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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.
Check out those pictures of hot data-processing chixors! Man, 70s era DP babes. Be still, my heart.
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?
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
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
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
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!
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).
Can we get a book on how Slashdot works? because I have no fscking clue.
Sure! http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/
It's not a book, but what the heck.
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.
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."
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.
meeee!!
;)
Today you will be oggling Roxanne
what i posted first now what do i win?
How many computers are too many?
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.
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
...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
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.
Magnetic core memory was still being used as the sole memory medium in the mid 90's for a centralised process control system I worked on. It was a legacy ICL (UK) mainframe system from the early 70's adapted for realtime data acquisition and control but was kept going - it was actually quite reliable, until two more generations of equipment had been rolled out in the rest of the company and a rationalisation of regional control locations had been made. Due to a few problems in the new systems development and some logistical problems it remained in service around 10 years after it should have been replaced. In total it had a few (single digit) kilobytes spread over about 10 boards around 12 inches square. The power requirement was huge though - in the order of a few kW. It was very crude even by the standards of the first computer I ever worked on - a SWTP (South West Technical Products) 6800 in late 1979.
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.
Comment of the year
In Soviet Russia, Computers understand how you work. In Soviet Russia, Cards punch you.