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How Computers Work... in 1971
prostoalex writes "A recent submission to my free tech books site included a title that I thought many Slashdotters would enjoy. How It Works: The Computer (published 1971 and re-published 1979) is an exciting look into this new thing called computer. The site presents the scanned pages of 1971 and 1979 editions, and you can see how the page on computer code changes over 8 years from punchcards exclusively to magnetic tapes."
for everything even remotely related to computation is the intellectual property of SC0.
you'll have SCO on your ass, you're distributing their code.
Now let me go get my soldering iron, a trained monkey and a monitor I can get a tan from and we got it made. The monkey is for fetching stuff and "debugging" btw..... (hands monkey a hammer)
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
Looks like a laundromat to me.
Some people are like slinkys. They're useless, but it puts a smile on your face to push them down the stairs.
I recently met someone I hadn't seen in twenty years. He used to be a programmer where I worked and now he's teaching at a college.
...
He told me that his students call him 'the old fart' and accuse him of being antiquated. I told him that the solution was to prefix anything he said with the word 'embedded'. All of the stuff that he used to do on mini-computers in the seventies is exactly what we are doing on chips today. In fact some chips have exactly the same architecture as the minis that he used to program. Plus ca change
...what you call old news?
works fine for me, you using the release version 1.0?
I presume it was the 79 edition they recommended.
What a lovely nostalgia trip. Thanks!
I think CmdrTaco is showing us the instruction booklet for the /. webserver
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
My first thought when I saw this picture was:
"Honey, what's this magnetic tape labelled 'pr0n'?"
I really want to have one of those when I grow up. :)
Or maybe not...
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Is it me, or were they a little optimistic that there would be just as many women as men working on computers?
"Yeah, I remember paying almost a thousand dollars for just a ONE TERABYTE hard drive!"
-- Gargonia
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
... is how well your site's holding up under the slashdotting!
On topic, though, it is a quaint little trip you've provided. It's fun to see the historical context of a chosen career (a chosen passion, I should say). In 1971 I was 1 to 2 years old, and don't recall what the professional goal was. Later it would be "astronaut," until grade school, when video games (c.f. this posting) made "computer programmer" be the new (and final) choice.
Apparently, the publisher, Ladybird Books, has had its own interesting history, and is now part of Penguin.
Thanks Dude. Personally, I enjoy reading old computer books & magazines. I think it's kinda cool. Thanks for providing the books for free.
Cheers,
John Galt
Huh? Works fine... always has done.
The people who wrote this book basically felt that a child of 8 should not have the inner workings of a computer being hidden from them, but be taught th technical side from day 1.
Anyway, 20 years later this book is still where I first learnt about flow charts and cpu registers!
.. describing huge spaceships navigated by super-computers with magnetic tapes and stuff, which were so fast they could calculate data dozens times faster than any human :)
Wow :)
A quick ctrl +, ctrl - can sort the problem in a fraction of a second. Still not great though I'll give you.
I guess we now know different, with Atanasoff/Turing/Flowers. We were always taught that ENIAC was first when I did my studies back in the early '80s ....
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
does anyone else find it annoying that these are scanned as jpg images? it might be a bit easier to read if the images were thrown into a pdf...
Wave upon wave of demented avengers March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
Pressing Ctrl-+ and then Ctrl-- reformats the page nicely.
Actually, my parents have the original book from 1971. It was part of a series.
OK they were probably more interested in less geeky stuff at the time, but the principles of electronic data manipulation haven't changed since then. Sure, now we've got gigahertz+ processors and all that, but a bit is still a bit, regardless of media (so now trees around the world can breathe easier knowing punch cards & tape are obsolete).
Stuck down a hole! In the middle of the night! With an owl!
For some reason the digital/analog thing always stuck in my mind.
...is this book goes into quite some detail (like the method of magnetic polarity changes on a tape). Now you might not think that particularly remarkable - but the book was published by Ladybird - i.e. it was a children's book published in Britain, aimed at children between 8 and 10 years old!
:-) I still test 9v PP9 batteries on my tongue!
I remember Ladybird books from my childhood - starting with "Magnets, Bulbs and Batteries." That book had the advice to test a battery, stick the terminals on your tongue (but it admonished you to never do it with a large battery). Just imagine trying to publish that advice now
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"A small digital computer designed for the businessman." Very humorous indeed. LOL!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Programming in machine code is a job for a highly trained person, whereas programming in a high level language is something most people can do provided they are given time to learn the rules that must be followed"
That was optimistic. We have languages such as C++, Python, Java etc now (compared to FORTRAN and COBOL they mentioned in the book) and still programming is sort of a geek thing.
Here: http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/005.html/
R3
Stuff that matters: circuitbreakers, vacuum-cleaners coffee makers, calculators generators, matching salt+pepper shakers
I remember having paper tape and card jobs to worry about.... in the early 1990s.
So even though the book may suggest that mag tape was the only way in 1979, in practice much of the world retained their paper media for a long time.
