Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

7 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. 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. 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
  3. 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.
  4. 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!

  5. 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.