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Big, Beautiful Boxes From Computer History
Slatterz writes "We might sometimes complain about the limitations of today's technology, but there's nothing like seeing photos of a 27Kg hard drive with a capacity of 5MB to put things into perspective. PC Authority has toured the Computer History Museum in California, and has posted these fascinating photos, including monster 27Kg and 60Kg drives, and a SAGE air-defense system. Each SAGE housed an A/N FSQ-7 computer, which had around 60,000 vacuum tubes. IBM constructed the hardware, and each computer occupied a huge amount of space. From its completion in 1954 it analyzed radar data in real-time, to provide a complete picture of US Airspace during the cold war. Other interesting photos and trivia include some giant early IBM disc platters, and pics of a curvaceous Cray-1 supercomputer, built in 1972. It was the fastest machine in the world until 1977 and an icon for decades. It cost a mere $6 million, and could perform at 160MFLOPS — which your phone can now comfortably manage."
Although these photos don't include the functional replica of Babbage's Difference Engine #2 that's currently at the museum, and leaves in a few months. I was just at the museum two weeks ago. It was pretty interesting. There's also an exhibit about the history of chess computation. Apart from those two things though, most of the museum is a big room full of old computers. I wish there were more to see there, but what is there is pretty interesting. I recommend going before the Babbage Engine leaves in a few months if one gets a chance.
I love BBW errr I mean BBB.
are pretty impressive. It is amazing how much smaller and faster the equipment has become. What is alarming is the rate at which the raw materials are being pulled from the Earth then discarded, usually right after the two year contract expires.
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?
" The Enigma machine was used during world War Two - it gives more than a trillion possible combinations for a single number, making it impossible to decrypt letters encoded with the Enigma. The big silver piece next to it is a part of the Colossus - a British code-breaking computer."
The writer obviously doesn't know what he's talking about and didn't bother to read any text associated with that display, if he thinks Enigma was unbreakable. Especially since the parts of Colossus were specifically for breaking Enigma. Further, "more than a trillion" is a ludicrously imprecise figure, why couldn't he at least look up a more accurate figure (10^23 according to Wikipedia)?
Magnetic core memory came in a range of sizes. It replaced vacuum tubes entirely by about 1960, and was extremely cheap to produce - from $1 per bit initially, to 1c per bit by the mid-60s.
Crazy, but in those days, no one ever used more than 640 bits of memory. True story.
Direct link to photograph, in case you want to see a range of core memories, which, incidentally were great because they didn't lose their values in a power outage:
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Gallery/153867,computer-history-museum-photo-gallery-weird-fascinating-photos-including-a-giant-cray-and-a-60kg-hard-drive.aspx/40
Qxe4
Going off of those standards, the thumbdrive sitting on my desk should weigh 22,118.4 kilos.
Double that because i've got two.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
...until you plug it in, at which point you'd better pray you've got adequate cooling.
Third photo has an ominous misspelling. They can't even spell computers correctly in the caption.
Here was an interesting one, an old PC with a monitor in portrait format. It asks why they didn't catch on, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It seems like it WOULD be better, especially because you could look at an entire page on the thing. Now with 21 inch monitors I can do that anyway, but what was it that caused our landscape monitors to become standardized like they are?
Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?
Qxe4
So can anyone explain to me what exactly a Kelvin gram is, and how it relates to hard drives? I'm guessing something to do with heat capacity...
Oh, you meant kilogram?
k = kilo
K = Kelvin
It's not rocket surgery, people. And it's something that should be caught by Slashdot's "editors" before it goes up on the main page.
No kidding, did you check out this insane piece? It's like a rats nest but needs to be immersed in coolant to run. Smaller than a desktop computer, too.
Qxe4
I recently read A Computer called Leo, which tells a story of post WW2 computer development in the UK.
The thing that stuck me most was the long cylinders of mercury used as memory, (mercury delay lines).
The sad thing about the Computer Museum is that almost nothing there works. The Difference Engine replica is about it, and that's entirely mechanical. Some people tried to restore an IBM 1620 back in 1999, but they never got it working.