After all, we had plenty of expensive specialty machines that read cards and paper tape. It's hard to convince your boss to unload $millions$ in equipment costs so you can upgrade to a mag tape or mini-floppy (that's 5.25") based system.
I'm very glad we skipped all of that interum media crap and went straight to TCP/IP over Ethernet. The most painful part was that one card job that lasted until 1993 or so.
Interestingly enough, the first part my company outsourced was keypunch operators. In the end, they outsourced all of IT.
It even has a replica of a 5&1/4" floppy that you can remove and insert into a popup disk drive!
I've been glansing through the book. Although most things are laughingly dated, I find it disturbing how some things really didn't change that much. For instance, people still think that computers can think for themselves.
Enybody feeling the same thing?
Did Ladybird Books Ltd give permission for their copyrighted material to be distributed in this way? You nasty pirates should be ashamed of yourselves, taking money out of hard-working authors' pockets like that. It's theft!
Seriously though, isn't stuff like this reason enough to review the copyright laws? This won't be public domain for decades to come, and the market for it has long since passed away.
Oh, little did they know.
Obviously written for a young, general audience rather than technical people. Then again that's exactly what I was part of at the time. I wasn't actually born in 1971, I was born in 1972. Strangely though, I remember the first cover not the second - perhaps I had an old edition? Anyway, my point here is that despite being a supposedly non-technical book, look at the language and level of detail covered. Look at this page, for example - get that in many introductory books these days? No, you don't. Interesting how depth of knowledge changes.
Anyway, can confirm that this piqued my interest enough to be excited about computers when the first wave of home computing hit the UK (about 1982, a ZX Spectrum 48k for me). Haven't really looked back - I now have a computing career, and whilst many factors lead to me wanting that it must be said that this book was the first to nudge me in the right direction.
Cheers,
Ian
I tell anyone who asks that if they can tell someone how to do something in order, then they can program. And once they get the basics down (logical test, loops, etc) it's all pretty much the same.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
or ctrl + scrollwheel (if you have it). Works better for me, since i dont have to let go of the mouse. Yeah, laziness :)
We had few years ago a software in the works, which had been estimated bit too optimistically when it came to time and money. One old timer who had done coding in his time from the buyers side suggested as a remedy for next time to write all the code first into a notebook before writing it to the computer, because thats how it was done in their days. Even when we pointed out that the project consisted over sixty thousand lines of code he couldn't be convinced othervice.
Please do not feed the trolls. Have a nice day.
Don't respond to trolls. Regardless of the type of response, you will only encourage them.
I managed to miss this book (series?), but I still have my handbook for my "Computer Merit Badge" kicking around, complete with the then obligatory explanation/illustration of core memory, and the picture of the latest and greatest IBM mainframe (I think it's whatever preceeded the S/360). Now I have two resources to refer to when my nephew askes, "What were computers like when you were my age?"
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
Reminds me of some of the books I have at home. The 1981 edition of Tomorrow's Home has a fantastic description of how technology will change your life. Predictably it features dodgy Buck Rogers technology being used by Jason King lookalikes. It also shows someone using a five-button mouse - an interesting item that shows how the modern computer interface was embedded in modern culture at the time.
This title remains the copyright of Ladybird Books (part of the Penguin Group). IANAL, but there are a bunch of them upstairs in my office (yes, I work for Penguin) looking into this one.
Cheers,
Ian
I wish my PC had a built in washing machine, like the one the guy is using on page 9 'mini computer system'.
And they call it progress.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Born in the early 50's with a hand in electronics since messing with old radios in my grandfathers chicken coup at age 4, I've never felt any 'magic' associated with computers. Adders, registers, programs 'written' in wire on a card were all easy to understand. I messed with early RTL IC's in high school and have played with computer hardware ever since. However, while computers are grand tools, they've never seemed 'magical'. Not like radio. Radio was and always has held a much greater fascination. I attribute this to the deterministic nature of the computer as opposed ot the 'fishing' aspect of radio. With radio, you never really know if it is going to do what you ask it to. A computer does exactly what you ask it to. Yet, I see this aura of magic in the eyes of others when they work with computers. Where does it come from? The humorous answer is that their computers don't seem to behave in a deterministic way (spare me the Mr. Softie humor). But, many postings on
These comments apply to digital electronic computers. I can't help but see some magic in wetware (mouse brains flying airplanes).
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
"1943 saw the need for computing artillery firing charts, and ENIAC was born."
This always struck me as odd. I think it went more like: Shit. We invented the programmable digital computer. We've got 1001 uses for it so we need to declassify it. We can't very well declassify what we've been USING it for, so we gotta make up a bullshit reason for inventing it.
So uh The ARMY needed a programmable whatsahoozit to do... um... computation... er... The army computes what now? Ok artillery firing charts! Yeah the reds will buy that.
