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The Laptop, Circa 1968
Harry writes "In 1968, computers tended to occupy entire rooms, and were therefore hard to take with you. But Computerworld reports on Anderson Jacobson's 75-pound Teletype-terminal-in-a-case, an early attempt to let folks compute from anywhere. (Well, anywhere they had power and access to a telephone for the Teletype's acoustic coupler.) Wheels were optional."
Even Aristotle commented 2300 years ago, about how men and things were always purported to be bigger and better in the distant past. It really seems that geeks must have been much bigger and stronger in 1968.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Once I was talking to my grandpa about old computers, and I mentioned that my C64 had a slow 300 baud modem. He used to work on these mainframes, and he came right back and said, "the first modem I had was 9 baud." The article doesn't say how fast their modem is, but from the picture 9 baud is about right.
Just for comparison, 300 baud is so slow that you can read the text faster than it downloads. That teletype is honestly not the most convenient device.
Qxe4
They don't really call it a laptop, they use 'laptop' to draw a comparison between the somewhat portable teletype and modern portable computers.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Can't wait till they come out with the 300 baud version"
cat
For me anything bigger than 13' isn't portable, but "transportable".
*sheesh!* Kids now days![Ryiah (1324299) that you replied to, not you]
Hell, compared to the first computers I experienced at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1975 and 1976, these 'laptops' would almost be considered 'handhelds' since you did not need a forklift and 20 engineers to move them around.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
TI Silent 700 Ad: See how much progress was made in 8 years? :-)
However, the true* first portable computer began its early development in 1956, got approved in 1958 and entered active service in 1962: (*=The one that melts your face off)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/05/tob_minuteman_1/print.html
quote from TFA:
the American government was already rocking a line of cutting-edge portable computers that -- had they only been more widely released -- would have melted any tech lover's heart. And their face. And probably most everything within a mile radius.
We're speaking, of course, of the first-ever guidance system baked into the US Minuteman 1 nuclear missile. Maximum portability: about 9,700 km (6,000 mi). Target demographic: Commies.
root@127.0.0.1
For me anything bigger than 13' isn't portable, but "transportable".
Thirteen feet?! Sheesh, for me anything bigger than 13 feet isn't "transportable" but bloody enormous.
Incidentally, the fact about 2009 that might have most surprised by short-trousered self circa 1968 is the ubiquity of inches. It's not just the Burmese, the Liberians aind the Youessians who're talking about "13 inch screens", "1200 dpi" and so forth these days. it's (for example) Yodobashi Camera hawking consumer durables to people in Tokyo. Can we please go back to the 1968 future of SI?
...or something very similar. I got my start in computing 40 years ago on a "portable" Teletype with an acoustic coupler, dialed into a GE timesharing system from home. The teletype had a tape punch/reader, so I could write programs off-line. I believe the modem ran at about 110 baud. I programmed in BASIC--the real Kemeny and Kurtz variety, not the stripped-down variety that showed up 10 years later on the first personal computers. (Yes, I'm a bit above the median age for slashdot readers.)
What is funny is I was contemplating how to make a statement like yours and get it +5 funny! You aren't insightul, you are forgetful.
BBS's didn't have wikipedia. 99% of your BBS buddies were local. You couldn't order books on your BBS. You couldn't book a vacation to some far off land online--you'd have to use a travel agent. You couldn't play any kind of game with 10,000 other users at the same time. You couldn't be on a bus, a coffee shop, a library, or a park and instantly connect to any BBS in the world all at the same time. Elections weren't won or lost in part because of the effectiveness of a candidates BBS strategy. You didn't have entire political revolutions organized using BBSes either. If Iran was in the midst of a revolution during the BBS era, the US government wouldn't be telling some random BBS not to perform system maintenance because so many iranians were relying on it for communication!
Information? Forget it! You couldn't "google" a BBS and pull up schematics for some random IC. Which BBS did you dial into when you wanted to get a corporations SEC filings? Which BBS had information about the number of legs on a centipede? Which BBS contained streaming, real-time video coming from the olympics and for that matter, which BBS had the scores for every olympic game updated by the second? Which BBS had the wiring digram for a vintage VW bug?
