Deconstructing the PC Revolution

coondoggie writes to mention that room-sized computers and other recollections were shared over the weekend at the Vintage Computer Festival in Silicon Valley. "About 200 people, many of them of the gray-haired pony tail, bifocals and middle-age paunch variety, attended the event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif."

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Vintage computers

[sm62704]

From Growing Up With Computers (2005):

A half an hour or so later I arrived at the facility, swearing, with air conditioners in tow. To my amazement there were two guys standing outside in the snow waiting for me.

"What the fuck do you need a God damned air conditioner in the snow for? I demanded.

"Oh, man," one replied excitedly, "this is so cool. You have to see it!" These guys were bouncing around like kids at a birthday party. One showed me around as the other hooked up the hoses from the air conditioners and turned them on.

Inside was what looked like a library. Every room was filled with rows and rows of what appeared to be bookshelves. However, instead of books, these shelves held printed circuit boards. There must have been thousands of them. I was duly impressed, and had nerdily forgotten about the beer I had wanted so badly.

"Cool. But what is it for?" I asked.

"Ahh," he said, "come in here," and led me to yet another room. This room was huge, and had little in it that I recognized. It was straight out of a science fiction movie, only less corny looking.

"Ok," I replied stupidly, "what is it?"

"It's a C5 simulator! Come on inside!"

And inside the contraption was the cockpit of a C-5A cargo plane, at the time the largest aircraft in the world. We had several C5s there at Dover, which was, of course, why they needed a C5 simulator. And two SUV sized air conditioners to cool the contraption's circuitry.

It was identical to a C5 cockpit, right down to the bolts and carpets. The only difference was that the windows were ground glass rather than clear, for projecting images on.

They let me "fly" it. It was incredible! It sat on hydraulics, so when you accelerated, it felt like acceleration. Likewise banking, diving, etc. You could even crash the thing! This was even cooler than the other computer I had seen back when I was 12.

Again, I lusted after a computer of my own.

-mcgrew

Re:Smarter than that

[p0tat03]

And take twice as long to develop for, generate codebases that are 10 times more difficult to maintain... Computing power in general is being put to very good use. Look at Expose on Mac OS X, it can render *all* of your windows in real-time in an arrayed view. This is extremely useful for multitaskers who need to be able to get an overview of all of their open tasks, and switch between them quickly. Try doing that on a 100MHz machine (20 times slower than a 2GHz "modern" CPU).

Or heck, voice recognition input for handicapped people, try doing that to the same reliability and responsiveness as we can now, with a 100MHz machine. Or text-to-speech output, for visually impaired people, without the stuttering stilted sounds of yester-year, only possible because we have so many cycles to put towards it. Or for other visually impaired people - seamlessly scaling up UI elements without pixelation, using all vector resources, you can't do that on a 100MHz machine either.

Or more productively, photo manipulation and video production. Do you seriously mean to tell me that a 100MHz machine can edit videos just as well as a 2GHz machine? Way back in the day when I used an early version of Adobe Premiere to edit videos, you couldn't preview effects added to a video stream until you rendered it - simply not even CPU power to keep things smooth if you tried.

So yeah, if you're stuck in a CLI all day, maybe a modern computer can't do much more than an old busted one, but for the rest of the world it's fairly obvious where all the power is going.

Re:Smarter than that

[betterunixthanunix]

"Now put them in front of a box running DOS 6.22 and well, you can figure it out."

Depends on what you are trying to get them to do. The librarians at the Queens public library don't use a GUI to manage transactions. Everything from checking in/out books to issuing library cards is handled by a console app, and I've seen 80 year old librarians do it with no problem. The keys are plainly labeled on screen. The bar code ready just acts as a keyboard, and enters a single line of text followed by a newline after every scan.

That being said, there is no need for a system with Mac OS X graphics. It wastes battery life, it wastes program code, it increases complexity (and the probability of a bug goes up with it), and all the effort spent on flashy graphics could have been spent on better software design. I once sat down and figured this out: I could do everything I need to do for school using only:

• vi
• groff or latex
• lpr
• w3m
• ssh/scp

That's it; things like Matlab are running on our Unix servers. That software could be run in 4MB of RAM, which is the cutoff for NetBSD, and is therefore feasible for a modern OS. Prove to me that a student needs more than that.