My school used something almost exactly like this for their only computing class... in 1995. I remember one good quote from it "Most floppies are 8" to a side, but 5 1/4" disks are becoming more popular" My school wasn't very tech savvy to say the least.
On a similar note, I can remember the series that was published by Marshall Cavendish called INPUT. This was a fantastic bi-weekly serial magazine published in the early 80's that focused almost exclusively on programming for the early micros.
I owned about six or seven issues and it was the best explanation of programming, also containing loads of example programs for about six different home machines, so that no matter what machine you had you could use the same program as everyone else. The learning curve was perfect when I was a kid and isn't patronising now that I'm an adult re-reading them. Those issues almost single-handedly started my love of computing (along with the ZX Spectrum).
My brother found the entire first volume at a boot sale some years back and I read through them all again, despite knowing several languages by then (the books primarily focused on BASIC and assembly for the revelant micros, Z80 or 6502 etc.).
Recently, I purchased the missing volumes off of eBay and they are fantastic. I only wish I had the enthusiasm to actually still sit and type out my programs any more. One text adventure had about 10 pages full of encrypted hexadecimal that you had to type in by hand, perfectly, for it to work! I don't miss those days...
Reading back through them, like this book, the parts that were generic to computing, i.e. hardware, peripherals, storage etc., were very quickly outdated. However the computing and programming principles still stand strong and many's the time that my understanding of binary, assembly and the deeper workings of the computer have helped me.
But it's still amazing how quickly something can go from being state-of-the-art to back-of-the-cupboard.
Sheesh. Computers weren't a "new thing" in 1971. They were expensive, but every university in the developed world AFAIK either had one or more, or had access to one.
25 years after publishing, the copyright has certainly expired.
I have a treasure: manual of a Wegematic 1000 computer, from beginning of 1960s.
a tic_eng.htm
The machine had vacuum tubes. The operating console included an oscilloscope and bit switches for entering instructions. It did have a punched tape reader as well.
My father programmed it for his graduate thesis, although now he is a member of the blinking twelve generation and would not survive with his mac without my IT support. Changing are the fortunes in life.
Link: http://www.tietokonemuseo.saunalahti.fi/eng/wegem
- ac
Even better - there's a javascript bookmarklet that does the reflow.
... my home machine doesn't seem to be affected.
I assigned a keyword to the bookmarklet - then assigned a mouse gesture (using the mouse gestures extension) to activate the keyword.
Now a rightclick-right-down causes any incorrect slashdot renderings to immediately snap into shape. That way I can get the page to look right, even if I don't have a hand on the keyboard to hit ctrl.
(It's unfortunate that this bug is there, but there are so many niceties about FireFox that I wouldn't give it up just because slashdot renders funny sometimes.) Luckily, it only seems to affect my machine at work
Although of course wildly outdated even when it was published (as all useful computer books always are) a good book explaining the basics is never wrong. And the basics still are the same. There is still is loads of information in these old books that would be useful to anyone getting into computers, surprisingly enough... :-)
;)
I held a course in TCP/IP in the early nineties. The part that most clearly divided the class was the net mask. People that had studied computer science, or were self-taught nerds, of course already knew binary arithmetic. They found using net masks trivial. The people who had ended up as network administrators by mistake (most of them, really) had huge problems. After holding this course a couple of times, I simply extended it with teaching everybody binary arithmetic first. That made it easier for most people.
You don't need to know how a computer works to use it anymore, but a good network manager should still know it, and a programmer won't last two weeks without understanding what actually goes on.
Well, maybe if he is using Python.
It's not only old news, I remember this being posted back in 1987 or so.
Have Linux installed at your place in Amsterdam, for cheap
from an old late book aimed at kids about robots, computers and the like, went something like -
"A programmer is somebody who converts problems from the real word into a language the computer can understand"
I just love it! not 'creats solutions' but 'converts problems' LOL!
(wish i could look it up but everything is packed away at the mo)
Either you're trolling or have no clue at all about copyright law.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Well sh*t, my bad. I didn't realize that was done intentionally. All this time I have been telling people that it was a bug in Microsoft Windows.
This looks like a great book, kinda like a blast from the past! I love this stuff :-)
The military employed rooms of women to compute ballistic tables and the like using mechanical calculators. I recall Richard Feyman mentioning this in one of his autobiographies. I presume this what lead women into programming work on the early electronic calculators and computers.
Isn't the picture on pg 8 of the 1971 edition actually an IBM 360? I operated one as a student and this sure looks like a 360 without the power supply cabinet or tape drives. That would not have been considered a small system even in the early 70's. Looks like a 1403 line printer with it too.
Having signaled that I am ancient, I may not surprise a few of you to note that the quaint and amusing quality of the book in the article is a misleading offering if you take it as history. The development of computing is both a technical and a human story of considerable depth and much more interesting reading is available.
