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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.
...what you call old news?
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. :)
Is it me, or were they a little optimistic that there would be just as many women as men working on computers?
Dude, a beowulf cluster of these things would probably shift the Earth's orbit.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
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
And in his next lecture, he teached the following:
Now, we type this onto embedded punch cards and put it into the embedded mainframe. The embedded program will then run, and finally the embedded printer will print the embedded result.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Don't respond to trolls. Regardless of the type of response, you will only encourage them.
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)
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
Does anyone else find it annoying that these are just million-digit-long strings of ones and zeroes? It might be a bit easier to read if the images were just pressed in ink onto pieces of paper...
Corrected link, please mod up http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/005.html
I'd agree.. Especially after Microsoft teamed up with Fisher Price on the design work for Windows XP...
. . . 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
My mom worked as Wire Chief (read: senior technician with some management responsibilities) for the Burlington Northern Railroad in the '80s when they installed a Xerox Star network. It was the first GUI I'd ever seen. Well, actually, it was the first GUI that pretty much anyone had ever seen. Anyway, there she was back at the start of the Reagan era using a graphical networked workstation with remote file storage.
I caught myself using the "dumb it down for the old folks" voice with her one day when I was explaining that I'd made /home an NFS mount on a fileserver on my home LAN. She'd just kind of assumed that's how everyone did things, since that's what she'd been using for the last 20 years or so.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Quoth a student, "When the fuck does this embedded class end again?"
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!