It's almost the last computer museum, too. The ones in Boston, San Diego, and Germany went bust. There's one still open in Bozeman, Montana. There are a few others which are just stuff in storage. That's about it.
The history of this field disappears very fast.
The highlight and centrepiece of the Museum - The Babbage Engine. It's a replica, made in the British Museum using the original as a template.
This is not a replica of an original. The machine in the British museum was built by a team using Babbage's note. No original was ever built, as Babbage could not get funding for the project. The machine at the Computer History Museum (as pictured) is the second built by the same British Museum team who built the first.
If you want to see it, it will be at the CHM until December 2010, at which time it will be moved to the home of Nathan Myhrvold, the person who paid for its construction.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Very cool indeed. Back in 3rd grade, I really wanted a Cray. I remember thinking when I grew up I could have a garage out back and fill it with the worlds MOST POWERFUL COMPUTER! I saw one up close and personal in a museum in france, had to tease it with my cell phone.
Some of those machine calculators are pretty awesome, but I really like the fact that we have now come some type of odd circle, and now we have games where we can virtually build something similar.
Also, I've seen this picture before. Two questions: one, is it real. Two: please tell me the steering wheel is to avoid computer crashes.
Oh well...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
That CDC 6600 console with the two round screens must be the weirdest-looking real-life terminal device ever built! The whole thing looks like a robot face. I wonder what the screen resolution was...
That brings back a lot of memories. Back then, we used to put our desks on top of the computer.
Seeing that old gear is great. It's amazing the ingenuity used in the 40s and 50s.
My mother-in-law used to program a CDC, which always seems quite crazy as she can't even use SMS on her phone! Of course in those days doing punch cards was so tedious men didn't want the jobs. It would be interesting to compare the ratios of female:male programmers and correlate it with the improvement in tech over time.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
When I was in high school, my computer class did a field trip to one of the sites. It was a two story building, with each floor the size of a department store and filled with aisles and aisle of racks filled with vacuum tube processing modules. The had disk had a drum the size of a small trash can. Even at the time (late 70's) the guy giving the tour said the computer could be replaced by one the size of a phone booth. These days, a few hundred of them could fit into something the size of a phone.
15 years is not that much. We already had Pentiums in 1994. The article is about a time when CPU cycles were more expensive than programmer time and text data took a lot of space.
The UI itself hasn't got significantly better since Windows 95. (Hands up if you would actually consider using a graphical interface without a task bar.)
It is a tricky linguistic problem. This probably doesn't happen often, where the designer never gets to make one but someone makes long afterwards. It's not a replica in the conventional sense, but I don't know what other word would describe it better than that.
Is there any information on what this thing cost to make? Was it in the millions? several tens or hundreds of thousands?
Correct - but also note that it was the Science Museum in London that build the replica - not the British Museum (also in London). The British Museum houses collections of cultural artifact and history from around the globe (it's in Great Russell Street in the Bloomsbury area of London, and is well worth a visit if you ever get the chance). The Science Museum is in Cromwell Road in the Kensington area of London, and specialises, as you might guess, in the history of science and technology from the year dot to the present time - also well worth a visit.
I think I've seen one of those 27 kilo HDDs before. I volunteered at a local computer recycling program, and among many usable machines, they'd get old stuff that we were to dismantle, and separate into different kinds of materials for disposal. The one I saw was an IBM, and the outer housing for the HDD was roughly the shape and size of a washer or dryer. The host machine was similar but twice as long. It had an 8-inch floppy with what I think was some kind of auto-loader. I think, all told, it had hookups for THREE 220V circuits. (Two on the host, and one on the HDD) I wanted to get one of the drive platters for myself, but the best I could do was the 'Unit Emergency' killswitch off the host computer. (I had set aside the control panel from the host machine, but didn't have room to take it home that day, and someone tossed it.)
