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How Computers Work... in 1971

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the doomed-to-repeat-ourselves dept.

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."

7 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. Careful... by ideatrack · · Score: 5, Funny

    you'll have SCO on your ass, you're distributing their code.

  2. Sweet by hcob$ · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  3. General principles don't change by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ...

  4. just a theory, but ... by lottameez · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think CmdrTaco is showing us the instruction booklet for the /. webserver

    --
    Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
  5. Cool! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    My first thought when I saw this picture was:

    "Honey, what's this magnetic tape labelled 'pr0n'?"

  6. I've still got that book by palfreman · · Score: 5, Informative
    I've still got that book. It's been pretty out of date for a long time (er, very out of date), but it is very good at explaining things like assembler, old style core memory and flow charting for kids - sets them on the right path, instead of messing them up with an a childized gui's, talking elephants and suchlike.

    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!

  7. Re:Is this... by plover · · Score: 5, Funny
    I think it's more like "News for Old Nerds. Stuff that Used to Matter."

    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