Anybody who actually finds this stuff interesting need not confess. Just quietly make your way to the libraray and look up Paul Ceruzzi's A History of Computing [MIT PRESS] which gets all the facts and personalities straight as well as properly labeling the pictures. If you are in a hurry to waste time, there are tons of documents on line re the history of computing, for instance such as this page of links from an IIT prof.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
still programming is sort of a geek thing.
It's probably because most people aren't used to dealing with rules that can't be cheated.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It's the Longhorn manual.
--- Ban humanity.
In The UK, copyright expires on a published work 25 years after the end of the year in which it was published. Seems the poster of the book was 7 weeks premature and thus is in breach of copyright. As stated in another post on this topic, IANAL, but there's a bunch of them upstairs here at Penguin Books (owners of Ladybird) who are looking into this.
It always cracks me up to think about what fools we'll feel like in the future for paying top dollar for the latest and greatest hardware now.
The key word is NOW. Why is it foolish, if you need state of the art hardware to do work (or play games) on, to pay the current prices for it? Sure, it'll be 1/2 the cost in 1 year but that's in 1 year. You need it/want it immediately, so you pay the current market rate. If your need for the item is less urgent, or you have less money, you will perhaps wait and buy the same item later, for less, ie. you sacrifice immediate usage for affordability. Applying financial hindsight in this situation is what's foolish.
Freedom: "I won't!"
And in 2029 /. will have an article about computing in 2004 when they'll laugh at the way we...
And if you can answer that one you'll make millions!
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
On the contrary. One of the promises of computers once was, that they would do away with much paperwork, and thus save paper. Time has shown that this is true in some respects, but computers also add bigtime to paper use. Think easy printing of e-mails received or PDF's found on the web, book shelves filled with 600+ page programming manuals...
Many people still prefer reading hardcopy over computerscreens (and with good reason), and good/cheap 'electronic paper' has yet to hit the market.
Paper-less office, anyone?
In the 19th century, men were clerks. They could earn a good salary copying letters and such. Eventually, this became automated and took less skill, men were less likely to be able to support a family as a clerk, and women moved in to fill this role.
Obviously, the same thing happened here, except somehow over time, women have also been trained to believe that they lack the higher logic that only men can provide for programming (although I know two brilliant women programmers among the dozen or so men and women I consider very good and skilled).
Displayed proudly in my cube. I tend to refer people to it when they ask about BGP/MPLS/EIGRP.
.-=Wit is educated insolence=-. -Aristotle
My school got a teletype connection to some nearby college computer, probably a DEC machine. We were allowed to write BASIC programs. At the same time John Conway's "Game of Life" was the rage in Scientific American. So I coded it up in BASIC. Took about a minute to print each generation in asterisks and blanks.
A few years later I implemented the algorithm in bipolar circuits for digital electronics lab at the university. The display was was blobs on an oscilliscope. I recall it did several hundred generations a second. CRT computer terminals didnt really become widespread until shortly after that in 1975. They required that the price of a half kilobyte of ROM to fall to $100 (thanks to that upstart Intel). Type fonts patterns were stored in ROM. A 5x7 bit character set required 320 bytes of ROM.
When clearing out the wardrobes in my old room at my parent's house. Brought back memories I can tell you. Computers seemed so much more exciting back then, but then again, I didn't have to work with them 9 hours a day.
Being a really smart guy in highschool all the girls would come to me with their computer related questions:
::blink:: ::blink:: ::blink::
girl: Why isn't my computer working?
me: You need to flip that switch that says "ON".
Women don't troubleshoot, most of them are too busy using their powers of persuasion to get easy answers.
Hehehe, my mummy bought this book for me when I was little. I still have it in my bookshelf today :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I was born in 1970, and the first cover is also familiar to me, though I can't remember where I saw it. My interest in computers started in 1982 with another very well-written book (for kids) which saw me joining a computer club and trying to write a lunar lander program with no knowledge of physics. I spent my time fantasizing about ZX-81s and monopolising my friend's VIC-20.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Computers...are those things still around?
28:06:42:12 - That is when the world will end...
Apropos old computers, I've had a recent fixation on the Olivetti Video Display Terminal, which I saw in a book of Mario Bellini's industrial designs. It's probably just as well it hasn't shown up on eBay lately 'cause I sure don't have the space.
I'm not too sure about that myself. A definitely-non-geek friend of mine can use SQL and VB (yeah, I know...) when pressed to do so.
I think the main thing is that few but geeks every have the inclination to learn programming in the first place. Most (non-stupid) people who have not already decided it's "too hard" or "scary" can manage programming... they just normally don't care to.
Well math is math. I learned binary arithmatic for my digital circuits course. On my way to becoming an EE. Just as I had to learn physics as part of becomng an ME.
:)
Of course I no longer have to build a CPU using discrete logic, so some of this stuff is obsolete.
Where she really comes through is (of course) in her writing, but also in her understanding of the philisophical implications of computation. She was writing about music and human thought in terms of computation when no one else was. Charles was stuck on industrial uses, it seems, but Ada had a good eye for the big picture.
