Slashdot Mirror
How Computers Work -- Circa 1979
Guinnessy writes "In a younger, more innocent time, Ladybird Books came out with a series of children's books called "How things work." Someone has put the 1971 and 1979 versions of How Computers Work onto the web. It's a fascinating glance at how much computers have advanced since the silicon chip was introduced. State-of-the-art in 1971 consisted of fitting thirty components into a 1 cm3 volume."
...and its proper title is "How it Works... The Computer"!
1971 = 3*3*3*73
1979 is prime
I feel it being /.'d like now... Although I know why my computer room sucks now, our tiles are not orange... :|
Dibs on dupe!!
Do I get a prize?
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
[insert joke about how fascinating it is looking back at what links from two+ years ago were like here]
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Repost from November 04. Not bad, considering!
My first 5.25" was a Commodore external drive. It cost me about $300, IIRC. I was so psyched! Until I went to college and saw the 30MB HDDs for Macs. :-)
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Wasent this already poster a few months back?
Check out those pictures of hot data-processing chixors! Man, 70s era DP babes. Be still, my heart.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/12/131204 &tid=133
C'mon, morons.
A quick glance at the pictures also gives one a sense of how styles have changed since the 1970s as well. Gotta love the hair on the picture of the chic carrying a tape reel in the datacenter:P
:P
So glad we don't use stacks of punch cards anymore. I mean can you imagine how many truckloads of punch cards you would need to install windows XP?
Tapes were cheap (relatively), Winchester drives (ie, Hard Drives, Fixed Disks, DASD, etc) were expensive. Like $500/meg expensive.
:)
But then a meg was a lot of space back then... because pr0n was all really low-resultion stuff that came out on line printers.
Ok, who's going to be first to post a link to line-printer pr0n?
Wanted to get the link to the old article, only to realizs just HOW RETARTED ./s search fuction really is. My guess is it doesnt actually search, but randomly choses articles, and the search term seeds the rendom number generator
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Computers with touch screens, Woooo!
Must get into that feild!
/. is not to be used by individuals with high blood pressure or a history of heart attacks
If I went back in time with my old 266 laptop and spoke leet speak... I'd get all the compu-hotties.
10 STORY = "How Computers Work -- Circa 1979"
20 POST STORY
30 SLEEP RAND(TIME)
40 GOTO 20
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
At the time of writing, the quote at the bottom of the page is:
"To be loved is very demoralizing. -- Katharine Hepburn"
I think I'm beginning to get what she meant. Mind you, as I pointed out the first time this was posted, they do seem to have Emma Peel working for them.
Cheers,
Ian
I think in 25 more years things will be even more drastically changed. We are reaching the end of the transister, and the next tech is going to be even more impressive.
Voice your opinion!
That subscriber bonus 15 mins somehow didn't work. So Dupe and BUG both at the same time. My Beastie Boys background music agrees with me.
My little site.
It seems nowdays with computers being so commonplace that most folk are just not interested in 'how computers work' anymore. Thats certainly what I see when I get called round to fix peoples machines. They just want them to work.
/.'s are evolving out of existance?
Perhaps we
Since only the 5 kings of Europe own computers these days
Considering that Taco's original department was "doomed-to-repeat-ourselves dept" it only seems appropriate that they would rerun this one...
the British Ministry of Defence ordered a print run of about 20,000 in plain covers to issue to soldiers as an explanation of how computers worked.
It was a pretty succinct explanation for neophytes
Or in other words, "Don't do what I just did."
I'm not trying to argue one side of the copyright debate or the other here, but please choose a position and be consistent about it: either you respect the copyright (in which case you don't put these books on the web without permission in the first place) or you don't respect it (in which case you leave off the notice lecturing people not to do it).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Yes, I am a proud member of the UK's own Association of Sad Bastards.
When I was sorting through my junk in the garage, I found a volume of a 1986 world book encyclopedia, which had the computer article in it. Old school all the way, describing "expensive color graphics" and "costly, permanent, hard disk drives." It was amazing to see see how much progess was made in the span of 2 decades. The encyclopedia was describing memory in terms of kb, although I forgot how much memory it listed as being ideal or "fast." The tips it had on purchasing a computer still mostly apply today though.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
The funny (sad?) part is that this "children's book" is more advanced in many ways than some of my CS intro classes were 7 years ago (and some people still failed out!)
People getting dumber? Nah.. can't be!
Can we get a book on how Slashdot works? because I have no fscking clue. Damn dupes.
