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."

Comments

Re:The times, they are a-changin'

[Monte]

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? :)

Co-incidence?

[mccalli]

Check out those pictures of hot data-processing chixors! Man, 70s era DP babes. Be still, my heart.

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

Re:Second that!

[nn5ks]

Helps make it difficult to find dupes...

--
Nobody really understands sigs.

How Rockets Work

[lotho brandybuck]

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?

Copyright issue

[houghi]

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.

Re:Just wait 25 more years

[Blakey Rat]

Hey moderators... where's the insight here? I'm not seeing it...

I also love posts that say things like "reaching the end of the transister" without giving any sort of reference or even half-decent argument for that.

We're nearing the end of this comment.