The IBM PC was designed by observing the market leader (the Apple II with a Microsoft CP/M card) and copying all the good stuff while trying to avoid its problems. One of the problems of the Apple II was that reset was a simple key close to the return key. So it wasn't rare for you to type in stuff all night only to watch it all vanish due to a slightly misplaced finger. A popular add-on product for the Apple II was a little plastic cap for the reset key that you had to lift before you could press it. IBM selected three keys that were far enough apart than nobody would type by accident.
The PDF makes it sound like an internal Xerox PARC report but it was actually article 1 in ACM '72 Proceedings of the ACM annual conference - Volume 1.
While previous patents are the first thing the US Patent Office looks for in prior art that might invalidate a patent under consideration, an article such as the above counts just as much. A public demonstration of a product would count too. In fact, even if the prior art was produced by the author of the patent it can invalidate it, though there is a grace period (six months or something like that) in the case of the patent's author. I don't know if that has changed in the move from "first to invent" to "first to file" by the USPO.
Once thing that always makes these discussions more confusing than they should be is that there are patents for inventions (how it works) and also patents for designs (how it looks). They are different and how they are invalidated by prior are is different. Since the summary talks about "rounded corners" and stuff like that we might be talking about a design patent.
This. Half of the newer high-level languages today are just the mental masturbations of someone who either thinks he can make the wheel more round or the result of a "not invented here" mindset. There's so much crap out there forking a perfectly good language because someone thinks it should be a =+ b; instead of a += b;
You might not be aware that in very early versions of C the syntax was actually a=+b; but they changed that when they noticed there were two ways to interpret a=-1; and they decided they didn't want to use white space to distinguish between them.
Obviously I was generalizing. I am glad that your own experience wasn't like what I was saying. And it varies by culture quite a bit. In the 1980s I sometimes had the opportunity to show children computers for the first time when they visited my house with their parents for some reason. This was a pretty small sample, but I did notice the adults pushing the boys more than the girls even in the cases where the girl showed more interest.
Given that I was designing computers for children (first with Logo, later with Smalltalk) at the time, I was paying a lot more attention to this kind of thing than I normally would.
The ads showed computers as toys for boys because that was what the market was like and not the other way around.
In the mainframe days most people only met a computers in their college days. Some would become more interested in them than what they were supposed to be studying (physics, biology, whatever - computer science courses were pretty rare back then) and would end up becoming programmers. It was mostly men, but there were a reasonable number of women (a lot more than today in relative terms, fewer in absolute numbers).
The microcomputer revolution happened because a certain kind of guy (as far as I know, no women participated in the Homebrew Computer Club meetings, for example) wanted to have his very own computer even if it was completely useless. Normal computer people looked down on those weirdos, but they soon hit it big. As prices came down it was possible to give a kid a computer as a toy. Practically no girls were interested (and those that were tended to be discouraged by parents and friends) but most boys were also not excited about calculating Fibanacci sequences or typing in Basic listings to draw mazes. It was a rather specialized market and that is what the ads aimed for.
The computers in the 1980s ads simply were not interesting for the general public. This changed in the early 1990s with the home office - a computer with disks and a reasonable printer and compatible with the one you had at work and changed yet again in the late 1990s with the Internet. That brought its own set of problems (which the Raspberry Pi was created to address) without killing the "computers are toys for boys" image that had been created.
I used a B5500, at UC Santa Cruz, in a summer course on computer architecture in 1975, taught by one of its designers. Burroughs donated the obsolete machine, and we stepped it through instructions from its maintenance panel, watching the stack hardware work. We were also taken up to Xerox PARC to meet Alan Kay and see the original prototype Alto machines, years before Steve Jobs did. (They were really Data General Nova machines inside, with different microcode.)
The Altos were not too Nova-like, but the built-in part of their microcode did implement the Nova instruction set (except that the I/O instructions were used for other stuff). Alan had been previously using Novas in his projects (Smalltalk-72 was first implemented in Nova BASIC and then assembly, for example) and this allowed him to quickly port to the Alto.
"12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation."
And:
"60. My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: this also applies to passwords."
Perhaps Microsoft doesn't consider itself evil? Lots of people no longer do. At least they followed rule 32 in this case.
Fluids "love" to twist, so laminar flows (such as the curtain of air along the inner surface of air amplifiers) don't always get the best results. The laminar flows seem so quiet and smooth so it is hard for our intuition not to consider them to be the way to move mass with the least energy.
