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Updating the Computer, Circa 1969
Coudal points out a "Swell article from UK Magazine 'Design' from 1969," excerpting "Designing a computer is a continuous process in which technological breakthroughs must be matched by new hardware, and new hardware by new software, without invalidating the systems already in use."
My theory is that computing and humanity interrelate: in an environment where Latin is taught alongside math, your users and developers are sharper and more humane.
without invalidating the systems already in use.
Everyone knows that Intel and Microsoft have never invalidated a system already in use.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I read about that 37 years ago on Digg.
If you put your ear against it you can hear the hampsters running!
The girl in the photo on the first page is H-A-W-T HOT!
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Anyone know what happened?
Everyone knows that Intel and Microsoft have never invalidated a system already in use.
:P
They just wait a few hours for it to crash first
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
If you're going to drop ancient Greek into your posts to sound like an intellectual then you should make sure your grammar is correct. ;)
Your use of the definate article is ugly and redundant. What you wrote translates into English as "... than the point-and-grunt interface of today's the people".
The article's mention of ICL (formerly ICT) made me think of the book "LEO, The Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer". The 1968 ICT merger with English Electric Computers to form ICL, connects the company with LEO, a computer designed by a Bakery company in the late 1940's/early 1950's. A bizarre and entertaining tale, if you are into obscure computer history.
Bah.... I much rather have a portable computer...
It might be a little easier to read if the paragraphs were INDENTED.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
1969 called and they want their article back
that a page about a design magazine might just, maybe, break up that wall of text into something designed to be easier to read.
... these people never heard about vista ;)
Yeah, 1969 was about the last time attractive women in skirts were seen anywhere near a data center... :)
Totally off-topic, but your .sig prompted me to find that story online. Thank you!
...a mere TEN YEARS LATER, one could purchase a TRS-80 at Radio Shack, featuring 4K of RAM and using a casette tape recorder for storage, for only a thousand bucks or so.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/diad_search.html Thanks! Quite a resource (for some of us).
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
Wow! An old aricle on computers. Big deal!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That article is a typical pice of sales department puffery. If you really want to know what it was like to design a computer in those days read Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine. It chronicles the efforts by Data General engineers to create a new computer. At the time I was working as an engineer for Honeywell's EDP (Electronic Data Processing) division and I can vouch for the accuracy of Kidder's reporting. I recognized all the problems and all the actors even though it was a different company.
At a given point in the development of computers a lot of people end up working on the same problems and often come up with similar solutions. While I was at Honeywell they bought GE's computer division and we got to see the design documents for GE's new computer. It was very interesting reading since we could look at each turning point in the design and say: "Oh, they decided to do it that way." All of the problems were ones that we'd worked on and the solutions were all ones that we'd considered. For the most part they'd made the same decisions we had. It was an experience that's given me a real respect for the notion that an invention is "in the air." It isn't necessarily because the problems are being widely discussed but more that a given state of technology dictates certain questions and that the solutions follow logically from the questions.
Does it run Linux?
I found this other article even more interesting - 1974, issue 311, "In Praise of Hydrogen." It talks about how easily the School of Automotive Studies converted a traditional internal combustion engine to hydrogen, and how with only one major area of research (storage of hydrogen) we should expect our dependance on gasoline to be quickly and easily eliminated.
Talk about vaporware (pun not intended, though also funny).
When you look at it, you wonder why the US designers are so retarted to design ugly stuff like the KSR-33.
That Olivetti unit looks like it was made 20 years later...
Actually, no. It means "(the) masses" or "(the) general populace". That's what makes language so interesting: it tends to transmute over time.
However, the Colt 1911 model still works fine - not really a computer, unless it involves questions where the answer is BANG!
Q: Why don't the British make computers anymore? A: Because they couldn't find a way to make them leak oil.
-- Mace only makes me hornier.
I can still program in PLAN (its assembler), and CES-Basic. And FORTRAN.
Obsessed with the Golden Ratio, are we?
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
To put this in perspective, modern Electronics was being invented. The hardware advances werer hi8ge at the time. :-)
Designing your computer you had the choice of something like:
Rockwell's 6500 (8 bit 1 Mhz cpu)
Motorola's very first 6800
Intel's (Who's Intel? Never heard of them) 8080 was under development or mebbe in prototype
The Next kid onto the block was Zilog with the Z80 in 1973 or thereabouts.
