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How Computers Work -- Circa 1979

Posted by timothy on from the everything-was-in-black-and-white dept.

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."

22 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. OMG is this mirrored?! by 0xdeaddead · · Score: 3, Funny

    I feel it being /.'d like now... Although I know why my computer room sucks now, our tiles are not orange... :|

  2. dupe!! by gambit3 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Dibs on dupe!!

    Do I get a prize?

    --
    Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
  3. [joke] by Lord+Bitman · · Score: 3, Funny

    [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
  4. Repost! by willith · · Score: 3, Informative

    Repost from November 04. Not bad, considering!

  5. The times, they are a-changin' by cagle_.25 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Interesting that tape and disk were competing media back in the day. Now they each have specialized uses (backup and storage, resp.).

    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.
  6. W00t!!1! by Monte · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  7. Illustrations by bobcat7677 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    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? :P

    1. Re:Illustrations by Monte · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I mean can you imagine how many truckloads of punch cards you would need to install windows XP?

      Let's assume we need all of a 650Meg ISO image to instal Windows XP. That's 650x1024^2 or 681,574,400 byes. A standard Hollerith punch card can hold 80 bytes, so we need 8,519,680 cards.

      Big assumption here, if someone has better data please chime in - but I'm going to assume 75 Hollerith cards stack to one inch, so we're talking 113,596 or so inches worth of cards, 9,466 feet.

      Assuming a semi trailer is 28 feet long, that's 338 stacks. Which is as far as I'm going to take it, but it's not a full truckload.

      However one should never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckload of tapes.

    2. Re:Illustrations by Monte · · Score: 3, Funny

      Your a geek.

      What about my a geek?

      (I'm a grammar nazi, too.)

  8. Second that! by imsabbel · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?
    1. Re:Second that! by oberondarksoul · · Score: 4, Informative

      I gave up on Slashdot's search ages ago - try using Google instead. Using "site:slashdot.org" then the search term usually works wonders.

      --
      And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
  9. How Slashdot works...The Dupe! by toupsie · · Score: 4, Funny


    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.
  10. Are people still interested by Zane+Hopkins · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    Perhaps we /.'s are evolving out of existance?

  11. when this was first issued ...... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  12. Chindren's book by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  13. Sad by Random+BedHead+Ed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  14. They are obeying the law. by reality-bytes · · Score: 3, Informative
    According to the UK govt copyright office:

    Copyright in a published edition expires 25 years from the end of the year in which the edition was first published.


    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.
  15. Re:The times, they are a-changin' by ttldkns · · Score: 3, Informative

    meeee!!

    Today you will be oggling Roxanne

    what i posted first now what do i win? ;)

    --
    How many computers are too many?
  16. Wow! I had that book as a kid. by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  17. Re:But, but, by Linker3000 · · Score: 3, Funny

    How do computers work without Windows?

    Better.

    --
    AT&ROFLMAO
  18. I want to be the first to do these... by plexx · · Score: 3, Funny

    In Soviet Russia, Computers understand how you work. In Soviet Russia, Cards punch you.

  19. Re:I've got the 1979 version of this book... by The+Snowman · · Score: 3, Funny

    Was there a "How it Works... The Woman" version of those books too?

    No, there are some mysteries of the universe that cannot be explained.

    --
    24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!