It's nice to look at the changes between 1971 and 1979. Clearly there were a lot of aspects of the book that looked ancient after 8 years of progress. Punch cards had been replaced by VDUs. Presumably magnetic drums were no longer used for storage by 1979, and would have been seen as outdated as a 5.25 inch floppy disk.
Makes me feel progress has slowed. The difference between a modern PC and one from 8 years ago is simply speed and storage.
This reminds me of a book my mom bought me maybe 10 years ago: 20th Century Computers and How They Worked: The Official Starfleet History of Computers.
It was a very interesting way to learn about technology at my age (what was I, like 12?) especially as a Trekkie, since the author compares "old" 20th-Century technology to "Current" Starfleet technology. It was very well done, I recommend picking up a copy (no, there are no affiliate links in there).
... and the ultimate advancement came when the mouse was introduced, forcing right handed people to use their more developed instrument (fitted to perform complex movements like writing) to press buttons. Sic(k)!
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
think it was January 1980.
...
Had to get a loan to buy it from HFC
Before had built S-100 bus computers, which we soldered the boards for ourselves, and we liked it.
I made a hacker's version of my Apple II+, taking the base 64K and expanding it to 172K with a slot RAM board, and dual floppies I hand-adjusted the speed on - using an oscilloscope, the only way to fly, after running thru the numbers on my slide rule. I had the cool triangle core slide rule.
Made a boot disk with the BASIC programs I wrote, and some assembler ones, which I loaded into my RAM disk so they would run 1000 times faster than if I loaded them from disk, and used the second drive for the read/write disk for file input/output.
My Apple screamed - made all the Commodore and Tandy's that came to the neighborhood look sick - even after I rewrote their programs to run faster and not have bugs.
And I commented my code back then, which was heresy, but really helped a lot. Everyone else relied on cryptic variable names, but I knew how they were stored, so I could get away with murder.
Ah, the bad old days. We cheered when 300 baud came out, cause everyone was using 110 baud [that's 0.3K modem speed, and I'm using Gigabit Internet here at the UW right now, and get 33Mbps with my laptop at home].
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The book describes magnetic core which was pretty well obsolete in 1971. It describes CPU, disk, and tape that have become smaller and faster, but that's about it. The monumental developments in programming languages - object-oriented, functional programming, concurrent programming - were in the past. Ditto for file systems, data structures, and operating systems.
If you learned computer architecture back then, you wouldn't have much difficulty with today. Not like the man-frozen-in-the-glacier movie scenario at all.
The development that wasn't even a gleam in the eye of computer scientists of the day is networking.
I just looked up this article because I recognized it as a dupe, and found that it goes back to November of 2004. There were only 20ish comments about the article, so I thought I'd be the first person who noticed. I was wrong. At least five people had already posted their dupe spottings, and the number is probably rising.
So I thought, what are the odds of my recognizing a dupe from eight months ago? Or of anyone else recognizing it? And then I realized - they're pretty high. I just discovered that I don't tend to miss Slashdot stories, ever, because if I'm away from the site for an extended period I usually scan backwards and browse the recent days, at least to get the basic ideas of the articles if not to go in-depth. In short, I've missed nothing here. Not in a long time. And I'm starting to wonder what that says about my life.
How long do we spend on this site? How much of our lives is lost to this pursuit? What would happen if I didn't come to this site tomorrow, and on Wednesday I ignore the Yesterday articles? Am I capable of this? A Tuesday without Slashdot? Would I suffer from any withdrawal symptoms? Because I'm scared, but I think it's important enough to try.
Dupe, dupe, dupe. We all know, but I find it interesting the Taco predicted this dupe by the dept. he put the story in.
State-of-the-art in 1971 consisted of fitting thirty components into a 1 cm3 volume.
Whereas the article says, "As many as thirty components can now be fitted into a capsule approximately one-third of a cubic centimetre in volume."
i.e., "1/3 cm3" not "1"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/12/131204 &tid=133
I bet they didn't know how true that'd be when they wrote it.
There's no mention of Windows(tm) anywhere! How do computers work without Windows?
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Now all we need to do is get the book, "How Rockets Work" and give it to NASA.. I want to get back to the moon! Seriously, I wonder what it would take to rebuild the Saturn 5 program and send the rest of the ISS up in one or two big shots, instead of 20 little shuttle trips. Could we build a 60's era rocket in less time and with less risk than launching 20 space shuttles?
Nowadays it's hard to imagine that all operators are girls :)
Might as well add my 2 cents...