Anyway, it's just a bit of a nit of mine to see people refere to Ada as the world's first programmer or some crap like that (what about Eratosthenes?!). It's doing a great disservice to Ada's work and the role of women in computing. You want a female role model, I highly recommend Grace Hopper. Grace truly was outstanding in technical work. I think Ada took after her father, though, despite her mother, and her strengths laid elsewhere.
I concur, right no I'm sitting next to 7 filing cabinets that are each 7 feet tall and 2 feet wide and about 4 feet long filled with documents printed from a computer.
I don't think I ever read this book (born in 1970), but flipping through the pages, it makes me realize what computers still mean to my folks; batch cards, mag tapes, green-n-white printouts.
Therein lies the rub; to my folks, any computer that can be fit in a single box and doesn't live in a raised-floor room, is a toy. It's actually very black and white for them..."yes it's all very nice what those toys can do for the movies, but it takes a *computer* to process GE's payroll."
It also reminds me of when a friend of mine brought his dad in to work to show him what he did. His dad was a serious old school programmer for custom chips for Navy jets. He looked it too...checkered shirt, crew cut, pocket protector (first time I'd ever seen one). My friend shows him the *cough* Powerbuilder app we'd be working on, with its buttons and datawindows, etc., and his dad just went *pft* and waved his hand.
The fact that I can run emulators of any of those systems and they run 10x faster has never made a dent in my folks opinion. As far as they can see, and as far as my friend's dad can see, we're just playing with toys.
Anyone else had that happen?
Just curious: how do you intend to plonk an AC, on /.? Or are you trying to sound cool even though you're a clueless n00bler?
I remember this book from when I was 7! Set me on this path! It was my favorite & I carried it everywhere.
One thing that bothered me though, the mag memory didn't seem elegant.
BTW I am in the future & writing into the wayback time server, this discussion is indeed humorous!!!
"Anyway, the big advantage of this book is that it may show some of you kids the kind of drivel we had to learn from back then. :-)"
:)
That's what ancient history class is for, grandpa.
What video memory? The ZX81 generates screen output something like this: an interrupt routine eating 75% CPU time feeds character data to hardware shift registers, that produce a line of black&white dots on the screen. Repeat (carefully timed) until screen is done, and then remaining 25% CPU time (vertical blank period) is left for doing useful work until new TV frame begins.
It also had "fast mode" that did away with this, leaving snow on the TV screen (but at a 4x gain in processing speed!). I always loved this machine for its wonderful use of the limited hardware. You can even build your own, or personally type in a flicker-free space invaders clone on it.
Still used for things like controlling model trains or stepper motors, or re-built by programming the entire machine's function into a FPGA. Note: color in screenshot on last link is surely not on original hardware...
"One terabyte should be enough for everyone" they used to say in those early days!
Just imagine what kind of nitwits they were, haha!
My parents got me this for my 6th birthday... I've still got it!
We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me. -- Jack Handey
For all you slashdooters to young to know why a core dump is called a core dump, look at page 30 of the book.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We have languages such as C++, Python, Java etc now (compared to FORTRAN and COBOL they mentioned in the book) and still programming is sort of a geek thing.
And I'll argue those languages are much more complex than FORTRAN and COBOL. I'm looking at my old F77 book. Any decent programmer could learn the entire language before breakfast. Compare that to C++. Tack on the near-infinite number of libraries you need to do interesting things in Java and C++ (I'm not familiar with Python) and I'm not surprised that programming is still a geek thing.
Consider languages like Flash. You can do very sophisticated things in it without ever typing a line of code. How many web sites out there have goofy Flash movies? Give people easy languages and a lot more will program.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I did my first real programming in Fortran on punched cards. Nobody could punch 'CONTINUE' faster than I did at that time.
I still remember the sound of the card reader (fla-bap, flapflapflapflapflap......) and of the line printer. To recogize when my job was done, I inserted a few carefully spaced cards full of '*'s in front of the deck, producing a unique rhythmic sound pattern when printed.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
That's one of the questions that I had at the back of my mind when I got my first PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I (with the 16K expansion!) in 1977. I could program the thing in BASIC, and learned some other rudimentary stuff, but really I didn't understand it. It seemed magical.
The question stayed with me through high school, until finally in college I learned about transistors, NAND gates, latches, full adders, microcode, machine code, assembler, compilers, UNIX, and how it really worked.
But it still seems magical.
sigs, as if you care.
my first programming class, fortran: we typed code on a terminal which punched each line on a card (80 chars). Your program was a deck of cards!
sniff, the good ol' days...
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
1971: when men were men and women were keypunch operators.
Couldn't resist, could you?
Firstly, this book is still under copyright.
Secondly, I heard a story that a UK government department placed a large order for several hundred copies of this book in 1979 or 1980. Ladybird books wrote back explaining that the book was aimed at children aged between 9 and 11. The government department wrote back confirming the order!