Also, holy crap. I never knew silicon wafers came from hugeass things of silicon like that, I always assumed they were made more or less in their final wafer form artificially from smaller pieces. o_O I guess it makes more sense that they're cut from massive homogeneous chunks of solid silicon.
I wish they had a better shot of the RCA tube memory. I've seen pictures of those before, the dies look cool in a vacuum tube like that. They look very intricate, like miniatures of space station solar panels or something, heh. (Like the die in an EPROM, but MUCH bigger)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Yeah, I programmed the SAGE in the late 50's. It did crazy stuff: Imaging talking to remote radars connected via a phone line? You're kidding, no? Modems the size of a small bus.
Got audio by monitoring the 1's and 0's cycling a particular register bit, and since the SAGE was a dual machine, some local talent had one playing right and left hand boogie-woogie.
Can you imagine the design meetings? "Good lord, who was it that decided 50 kilo chassis would be in vogue this year!?"
Also, I've seen this picture before. Two questions: one, is it real. Two: please tell me the steering wheel is to avoid computer crashes.
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp
Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a "home computer" might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn't, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype "home computer." The picture is actually an entry submitted to a Fark.com image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on the U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo)
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The article is about a time when CPU cycles were more expensive than programmer time and text data took a lot of space.
That's about when I started -- punch cards and all. Maybe two or three turnarounds a day. Before sending a program in to run through the assembler, we were expected to sit there and "play computer", going through all the operations of all paths through the programs before "wasting time" on the big iron.
Mind you, this was in the afternoon. The mornings were spent cutting down redwood trees, tapping rubber trees and mining graphite, copper and zinc so we could fabricate our own pencils for the afternoon's work. The real hotshots didn't make programming mistakes, so they could skip tapping the rubber trees for use in making pencil erasers.
Is there any information on what this thing cost to make? Was it in the millions? several tens or hundreds of thousands?
I was at the talk which Nathan Myhrvold gave (he paid for it) at the opening ceremony for the exhibit. He did not give a figure, but my impression was $10 million (US) or more. Nathan did make a comment about the ridiculous cost of shipping it via air from the UK to the US. :-)
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
You mean a wm/desktop environment?
The application menu in System 7 was the evolution of the System 6 switcher and the OSX dock is an improvement the concept. Openbox and other lightweight WM's install without a taskbar. I have one machine where I've removed the xfce tasklist, relying on minimised application icons instead (Minimised apps icons are the only use I have for the desktop).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IBM did not invent pipelining as the captions suggest. It was invented by Zuse, 20 years earlier.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Windows 95 == Mac 85!
It _is_ a replica, but just not in the way you imagined.
The (British) _Science_ Museum has (or had) a workshop for building Difference Engine No. 2. This is the second one, built by replicating the first. They can't build one by following Babbage's plans, because his plans are wrong in subtle ways, and had to be corrected. One of the things the Science Museum gained by making the first one was a _correct_ set of plans for the machine. If you have a lot of money and want a Difference Engine, I have no doubt that the Science Museum would start up that workshop again and build another replica for you too.
Very cool indeed. Back in 3rd grade, I really wanted a Cray.
The one at the CHM is neat. they let you look into the center of the circle. Pretty amazing -- the thing is a rat's nest of cables draped from one segment of the machine to the other segments. They're draped that way so that the electrical path from one place to the other is the same, to keep the signal timings right. If a signal went from one segment to an adjacent one, it draped in a loop that went nearly to the floor. But if a signal were going to a segment 180 degrees away, directly across the core, the ends were farther apart and the sagging part did not get as close to the floor. Kinda like holding a jump rope with your hands together, then moving them apart while keeping the same distance above the floor.
Good point. You are correct. Thank you for your comment.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Windows 95 == Mac 85!
You seem to think I'm talking about the graphical interface as a whole, but that's not the case. I'm talking about the task bar (as in, a convenient way to always see all your running programs and switch back and forth between them with a single click of the mouse). I've never used a Mac, and I'm not planning to start anytime soon, but from what I found, they didn't have anything like that before Win95, and afterwards they focused on starting new programs with a single click, not switch to running ones or even show them.