This book looks completely stupid... I have no idea who the intended audience was at the time, but I don't know if it was normal people.
Anyhow, I have manuals from 1977 for equipment I use today. (Actually the equipment was built in 77 and I think it was around a bit before then).
It's nothing quite like that, but pretty standard stuff for the industry. Things like how it works, diagnostics, troubleshootings, maintenance and EVERY SCHEMATIC you would need to fix it. (which is every schematic in the unit).
Pretty flippin handy... I just wish they made all books like transmitter docs.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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?
Man, 70s era DP babes. Be still, my heart.
Brother, double-penetration is hot, no matter what the era.
Luxury! Back in my day, we had to wear roller skates to get around our computer.
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe you...
You need this:
35 next I
Otherwise, your "for" loop will never increment. As written, your program will post dupes as fast as the CPU can run... but still slower than Taco.
So apparently, this work by virtue of being copyright 1971 and 1979 is actually copyright expired.
Here is the page I refer to: LINK
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
This is so dupe... I read these whole books on-line over a year ago from a link on /.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
meeee!!
;)
Today you will be oggling Roxanne
what i posted first now what do i win?
How many computers are too many?
If you like that, you might also enjoy the 1989 Time-Life Understanding Computers series. They actually have very good explanations and in-depth essays about the state of computers at that time. You can pick them up cheap on eBay.
The sad thing is I do believe I read this as a textbook in gradeschool...
...in 1994!
...technology. No wonder we have so many worms, viri and other malware proliferating on our networks. For some reason, this person RECOMMENDS NOT installing service packs and enabling the event viewer. Next thing you know, he will want my IP address just to download the document ;)
"Give up hope, dreams are for suckers."
what i posted first now what do i win?
:)
The sound of my hearty laughter, and my gratitude: I have now bookmarked "asciipr0n.com".
Double points if you can find some EBCDIC pr0n
I must be out of the loop because my computer resembles nothing like this. Probably are high end government main frames.
It's amazing how some of those images are burnt into my brain. But that was a fine book. It's audience was young kids (all Ladybird books where) and yet it discusses binary and CPU architecture. Of course the people who wrote that book were probably old men who were unaware of the revolution taking place around them. In bookshops we had old serious looking books full of Fortran and pictures of magnetic core memory and yet we we were already using machines with solid state RAM at home. It was as if serious computer professionals were in denial that those 'toys' were ever going to amount to anything.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Page 6 in the book talks about the Babbage punch card. This is off-topic from the OP, but Babbage punch cards were/are also used in other applications that just analytical machines. They are still used in weaving factories, for example.
I own a kilt, and when I visited the weaver that made the kilt (Geoffrey(Tailor) in Edinburgh) they showed off their kilt weaving machine. It uses Babbage punch cards to control the action- load this color, weave, return, load other color, weave, return, ...
(Well, I thought it was interesting.)
I remember having a copy of both of those books... I probably still do...
Pretty good reads, even though they were outdated when I was a kid...
...by me. I replied to the wrong post.
"Give up hope, dreams are for suckers."
Seriously, I was most impressed that while the details have changed, so much of the information in the book is still very valid today. The explanation of registries, addresses, arithmetic, etc. is actually quite good. It's very impressive for a children's book.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina.
Anyone else think washing machines?g
http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/1979/01.jp
this is still how Linux users think the world should be
Seriously that mindset still plaguing Linux and will continue to do so. X Windows to blame.
see this too. This is the cutting edge in Linux circles and something to aspire too that X Windows is still all about.
more later
I grew up reading this book - both editions of it.
Man was I confused when the 80s hit and I first started playing with micros (Commodore PET and BBC Micro). Where were the core memory and the disk packs? But I had 8K of RAM all to myself. Woohoo!
Now my Palm Tungsten has a postage-sized removable plastic chip with half gig of flash RAM containing the entire English Wikipedia.
I don't miss those days, actually.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I remember these well. My grandparents got me a set of them along with an old Apple IIe. And so began my lifelong treck into geekdom. These books were great. They basically told you how things worked from how ice was created to how electricity worked using a lightbulb, some old wire, a piece of wood and some aluminum foil. It's sad there aren't any books like this out for young kids anymore. "Or are there?"
I also have a copy of this book - and it's very different from the usual Ladybird offerings. It actually provides a good grounding in basic computer design, and is appropriate for 18 year olds, while most Ladybird books were aimed more at 10 year olds.
I got a copy when I started working for MOD in the 80s - for a while it was the standard introductory training book for MOD staff starting on computers!
