Sender: schneck@mail06.mitre.org (Paul B. Schneck)
Subject: Re: CM> Drums revolving swiftly, and machines that can't add

The core memory was called "Immediate Access Storage" and there were approx. 50
words (equal to 1 drum traack) available in 60 microseconds (as I recall)
cmpared with the drum's word time of 4.8 milliseconds --if the word was under
the read head! And, yes, one could operate directly on words in IAS (or the
console switches, which had the address 8000 and were generally used as the
first instruction, to read a card which contained instructions to read and load
the following cards).
Paul Schneck

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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "Woody Franke" 
Subject: Jenny?

I'm currently posted to the US Embassy in Canberra, Australia.  This last
weekend I was in Sydney and took time to tour the Powerhouse Museum.  The
museum has a small computer section which is sadly lacking but it does have an
IBM 650 which I believe was shipped to Australia in 1949.

Why a drum instead of a disk?  I think several manufacturers tried the drums.
I remember that Univac developed a magnetic drum to store data in the 1960s.
I also worked on a Scientific Data Systems (SDS) model 1200? that had a
magnetic drum in 1966.  Later on SDS was bought out by Xerox and the name was
changed to XDS (Xerox Data Systems).  One could hear the drum rotate like a
washing machine when it was searching for an address.  It would come to a halt
with a thud and shake the entire drum housing.
Sender: Nelson Winkless 
Subject: CM: Esoteric memory systems

Peter da Silva commented:

> Pretty much anything that can change state quickly enough and retain that
new >state for a while has been used for memory.

Nicely put.

We were briefly involved, thirty years ago, with work on a memory exploiting
a "Moving Barkhausen Discontinuity." As I recall, it's possible to create a
detectable blip in a skinny piece of wire at a point where two magnetic
states meet...and then electrically push that blip along the wire past a
detector. The notion was that a whole lot of blips could be created (and
discreated), storing information that could be pushed at electronic speeds
past the sensor. Compared with the speed of a rotating drum, that could be
might fast and convenient, with no physically moving parts.

Obviously, my technical grasp of this is pretty feeble (and was at the
time), but I loved the name Moving Barkhausen Discontinuity, which has the
same impress-your-neighbors quality as Vonnegut's "Chronosynclastic
Infundibulum," with the added virtue of being real.

I've no idea if anything ever came of the MBD memory work.

--Nels
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nelson Winkless                   Email: correspo@swcp.com
ABQ Communications Corporation    Voice: 505-897-0822
P.O. Box 1432                     Fax:   505-898-6525
Corrales NM 87048 USA             Website: http://www.swcp.com/correspo
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: decimal memory and old disks


> The IBM 1620 was known as CADET: Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try.
> It, and IBM's 1401 and 7070 all used some kind of decimal memory.

It might be worthwhile (pedantic? :-) to distinguish between the
implementation of the memory and the model exposed to the programmer.
While the 1620, 14xx, and IBM's "business" (as opposed to scientific)
machines exposed decimal quantities, they used two-state devices
internally.  There have been machines which used other-than-two-state
devices.  The elctromechanical counters on EAM equipment were 10-state
devices, and I recall that Signetics had some 3-state parts in the
1970s and perhaps early 80s.  Any other examples?

Another nit in this thread is that the 650 used the drum for what we
would call "memory" or "RAM" today, and cards for what we call
"storage."  Did anyone work with the 305 RAMAC?  (I used the 1301 and
1405 disks, and saw RAMACs, but never programmed one).

Lar
______________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Michele Crecca 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of NEXIS, RECON.


Dear Folks,

Although I am not a computer scientist, I have been enjoying monitoring
your conversations for awhile now and am finding all sorts of points of
interest in them.

However, you have ventured into the world of online systems and I think
(being a librarian) I may be able to add a bit here. The first online
service was MEDLARS (Natl Library of Medicine) initiated in 1964. You all
may be familiar with MEDLINE (which is MEDlars onLINE) which is available
on a host of information providers (DIALOG, DataStar, STN Int'l to name a
few). MEDLINE is the database that information providers purchase and
MEDLARS is still available through the NLM.

In 1965, NASA RECON was born and during that same year ORBIT of SDC was
developed. In 1967, Data Corporation started a project called O-BAR for
the Ohio Bar Association (later named LEXIS) and it wasn't until 1969
that DIALOG made its appearance.

There were several information retrieval systems developed in the 1950s,
however, I do not believe that they ever became information "services" as
we know them. The first was in 1954 at China Lake developed by Harley
Tillet; after that was SAGE in 1956 (U.S. Air Force); the U. S. Patent &
Trademark Office's early experiments with NIST (or NBS at the time) in
1957 (this is NOT PTO's APS system); IBM's system for the Strategic Air
Command in 1959; and Protosynthex (SDC) in 1960.

As another point of interest, MEDLARS was the first service to offer
remote online access from the NLM to SUNY in 1968.

Database Magazine published a timeline on the information industry in
their October 1988 issue, "Online Database Industry Timeline" by Charles
T. Meadow. I keep it close at hand (as I am looking at it now) and would
recommend it to interested parties.