I'm sure right now, some dillegent Slashdotter is going to post some BBS who did those things, but let me ask them this--how did you know of that BBS's existance? There was no Google, Bing or Yahoo for BBSes, and if there was, you'd have to know its phone number (which would probably be non-local).
No sir, you aren't insightful. You are my "+5 Funny" comment only serious. I had fun with BBSes too--but we have moved on. The amount of information available *instantly* at my fingertips is many, many orders of magnitude higher than the sum of all information found on all BBS systems that ever existed.
It is okay to be nostalgic about ANSI art, ACID draw, renegade BBSes, and 16 color gifs of madona in her swimsuit, but don't fool yourself into thinking you are feeling anything else.
Um, yeah, that "progress" was called the microchip.
For everyone out there who learned to use a computer after the late 1970's or so, a "Teletype", as this device is called, does not have a display. All output is to a printer -- a character printer. I am slightly amused at the stated despair over the need for a power plug and a landline. How about that ream of paper you have to lug around? (And if it's confidential information, I suppose also a trash bag.)
Um, yeah, that "progress" was called the microchip.
Yes, what I think a lot of people may have failed to realise with the ASR-33 is that it's all mechanical. The only electrical part is the solenoid that flips some pins sticking out of the shifter drum back and forwards.
When you press a key, the keypress is turned into a stream of data by a mechanical shifter. When you receive a character, the serial data is unshifted and printed by a mechanical shifter. No electronics to be found at all.
Let's not go overboard. The modem is electronic. It is almost certainly also digital. It would just be discrete parts, such as the 7400 series invented in 1964 -- with no microprocessors or any other chip with more than a handful of gates.
Have anyone installed gentoo on it? I would like which CFLAGS to use whit it so to have lightning fast system.
Still compiling the kernel. I'll let you know in 2014.
BTW Anyone had compiz running on it?
Now you're pulling my leg.
Alan Kay imagined the Dynabook in 1968. Have a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook
It was to be programmed in Smalltalk, which Kay created over the next few years.
Smalltalk what Objective-C and Cocoa were modeled on. However, even Smalltalk-80 (as in 1980) was more advanced in many ways than Objective-C and Cocoa are in 2009.
Look at why facebook is popular. I wager almost your entire friends list is people you know (or knew) in person.
If I were a betting man, my hunch would be that we'll figure out people dont really like socializing with random people on in the internet and what we really want is ways to better communicate with the people geographically and socially close to us. In otherwords, we'll go from "random people scattered across the globe talk about Linux" (slashdot) to "random people scattered across my city talk about technology in general".
We had one of those at Sperry Vickers (Troy, Michigan) in 1971, with the acoustic coupler in the wooden case. Even then, it was on the way out; we were moving to Uniscope CRT terminals and UNIVAC DCT 300 printers, connected to a UNIVAC 1108 computer.
Power was supplied to the modem as 120 VAC over otherwise-unused pins in the DB-25 connector from the Teletype Model 33 ASR.
Things were really clunky back then. We still had a full set of mechanical Remington Rand 90-column card gear, programmed by wiring up "connection boxes", mechanical plugboards which used flexible cables like bike brake cables to transmit data from input to output. That, too, was on the way out, but it was still used for a few jobs.
Shame on you, astroturfers.
Let's not go overboard. The modem is electronic. It is almost certainly also digital.
Early FSK modems, below 1200 baud, were analog devices. The output side was just an oscillator switched between two frequencies, and the input side was a pair of filters. This was a version of the technology used for radioteletype (RTTY), where it had often been implemented with tubes. (There are some very retro radio hams still using all-tube demodulators with mechanical teletypes.)
At 1200 baud and above, modem technology changed drastically, and digital components appeared. But modems were still mostly analog devices until DSP-based modems became economically feasible in the 1980s.
LOL!
That was the year I graduated from High School.
I was actually a subcontractor employee with Bendix Field Engineering Corp., working at Goddard's NTTF facility in the Logistics Department, on the graveyard shift then.