The only thing missing from this manual is the picture of a crying/screaming user standing in a pile of unlabelled cards that he just spilled on the floor.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I completely forgot about it, I used to use it all the time. I could draw directly on the screen, and the first GUI's used it too. But alas, like the moon, technology doesn't always go forward.
...But this is cool stuff. Look at the minidress the 'punchcard operator' is wearing. Holy Uhura Batman! Now that deserves an ESRB rating of 18+. As someone who hit 12 years old with 8 bit computers and remembers his parent bringing home one of the new WANG "laptops" (really, not bigger than todays laptops!) with like a 4 line LCD screen and built in 1200 baud acoustic coupler (1200 baud!!!! circa 1983) This brings back happy memories of the 8" floppy. With the movie Wargames out, this was the golden time to be a geek. Now I wasn't one of the uber l33t Altair types but I can still remember going to the local big box retailer of the area (Lechmere's around these parts...more than just a T station!) and seeing people queing up to try out the consumer grade computers. It just doesn't work that way anymore and I for one am a tad bummed about this. Call it nostalgia, call it what you will, but the mystique is gone and likely won't be back. -Trouble
Perhaps future nerds will look back upon the Slashdot of today as an example of how Dupes were once accomplished
Great find. Vintage computer buff here and I love this kind of stuff. Thanks!
I have a fever baby and the only cure is more cowbell!
Is that a beowulf cluster of WASHING MACHINES!!!!
The difference between Eniac and an Athlon 64 PC are .. speed and storage..
It's what that extra speed and storage enables you to do - a lot of the great inventions and engineering in modern PC's are under the hood.
Of course, there's more obvious things since Eniac, too. Cell phones are little computers. PDA's, wireless stuff, that big thing called the Internet.
But you're talking 8 years. There's been a lot of new stuff in 8 years, on par to what that book mentions I'd say. Of course, we're past the "golden age" of when computers were first moving in, and recently we're all becoming used to the Internet (which wasn't all that much longer then 8 years ago when it started to boom, really.)
It's easy to think that it hasn't changed much, but it's the little things you don't think about because they're so easy to take for granted.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
OK, it's a dupr as many have pointed out. What strikes me is that these are just JPG files. This company that hold the copyright was so kind to at least let them be put online for others to read.
The majority of other companies and books will never be officially published. A lot of books are not in publication anymore and even if they are, the older versions (like this one) give an insight on how we thought at a certain time.
It is depressing to know that this way most of our knowledge will be just as lost as the books of the library of Alexandia.
If you do not have access to the books, they just might as well never have existed. It also shows that the lenght of copyright is rediculously long.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Who gives a fuck if it's a dupe, other than the whining fucktards that only know how to bitch an moan.
People, get a fucking life and stop complaining, if you don't like the place, then please do just fuck off.
Here: http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/1979/01.jpg
Look on the screen at the left at the 'major computer installation'. What IS that?
I find it interesting how the first sentence changes between the versions.
1971: There is something about computers that is both fascinating and alarming.
1979: There is something about computers that is both fascinating and intimidating.
It's an interesting social change if you think about it.
Core memory was not "pretty well obsolete" in 1971. Semiconductor memory was only just starting to come into wide use by then. It was not until 1974 that it became cheaper than core (see http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/CoreMem ory.html), and even later before it overtook it in volume.
Jeez! A blast from the past! I had that book (the 1979 edition) when I was a kid, about 8! Wow! Weird feeling seeing that again! Martin
"Absorbing your worst..."
http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/001.htmlLoo k at the 1979 edition
I don't believe them. I think that's a laundromat.
In Soviet Russia, Computers understand how you work. In Soviet Russia, Cards punch you.
Even in the early 80's tape was what I used on my portable computer.
Of course CD and DVD is still useful for storage, but the do not seem to be as reliable as floppy, especially not as reliable as 3.5" floppy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Yes, I know who Charles Babbage is, I know about his machines, I know that he designed the Analytical Engine (and named many of the pieces of the AE after mill parts - ie, the Mill=CPU, the Store=memory, etc) to use punch cards after seeing one of Jaquard's looms in actions (and subsequently a tapestry portrait of Babbage was made on said looms). I don't remember the format of the cards which were to be used by the Analytical Engine, but I do know that the only relationship that they bore to the Jaquard design was that they had holes in them. IIRC, the Jaquard punch cards had a fairly small number of holes in them. Undoubtedly, Babbages cards would have had to have more holes to represent the numbers/instructions his machine could handle. Unfortunately, he never built the machine, thus there never existed anything called "Babbage Cards".