"Of course, we really haven't totally outgrown that attitude yet. Lots of young women would still agree with that Barbie doll who said "Math is hard." Lots of parents and teachers are still working hard to overcome all the pressures on kids (girls and boys) to remain technically ignorant. This social battle will go on for a long time."
For some "Math is hard". Just as there are people who in this day and age can't read. We all aren't wired the same, but our learning methods sure act as though we are.
ca. 3500 BC: Calculi is dying
ca. 2500 BC: Cuneiform is dying
1835: Babbage Design: 1. Make a precisely-machined brass gear 2: now do it a million times 3. ??? 4. Profit!
1837: The Analytical Engine is Dying
1978: BSD is Dying
I still have a few issues of Byte magazine from the late 70s. Remember when they had an annual "language" issue where they exposed readers to a new language - Lisp, APL, etc.?
Anyway, I have ads for 128k floppy drives for over $1000. 4k of memory would cost hundreds of dollars. All of this far beyond what a HS student could afford. The mass storage for my first two computers (and the default for the first IBM PCs) were cassette tapes.
On the flip side one of my college labs (1981 or so) was a SBC with a 8080, a hex keypad and LED display, and one of those new-fangled breadboard things. It was easy to wire up 74xx chips into the system for experiments.
Ah, for the days when you could hand-assemble your code and enter it via a hex keypad... (or via the large toggles on the front of an IMSAI.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
12. You have problems in understanding Windows, and you will blame your own incompetence on Microsoft.
I don't know about the other points but this one is most certainly true. The amount of ignorance that many Linux users display in regards to Windows is astounding. As someone once put it, listening to slashdoters talk about windows is like listening to AOLers talk about Linux.
Really. I hate microsoft and love open source but economic reality forces me to work as a windows sysadmin so I understand windows strengths and weaknesses and constantly seeing Linux advocates say untrue things about windows really bugs me because that is actually hurting the Linux cause.
Having a decent graphics hardware would save the CPU from being responsible for feeding the shift register... But even with the ZX81 you still have to store your 24x32 char screen. Call it screen buffer or whatever, after all it's your video memory.
The same hardware for video generation was also used for tape storage which produced interesting patterns during load/store operations. But you could instantly see the quality of your recordings and eventually adjust volume etc.
Makes me wonder what an early NEC multisync would show...
There was much mischief made with line printers. Some student wrote a program called, "paper cutter", that would continuously print all the characters without advancing the paper in the line printer. So it kept printing over the same area until it became saturated with ink. It sounded like the printer was going berzerk. The soggy area would disintegrate from the motion of the print heads and the printer would have to be powered down to clear it's buffer, clean the ink off the drum and rethread paper. Another mischievous act was the use of "explode programs" to print obscene banners.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
ENIAC also was a decimal machine, not binary - the counter registers (which could only add - subtraction was done via another method akin to 2's complement arithmetic, but on Base 10) were simple 10 flip-flop ring-counters built on vacuum tube technology. Basically, the system was a very, very fast adding machine, which could be reconfigured to move and add results around from various registers, until a final result was obtained. This reconfiguration was done via plugboards and wires originally, though later a punchcard system was added (late 40's-early 50's).
According to *every* history book on computers I have read, ENIAC was developed to create firing tables - prior to that, such tables were created by "computers" (the human version) - and were difficult to make, very error prone, and with the new number of weapons being created and used during WW2, impossible to keep up-to-date (what was really interesting is that ENIAC was essentially Babbage's Difference Engine, and to some extent the Analytical Engine, realized in electronic form). ENIAC was designed to address this, but was really too late in the effort: the war was over before it really could have any impact.
IIRC, ENIAC was also used somewhat for some atomic bomb calculations (actually, according to both computing and atomic bomb histories I have read, any computer or calculator that had spare cycles was fair game for such calcs - ENIAC was one among many) - but this didn't really come into play until later, after the war.
Read the history books - there are tons of them. Be sure to read both about the history of computing - from the abacus on forward - as well as about the role computers played in war time - especially in the case of WW2 - where atomic bombs and computers meshed - producing a weird combination of people versed in both (like Von Neumann) - as well as code breaking and war (Turing). Also the history of table calculation (Babbage's Machines and ENIAC), the need to calculate the census (Hollerith, who begat IBM). Read about the connections between automata and computers. There are actually a ton more of "connections" between some the "greats" in this history (Jaquard and Babbage knew each other well, for instance - there is also the connection between Mary Shelly, Tesla, Babbage, and Twain - in regards to Kemplan's Chess Playing Turk - which, while not an automaton, inspired, awed, and moved people to think about machines thinking, something which has driven computing for such a long while, even today).
If you have an interest in computers and computing - there is so much out there to know about the wonderful history, legends, and facts - the interconnections, the friendships and knowledge shared between people, etc - it is all a part of what is now these small and large machines around us. The more I read on it, the more I discover about it, the more amazed I am. It is literally beautiful...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
On Page 17 of the 1979 edition there is a check (or cheque) with pence marked on it. Then I remembered that we used to have an I.T. industry!