Michele Crecca
Librarian
Electronic Information Center
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office
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Sender: John Cowan 
Subject: Re: CM> Plywood computing.

christopher f. chiesa wrote:

> I for one would like to see the complete lyric to "You Can Build A
> Mainframe from the Things You Find At Home"(sic).  E-mail is fine, if this
> is not adjudged to be of general interest...

I'd like to see it too.

> That also reminds me of a real book I owned for a while, called "how to
> build a working digital computer" -- out of things like wood, screws,
> paper clips, and light bulbs.  (There was even a memory drum made out of
> an oatmeal can, I kid you not.)  I was very excited to find this book, and
> had visions of constructing a clattering monstrosity that, if nothing
> else, might be able to "add 2 and 3 to get 5," that sort of thing.

I actually owned such a monstrosity, although it was a kit rather than
a DIY project.  I've forgotten the manufacturer, but the product was called
the DigiComp II.  It involved marbles rolling down an inclined board,
wherein were
mounted plastic flipflops that actually flipped (or flopped) as a marble
passed them.  If I remember correctly, the word size was 12 bits.  I
definitely remember an accumulator and an MQ register (set with non-flipping
switches), so the thing could at least add and multiply.  It was not,
of course, stored-program, but it was a true digital computer, and
binary to boot.

Anyone else remember this pinball-machine-cum-computer?

--
John Cowan                                              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "keith reid-green" 
Subject: re: Upgrading and changing.

>From Keith Reid-Green 

In message <164099420745.LTK.013@cpsr.org>, Bill Anderson
 writes
>Has anyone ever stopped and consider the amount of money we have spent
>upgrading and changing machines over the years.

My recollection of the decade of the '60s was that we spent all of it
rewriting software.  This isn't quite true, because from '65 on we were on
the IBM 360 (not at my present job) but in between, I went from the 704 to
the 7090 to the 7070 to the 7040 on the scientific side, and from the 650
to the 1401 to the 1410 to the 7010 on the commercial side.  We spent six
or seven years marching sideways.

Concurrently, and beginning in 1957, we went from assembler language to
Fortran, to Algol, to PL/1 to C, while simultaneously staying with
assembler languages on the 1401 and 7070.  If we got bored, we could always
work on the 7750 and 7740.  These were machines dedicated to data
transmission and the 7740 (I didn't work on the 7750) was a bitch.  It
didn't even have its own assembler--we assembled on a 1401--and we had to
contend with four machine states and only had ADD and COMplement
instructions to do arithmetic.  The 7740 was the first 8-bit byte machine I
worked on (1964) and to use four bytes together it was necessary to perform
an operation on the "right-hand" byte, then on the one to its left, etc.
If an arithmetic overflow occurred, it carried automatically into the next
arithmetic operation.  Nasty.  Anyway, in one instance of this mess, I had
to figure out the track address on a disk from the sector address.  Since
there were two hundred sectors on a track, this meant dividing the sector
address by 200.  To do so, I dropped the lowest two BCD digits, thus
dividing by 100, converted this to binary and shifted right 1 bit, dividing
by 2, and converted back to BCD.  Voila!  The sector address--62
instructions later.  I think this took me almost a week to code and debug,
and all it is, more or less, is
          SECTOR = INT(TRACK/200)

Keith Reid-Green
Educational Testing Service
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Philippe Chartier 
Subject: RE: CM> Drums revolving swiftly, and machines that can't add


Since we're talking about drums, it reminded me of that piece of hacker
folklore I've read awhile ago. I'm still unable to understand half of it
but I appreciate the dramatic effect.  Somehow I think it's appropriate
for the list. I'd be curious to see what Old Timers would have to say on
the accuracy of this story.

You can find this story and others at :

http://www.denken.or.jp/local/misc/JARGON/app-a.html

Philippe Chartier

 ----------------------------------
The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer

This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on
May 21, 1983.

     A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming
     made the bald and unvarnished statement:

         Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.

     Maybe they do now,
     in this decadent era of
     Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software
     but back in the Good Old Days,
     when the term "software" sounded funny
     and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
     Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
     Not FORTRAN.  Not RATFOR.  Not, even, assembly language.
     Machine Code.
     Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
     Directly.

     Lest a whole new generation of programmers
     grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
     I feel duty-bound to describe,
     as best I can through the generation gap,
     how a Real Programmer wrote code.
     I'll call him Mel,
     because that was his name.

     I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
     a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
     The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
     a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
     drum-memory computer,
     and had just started to manufacture
     the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
     bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer.
     Cores cost too much,
     and weren't here to stay, anyway.
     (That's why you haven't heard of the company,
     or the computer.)

     I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
     for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
     Mel didn't approve of compilers.

     "If a program can't rewrite its own code",
     he asked, "what good is it?"

     Mel had written,
     in hexadecimal,
     the most popular computer program the company owned.
     It ran on the LGP-30
     and played blackjack with potential customers
     at computer shows.
     Its effect was always dramatic.
     The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show,
     and the IBM salesmen stood around
     talking to each other.
     Whether or not this actually sold computers
     was a question we never discussed.

     Mel's job was to re-write
     the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
     (Port?  What does that mean?)
     The new computer had a one-plus-one
     addressing scheme,
     in which each machine instruction,
     in addition to the operation code
     and the address of the needed operand,
     had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
     the next instruction was located.