In the late 1800's, another individual came to light, trying to solve the problem of the 1890 US Census. The last census had taken so long to tabulate that it was feared that by the time the current census was finished and tabulated, the next census cycle would be well underway and the data would be useless. Herman Hollerith came along and changed that. He created what would become the standard punch card, for his tabulation machine. He took his inspiration from a completely different source, though: he was riding a train and saw the conduction punch his ticket, and he thought about how such a card could record all the characteristics of a person on it for the census, and how using the technology of the day, those cards could be processed and tabulated much quicker than the hand processes previously devised. His machines were tested alongside other methods of tabulation and counting available at the time, and the US government chose his system, which turned out to be very successful. His tabulation machine business grew, he became fairly wealthy, and his machines saw use in many businesses the world over (especially in the freight train business).
Eventually, Hollerith's company became what we know today as IBM. His cards lived on with few modifications, to become the punch cards as we know them (or barely know them - not much use for them today). These cards had a standard size - 80 columns by 25 rows...
Now you know why there is such a thing as an IBM 80 x 25 display - one screen could accurately represent a full card (whether this was the true purpose or not of this size is something I have never found out to my satisfaction - some history books say yes, others just hold it as a curiosity or holdover)...
Now - with that said, I must say that from the link to the site you give, that looks like an impressive weaving mill, and fairly old. It is hard to tell what the age of it is, but it could be using a form of Jaquard's loom cards, or a later form of Hollerith card, or some hybrid, or something else. In the weaving mill industry, there wasn't anything like a "standard card" - I would speculate, though, that if the machine was using something like 80x25 hole cards and were built after 1890, then they were likely Hollerith cards (albeit likely more beefy or made of metal to handle the abuse)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Your kidding right ?, I would never call a floppy disk "reliable", my usbs flash drive on the other hand...
Why can't we just have a "duplicates" topic? Then all the duplicate postings could be tagged with that topic, and readers who prefer not to read duplicates could easily filter it.
A quote in the pages of the book gives the impression that debate was going on about computers' role in industry: "The introduction of a computer rarely decreases a labour force. It is more likely, due to the increase in production, to expand labour requirements within parts of the organisation."
I think we are still trying to sell ourselves on this: the late nineties all about unbounded optimism for the role of technology in industry, and now after a little break we are right back in the same game.
the idea does have to break down, though: as one manufacturer realizes that computers and robots are cheap and easy to maintain compared to their large workforce, layoffs ensue. For better or for worse.
OMG asciiprOn is slashdotted!
Every OS Sucks
By 3 Dead Trolls In A Baggie
I come from a time in the nineteen hundred and seventies when computers where used for two things. To either go to the moon, or play pong. And nothing in between, you see, and you didn't need a fancy operating system to play pong and the men who went to the moon, god bless them, did it with no mouse and a plain text only black and white screen and thiry-two kilobytes of ram.
But then round about the late seventies home computers started to do a little bit more than play pong. Very little more. Why, computers started to play games and balance check books. Why, you could play Zaxxon on your apple II or write a book. All with a computer that had thirty-two kilobytes of ram.
It was enough to go to the moon, it was enough for you
It was a golden time, a time before Windows, a time before mouses, a time before the Internet and bloatware and a time before every OS sucked
Well way back in the olden times my computer worked for me
I'd laugh and play all night and day on Zork One, Two and Three
The Amiga, VIC 20 and Sinclair too, the TRS 80 and the Apple II
They did what they where supposed to do
It wasn't much but it was enough
But then Xerox made a prototype
Steve Jobs came on the scene
Read of mice and menus, windows, icons, trash, and a bitmapped screen
Oh, Stevie said to xerox "Boys, turn your heads and cough"
And when no one was looking he ripped their interfaces off
Stole every feature that he had seen
Put it in a cute box with a tiny little screen
MacOS1 ran that machine, only cost 5000 bucks
But it was slow, it was buggy, so they wrote it again
And now they're up to OS10
They'll charge you for the beta, then charge you again
But the MacOS still sucks
Every OS wastes your time, from the desktop to the lap
Every thing since Apple DOS, just a bunch of crap
From Microsoft to Macintosh to Lin-line-lin-line-nucs
Every computer crashes 'cause every OS sucks
Well then Microsoft jumped in the game
Copied Apple's interface with an OS named
Windows 3.1, it was twice as lame
But the stock price rose and rose
Then Windows 95, then 98
Man, Solitare never ran so great
And every single version came out late
But I guess thats the way it goes
But that bloatware will crash and delete your work
And dme man none of them work
Bill Gates may be richer than Captain Kirk
But the Windows OS blows. And sucks. At the same time
I'd trade it in. Yeah, right. For what?
