardware makers stuffed onto PCs and rolled into the total price the customer pays.
In that context that means the picture to the right of the text is the object referred to in the sentence. Let me explain some more: read the text, when you see the word "right", move your eyes over to the the right on the screen ... I'll leave the rest up to you.
...but total BS. Hockey wasn't imported but is a home-grown on-ice adaptaion of what natives were playing before the arrival of european settlers.
You may have been confusing Hockey with another popular Canadian pastime played on ice: CURLING. That sport was brought over from Scotland.
Basketball was invented in Ontario by James Naismith--he was nether French nor a monk. The venue was not an orphanage or church but a YMCA.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it& u=http://www.computermuseum.it/docs/programma-101. htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dprimo%2Bpersonal%2Bcomputer %2B%2Bolivetti%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe %3DUTF-8%26sa%3DG
Olivetti made a personal computer since 1965. What do you think. Was this a personal computer? And the recurrent question: will it run linux?
I see it's time to upgrade.
...was the high school company of Paul Allen and Bill Gates.
Motorola was making microcomputors based on the 6800 series as early as 1973. That was the year I first saw one. I am not sure of the name at that time, but later 6809 systems were marketed under the name ExorCiser or something simular.
Sig Applied For
> Dan Rather (i might be wrong,
Yes, you are. Rather is from Houston TX, definitely a 'merkin. Jennings is the one you're looking for, a Toronto native. I love it when he slips and says a canuckism like "oot".
I didn't know Clapton lived in Toronto.
Until version 5, MS-DOS was never, ever, available as a retail product. MS-DOS was something you bought bundled as an OEM product with a Personal Computer from one of the clone manufacturers. MS-DOS as a stand alone product never existed on a store shelf until the 'MS-DOS 5 Upgrade' product appeared. And even that was only an 'upgrade' product, unusable unless you already had DOS installed on your machine.
People who built their own machine, different from people who bought a clone box from Compaq or AST or any of the other clone and white-box vendors, had to buy PC-DOS, the MS-DOS cousin, from IBM, to run on their machines, or make off with an OEM copy of MS-DOS and use it illegally. PC-DOS was available as off-the-shelf software from IBM.
When I built my first PC clone, I did it by going to a swapmeet, and buying an 8088 XT clone motherboard, disk controller, an MDA display card, a couple floppy drives and a used copy of IBM's PC-DOS 3.1. I read that PC-DOS manual cover to cover (it was TERRIBLE documentation, in hindsight). I didn't buy a monitor because by then I was salvaging bare CRT chassis out of dumb terminals, reverse engineering the Horizontal, Vertical, and Video signals and grafting on a 9 pin cable on my own. I had one of those on my BigBoard (CP/M-80 clone) and since my dad had the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual it was trivial to hook up my own kludge monitor. It was years later before I had a monitor hooked up to my PC that actually had an enclosure.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Believe me, at the time, microcomputers were very useful -- but only to those who needed them.
So you're saying the only people who found them useful were people who had uses for them? Who whudda thunked it!?
Web Hosting Reviews
It seems to me that it was over 30 years ago that Ohio Scientific came out with their micros. With Kansas City cassette interface and all. It operated at 300 baud and I used to soup them up to about 1200 baud.
My first very micro was probably about 32 years ago. I clearly recall the underground feeling the store had to it.
I had to write a driver to print and even one to start and stop the floppy drive motor a few years later.
A firm called Traf-O-Data is said to have used it in a microcomputer designed to record highway traffic flow.
That was Bill Gate's first company, before MicroSoft. No kidding, and no joke.
Corroborated on Google, or here's a link industry.htm
> there was a brief market in Apple II clones
Indeed. In 1980 in the electronics market section of Seoul, Korea I came across parts and PC boards for the Krapple. A couple of months later in Tokyo I found similar items for the Japple.
I'm not making this up!
... where's Mel now?
Bendix advertised their G-15 system (29 bit word with drum memory - programmed with paper tape that could be punched in advance using a Friden Flexowriter...) as a personal computer.
The MCM was a little-known machine in its day. I was following the birth of the micro as it happened; I have a few copies of Byte Magazine #1 (July, 1975) to prove it. Nobody in that circle ever heard of MCM, I suspect.
The Scelbi 8-H (1974) was often considered the first hacker microcomputer; here's a picture: http://online.sfsu.edu/~hl/c.Scelbi8H.html . It was $580, though by itself it did little. It used the 8008. Very few were made. In early 1975, MITS came out with the Altair 8800, using the Intel 8080 CPU. Much nicer than the 8008, but the Altair was modeled on minicomputers (PDP-8, for instance) and used lots of sense switches and blinkenlights on the front panel. External teletype for I/O, for instance, and cassette. Or the SWTP "TV Typewriter" kit.
Bill Gates went to Albuquerque that summer to work at MITS, with the "4K BASIC" and "8K BASIC" interpreters. He never went back to finish his studies at Harvard. He went home to Seattle to sell software. Apple started in 1996, competing with MITS and SWTP, who by then had a popular 6800-based unit. Ohio Scientific and a few others tried to sell micros to business. IBM actually had a BASIC-speaking CRT/keyboard business micro, the 5100, in 1977 or so -- the original "PC" was the 5150, reflecting its family heritage.
Fuck 'em, eh?
In other news, the China Post celebrates 4000 year celebration of the invention of the personal computer in China.
.... grandfather Adam invented counting on his fingers. (He could even do double precision by using his toes...)
My great
Before we can accurately claim who invented the first personal computer, microcomputer, or computer, you gotta decide what criterion to use. The C?n?di?ns claim the MCM/70 predates the Altair. But so do many other microprocessor based computers. The Altair wasn't "the first," it was the "first successful" microcomputer. Others were actually better, but the Altair hit things right with technology, price and marketing. It caught the imagination.