     In modern parlance,
     every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
     Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.

     Mel loved the RPC-4000
     because he could optimize his code:
     that is, locate instructions on the drum
     so that just as one finished its job,
     the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
     and available for immediate execution.
     There was a program to do that job,
     an "optimizing assembler",
     but Mel refused to use it.

     "You never know where it's going to put things",
     he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants".

     It was a long time before I understood that remark.
     Since Mel knew the numerical value
     of every operation code,
     and assigned his own drum addresses,
     every instruction he wrote could also be considered
     a numerical constant.
     He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say,
     and multiply by it,
     if it had the right numeric value.
     His code was not easy for someone else to modify.

     I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs
     with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program,
     and Mel's always ran faster.
     That was because the "top-down" method of program design
     hadn't been invented yet,
     and Mel wouldn't have used it anyway.
     He wrote the innermost parts of his program loops first,
     so they would get first choice
     of the optimum address locations on the drum.
     The optimizing assembler wasn't smart enough to do it that way.

     Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either,
     even when the balky Flexowriter
     required a delay between output characters to work right.
     He just located instructions on the drum
     so each successive one was just *past* the read head
     when it was needed;
     the drum had to execute another complete revolution
     to find the next instruction.
     He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure.
     Although "optimum" is an absolute term,
     like "unique", it became common verbal practice
     to make it relative:
     "not quite optimum" or "less optimum"
     or "not very optimum".
     Mel called the maximum time-delay locations
     the "most pessimum".

     After he finished the blackjack program
     and got it to run
     ("Even the initializer is optimized",
     he said proudly),
     he got a Change Request from the sales department.
     The program used an elegant (optimized)
     random number generator
     to shuffle the "cards" and deal from the "deck",
     and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair,
     since sometimes the customers lost.
     They wanted Mel to modify the program
     so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
     they could change the odds and let the customer win.

     Mel balked.
     He felt this was patently dishonest,
     which it was,
     and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer,
     which it did,
     so he refused to do it.
     The Head Salesman talked to Mel,
     as did the Big Boss and, at the boss's urging,
     a few Fellow Programmers.
     Mel finally gave in and wrote the code,
     but he got the test backwards,
     and, when the sense switch was turned on,
     the program would cheat, winning every time.
     Mel was delighted with this,
     claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical,
     and adamantly refused to fix it.

     After Mel had left the company for greener pa$ture$,
     the Big Boss asked me to look at the code
     and see if I could find the test and reverse it.
     Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to look.
     Tracking Mel's code was a real adventure.

     I have often felt that programming is an art form,
     whose real value can only be appreciated
     by another versed in the same arcane art;
     there are lovely gems and brilliant coups
     hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,
     by the very nature of the process.
     You can learn a lot about an individual
     just by reading through his code,
     even in hexadecimal.
     Mel was, I think, an unsung genius.

     Perhaps my greatest shock came
     when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it.
     No test.  *None*.
     Common sense said it had to be a closed loop,
     where the program would circle, forever, endlessly.
     Program control passed right through it, however,
     and safely out the other side.
     It took me two weeks to figure it out.

     The RPC-4000 computer had a really modern facility
     called an index register.
     It allowed the programmer to write a program loop
     that used an indexed instruction inside;
     each time through,
     the number in the index register
     was added to the address of that instruction,
     so it would refer
     to the next datum in a series.
     He had only to increment the index register
     each time through.
     Mel never used it.

     Instead, he would pull the instruction into a machine register,
     add one to its address,
     and store it back.
     He would then execute the modified instruction
     right from the register.
     The loop was written so this additional execution time
     was taken into account ---
     just as this instruction finished,
     the next one was right under the drum's read head,
     ready to go.
     But the loop had no test in it.

     The vital clue came when I noticed
     the index register bit,
     the bit that lay between the address
     and the operation code in the instruction word,
     was turned on ---
     yet Mel never used the index register,
     leaving it zero all the time.
     When the light went on it nearly blinded me.

     He had located the data he was working on
     near the top of memory --
     the largest locations the instructions could address ---
     so, after the last datum was handled,
     incrementing the instruction address
     would make it overflow.
     The carry would add one to the
     operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set:
     a jump instruction.
     Sure enough, the next program instruction was
     in address location zero,
     and the program went happily on its way.

     I haven't kept in touch with Mel,
     so I don't know if he ever gave in to the flood of
     change that has washed over programming techniques
     since those long-gone days.
     I like to think he didn't.
     In any event,
     I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the
     offending test,
     telling the Big Boss I couldn't find it.
     He didn't seem surprised.

     When I left the company,
     the blackjack program would still cheat
     if you turned on the right sense switch,
     and I think that's how it should be.
     I didn't feel comfortable
     hacking up the code of a Real Programmer.

This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a few
spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology of
hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together. For
an opposing point of view, see the entry for Real Programmer.