Vortices can scale very well. I always point to the Red Spot on Jupiter as an example. Can one be generated on a scale that could keep a car or a person suspended in mid air while using less fuel than a helicopter? I think it is possible, but haven't proved it yet.
Stubby lifting bodies can be practical at interesting cruise speeds, but you wouldn't want to take off or land at such speeds. Adding VTOL capability would solve that problem, but then we are back to the big and slow propellers issue you explained so well. I believe it is possible to convert a small, low thrust, high speed jet to a high thrust, low speed one with no moving parts. Air amplifiers actually increase thrust below 5cm in diameter but reduce it for larger sizes, so you have to figure out why it doesn't scale and fix that. The Dyson fan (http://www.dyson.com/Fans-and-heaters/cooling-fans.aspx), for example, is a terrible jet engine.
One of the issues that led to Brazil's "reserved market" policy (1977 to 1992: no foreign companies could make mini and microcomputers and there were no imports) was that in 1974 the government got so tired of US spying (including on companies such as Petrobras) that they set up a task force to create a cryptographic system for Telex machines (to be expanded to voice later).
I thought King Arthur was Celtic (speaking Latin with a Celtic accent) and fought against the Anglo Saxon invaders. And that Robin Hood spoke French, so English would be fake for him no matter what accent is used (not that the movie goers would ever accept this).
Data General Nova machines were popular at Xerox PARC before the Alto was developed, so one of the various instruction sets that the Alto supported was that of the Nova allowing old software to be easily ported to the new machine. Other than that, there was no relation between Xerox and Data General.
While the Alto and its successors (including the Star and specially the Dorado) were very expensive, there was the Notetaker project that would have had a huge impact if it had been released. Imagine a $3000 machine in 1979 like the future Compaq portable but with a mouse and GUI. Don't pay attention to what the Wikipedia or the Computer History Museum say about the machine, by the way, but look at the original documents instead:
The original plan was to create a Xerox microprocessor compatible with the Alto and use two 8086 for I/O. Imagine how cool that would have been! But the group was forbidden to do their own chips, though there was a division of PARC for doing just that. So the design was changed to three 8086s instead. And as neat as this was, there were plans for a cost reduced Notetaker 2. An executive flew from the east coast specially to kill the project and make sure it really died because the board had decided to keep Xerox outside of the silly microcomputer business. They changed their minds a little later and gave us a Z80 CP/M machine after IBM came out with their PC.
The only good thing about this was that the Notetaker's designer, Douglas Fairbairn, was so upset over the cancellation that he left PARC and founded VLSI Technology Inc. (VTI) which made possible for small companies to design their own chips. Like Acorn and their ARM.
I find it ironic that several people are proposing that demanding real names would solve some of Wikipedia's problems because I was banned for life for using a "spam user name", which happens to be my real first name (I have never used a nickname since I got online in 1986, except in systems that use numbers as user IDs). Now I know that is not the real reason, but it is the official reason and the only option they offer for getting my account unbanned is to post a special message selecting a different user ID, which then wouldn't be my real name.
My guess is that the real reason I was banned was because my home page (which was deleted) only had a short phrase about me and a link to my home page, which is a company page. When I created my account (a few years before the guy who banned me), I took a quick look at a few other user pages and most were like this so I just copied their style. If this is not acceptable, then just delete the page. I don't care: I was asked to create a page when I created the account though I didn't really want to. But banning for life seems a bit harsh.
For DEC they could have gone downscale to PCs, but the profit margins are too low: it's a commodity item. IBM doesn't build PCs anymore; they sold their PC business to Lenovo.
People, including Gordon Bell, like to mention Ken's "Nobody needs a computer in their home" quote to say he lacked the vision to get into the PC market. I don't agree - as much as it saddens me, the home computer was a fad that had died out by the 1990s. People have PCs, which is a business machine, in their home offices.
While DEC's PC efforts failed, this 1982 movie shows that they did try:
This approach, trying to leverage their PDP-11 and PDP-8 technologies, had a better chance of working than their later industry standard stuff, like the Rainbow. But I think they were about three years too late.
None of the early Zuse machines were stored program computers - they had a relay memory for data and got their instructions from punched tape. The table in the Wikipedia page about the Z3 seems about right:
The Manchester Baby was the first stored program machine, quickly followed by the modified ENIAC (the original used patch panels and cables) and then the EDSAC. Since the Baby was created to explore ideas for the EDSAC rather than as a usable machine on its own, I guess if you squint enough the article is right in an Obi-wan kind of way:-)
The official reason why the ARM wasn't used was that none of the many available models had decent floating point when the OLPC project was started. Unfortunately, the Geode's floating point performance turned out to be less than what was hoped. Unofficially, I imagine that the fact that AMD was one of the four initial sponsors of the OLPC biased the choice towards their product, just like having Red Hat as one of the other sponsors led to the Fedora based software (in contrast to using some already stripped down Linux distribution).
