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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."
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
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 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!
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. :-)
John
were they a little optimistic that there would be just as many women as men working on computers?
No, they were showing reality.
Most (but not all!) programmers were men - they'd be writing the code.
But most men weren't expected to type... at least not all that well or fast. So they had special purpose "keypunch operators" - mostly women - who would take the hand-written code (written on "coding sheets") and key it onto punchcards. Accuracy and speed in typing were key.
In addition, operators would feed cards into the computers, etc etc.
It wasn't a glamorous or creative job. As "on-line" systems and terminals like the 3270 and VT-100 were deployed, the keypunch operators slowly faded away.
I'd assume that a few exceptionally interested keypunch operators learned to identify programming and machine errors and found their way into programmer ranks.
Probably, though back in the early days, the first programmers were women. Ada Lovelace has been described as Founder of Scientific Computing Grace Hopper also comes to mind. Futhermore, back in the days of cracking Enigma codes, it was teams of women who programmed the bombes. Somewhere along the line, computer programming was co-opted into professional studies as 'engineering' and 'science' and unfortunately, women were actively discouraged from entering those professions. Only now is this changing ...
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
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.
Actually, some of the first computers were women.
My wife likes to tell people that one of her first job titles, back in the 1970's, was "computer". This was working for a survey department in the New York state government. She did have an electronic computer available as part of the departmental equipment, and the conflict in the terminology led to a change in the job title after a couple of years.
She got the job partly because she'd done well in math classes in high school and college. While it was true that there was a lot of social pressure on girls to be technically ignorant, there was also a lot of counter-pressure from many parents and teachers, who often didn't agree with the "barefoot and pregnant" approach.
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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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?