[1992 postscript --- the author writes: "The original submission to the
net was not in free verse, nor any approximation to it -- it was straight
prose style, in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around the net it
apparently got modified into the `free verse' form now popular. In other
words, it got hacked on the net. That seems appropriate, somehow."]
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Les Earnest 
Subject: CM> Licklider, Timesharing, and Popular History

Paul Ceruzzi writes:
   In an aside to a posting about J.C.R. Licklider, Les Earnest lamented
   the tendency of popular histories, esp. recent PBS documentaries, to
   credit interactive computing too much to the PC and not enough to
   timesharing.

   As one of the consultants and narrators of the PBS/BBC series "The
   Machine that Changed the World," I plead guilty to this error. However I
   offer as an apology my belief that the mental model of a "computer
   utility," which early time-sharing advocates had, impeded progress. That
   is, they thought of one or a few central computers (one even proposed
   siting it in Kansas City), accessed through a jack in the wall just like
   you get electric power. For a variety of technical reasons (so far!) it
   is not practical to have individual electric power plants in everyone's
   home, car, briefcase, etc.

Thanks, but I don't buy this argument.  Who was the unnamed person who:
   "thought of one or a few central computers (one even proposed siting
   it in Kansas City), accessed through a jack in the wall just like
   you get electric power?"
Doesn't sound like any timesharing pioneer that I know of.

In the 1970s, commercial timesharing systems did provide needed
computer services for many companies that were too small to afford a
computer of their own.  As computer prices came down and companies
grew, many of them were able to buy minicomputers and even larger
systems that were more economical, but that transition would have been
much more difficult had they not been able to access commerical
timesharing services earlier.  Incidentally, the companies offering
timesharing services learned early that the dominant cost in that
business was not computer hardware or software but "hand-holding" of
customers who were learning how to use a computer for the first time.

I note that most Internet access providers today use timesharing
systems to provide that service and the proposed inexpensive "network
computers" that some think will revolutionize Internet services amount
to a new form of "dumb terminal" connected to a central timesharing
system -- an old idea made new again.

Paul Ceruzzi continues:
   But it _is_ not only practical but preferable to have computing power
   so distributed (with a few exceotions). That was what I was trying to
   point out in the series. If I/we seemed to have slighted the time-sharing
   pioneers, I apologize.

Mr. Ceruzzi apparently believes that the early advocates of
timesharing were somehow opposed to distributed computing, but he
offers no evidence in support of this belief.  I believe that it is
simply not true.

Timesharing did exactly what it was intended to do: bring down the
cost of interactive computing by an order of magnitude.  It did that,
is still doing that and will probably continue to be an important
element of computer services for at least another half-century.

        -Les Earnest
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Sender: Carl Dick 
Subject: VECTOR GRAPHICS

Does anyone know why they called the company Vector Graphics?  For years, as
I recall, the only graphics they sold were raster graphics.

Or how US Robotics sells modems, not robots?

-- Carl Dick   trimagna@primenet.com

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "keith reid-green" 
Subject: re: CM> Drums revolving swiftly, and machines that can't add

>From KReid-Green@ets.org (Keith Reid-Green)

Peter Capek said, "In the 650, core was an option with a very specific
purpose: to buffer data transfer operations between the drum and tape
drives.  Because the
two devices operated at different speeds, core was necessary to avoid
losing data during the transfer.  So reading a tape consisted of
reading a record into core memory, and then transferring core memory
to drum.  Perhaps it was possible to operated on the data directly in
the core memory; I think so, but I'm not certain."

If memory serves (mine, that is, and it doesn't always) the core memory for
the tape unit was 80 characters and was in fact to prepare a tape record to
be written on tape at the tape's speed (200 bytes per second at that time.)
 Of course, the tape unit was very much a latter-day add-on for the 650.
The reason why the core memory was 80 characters was that this was exactly
what was needed to store an 80-column punched card record.  It was years
and years before the punched card mentality died out, if in fact it has.
There are, no doubt, a few hermits hiding in caves who still design for the
80-character record. :-)  I, too, recall that it was possible to operate
directly on the data in core.

Keith Reid-Green
Educational Testing Service.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: wandd@netcom.com (Dirk H van Nouhuys)
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider

It's been mentioned here before but it bears repeating that several of the
features we associate with interactive use of personal computers were
developed first in a timesharing environment by the Doug Engelbart group
at SRI in the late 60's and early 70's. These include the mouse, hypertext,
and two-dimensional editing. (This use of the screen two-dimensionally (as
opposed to the previous standard, line by line) did not involve graphics or
menus in the Engelbart group.)

Note that machines with a tiny fraction of the power of your desktop
computer were "supporting" 30 or more people. Response was horrendous.
Several seconds commonly elapse between keying a command, say delete
word, and the appearance of its execution. Later on in the 70's all the work
in Menlo Park was being done on machines at BBN in Boston or ISI in Los
Angeles through the (then called)ARPANet, partly to save money and
partly to prove it was possible. It was barely possible. At that time
someone knitted a sweater working exclusively while waiting for
commands to execute. This was no big needle sweater, but a fine yarn fuzzy
sweater, which she intended to give to her boss in protest but decide it was
too nice to give up.

The response and other time sharing problems was one reason some people
left the SRI group for Xerox Park where they worked on the Star system and
so on.

Engelbart was fully aware of the problems of time sharing for interactive
work with the computer power and network bandwidth of the time and
would have preferred to work on what would now be called personal
computers, but was dragged into it by Licklider and others who were
interested in the development of time sharing and controlled his funding.