Could you please tell me from each of the screenshots, if there is a text editor somewhere in the background with a file I want to edit? I wouldn't want to open the same file twice.
Ah! Something was just bugging me about that display - it didn't 'fit' along the scene's perspective lines.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
In 1980 I was programming on an Amdahl 470 with a whopping 1 Gigabyte of disk memory. This required a large room full of IBM Winchester drives, looking for all the world like some sort of high-tech laundromat. The computer itself was in another large room full of equipment, and a laser printer the size of a VW microbus (no kidding).
This machine also came with not one, but two full time consulting engineers, one from Amdahl for hardware problems, and one from IBM for software problems. The Amdahl CE made $ 50K per year, which seemed like an impossibly high salary to us grunt programmers.
The biggest game on this machine was a dungeons and dragons type game written in PL1. I have often wondered what that game really was and what its history was. ( I never played it since as a student I couldn't afford it - with the IBM mainframe philosophy, you were charged for everything, which came out of my grant, and machine time was not cheap. Logging in to check the status of my jobs and immediately logging out cost about $ 3.00, for example.)
I think you'll find that this was probabaly down to the costs of having the parts made and the maybe one person who was officially on the project. A lot of skilled people gave some serious time to the project. If you included their time, it would be much more.
See my journal, I write things there
you can't open the same file twice on a mac.
Yeah, thanks for that mod. I'd like to hear your reasoning for it. I think you'll find it's well documented that many of the early programmers were women and that women only make up a small proportion of programmers now.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I think you'll find that this was probabaly down to the costs of having the parts made and the maybe one person who was officially on the project. A lot of skilled people gave some serious time to the project. If you included their time, it would be much more.
I agree. I said $10 million (US) or more. I did not want to over-estimate. And, as you say, the machining of the parts was certainly expensive.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
When I saw the title, I thought it mean the big, beautiful boxes of the > $500 display cards...
Oddly enough, there apparently are some people that still use them. The train ticketing, phone book, and a number of other services are still up and in use.
Not odd at all considering the various threats of Internet, from spam to virus, credit cards frauds, DoS etc. Minitel pretty much insure that whomever you phone is legit provided you don't misstype the phone number. It's a very helpful and desirable feature for some sensitive businesses (chemist ordering prescription drugs, etc.)
And thanks to being a passive terminal, Minitel is immune to virus and trojans by nature. Being so simple, there are no bugs either I'm aware off. And being text only makes for a great bonus to blinds who can plug whatever Braille device they want to use it.
... would be used if all computers were still that big!
So, was this used to drive a very early model of EMH?
So where's the Crushinator?
Okay, suppose we are back in the forties. We have lots of sound and telephone technology. There are tape and wire recorders. We have some early TV technology. There are mechanical calculators and cash registers. You have Hollerith punched cards, Jacquard looms, and the Harringay Tote. How would you set about it? Telephone technology and mercury delay lines were used for early memory, but you had to wait for your bit to arrive back. TV read/write tubes were used to store a small 2D array of dots and re-sample them, but they weren't really RAM yet.
For me, the big missed opportunity was the neon lamp. A neon lamp may take 20 volts to strike, but will run on 5 volts. A neon lamp would store a bit. You could even address a single bulb in a 2D array of them by X and Y buses, and query the state non-destructively, or change its state without affecting the others. Rather than having hundreds of little glass tubes, you might seal a 2D array into a single, flat tube. You would then have an early plasma display (remember the early orange ones in the eighties could store data?). There were calculating valves like the decatron (I remember using those) but, tantalizingly, no large-scale plasma arc logic.
What would you do?
I got it when a company I worked for replaced those huge drives with an EMC box. Exellent fan, it's silent and produces a lot of air flow, very nice to have in my bedroom during hot summer nights.
OMFG, what retarded troll!
I'd happily not have a taskbar, if there were other ways to do it (e.g., workspaces). The UI hasn't really changed much since long before Windows 95 - in the 80s there were plenty of GUIs (AmigaOS, MacOS etc).