It's top of the line from the CompuHut
The fridge, stove and toaster never crash on me
I should be able to get online without a Phd
My phone doesn't take a week to boot it
My TV doesn't crash when I mute it
I miss ascii text in my floppy drive
I wish VIC 20 was still alive
It ain't the hardware man
It's just that every OS sucks.. and blows
Now theres lin-ux or line-ux. I don't know how you say it
Or how you install it or use it or play it
Or where you download it or what programs run
But lin-ux or line-ux don't look like much fun
However you say it, it's getting great press
Though how it survives is anyones guess
If you ask me it's a great big mess
For elitist nerdy schmucks
"It's free" they say, if you can get it to run
"he geeks say "Hey, thats half the fun"
Yeah, but I've got a girlfriend and things to get done
The Linux OS sucks. I'm sorry to say it, but it does
Every OS wastes your time from the desktop to the lap
Everything since the Abacus, just a bunch of crap
From Microsoft to Macintosh to Lin-line-lin-line-nucs
Every computer crashes cause every os sucks
Every computer crashes cause every os sucks
Technoli
EBCDIC pr0n, doesnt sound like my bag, but you woultdn have thought ASCII pr0n would have been much straighter.
How many computers are too many?
I used to use Atari 8-bits and STs with their 5.25 and 3.5 in floppies respectively. I would boot the machines with the same floppy daily for months. I'd occasionally have one crap out on me but the key word is occasionally. I think the QC on disks and drives used to be quite a bit better. Come to think it, Verbatim media was good then too. Lower data densities probably helped too.
These days you're lucky if a floppy works once. My only use for them any more is flashing firmware that can't be flashed any other way. You better believe I sweat bullets until success is achieved.
I don't care if the pages are similar, I want to read one book, then the other. And if I can do it without having to scroll past the page of the book I'm not interested in, down to click a link, so much the better.
Computers work? Since when?
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Sociopath.
actually, it's a meta dupe
it's a dupe about a book from 1979 that is a dupe from one from 1971
Has anybody got a torrent link for the book?
From the Simpsons, as spoken by Prof. Frink:
Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive - Don't touch it! - But I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will own them.
My dad has worked extensively with computers since the mid-late seventies. One of his treasured possessions is a 10 lb computer bearing assembly that looks like it could of been a wheel bearing for a Toyota. I can't remember what exactly this bearing spun, but I do remember back in the eighties visiting my dad at his office and seeing rows and rows of refrigerator sized cabinets with spinning tape reels inside. I am also proud to say that I was surfing BBS's through a dialup modem back in the early nineties when I was a young teenager. I was on the internet before it was called the internet. Yea antiquity!
------- "I must create my own system, Or be enslaved by another man's" -William Blake
and the 3 Dead Trolls In a Baggie site
You haven't answered my question yet: How did you know, when you signed up, that your Slashdot UID would be 900132?
They are still the Von Neuman machine type, as described in that book. Just replace the components with bigger-better-faster-more complex ones, but not different. The same algorithms are applied to them, just as they had 25 years ago. And many algorithms are used today only because today's computers are faster than those of yesteryear, not because these algorithms where not known back then.
It's frightening that the amongst the people who where the target for this book when it was published (12-16 yrs old) most of them will still know less about computers than their kids do 30 years later.
indeed, i've bookmarked it as well :-)
though this needs a bit of work.
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
In the late 1970's I remember that Ladybird book was part of the standard induction course reading for trainee ICL salesmen! I think Ladybird books are still going strong, whereas ICL is now part of Fujitsu......
Don't you damned kids remember Expanded ram boards in the PC? And get OFF my DAMNED lawn!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Actually, what I meant was that sequential access (tape) and random access (disk, whether floppy or hard or optical -- remember the games on laser disk?) were considered competitors at the time. Each has found its own niche now.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
I think it's "watery tarts," not "strange women." But that's just my memory.
Other materials increasingly employed are magnetic tapes, casettes and diskettes (small flexible disks similar in size to a small gramophone record
This would definitely make one appreciate modern developments if the diskettes of 2005 didn't have the data integrity of a dead koala.
1947: Gates (transistor). Best thing to happen to computing.
1955: Gates (human). Worst thing to happen to computing.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Faggot