[Moderator's Note: What was the relationship between Licklider and
Engelbart?  I know that Licklider funded Engelbart's work via ARPA, and
Engelbart's lab managed the first ARPANET link with UCLA in September,
1969.  But these two men may have had different philosophies concerning the
future of man-machine computer interaction.  It would be wonderful to get
information on Engelbart's career and the contributions he made.  Is there
anyone on the list who witnessed first hand Engelbart's famous "mother of
all demos" where he showed his mouse-windows system to an audience in San
Francisco?  Or anyone who worked at SRI at that time, or with Engelbart?]

Dirk van Nouhuys
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: jgro@netcom.com (Jeremy Grodberg)
Subject: Re: CM> City-oriented on-line services

David Bennahum wrote:

>        I am wondering if there are earlier examples of on-line services
> creating city-wide databases of this sort, and if so does anyone recall
> them?  Were they successes, flops?  Is there any historical basis for this
> universal consensus that this is a good metaphor based on previous online
> services?

I recall a service in the Los Angeles area around 1988.  I believe it
was called "Yellow Phone", it was billing itself as an online yellow
pages.  It was free, you had to dial into it directly, and it
basically only had movie listings and some restaurants, but it had
some very nice features.  You entered your zip code or neighborhood
location, and it would tell you where the nearest theaters were
showing your film and when they were playing.  It even had a review
feature where you could rate the film on a 10 point scale, and view
the ratings of the other reviewers (it printed out a nice little
histograph of the votes, along with the average and number of
reviewers).  You could restrict restaurant listings to restaurants
that delivered and/or were still open at the current time of day.
All-in-all it was the most useful free online service I had used up
until that time.  I left LA in '89 and don't know what happened to it
after that, although my guess is that it evolved into the now famous
MovieFone (777-FILM), given the incredible similarities.

--
Jeremy Grodberg
jgro@netcom.com
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: The Seeker 
Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.

At 02:35 AM 7/29/96 -0700,
>Sender: "christopher f. chiesa" 
>Subject: Re: CM> Early On-Line Services
...

>Don't know whether Plink is still active, but a whole mass of Amiga users
>migrated OFF of Plink onto Portal (which was at that time my sole ISP)
>around early-to-mid-1988 if I recall correctly.  They're still active,
>now on Portal.

I used to be on Plink, accessing it with both IBM PCs (XT) and Commodore 64.
My particular interest was the Jewish Activist Network. I had signed up to
People Link after reading about the Jewish forum in a magazine.

People Link was run by an outfit called American Home Network.  It appeared
to have ceased operations in late 1980's, maybe about 1989.
======================================================================
   J.D. Abolins                             jda-ir@pluto.njcc.com
   Meyda BBS ; Ewing, NJ;  609-883-8124  "Meyda means Information"
   Meyda Online Page at http://pluto.njcc.com/~jda-ir/
======================================================================
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "Suzanne M. Johnson" 
Subject: decimal computers..

> I've heard of some unusual and now-abandoned ways of putting together
> computer hardware:  my father tells me that someone really built a
> computer that used decimal memory rather than binary storage [...]
> Did someone really try decimal memory?

The IBM 7072 was a decimal machine.  U. Arizona had one back in the late
60's.  It made learning machine code programming relatively easy..down to
reading the commands (which were "overpunched" in a particular field on a card).
        Suzanne Johnson
__________________________________________________
Suzanne M. Johnson           Sunnyvale, California
              johnson@rahul.net
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "Mihai T. LAZARESCU" 
Subject: Re: Early memory of "networking."

On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Tice DeYoung wrote:

> Back in the late seventies to early eighties we had a data transmission
> problem.  We had two PCs, one had an 8" floppy drive and the other had a
> 5.25" floppy drive.  Of course we had the need to have similar data on both
> systems (I forget why).  Luckily we were running CP/M.

In the second half of the eighties, in a Romanian University
laboratory where I do some research as undergraduate student
after the class hours, there were several 8 bit CP/M machines
with 8" floppy and an XT PC with 5.25" floppy.  Needless to
say that we need pretty often to transfer data between the PC
and CM/Ps.

We used for this purpose a serial cable to connect the serial
interfaces, MODE program to program the serial interfaces
of the two machines, and then we used the MOVE program to
transfer data.  This was a command line utility able to access
files on disk and to send them through the serial interface
on one side and to listen the serial interface and to save on
a file on disk on the other end.

The whole system was reliable enough once the right settings
were done and it was possible for one person to do a transfer
without asking anyone else's help.

That was my first introduction to networking.

[Moderator's Note: It would be interesting to hear about the evolution of
computing and information technologies in former Soviet/Communist countries
of Europe.  For instance, I read that COMECON, the economic planning
organization of the former Soviet-block, designated Bulgaria as a country
which should aggressively train programmers (in the 1980s) and that today
Bulgaria has too many programmers for the amount of work available, which
partially explains (supposedly) why so many computer viruses were
originating from Bulgaria in the early '90s.]