The shiny hasn't got significantly better, but in areas which actually matter, the UI has actually improved significantly. Task switching is largely seamless. Granted, that's largely a hardware thing, but the fact that I can do several downloads while working on something else, while my computer does an antivirus scan (ok that last part might be a bad idea) is a significant UI improvement.
Also, there are more subtle things. Have you used Windows 95 recently? I've used a few apps that were coded for 95, and you can see a lot of the usability gaps shining through from the less-mature APIs. Unable to properly minimize, hard to resize certain text boxes, crap that overflows off the edge of the screen when the text gets too large... Things have gotten better.
And let's not even talk about stability.
I thought the meme was "Windows 95 == Mac 89" (I'm not sure why 89 was chosen in particlar)?
Which we then pointed out in turn was equal to Amiga 85.
(The claim for Mac OS might make sense for the UI alone, but in other areas, such as offering preemptive multitasking, it lagged behind Windows 95, and in fact it never got that feature.)
It is simple fact that many cryptographic systems are uncrackable in the absence of all knowledge of how they work - but in the real world keys must be exchanged somehow, and encryption must always have a mechanism, and these are always potential vulnerabilities.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I dunno, Windows 95 OSR2 was extremely stable for me on a 486dx2-66 with 8M RAM. Granted, I only used Word 97, and didn't have Internet connection until I think 2000 (I live in Russia.)
Hands up if you would actually consider using a graphical interface without a task bar
You mean 'hand up if you'd consider using Mac OS X or one of the many *NIX environments that doesn't try to copy Windows?'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I was offered a Cray a few years ago - free if I paid delivery, ex-MoD. Unfortunately, it was about as big as my house and, if I wanted to turn it on then it cost something like 5K in liquid nitrogen to keep it cool per day.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What part of "no fatties" didn't you understand?
It appears to be an early prototype of a "graphecon", "radechon", or some other type of scan converter tube. The dual electron guns and image plate rule it out as a selectron.
The selectron was a real neat piece of engineering, and must have been a beautiful sight to see in operation, with rows of blinking phosphor dots, one for each stored bit.
A comprehensive page on the selectron tube here, with LOTS of pictures and technical data:
http://home.att.net/~thercaselectron/index1.html
Run your mouse over the tube pins on the front page to see a simulation of the tube in operation.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Alan Turing (genuflect three times) calculated that gin (i.e. 60% water/40% ethanol) was as good as mercury. But it wasn't "exotic" enough to be approved for use.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
That is a mess of wires obscuring the Cray 3 CPUs to which they are connected. It cost $300 million to develop the first functional system for NCAR before Cray Computer Corp, Seymore Cray's last start-up company, folded. (Not to be confused with Cray Inc. which is still producing new systems.)
This machine required 90,000 watts of power and gave off 310,000 British thermal units of heat per hour â" enough to warm six 2,000-square-foot homes. Getting the heat out of the data center would have been a serious problem. I'm sure the whole NCAR building was designed to do just that.
DigiBarn has more pictures of the Cray 3 CPUs.
I've been away from the scene from awhile but can someone tell me which phone is capable of performing 160 million Floating Point Operations per second? At 6 clock cycles per Floating Point Instruction (which I really doubt), that would be running at a clock rate of 1GHz. I recall that even NOP (No Operation) instructions take a clock or two to execute which is why they used to be (still are?) used in some timing loops. Even with pipelining that advances every clock cycle, I find it hard to believe that 355.0/113.0 done out to 6 or 10 digits of (equivalent) precision can be done 160 Million times per second. I can see a phone micro maybe handling 160MIPS (Instructions Per Second), but not floating point.
For most purposes, 355/113 is close enough.
If you want to see some big boxes, VCF East is being held Sept 12-13th, at INFOAGE in Wall NJ.
