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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.
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...
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... :)
...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)
Integrated Circuits happened. Squeezing one of the aforementioned "circuits" onto a single little package called an "IC", or a "chip."
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.
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).
"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
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.
FWIW, I suspect the real reason that Teletype Model 33 looks so ancient is that, from looking at the internals, it appears to be a clone/ripoff of a Siemens Model 100 or a Creed Model 47 - both much earlier models - updated with an "electronic" keyboard. IIRC, Teletype Corp bought (or maybe partnered with) the UK-based Creed.
(Slashdotters with a mechanical bent really should look into the old electromechanical teleprinters. They're amazing machines; a real tribute to the ingenuity of their designers. Given a motor spinning at 3000 RPM, and no electronics, how would you convert a 5-bit code to printed text?)
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
No, but it'll probaby run NetBSD.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
You know how people watch old movies, learn history, carry on traditions, things like that? It's called culture. Now I don't know if you're a professional, or even just a dedicated hobbyist, but if either is true then this is your culture. Knowing who Atanasoff and Barry are, or what ENIAC stands for and what it was used for, or what a Hollerith Card is, or who Charles Babbage and Lady Lovelace (Ada Byron) are and what they did is maybe not a necessity, but I personally don't see how you can take real pride in your craft/trade/science/art if its history is completely meaningless to you.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
And if you do happen to work in IT proffesionally, or want to, then knowing what mistakes people have made in the past or what they have done that has worked well can help you immeasurably.
But then, who wants to do something well when you can do a half arsed job, spend twice as long ironing out the bugs and then get a reputation for being a fuckwit.
I dont read
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.
But there were only a certain number of companies big enough to use a mainframe, and most of these would have been in the US an Europe until very recently. Other companies would have outsourced anything that needed a computer. I'd say world computing power definitely was higher than a 4GHz Pentium 4 by the time the home computer market had started, but the mainframes do mess things up
But this is where the problem is. With a little research, it's quite possible to get a good estimate for the speed of, say a PDP-8, but unless you know of a good resource for sales of computers between 1950 and 1980, it's difficult to estimate how many machines there were.