Ahh, I'm getting the warm glow associated with Tony Benn's "White Heat of Technology", ash veneer, polished steel trim, and Sir Clive.
Oh yeah, and keyboards that lasted forever.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
I think the awe and such you see stems from the fact that while a computer, in essence, is a simple machine (ie, a UTM) - the fact that it can do so many complex things, in a reprogrammable and commandable fashion - is nothing short of amazing.
However, even this is being turned on its head: Read "A New Kind of Science" by Stephen Wolfram - in which he posits and develops a theory of complexity arising from simple algorithms - to the point of being able to develop UTMs from 2D cellular automata running in as few a six "instructions"! Six simple instructions, arising to create (or emulate) a fully functional symbolic computer. This isn't the only thing he proposes. No, this isn't magic - but it seems damn close...
On the subject of brains: I am currently reading a book entitled "On Intelligence" (whose author's name escapes me - he is the founder of Palm and Handspring) - in which he presents a very interesting theory on the human neocortex, how it works, and how consciousness, intelligence, and understanding arise from it. I haven't finished it, but the basic premise is that everything we are and do is the result of pattern matching (that is, at the neocortical level - emotions and other feelings tend to happen at lower levels, with feedback up and down from the neocortex - he doesn't discount this - but he is more concerned with creating intelligent machines without this extra baggage - whether that would be a good or bad thing is debatable). He presents an interesting thought experiment, which he terms the "100 step rule": Imagine a ball is thrown to you, how do you know to catch it? Or - how would you get a robot to catch it? The common way would be to have cameras and a computer to do calculations on the fly, etc - to arrive at an end-point to catch the ball. Rarely does this work, more often than not, such an attempt fails horribly - one only has to look at the Darpa Grand Challenge to see the results. So - how does the human brain do it? The neurons in the brain take, on average, 20ms to propagate a signal. In two seconds, you have your hand positioned to catch the ball - thus, 100 propagations through the neural net, right? Or, 100 steps. How is this possible? Part of the answer lies in the parallelism of the network - but the majority, at least according to this author - comes also from pattern matching: that as your eyes see the ball, patterns are matched from earlier trials of catching an object (the "ball-ness" is abstracted away - the patterns are "catching flying object"), to cause feedback to the arm nervous system (which causes feedback itself to the brain, for other patterns) to move the arm - in effect, through hundreds/thousands of trials at catching objects, your brain has stored away those patterns (of vision, movement, feeling, etc) for recall and playback any time a ball is thrown toward you. BTW - how many times have you had something thrown toward you that you didn't try to catch? If it comes into your sight, you are likely going to try to catch it - because of the patterns set up in your brain to do so - this "reflex" action comes from all of those trials (starting as an infant or a little later, I would suppose).
Anyhow, read the book - very fascinating...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Come on, wasn't this on slashdot in 1971, then again in 1979? Don't the mods even check for redundant stories?
-You're only as clean as your towel.
Because these books talk about a time when punch cards were still all the rage, and because my Ask Slashdot article was rejected, I'll ask here:
Does anyone still use punch cards? I know some states used punch cards for the Nov 2 election, but I'm wondering if there are still decks of cards at companies waiting to be run through and the output printed on green-n-white paper.
It's not a criticism or putdown question, I can believe there are some jobs on some equipment that just can't (or won't) be ported to something newer, and "what worked for us back then works for us now."
Just curious.
I once had a college professor test us on how to use punch cards. We knew he was crazy when he started to teach how to add and subtract binary and hex by hand. I would have walked out had I not been 13 and unable to drive home.
A great story I feel appropraite to this topic. Enjoy :)
_ 49 .html
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon
It's a Bagel.
you are doing better!
amiased
acomplish
taskes.
And how today many of them are done a lot easier.(not a complete thought)
I remember having the '79 edition as a kid...
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
. . . and just think, if you actually bathed and moved out of your parents' basement, your dreams just might come true.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
I remember one summer when I was a kid my parents sent me to "computer camp"
I don't remember much about it except I didn't really like it. But that's not the point...The thing I do remember is when they gave us a tour of the IT department (except I don't think they used that term back then - c.1985).
Anyway, the guy who was giving the tour proudly displayed their Hard Drive that held an amazing 420 MEGAbytes. It was this huge washing machine-sized thing with 12 inch platters. I thought it was pretty cool, too. I remember telling my dad how cool it would be to have one of those.
Now that I think about it, it would be pretty cool to have had some giant hard disk hooked up to my C64!
Now I walk around with 20Gigabytes in my pocket (and kinda wish I had 40) we've come a long way.
The comments render all wacky for me about half the time.
Using latest 1.0 version, and on my fresh-today-built G4 optimized version.
you can do the ctrl+/- (cmd-/+) trick, but considering that slashdot has one of the highest percentage of Firefox users on the web it would be nice if they made it look right in Firefox.