Check out http://www.vintage.org/ for more information.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
very few people realize the power that sits in the palm of their hands these days. The computational power of a cell phone is vastly superior to that of computers that used to fill entire rooms! More people need to appreciate whats really going on here. It's not just a computer, it's a calculator. A very fast calculator crunching huge amounts of numbers for YOU. There is a machine in your pocket flipping trillions of 1's and 0's! It's nothing short of a miracle that we have learned to harness electricity in this way and on such a small scale.
From TFA: The card punch portion of the Hollerith Census Machine. For the 1990 census, there were slots to record what farm equipment was present, what lighting was used in the home, and the usual number of people in the household, among other piece of data.
I think they mean 1890 not 1990.
Proverbs 21:19
I always see this comparison and wonder if it is really true.
In the article they compare a phone to a Cray1.
Isn't the Cray massively parallel and always working on 64bit words?
Would it really be possible to do the *same* calculations as fast on a contemporary phone?
With mainframes, the attraction is the fast IO. The computer is not just the processor, but has processing power spread about to all the external tape and disk drives, io processing boxes etc, each with their own memory channels.
I wonder if a modern ARM 200Mhz or so in a phone could keep up?
I suspect the DSP in your optical mouse has more CPU power than a mainframe of the '60s or '70s.
Google says a typical optical mouse has a DSP rated at 18 MIPs. However they define a MIP, that's a lot of VAXes in the palm of your hand.
After figuring out how the machines worked, it became a simple matter to brute force the machines (try every combination) using mechanical means, ie the Bombes. This was simpler then it sounds because of some exploitable weaknesses (the same letter will never encryt to itself, the wiring in the disks wasn't changed, etc) The Bombes tried every possible combination of settings of an encoded message looking for the string "EIN" (German for one, Turring himself was said to have come up with this neat little hack) These possible decrypts were passed on to a human to check if the made sense. Remember that this was all done with a mechanical system. Late in the war, when the Germans were changing their codes every hour, this system was able to keep up.
OK, if I recognize this stuff (and likely still could run), do I need to worry I'll be next to be crated up and carried off to a museum?
Greg
Mind you, this was in the afternoon. The mornings were spent cutting down redwood trees, tapping rubber trees and mining graphite, copper and zinc so we could fabricate our own pencils for the afternoon's work. The real hotshots didn't make programming mistakes, so they could skip tapping the rubber trees for use in making pencil erasers.
... and if you tell that to kids these days they won't believe you.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
*raises hand*
I'd like a GUI/Text interface. Right click anywhere, and a menu (a task bar is only a sort of menu) comes up. You could enter text commands at the desktop, which could still have icons.
I have the design in my head, I've thought about modifying KDE to a desktop like that, but somehow I've never gotten around to it. Plus, I hate C.
Free Martian Whores!
#!/bin/sh
# Everyone seems to forget that browsers can SCROLL - no need to
# break ONE ARTICLE into dozens of separate pages that need to be
# loaded one at time, forcing you to wait for for it to load each tiny bit
# over the net - if its all one scrollable page, all the rest of it loads while
# you are reading the first part, then all one has to do is scroll the page.
# If you really need an ad impression for each photo, put them all on the same page too.
BASE1=http://www.pcauthority.com.au/
BASE2=Gallery/153867,computer-history-museum-photo-gallery-weird-fascinating-photos-including-a-giant-cray-and-a-60kg-hard-drive.aspx/
BASE=${BASE1}${BASE2}
(
x=1
while ( test $x -lt 58); do
echo "<P>"
wget ${1}.htf ${BASE}${x} | grep ImageGallery_CurrentImage | sed 's/</<br></g'
echo "<P>"
x=$(($x+1))
done
) > file.html
I have the design in my head, I've thought about modifying KDE to a desktop like that, but somehow I've never gotten around to it. Plus, I hate C.
You're in luck! KDE doesn't use C. It uses a modified version of C++.