Things have changed since 2005, including the decision by AMD to discontinue the Geode (which they had bought from National, who had bought the creator Cyrix). The decision to use the x86 compatible Via processors for the XO 1.5 greatly reduced the software effort, which is very important given their current limited staff.
I am a huge fan of the ARM (I think I was the first one in the world outside of Acorn itself to use this processor in a project) but back in 2005 my suggestion for OLPC was that they should do their own custom chip using two Leon 3 (Sparc) cores. I still think it would have been a good idea.
Softcard introduced Bill to IBM
on
Bringing Up Bill
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The IBM people saw that business people using the Apple II normally had a Z80 Softcard from Microsoft with CP/M and several Microsoft tools and applications. They decided that their machine should have this as well.
In their meeting with Bill, they were shocked to find out that CP/M belonged to a different company. Bill Gates immediately called Gary Kindall and told him he was sending some very important people to talk to him. The IBM people went to California and when things didn't work out they came back to Seattle and Bill promised to supply an OS himself.
Don't trust me on this - see what the people actually involved said about it:
Pictures of the voting machine screen with a given candidate only prove that the voter typed in the number they were told to. After taking the picture, they could have pressed "cancel" and typed in a different number before pressing "confirm".
Slashdot Mirror
The IBM PC was designed by observing the market leader (the Apple II with a Microsoft CP/M card) and copying all the good stuff while trying to avoid its problems. One of the problems of the Apple II was that reset was a simple key close to the return key. So it wasn't rare for you to type in stuff all night only to watch it all vanish due to a slightly misplaced finger. A popular add-on product for the Apple II was a little plastic cap for the reset key that you had to lift before you could press it. IBM selected three keys that were far enough apart than nobody would type by accident.
A very detailed article about the Dynabook was published in 1972:
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_per...
The PDF makes it sound like an internal Xerox PARC report but it was actually article 1 in ACM '72 Proceedings of the ACM annual conference - Volume 1.
While previous patents are the first thing the US Patent Office looks for in prior art that might invalidate a patent under consideration, an article such as the above counts just as much. A public demonstration of a product would count too. In fact, even if the prior art was produced by the author of the patent it can invalidate it, though there is a grace period (six months or something like that) in the case of the patent's author. I don't know if that has changed in the move from "first to invent" to "first to file" by the USPO.
Once thing that always makes these discussions more confusing than they should be is that there are patents for inventions (how it works) and also patents for designs (how it looks). They are different and how they are invalidated by prior are is different. Since the summary talks about "rounded corners" and stuff like that we might be talking about a design patent.
This. Half of the newer high-level languages today are just the mental masturbations of someone who either thinks he can make the wheel more round or the result of a "not invented here" mindset. There's so much crap out there forking a perfectly good language because someone thinks it should be a =+ b; instead of a += b;
You might not be aware that in very early versions of C the syntax was actually a=+b; but they changed that when they noticed there were two ways to interpret a=-1; and they decided they didn't want to use white space to distinguish between them.
Obviously I was generalizing. I am glad that your own experience wasn't like what I was saying. And it varies by culture quite a bit. In the 1980s I sometimes had the opportunity to show children computers for the first time when they visited my house with their parents for some reason. This was a pretty small sample, but I did notice the adults pushing the boys more than the girls even in the cases where the girl showed more interest.
Given that I was designing computers for children (first with Logo, later with Smalltalk) at the time, I was paying a lot more attention to this kind of thing than I normally would.
The ads showed computers as toys for boys because that was what the market was like and not the other way around.
In the mainframe days most people only met a computers in their college days. Some would become more interested in them than what they were supposed to be studying (physics, biology, whatever - computer science courses were pretty rare back then) and would end up becoming programmers. It was mostly men, but there were a reasonable number of women (a lot more than today in relative terms, fewer in absolute numbers).
The microcomputer revolution happened because a certain kind of guy (as far as I know, no women participated in the Homebrew Computer Club meetings, for example) wanted to have his very own computer even if it was completely useless. Normal computer people looked down on those weirdos, but they soon hit it big. As prices came down it was possible to give a kid a computer as a toy. Practically no girls were interested (and those that were tended to be discouraged by parents and friends) but most boys were also not excited about calculating Fibanacci sequences or typing in Basic listings to draw mazes. It was a rather specialized market and that is what the ads aimed for.