The Germans claim conrad Zuse's invention predated ENIAC. ENIAC was electronic, Zuse's was relay based. Also, there were other relay based machines at the time to compare Zuse's machine.
Brits brag on the Colossus, but won't publish the schematics or even a logic diagram of how it worked. (From what I've been able to find, some of the Colossus' circuits were based on binary counters from nuclear lab equipment.)
The ABC was an Electronic computer that predated the Colossus and ENIAC. (Key words are Electronic computer.)
Werner von Braun said, "The human brain is the best computer we have and the only one that can be mass-produced with unskilled labor."
I remember the 1130 16-bit machine and its Fortran, and a very funny feature.
Seems that with this computer that memory accesses created static on an AM radio. Someone (probably a /. geek if there had been /. at the time) determined that based on memory access intervals he could create notes. We got a card deck of the source code and several data decks for various songs, all of which were completely recognizable when the AM radio was placed next to the memory cores.
Interesting Side Note #1: Much of the Fortran program consisted of a DO loop with about thirty CONTINUE statements before the final labeled CONTINUE statement that terminated the loop.
Obvious Observation Derived From Side Note #1: IBM did not employ good optimizing compilers in its 1130 systems.
Interesting Side Note #2: Having had more access to a CDC (Control Data Corporation) 1700 (a 16-bit mini computer with a 1.1us clock rate) at the time that also had a Fortran IV compiler, we tried porting the code over to this seemingly equivalent machine. However when we tried playing the music decks, songs that took 2 minutes on the 1130, completed in 2 seconds on the CDC 1700.
Obvious Observation Derived From Side Note #2: CDC provided good optimization on its Fortran compiler of the time.
Interesting Side Note #3: Another very amusing music program existed for the CDC 3000 series computers (a rather more powerful mid-range 24-bit computer) circa mid 1970's. The CDC 3000 series contained a speaker below the console controlled by the low order bits of (IIRC) the A-Register. Tones could be created the old fashioned way by cycling through the wave form. However the imagination of the programmers was not limited to this single speaker in their quest for the $1M sound system. Up to 4 reel-to-reel high speed tape drives (about the size of your refrigerator each) were incorporated, with their loading doors left open, to provide the bass section for a memorable performance of The Stars and Stripes Forever.
Those were the days!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So where is APL now? Does it exist for Windows? I played around with it a bit in my early computer days and was impressed with its compactness and power -- even though I had to use character triplets to specify many of its operators. Given its uniqueness, I'm surprised that it seemed to drop completely out of the scene, along with a few other languages I once used including: Algol, and PL/1.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
WOW 30 years do fly by. For my first job I worked for MCM, in Kingston and Toronto, for most of the 70's in production, testing and field servies. I had a great time helping support various government and actuarial bodies on both sides of our shared border and I was always intrigued by the impressed looks of users once they got into the system and achieved most impressive results using the MCM/APL operating system. Ah all the classified uses the various military groups thought of. Very useful!
However as indicated in the article financial troubles hampered the what was then expected to be our meteoric future and most dissappointed were the customers who wanted to grow with the systems as technologies grew. Possibly it was all the trees used to printout all that code?
All in it was an incredible environment to start my career and such a contrast to the PDPs and IBM/360 we learned programming with at college! And the developers managed to get some games to work on that little orange SelfScan display, now that's a GUI!
Ah I wish the good old days were back again when hackers was a good profession and systems virus free:)
I wish the MCM alumni well! Where are you all now? Share some electrons - MCM at DarrylMabee.com
I think the explanation for this wierd design is that at the time the 1130 was designed, memory and disks were seriously expensive, so a low-end machine from the mid-1960s targetted at what we now call small and medium scale enterprises necessarily had a very limited minimum configuration: basic memory for the 1130 was just 4K 16-bit words, there would very probably be no magnetic tape peripherals (yes, the machine did support them) let alone disk, and it would run mostly simple RPG totalise/ print tasks - loaded from decks of punched cards. Utility programs and compilers would be loaded into the system in the same way, indeed, even with the disk-based machine I played with, some of the basic utilities (obviously disk format, disk backup, disk restore, but there were others) were still punched-card based.
I suspect that Fortran was added as something of a marketing afterthought to try to broaden the appeal of the machine (with no floating point hardware and index registers held in its core memory it was pretty ill-suited to scientific work), at any rate the compiler had to work in that same very basic environment, and the implementation used was one way of doing it. With what I know now, I think that even at the time a one-pass compiler for Fortran II that fitted into 4K words might have been feasible. Perhaps multiphase approach was just the usual IBM approach at the time; perhaps there was an existing compiler for an earlier machine that served as the basis for a (relatively) quick implementation (that it was Fortran II not IV supports this, but I'm speculating again here). Whatever. By the time disk prices had dropped enough for your small/medium enterprise or overfunded university department to be able to afford them, 1130's were probably selling in such small numbers that there was no point in doing more than the minimum work needed to get the original punched-card compiler working in a disk-based environment.
If you've read this far, thanks. You can stop yawning now.
Odd that you can remember so much about a machine you never thought highly of and last touched over 30 years ago, and now find it difficult to remember how to use a particular java class (or indeed which java class you need) from just a couple of weeks ago. I guess it's time to move into management, where forgetting what you learnt a couple of weeks ago seems to be a positive advantage.
Excuse the minirant - there's a 'promote the guilty and persecute the blameless' reorganisation going on where I work - which is I guess the reason I have time to indulge in long postings to /.
Oh, indeed. Summers were sunnier then, life was much more fun, on the other hand much less general comfort and none of the mixture of joy and tribulation that come from a family and children.No, he said for those who "needed" them. So, even if companies had uses for them, if they didn't need them, they didn't buy them.