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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
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?
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'?"
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.
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!
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
Dude, a beowulf cluster of these things would probably shift the Earth's orbit.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
...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
"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.
Hey, how about you just be thankful for the fact that this is online for free, instead of complaining about a totally free service that you get for free on a website that you don't have to pay to access.
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
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
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)
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!
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.
Are you sure that this book is still under the copyright of Ladybird?
On this page it claims...
"Copyright in a published edition expires 25 years from the end of the year in which the edition was first published."As 2004-1979 = 25 doesn't that make this book out of copyright now?
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
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.
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!"
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.
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 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?
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...
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...
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.
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
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.