The computers in the 1980s ads simply were not interesting for the general public. This changed in the early 1990s with the home office - a computer with disks and a reasonable printer and compatible with the one you had at work and changed yet again in the late 1990s with the Internet. That brought its own set of problems (which the Raspberry Pi was created to address) without killing the "computers are toys for boys" image that had been created.
Interesting that he doesn't list Amoeba among his achievements. I find it far more impressive than Minix.
I used a B5500, at UC Santa Cruz, in a summer course on computer architecture in 1975, taught by one of its designers. Burroughs donated the obsolete machine, and we stepped it through instructions from its maintenance panel, watching the stack hardware work. We were also taken up to Xerox PARC to meet Alan Kay and see the original prototype Alto machines, years before Steve Jobs did. (They were really Data General Nova machines inside, with different microcode.)
The Altos were not too Nova-like, but the built-in part of their microcode did implement the Nova instruction set (except that the I/O instructions were used for other stuff). Alan had been previously using Novas in his projects (Smalltalk-72 was first implemented in Nova BASIC and then assembly, for example) and this allowed him to quickly port to the Alto.
The original PC was fully open, but the AT had a keyboard controller and two PALs that had to be reverse engineered to produce a clone.
I guess their team of advisors is incomplete:
http://www.eviloverlord.com/li...
"12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation."
And:
"60. My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: this also applies to passwords."
Perhaps Microsoft doesn't consider itself evil? Lots of people no longer do. At least they followed rule 32 in this case.
Fluids "love" to twist, so laminar flows (such as the curtain of air along the inner surface of air amplifiers) don't always get the best results. The laminar flows seem so quiet and smooth so it is hard for our intuition not to consider them to be the way to move mass with the least energy.
Vortices can scale very well. I always point to the Red Spot on Jupiter as an example. Can one be generated on a scale that could keep a car or a person suspended in mid air while using less fuel than a helicopter? I think it is possible, but haven't proved it yet.
Stubby lifting bodies can be practical at interesting cruise speeds, but you wouldn't want to take off or land at such speeds. Adding VTOL capability would solve that problem, but then we are back to the big and slow propellers issue you explained so well. I believe it is possible to convert a small, low thrust, high speed jet to a high thrust, low speed one with no moving parts. Air amplifiers actually increase thrust below 5cm in diameter but reduce it for larger sizes, so you have to figure out why it doesn't scale and fix that. The Dyson fan (http://www.dyson.com/Fans-and-heaters/cooling-fans.aspx), for example, is a terrible jet engine.
The extra wait states were easy to eliminate. I did it by completely reprogramming the PAL chips.
http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/m...
The result was a 35% speed up (and 23% faster than the 1992 Mac Classic).
One of the issues that led to Brazil's "reserved market" policy (1977 to 1992: no foreign companies could make mini and microcomputers and there were no imports) was that in 1974 the government got so tired of US spying (including on companies such as Petrobras) that they set up a task force to create a cryptographic system for Telex machines (to be expanded to voice later).
I thought King Arthur was Celtic (speaking Latin with a Celtic accent) and fought against the Anglo Saxon invaders. And that Robin Hood spoke French, so English would be fake for him no matter what accent is used (not that the movie goers would ever accept this).
Some small corrections:
Data General Nova machines were popular at Xerox PARC before the Alto was developed, so one of the various instruction sets that the Alto supported was that of the Nova allowing old software to be easily ported to the new machine. Other than that, there was no relation between Xerox and Data General.
While the Alto and its successors (including the Star and specially the Dorado) were very expensive, there was the Notetaker project that would have had a huge impact if it had been released. Imagine a $3000 machine in 1979 like the future Compaq portable but with a mouse and GUI. Don't pay attention to what the Wikipedia or the Computer History Museum say about the machine, by the way, but look at the original documents instead:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/notetaker/
The original plan was to create a Xerox microprocessor compatible with the Alto and use two 8086 for I/O. Imagine how cool that would have been! But the group was forbidden to do their own chips, though there was a division of PARC for doing just that. So the design was changed to three 8086s instead. And as neat as this was, there were plans for a cost reduced Notetaker 2. An executive flew from the east coast specially to kill the project and make sure it really died because the board had decided to keep Xerox outside of the silly microcomputer business. They changed their minds a little later and gave us a Z80 CP/M machine after IBM came out with their PC.