No more than a 'parts man' with a security clearance for the Computer Science Corporation's tech's and engineers that had to be on duty 'just in case'.
I was playing a text-based baseball game, and blackjack on those behemoths, not actually 'doing work' on them...much less understanding them!
I was just there 'just in case someone needs something', on duty parts man at the mandatory 24-7 parts counter there.
But nothing short of death will erase the memories and mental imagery of walking into that 'Walmart-sized' room full of computers, with everyone dressed in parkas, seeing your breath in the air, as I watched those tape reels jerk around, and all of the flashy lights! Made one hell of an impression on me, even though I had no clue what I was seeing at that time!
BTW:
1976 was a very good year to be 18 years old!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the USAF put a huge amount of effort into making electronics more reliable, with considerable success. One of their more interesting efforts involved marking a few percent of the Air Force's inventory of electronics boxes with a sticker instructing users that the unit was part of the USAF's Reliability Program, and if it broke, it was to be replaced as a unit, not fixed in the field. The broken unit was to be sent back to a lab (at Wright-Patterson AFB, I think) for analysis.
At the lab, the unit was tested and the failing component(s) found. The, the failing component was disassembled and analyzed. This involved opening up transistor cans and looking at the component under a microscope, and if necessary, an electron microscope. The USAF was trying to understand why components failed in the field. Did a "hermetic" seal leak? Was a bonding wire badly soldered to a pad? Was something mispositioned? Was the transistor substrate damaged?
Results were published in Aviation Week. With enlarged pictures of the defect. Part numbers and names of vendors were given. The USAF deliberately did this to apply pain to vendors.
Over time, parts got much better. By the 1980s, though, the USAF wasn't buying a big enough fraction of the output of the electronics industry to get much attention, much to the annoyance of senior USAF types.
Information overloaded happened as soon as the first libraries were constructed. We only don't feel it when we're in a library because we already know the system (wing > aisle > shelf, fiction by author, non-fiction by topic, etc).
FWIW I think the various social bookmarking sites, although not always super useful, move the work of filtering information from an algorithm to a groups of people with similar tastes who you can link up with. Not quite the same as a BBS but when combine that with forums, it gets easier to find relevant info.
And I think that what's actually changed is the specialness of the connection itself (I mean the person-to-person connection, not the LAN). I don't have any reason to be in a chat room any more but there was a time when I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I think my generation basically has gone through that. It all happened fast enough that we have one generation that was wowed by being able to download BBS messages and another that is growing up with no notion of a world without Facebook.
and I have a box of it in my workshop. It's all on paper tape. You'd print out the tape on the teletype and a picture of a naked lady would appear after several minutes. Google TTY art and you'll see what it looks like.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I'm not certain, but the Silent 700 may have been a terminal my dad brought home from work once or twice a week for about a year. At 300 baud, it was a good deal faster than the 110 baud "ticker tape" terminal we had been using previously.
The silent 700 was very light, comparatively fast, and extremely quiet. For comparison, todays inkjet printers are just about as quiet. I was greatly impressed.
To set the stage:
As a 12 year old, I was used to working on model 33 teletypes as a member of a boy scout explorer post (post 599?) (GE/Honeywell in Phoenix, Arizona, about 1972). Punched cards were still common, but there were a few electronic 9600 baud terminals around and required special connections to the mainframes we were using. (Even at 12, I was a nerd, but there wasn't a name for people like us then.)
The ticker tape machine printed text onto a carbonless 1/2 inch tall tape in a long, single line of text. (Think of a single line display.) It worked by having a hammer strike a spinning drum with type characters on its surface. It worked, but there was no possibility for formatted text spanning multiple lines (though you could cut the tape into pieces and scotch tape the pieces to form a page....), and it was extremely noisy.
Yes - the excact same mecahnism, actually: It was a current-loop - if current flowed it was a 0, if it stopped, it was a 1! (In some cases, it was +/- current, and in other cases it was 15mA for 1 and 4mA for 0. There were probably several other "standards" as well.)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Sounds to me like cloud computing.
History does repeat itself hehe...
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