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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."
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.
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.
No, nor do most linguists.
The Piraha situation has recently been attacked as wishful thinking on behalf of its major researcher. There's plenty out there that's critical of it.
Yes, this was included in my professing the usefulness of Latin for understanding culture influenced by Latin.
A language's genetic affiliation is decided by phonological correspondences in the morphology, so English would be a Germanic language no matter how many French words it absorbed. To give a similar situation as an example, Armenian is still in its own branch even though most of its lexicon was replaced by Persian loans.
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)
Integrated Circuits happened. Squeezing one of the aforementioned "circuits" onto a single little package called an "IC", or a "chip."
"That Olivetti unit looks like it was made 20 years later..."
Probably because the Olivetti extensively used plastic or die-cast white metal in the case. If you look at the old ugly stuff like the KSR, the cases were _steel_ which is why they look so bland. You can't get the same shapes by stamping steel like you can with plastic-injection molding or die-casting and the style of the Olivetti simply screams "molded parts".
Back then it was a cultural thing. Plastic was "cheap" and steel meant quality. If the case wasn't heavy enough to kill someone with, it wasn't quality.
--
BMO
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.