Mihai Lazarescu
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Carl Ellison 
Subject: Re: CM> Early On-Line Services

There was an early on-line service I was tangentially involved with:

Keydata Corp in Watertown MA, 1966-69 plus/minus a few years.

They used a mainframe (with a hot spare) and interpreted assembly code for
user code to do financial operations for small businesses that couldn't
afford their own computer.  The interpreted language was the first "safe"
langauge I encountered (cf., Java) -- allowing multiple, mutually suspicious
users to use the same machine without danger of hacking one to the other.

Does anyone remember anything else?  I was at Adams Associates (a division
of Keydata) at the time and didn't follow the history of Keydata itself.

 - Carl

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Carl M. Ellison          cme@cybercash.com   http://www.clark.net/pub/cme |
|CyberCash, Inc.                              http://www.cybercash.com/    |
|207 Grindall Street           PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 |
|Baltimore MD 21230-4103       T:(410) 727-4288     F:(410)727-4293        |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Sender: Carl Ellison 
Subject: Re: CM> Epson QX-16 - was:The end of CP/M.

>In message <164099420745.LTK.013@cpsr.org>, Bill Anderson
> writes
>>Has anyone ever stopped and consider the amount of money we have spent
>>upgrading and changing machines over the years.
>
>Yes, and we know where the blame falls for that.

This is a fascinating side thread.

I once considered the problem of how to achieve the most rapid break of a
cryptographic key by brute force search.  Some of these keys might take
years to search for -- so the question is, do you buy machines now and start
the search, upgrading machines as the search progresses -- or do you wait
for N years doing nothing then buy a machine which will handle the job in
less than a chip power doubling cycle?

The irony here is that your money and time might be better invested by
waiting -- but if everyone did that, there would be no doubling of power
every 1.0 to 1.5 years.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Carl M. Ellison          cme@cybercash.com   http://www.clark.net/pub/cme |
|CyberCash, Inc.                              http://www.cybercash.com/    |
|207 Grindall Street           PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 |
|Baltimore MD 21230-4103       T:(410) 727-4288     F:(410)727-4293        |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Les Earnest 
Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution

At the U.S. Navy Aeronautical Computer Lab (Johnsville, PA) where I
spent most of my tour in the Navy (1953-56), we thought of the IBM 650
as a very advanced computer.  We were using an IBM CPC to solve
systems of simultaneous differential equations representing aircraft
and missile flight dynamics.  That was quite a challenge in view of
the fact that the CPC had only 40 words of storage, a calculation rate
of about 3 operations per second and mean time between failure of less
than an hour.  We necessarily programmed a lot of consistency
cross-checks and, whenever one of those showed a probable error, we
would restart the computation at the last apparently "good" point.

The main memory consisted of rotating mechanical disks, each of which
stored one decimal digit, just like the still older mechanical desk
calculators and IBM accounting machines.  Each morning we had to give
the computer calisthenics in order to get the oil circulating
properly.

We looked forward to getting the IBM 650, but inasmuch as we were
doing just numerical analysis my boss decided to "save money" by
ordering it with a numbers-only printer, which precluded the use of
the SOAP assembler.  Thus all programming had to be done in decimal
absolute.  When I left there and went to MIT, where they believed not
only in alphanumeric printing but also core memory and displays, I
thought I had gone to heaven!

        -Les Earnest
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Austin Meredith 
Subject: Re: CPSR-HISTORY digest 38

> Another note mentioned the Fortune and I am racking my brains to
> remember the details of that machine. Was that the really pretty
> machine in a platinum case (perhaps running a unix variant) an an early
> ergonomic (ie what is now standard but in those days was very slimline)
> keyboard?

It was based on the 680X0 and it did run a variant of UNIX. It looked like
a neato metal suitcase. The Fortune factory facade looked like the system
box -- sheer coincidence?

F was completely different from all the other computer startups.
The problem generally was money, not enough of to achieve your mission
statement. Fortune's was money, too much of to achieve their mission
statement. Where they went wrong was, they went public on their lucky day
and the offering prices for the stock soared outa sight. There was nowhere
to go from Euphoria City but down, down, down. Executives would stand
around in the halls throwing wads of bills at problems to make them go
hide, while that lasted. This was a pretty sight but it distracted the
workers. I worked for a coke-head who became very abusive -- especially
on mornings after a sniff party from which he had not yet come down.
My memory of this makes me say that if you've never been abused by a
coke-head you've never been abused.

In this case F stands for forget, or for forgive. Their fortune really
wasn't their fault.

New topic now: could someone recall some memories that would help
construct a dateline for the origin of the RELATIONAL DATABASE?

\s\ Austin Meredith , "Stack of the Artist of Kouroo" Project
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: gbuckler@limestone.kosone.com (Grant Buckler)
Subject: Re: CM> City-oriented on-line services, Toronto kiosks.


>I have no idea how it was done, nor whether an "online service" was
>involved, but I recall visiting Toronto, Ontario, Canada around 1983 or 84
>and seeing interactive "city info" kiosks.

That would be the Telidon system, a cousin of the French Minitel that had
better graphics but just never made it in the market -- partly because the
better graphics made it too slow. For several years in the early 80s, when
videotex was big, Telidon was touted as a great Canadian technology success
story. Eventually the NAPLPS videotex standard was established, and it
actually encompassed quite a bit of Telidon, but Telidon itself faded away.
I don't know when the kiosks disappeared from Toronto.