The first concept of a task bar (dock) was created in England, in 1987. The OS was called Arthur and it included the Iconbar. In 1989, this OS was renamed RISC OS. Also in 1989, NeXTSTEP was released and included a dock. Later versions of Amiga OS had it as an add-on. And the interface I was using when Windows 95 first came out, the Common Desktop Environment under SunOS also had it. Microsoft was a bit late to the game.
Here is an article with some screen-shots and descriptions of functionality: http://www.osnews.com/story/18941/pt_VI_the_Dock
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
He had a 1 kb. magnetic core memory module, maybe 6-8" cubed and heavy as all get up in his office. They had shepherd crooks to pull someone out of the machinery if they touched something they shouldn't have but he was unable to procure one of those.
I started out with a company that sold removable-platter hard drives. We had 75MB and 150MB versions, both about the size a dishwasher. Computer parts weren't expendable back then; we repaired everything.
Since the platters were removable, the read/write heads were prone to damage from dust and such, despite significant airflow and filtering when the lid was locked down. Heads had to be replaced regularly.
It takes considerable physical force to drive a stack of read/write heads back and forth across large (approx. 16") platters in a matter of milliseconds. This was accomplished by means of large electromagnetic coils. The head assembly was built as light as possible. To keep the whole machine from jumping across the floor, the moving coil pushed and pulled against a piece of thick, heavy steel that looked like a short, stocky cannon.
Aligning a replacement head had to be done live. To prevent catastrophic disk damage, however, these devices had an "emergency retract" system that would yank the heads back off the platters if the power failed, platters lost speed or something similar. Imagine a large but light-weight head assembly attached to a huge coil, pulsed by a large capacitive discharge, anchored to a small steel cannon. If you were aligning a head and had your fingers in the way of that, it would easily take them off. It was necessary to insert a special safety pin to prevent this from happening.
Pentiums? I'm not sure how reliable benchmarks are these days, but here's a table of dhrystones.
Pentium 75 achieves 87.1 VAX MIPS (Dhry2); Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz, 6248. 32 times the clockspeed, 70 times the performance. And well short of Moore's law.
Ah, memory planes.
In the late 50's/early 60's my sister-in-law's aunt had a thriving home business employing neighbor ladies to string memory in her garage. Yes, they sat around with needles stringing those little loops on very thin wires by hand.
Posts using ratpoison. (Before everyone starts screaming, yes, I'm an efficiency nerd, I do a lot of things reflexively, and I cannot imagine trying to teach a high percentage normal lusers to use this.)
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I was expecting to see something from Xerox in there, considering that they invented so much of present-day computing.
The IBM 360/91 was an interesting computer. It tried to re-order instructions for maximum performance. It didn't do it very well. It was infamous for its "imprecise interrrupts".
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Oops bad mod - sorry
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Even Apple OS had a simple listing of windows under the Apple menu. The menu bar at the top of the screen had the program's menu (file, edit, view, etc.), and still does for most Apple software, but the Apple menu is the OS menu and has always been there. You could use it to choose between different programs were open if you couldn't see the window you wanted to switch to and click on it directly.
Apple had that in 1986 with OS 1.0.
To be fair, Microsoft had very similar functionality with alt-tab, which was present in Windows 2.1 and above, from about the same time frame. (well, it was in earlier versions of the operating system, but prior to 386 mode Windows, it wasn't a multi-tasking operating system, so I don't really count it). Also, when you minimized a program, it disappeared to the bottom of the screen as an icon. Unless you were running full screen, you could always click on that icon to change to a different program that was open.
There have been *many* ways to manage different programs open which don't rely on having a taskbar. When I am running a Linux system, I use the lil star icon box, which is part of XFCE (which itself is related to the CDE that the parent was using). Many of them are very functional. And honestly, with a sufficiently big/high resolution screen, you don't even need a taskbar, as you rarely run with windows running full screen. Right now, I've got Firefox running in a portrait-format window, and next to it I've got a couple of MSN windows running, slightly cascaded, with Thunderbird off in the corner, beeping at me if I get any e-mail. The last time I clicked on the taskbar was to open the programs in the first place. And that's under Windows 7 (RTM version, MSDN).
