The Douglas DC-3. First built in the 1930s as the first real modern airliner they're still flying today all over the world.
The 707 airliner was developed about 1954 (I think). 707's are still used in the passenger carrying business a bit and are more common now in ferrying freight.
The F-4 fighter plane was developed around the same time and that thing is used in the world's militaries, including our own.
On the computer side, IBM has done an amazing job over the years in making its systems compatible with older incarnations, the result being that it is theoretically possible to run an old Fortran accounting program written in the 1950s for the IBM 650 vacuum tube beast on the latest and greatest IBM mainframe.... or so it is said. We in California should be grateful for this fact because the Department of Motor Vehicles, despite throwing tens millions of dollars at futile attempts to modernize their software and database, still uses software from the 1960s on much more modern hardware.
But all the kudos I have goes to my General Electric digital alarm clock that I've owned for nearly 20 years now and is still going strong despite numerous power spikes in the dorms early in its life and being dropped uncounted times.
U.S. Patent law clearly states that you cannot patent mathematical processes. I don't know why corporations can't use this to break all software patents such as Lempel-Zif-Welsh compress, etc. since computer algorithms can be thought of as being mathematics. So I hope this guy has good lawyers because someone is going to challenge the patent if the Patent Office is foolish enough to issue it. Nuf said.
If memory serves, the PDP-1 was transisterized. But we're talking about discrete components--no integrated circuits. So it was the size of a large fridge. One of the neat things about it from the "Hackers" book is that DEC used Spacewar as a kind of test program. They'd load the game into the its magnetic core memory (which didn't lose its contents when the computer was powered off) from paper tape. If it ran, the computer worked. Then they turned it off. When the customer received their computer and turned it on, what they first saw was two space ships facing off to do combat.
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The 707 airliner was developed about 1954 (I think). 707's are still used in the passenger carrying business a bit and are more common now in ferrying freight.
The F-4 fighter plane was developed around the same time and that thing is used in the world's militaries, including our own.
On the computer side, IBM has done an amazing job over the years in making its systems compatible with older incarnations, the result being that it is theoretically possible to run an old Fortran accounting program written in the 1950s for the IBM 650 vacuum tube beast on the latest and greatest IBM mainframe.... or so it is said. We in California should be grateful for this fact because the Department of Motor Vehicles, despite throwing tens millions of dollars at futile attempts to modernize their software and database, still uses software from the 1960s on much more modern hardware.
But all the kudos I have goes to my General Electric digital alarm clock that I've owned for nearly 20 years now and is still going strong despite numerous power spikes in the dorms early in its life and being dropped uncounted times.
U.S. Patent law clearly states that you cannot patent mathematical processes. I don't know why corporations can't use this to break all software patents such as Lempel-Zif-Welsh compress, etc. since computer algorithms can be thought of as being mathematics. So I hope this guy has good lawyers because someone is going to challenge the patent if the Patent Office is foolish enough to issue it. Nuf said.
If memory serves, the PDP-1 was transisterized. But we're talking about discrete components--no integrated circuits. So it was the size of a large fridge. One of the neat things about it from the "Hackers" book is that DEC used Spacewar as a kind of test program. They'd load the game into the its magnetic core memory (which didn't lose its contents when the computer was powered off) from paper tape. If it ran, the computer worked. Then they turned it off. When the customer received their computer and turned it on, what they first saw was two space ships facing off to do combat.