The only good thing about this was that the Notetaker's designer, Douglas Fairbairn, was so upset over the cancellation that he left PARC and founded VLSI Technology Inc. (VTI) which made possible for small companies to design their own chips. Like Acorn and their ARM.
I find it ironic that several people are proposing that demanding real names would solve some of Wikipedia's problems because I was banned for life for using a "spam user name", which happens to be my real first name (I have never used a nickname since I got online in 1986, except in systems that use numbers as user IDs). Now I know that is not the real reason, but it is the official reason and the only option they offer for getting my account unbanned is to post a special message selecting a different user ID, which then wouldn't be my real name.
My guess is that the real reason I was banned was because my home page (which was deleted) only had a short phrase about me and a link to my home page, which is a company page. When I created my account (a few years before the guy who banned me), I took a quick look at a few other user pages and most were like this so I just copied their style. If this is not acceptable, then just delete the page. I don't care: I was asked to create a page when I created the account though I didn't really want to. But banning for life seems a bit harsh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jecel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Jecel
That's a *basic* system; the point-plotting CRT display used in Spacewar! would have added quite a bit to the cost.
Is this correct? I always had the impression that the display was a standard part of the PDP-1 and only became optional in later models.
For DEC they could have gone downscale to PCs, but the profit margins are too low: it's a commodity item. IBM doesn't build PCs anymore; they sold their PC business to Lenovo.
People, including Gordon Bell, like to mention Ken's "Nobody needs a computer in their home" quote to say he lacked the vision to get into the PC market. I don't agree - as much as it saddens me, the home computer was a fad that had died out by the 1990s. People have PCs, which is a business machine, in their home offices.
While DEC's PC efforts failed, this 1982 movie shows that they did try:
http://www.youtube.com/computerhistory#p/u/31/YKbnbvF_2Ew
This approach, trying to leverage their PDP-11 and PDP-8 technologies, had a better chance of working than their later industry standard stuff, like the Rainbow. But I think they were about three years too late.
I suppose that by "x86 OLPC" they mean the current XO 1.5 which is powered by a 1GHz VIA chip.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification_1.5
None of the early Zuse machines were stored program computers - they had a relay memory for data and got their instructions from punched tape. The table in the Wikipedia page about the Z3 seems about right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
The Manchester Baby was the first stored program machine, quickly followed by the modified ENIAC (the original used patch panels and cables) and then the EDSAC. Since the Baby was created to explore ideas for the EDSAC rather than as a usable machine on its own, I guess if you squint enough the article is right in an Obi-wan kind of way :-)
Can you imagine an episode with Admiral Adama addressing the United Nations? How could that not suck?
Why don't you search for "UN BSG" on Youtube and see what it would look like? :-)
The official reason why the ARM wasn't used was that none of the many available models had decent floating point when the OLPC project was started. Unfortunately, the Geode's floating point performance turned out to be less than what was hoped. Unofficially, I imagine that the fact that AMD was one of the four initial sponsors of the OLPC biased the choice towards their product, just like having Red Hat as one of the other sponsors led to the Fedora based software (in contrast to using some already stripped down Linux distribution).
Things have changed since 2005, including the decision by AMD to discontinue the Geode (which they had bought from National, who had bought the creator Cyrix). The decision to use the x86 compatible Via processors for the XO 1.5 greatly reduced the software effort, which is very important given their current limited staff.
I am a huge fan of the ARM (I think I was the first one in the world outside of Acorn itself to use this processor in a project) but back in 2005 my suggestion for OLPC was that they should do their own custom chip using two Leon 3 (Sparc) cores. I still think it would have been a good idea.
There are also a few implementations of Smalltalk using Javascript:
http://gwt-smalltalk.appspot.com/
http://clamato.net/
http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/ometa-js-old/
The IBM people saw that business people using the Apple II normally had a Z80 Softcard from Microsoft with CP/M and several Microsoft tools and applications. They decided that their machine should have this as well.
In their meeting with Bill, they were shocked to find out that CP/M belonged to a different company. Bill Gates immediately called Gary Kindall and told him he was sending some very important people to talk to him. The IBM people went to California and when things didn't work out they came back to Seattle and Bill promised to supply an OS himself.
Don't trust me on this - see what the people actually involved said about it:
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
Pictures of the voting machine screen with a given candidate only prove that the voter typed in the number they were told to. After taking the picture, they could have pressed "cancel" and typed in a different number before pressing "confirm".