So in response to the GP, when asking whether I'd even consider running an OS that didn't have a task bar? Absolutely. If somebody found a way to do everything I wanted to do without the need of one, then I'd certainly consider using it... as it is now, it's a bit of a waste of space most of the time.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Why bother modifying KDE to do that when you can already do it with some very basic tweaks in XFCE, which uses less memory than KDE in the first place?
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Not really. The raw performance that a CPU can provide hasn't really increased at all in the last 7 years. We're running with basically the same clock speeds, and all other things being equal, the performance of the CPUs hasn't improved that much. What performance improvement we've seen in that time has been from improvements to chipset architecture, memory speed, bus speed, and data transfer rates between different buses.
The single biggest improvement your computer has seen in the last decade has been the GPU performance, which is on track with Moore's Law and then some, because that's where you, the user, will actually see the difference. Try running Farcry at 1920x1080 resolution with all effects turned on using a GeForce3 Ti500 w/ 64MB of RAM.
But the thing is... the reason the average clock speed has actually gone down in the last 5 years isn't because they aren't capable of making faster chips. It's because they don't really have a reason to make faster chips. Data crunched by the CPU can only be received by the user so fast, and the CPU is much faster than it needs to be. So it's cheaper to make slower chips using older, more refined technologies, and they had/have reached a plateau where the CPU is far more powerful than the rest of the computer, and the user, can handle. Who cares if your CPU can clock to 10GHz or more if it won't be used? Heck, Civilization IV is the only game I play that actually manages to cap out even one of the cores on my 2-year old Core2 Duo laptop, and that's only because of the raw number crunching it does between turns.
And what improvements we *have* seen on the CPU haven't been limited by the inability to cram more transistors into a die. They've been focusing on streamlining processes (a war that AMD started with Intel, when they put out a 1GHz Athlon that outperformed a 3GHz Pentium), and most importantly, they've been focusing on improving power and heat efficiency. CPU power hasn't improved much in the last 5 years, but the amount of power a CPU requires is a fraction of what it was back then. I can remember when you were a fool to build an AMD-based system with less than 350W of power running through it, and it was strongly recommended that you have more than 500W. The last computer I bult is a Core2Duo 2.4GHz with a 120GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM, and it's powered by an 80W brick. It could get by with a 60W brick, but the 80W gives me more play room.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
A comprehensive page on the selectron tube here, with LOTS of pictures and technical data:
http://home.att.net/~thercaselectron/index1.html
Run your mouse over the tube pins on the front page to see a simulation of the tube in operation.
I see what they did there, with a glider going down the bottom panel as you sweep from left to right. Life is good. :-)
Well that is starting to become true these days as well for PC's. I am hearing reasonable people talking about water to cool down PC's so the more things change the more the its constant.
Although I do remember one company up in St Paul that built a lake to get their cooling water from and they only thing the lake did was attract geese:)
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I find it amazing that computers generally stay about the same size. In the 80's when I got my first computer, I imagined that computers in the future would get smaller and slimmer as well as faster. Well, they are a lot faster but the specifications keep being increased so that most computers are still more or less the same size as many years ago. Back then I thought that ALL computers would have ended up like modern notebook or laptop computers!
The ability to run multiple applications at once was added to MacOS with MulitFinder. It was release for MacOS System 5 in 1988.
(MacOS has always had limited multitasking - 'desk accessories' could always be launched from the Apple menu. But these were like TSRs in DOS - they were never (and couldn't be) fully fledged applications.)
Although this screenshot set disproves WP saying MultiFinder did exist for system 4.2. (Look at the "Desktop with Applications shot). As you can see, though, switching between applications was done by selecting the desired target application from the Apple menu.
Anyway, prior to MultiFinder (or its predecessor program, Switcher), it was a non-issue. You couldn't run more than one program at the same time. (Excluding Desk Accessories as mentioned)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS#System_1.2C_2.2C_3_.26_4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7
XFCE
Thanks, hadn't heard of it, I'll do a little research.
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