When Motorola introduced the 16 bit 68000 (at a blistering 15Mhz eventually) hey, that was for
minicomputers & mainframes. When they got them to 33 Mhz, serious mainframes only.
HP were paying some lot to develop their own 12 bit processor, because none of the others were good enough
The Rockwell, Motorola and Intel chips were pretty primitive. Support chips were basically non existent.
Suddenly a thing like a PIO, timer or UART would save six square inches of board space.
Beyond basic logic devices. all logic families were bare. You had 74xx (not 74ls or hc or anbything) and about
a few dozen types at most. The PC and Mac were 13 years away and even the unix epoch was future.
So, here's the metric I want to know...
I have a computer under my desk. If you go backwards in time, computers get worse and worse. Until, finally, you reach this interesting point, where, if you look at the aggregate computation power of every computer on the planet in active use, my single computer arguably has them all collectively beat. In terms, say, of mathematical operations per second. I'd like to know what year that is. It's going to be later than 1950, 1960, 1970... Could it be as high as 1980? Higher?
Education is the silver bullet.
Nah... Have to keep remembering she'll be 40 years older now.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
cheers! I worked on this project - it was about 1995 -1997 so really fun to see it's still alive and useful. All praise to the Arts and Humanties Data Service for keeping it up there.
:-)
:-)
So for folks wondering why it's so basic - a little more info.. short answer: it was a small project and it was about ten years ago.
I think we started about 1995 or 1996 - description here. Pat Batley is a visionary librarian who could see the value of digitisation and pushed to get archive resources digitised. She got in contact with my boss in our small research group in the London College of Printing (about 4 people), and got him on board. So the project's original goal (as far I know) was to put ten years of Design magazine on CD-ROMs (this was 1994, 95? so CD-ROMs were still the way to go...). We got funded for a project manager and a couple of assistants and these guys scanned page by page all ten years, about 12,000 pages. Then ran the scans through an OCR program and then manually proof read them. We poured this into the database and produced the CD-ROMs. Towards the end of the programme (about 1996, 97) we decided it would be cool to put it online, it was a hack. So hence the very minimal web pages. Very limited time and money towards the end of the project and in 1997 it didn't look so bad! Plus the main thing we wanted was high res images of each of the pages, as the design of the journal itself as well as the content was important to archive (hence full pages rather than just the images). So the ascii text underneath we felt was fine, people could refer to the images of the whole pages for information about the layout. Would be great to update the site, anybody fancy sending some funding to AHDS?
But I'm really glad we did it because the web feels a lot better place right now than CD-ROMs for it to be on, and those Design editions cover an amazing period of the journal itself and what was going on in the world at the time. Take a look at the difference between the 1965 issues and the 1974 issues for how the magazine itself changes.
Cheers for your positive feedback! ten years later and it's still alive and useful, I'm really pleased. Enjoy
I don't agree. There is at least one good reason to teach latin. First of all to make sure that once we're done with them nobody will ever be interested again in the subject and so we can give them a dose of Cicero, the roman slumlord who had "National Security Risks" strangled in prison without due process and trial and declared martial law. Yes Cicero was a dirty slumlord and his income came from a couple of dozen hazardous, unhealthy tenements throughout the city, multistoried buildings made of wood that housed hundreds of people and their body wastes and more often than not went up in flames trapping the working poor inside. His writings are full of abuse and hatred for Julius Cesar who he particularily hated for the many improvements he brought about for Rome's poor, such as the forgiving of debt incurred by (among other) Ciceros abhorrent rent, but also other laws that also affected Cicero's bottom line such as forcing him to employ a certain percentage of free men instead of slaves to work on the freshly privatized formerly public agricultural fiels outside of Rome which Cicero happened to "own". Against this backdrop, the piece of shit of a "Hitlerland Security State" that is imposed on us is a high tech version of old Rome foisted upon us except that the puppets they show on TV are of course not nearly as eloquent as Cicero.
I'm don't think we should pass up such a splendid opportunity for young people to learn about the Roman Empire than from the Fascists who ran it and profitted from (instead of the people who endured it).
...Thank goodness!