I'm guessing the slashcode is so hacked that doing something like this would be a major undertaking.
Don't ya think?
I was a 2904 operator in 1979 - Those are MY EDS60's - Imagine it - A whole 60 megabytes on one disc pack!!! Real computers will always be orange to me....
This is the United States and we do have to protect Mickey.
From the following web-site:
http://www.ivanhoffman.com/expiration.html
Effective January 1, 1978, the United States Copyright law was changed substantially. Previously, a work's period of protection began either when it was published with a proper copyright notice or registered if the work was registered in unpublished form. The period of protection lasted for an initial term of 28 years and could be extended for a second period of 28 years if the copyright was appropriately renewed during the initial 28th year.
When the 1976 law came into effect, the statute extended the renewal term from 28 to 47 years for copyrights that were subsisting on January 1, 1978, making these works eligible for a total term of protection of 75 years and now under the new law, that term is extended for a total term of 95 years. But the copyright owner had to file an appropriate renewal application in order to obtain this extended protection. As a result, a person inquiring as to the status of the copyright of works falling into that time frame has to search the records for that renewal certificate.
In 1992, when the law was amended again, it automatically extend the term of copyrights that had previously been published with a copyright notice from January 1, 1964 through December 31, 1977 to the further term of 47 years and eliminated the requirement to file a renewal application, even though filing such a renewal provides certain benefits. And now, all works published with a copyright notice after January 1, 1964 but before December 31, 1977 have an additional term of 20 years from the previous 47 and a total term of protection of 95 years.
Sorry, please ignore the ignorant American who assumed that this book was printed in the US when it was in fact published in London. Maybe I should move to London. Copyright law sounds much saner in the UK than in the US.
Little did I know I'd be having anything to do with computers or IT in general.
I also had Magnets bulbs and batteries and many years later worked with electronics.
Then there was how to build a transistor radio - years later I got my ham licence...
These little books were really good at the time and some of them are now collectors items.
(Mine were chewed by dogs, scribbled in my "friends" or stolen - "can I borrow (er never bother to return) that?"
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
I hope you're joking. If you aren't, I'll gladly take it down. I assumed as these were so long out of print no one would care if I put them up.
For those that remember when coding meant peeks, pokes, and games were worth playing, look at Hey, Hey, 16k (Flash 7 needed, but it's well worth it!
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
this book was actually a very good introduction to the concepts of computing for the computer ignorant (which most people were in the 70s).
i sto ry.php
from a history of Ladybird books, which was a children's book publisher
" How it Works: The Computer was used by university lecturers to make sure that students started at the same level. Two hundred copies of this same book were ordered by the Ministry of Defence. The MOD wanted the books to be bound in plain brown covers and without any copyright information, to save embarrassing their trainees! "
http://www.theweeweb.co.uk/ladybird/ladybird_h
TAUGHT. The word is TAUGHT.
Make sure to ask for the "k" back as well.
yup just goes to show that you still dont know nothin'
fecken arrogant american linux luvun twats
M$oft
Interesting... have a look at: http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/012.html I've just been shopping on ebay - check out: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =5136915839
Funny how the CPUs and disks from 1971 are long gone, but still so many places have the tape drives... my last place of work (IBI) was still using identical drives when I quit!
Mike
http://www.corestore.org
Last year someone asked me how my computer worked (he hadn't used Linux before) so I handed him the book. He didn't ask me another question after that -- I guess the book answered them all ;)
http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/1979/01.jpg
I showed my dad that pic and he remembered those and named them. (2314 disc drives)
had hydrailic servo motors he said, adjustable heads, removeable packs, ran on 3 phase 208 power.
...were light reading like that. I guess it was much more common for people to have no idea about computers back then so they needed a "gentle" introduction.
I remember Ladybird books from the library when I was just a wee lad...I think they exclusivley published childrens books. Between grades I and III I was big into science type books and there was a series of them from Ladybird--I probably took all of them out eventually. I think they were noted for making Sunday School books too.
Even the 1979 version of the Ladybird book was looking dated when I was into those books. My first face to face encounter with a "real live" computer was aroung 1981 seeing the "computer lab" that the big kids got to use (I think it was a whopping three Commodore PETs--in Canadian schools Commodore ruled until Apple hit its stride a couple years later--probably because Commodore was originally a Canadian company in addition to it being an early player in the PC market). Later us younger kids got to work on the "new" Apple II+s (but odd ones--they were black instead of beige and were labelled "Bell+Howell" like the movie projectors) and eventualy Commodore 64s.
I guess I was an odd duck...I liked science and technology books at an early age--besides those I liked Roald Dahl (Charlie and the chocolate factory, etc), Mortechai Richler (Jacob Two Two books) and Ian Fleming (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). So if it wasn't science-related it was fiction that was just a bit twisted. If I wasn't destined for a career in science or engineering I probably would've been another Tim Burton.