Telidon was videotex, so it wasn't exactly a computer online service.
However, it's interesting how much the Web seems like those videotex systems
of the early 80s in some respects.

For some time after Telidon, Bell Canada had a videotex service called Alex
in Toronto and Montreal. It did some of the same sort of thing --
entertainment listings and so on -- and it was rumored that as with Minitel,
sex chat was the most-used area. But it also failed economically, and Bell
eventually pulled the plug -- around 1990 if I remember rightly.



=================================================================Grant Buckler
Kingston, Ontario, Canada

E-mail: gbuckler@limestone.kosone.com
Phone:  613-548-4213
Fax:    613-548-3315
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the
world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong."
                                                - Salman Rushdie
=================================================================
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: LESPEA@muze.com (Leslie Pearson)
Subject: Computer Museum/Tinker Toy Computer?


asr@geom.umn.edu wrote:

What about Danny Hillis' tinkertoy computer?  Can anyone give an
authoritative
account of Hillis' project?  All I know is that he (and possibly others)
built
a computer out of tinkertoys to show the universal nature of computation,
and
to show that it could be done.

I recall there was a tinkertoy computer at the Computer Museum in Boston
in the late 1980's - is this the one being referred to?

Leslie
(lespea@muze.com)
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: Demise of SCCS

> Sender: Nelson Winkless 
> Subject: CM: SCCS etc...


> Does SCCS yet live?

Nope.  It was done in by at least 3 things --

1.  We used to make group purchases of parts.  A check for about
$25,000 was sent to a supplier, who went south with it.  Those were
the children's crusade days, and people trusted everyone.  The group
purchase program was run by SCCS' treasurer Hal Lashley, who, as a
CPA, should have known better.  Hal went on to become the accidently
misspelled "Ashton" of Ashton-Tate, the dBase publishers.  George
Tate, his partner, was also an SCCS board member.

2.  The interuption of the publication of the magazine and subsequent
law suits and wasted energy in combat with Interface Age.

3.  General lack of focus when a bunch of volunteers try to do
anything.

Lar
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: John R Levine 
Subject: Re: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution

> >Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?
>
> It looked like a disk to me.  A really big disk:) probably 36-48 inches in
> diameter and the stack of platters were over.5 inch apart and stood 3+feet
> tall.

Your 650 may have had an external disk added late in its life, but its
main memory was a big honking drum which spun at an amazing 12,000 RPM.
(I think that's the fastest rotating storage medium ever.)

As to why drums rather than disks, drums were a lot easier to develop.  A
drum memory has to spin fast and very evenly with as little wobble or
variation in radius as possible, with a recording medium deposited very
evenly all over the surface.  These problems had already been solved in
the grinding drum business.  Bryant, one of the early names in drums, was
originally a grinding drum company.  Coat a drum with iron oxide rather
than carborundum and poof, it's a computer memory.  Drums had a fixed head
per track, so they avoided the problems of moving heads and floating heads
that made early disk development difficult.

The disadvantage of drums, of course, was that you got a lot less storage
per spindle than you did with a disk, but drums were popular well into
the 1960s for swapping and loading frequently used programs because they
were so fast.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Trumansburg NY
Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies"
and Information Superhighwayman wanna-be
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Fred Cisin 
Subject: Re: CM> Osborne

On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Bill Anderson wrote:
> On Jul 27,  2:14am, Josh Hodas wrote:
> >
> > Also, anyone know what Adam Osborne is up to these days?
> >
> If I remember correctly, he continued on with Osborne books. However, I
> am not totally sure.

Osborne books preceded Osborne Computers.  The sale of Osborne books to
McGraw-Hill  provided most of the funding for starting Osborne Computer.

He and John Dvorak? wrote a very paranoid account of the demise of
Osborne Computer, blaming it on sabotage, not foot shooting.

After Osborne Computer, Adam Osborne started Paperback Software,
specializing in good quality cheap knock-offs of popular products.
It was sued out of existence.

I saw him a couple of times after that.  For a while he was peddling
external SCSI hard drives.

--
Fred Cisin       (510) 436-2663   Computer Information Systems Department
Merritt College         12500 Campus Drive      Oakland,  CA  94619
RE: Peralta district internet connection..  "Mir zul nor leben su zane."
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Alex McKenzie 
Subject: JCR Licklider & ARPANET origins

It is great to read the recollections of Lick from Les Earnest.  I
didn't know Lick well, but I enjoyed every meeting with him.

There is a brand new book (perhaps not even in stores yet) titled "Where
Wizards Stay Up Late -- The Origins of the INTERNET" by Katie Hafner and
Matthew Lyon (ISBN 0-684-81201-0) which is dedicated to the memory of
J.C.R.  Licklider and which has a lot of detail about Lick and the
origins of ARPANET.  I haven't yet read the actual book, but I have read
two versions of the manuscript and I heartily recommend it.

The Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota collected a
set of "oral histories" of people associated with ARPA and ARPANET,
including an interview with Lick.  Recordings and/or transcripts of each
of these interviews is available from CBI.  In addition, both Arthur
Norberg and Judy O'Neill, researchers at CBI, have written extensive
summaries of the information gatered in these intervies.  At least some
of their work has appeared in the IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing during the past 2 years.

Cheers,
Alex McKenzie
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Sender: Les Earnest 
Subject: CM> early interactive games

Laurence Press writes:
   Cristopher Strachey, who wrote an oft-referenced pre-timesharing paper
   that outlined a system for several programmers debugging at the same
   time, wrote an interactive chess (checkers ?) program for one of the
   English research machines during the 1950s.  It was written up in the
   Annals of the History of Computing, but I don't have the reference off
   hand.

As I pointed out earlier, though the 1959 Strachey paper used the term
"timesharing" it was NOT about timesharing as we know it.  In
particular, it included no description of "a system for several
programmers debugging at the same time" as claimed above.

   Art Samules' checkers program that learned and beat Samuels was
   described in the IBM journal of R&D around 1959.  (The year of
   Strachey's tss precursor paper).

I believe that Art Samuel began his work on a checkers program at the
University of Illinois, before he went to IBM.  He reportedly got the
logic instructions added to the 704 after demonstrating that they
would be good for the checkers program.

Art joined us at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab immediately
after retiring from IBM in 1966 and continued the development of his
checkers program there through the 1970s, using our DEC-10 system.
His program came close to defeating the then-reigning world champion,
who was quite interested in the project, but the champion died before
the program got to beat him.  Art then decided to retire himself.

        -Les Earnest
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: kwebb@astro.phys.unm.edu (Kyle L. Webb)
Subject: Re: CM> PLATO in South Africa.

>
>
> Sender: bill@atd.co.za (William Bowles)
> An interesting aside to the PLATO project is that it was commissioned by
> the US Armed Forces for teaching soldiers but it involved a sophisticated
> tracking system which when Congress learned of its implications, promptly
> threw it out as a dangerous 'Big Brother' system!

Hmm. Plato was used by the US armed forces well into the 80s that I witnessed,
and one of my aquaintances was involved in developing new Plato applications
for the US Army Armor school into the early 90s. Doesn't sound like it was
thrown out. Plato was used regularly at quite a number of colleges into the
early nineties. Specificaly it was still used by Parkland College in Champaign
Il, for general educational work when I was taking an organic chemistry class
in 92. The University of Illinois continued to use it as well through 92 for
its introductory physics classes, and grade tracking in its higher level
physics classes at least though 92 as well. I don't know what it was replaced
with.
I was aquainted with Dr. Lorella Jones who was (as far as I know) the
last director of the U of Illinois's CERL Plato system (She unfortunately
died of cancer a couple years ago). She was a physics prof, who had developed
quite a number of physics related programs on Plato, including some very
usefull special relativity simulations. In 1992 I was part of an experiment
aimed at delivering Plato services through cable television systems. I was
living at a Champaign IL apartment complex that had its own cable system,
independent from the one that served the town. Having worked for the cable
provider, and also having been on Plato for a number of years, I tested a
Plato III terminal with a converter box to feed the signal out over the apt's
cable system back to the head end. From there it was relayed over microwave
and phone line to CERL headquarters in the ERL building on the U of I
campus in Urbana.
Sadly the performance was poor to say the least, and this was one of the last
dying gasps of Plato as far as I saw.
Though the Plato system was impressive in many ways, by that time it was
getting very long in the tooth. It had very limited connectivity to anything
other than Plato (in 92 or so, it finally became able to receive and send
mail to the internet). Further the files structure was highly centrally
controlled, meaning for example that it took a relatively high level director
to allocate not only the divisions of files in a given amount of space, but
even to designate what that space was to be used for.
On the other hand, we are only recently seeing interactive multi-user games
that equal such Plato mainstays as avatar (a dungeon game), empire (team based
star trek game), and the like.
In 1988 or so, I knew of two companies based in the Champaign Urbana area
that were either working on or fielding Plato followons. I don't recall the
names of either but one was a pc based system, and the other was closely
related to the Novanet followon. As I was leaving that area in 1993, I heard
rumors that some former Plato types were looking at revamping the system, and
releasing some updated versions to run on modern hardware, with improved
software. Whether any of these efforts came to pass, I don't know.


> When Control Data realised that it had a multi-million dollar boondoggle on
> its hands, it sold it to the South African Govt! The Apartheid regime
> started to install it in the Black school system as a method of tracking
> students and their activities (both educational and political) and even
> went as far as linking it to Employment Centres so that for example, when a
> Black student who was politically active finally left school and applied
> for a job through an Employment Centre, his/her activities were there in
> the file and any activists of course, couldn't get jobs. The Apartheid
> regime installed it in the Orange Free State and had plans to use it
> nationwide but I don't think it got that far. It had to use the teachers in
> the school system as a source of information on the students, effectively
> using the teachers as spies.

Absolutely the opposite of my experience with it. All sorts of people got
author signons (privileged access that allowed one to program) to Plato that
allowed them to game, use the term-talk chat system, the copious notesfiles
(newsgroups equivalents), and form a sort of Champaign-Urbana subculture that
survived for years. It was largely untracked, subversive in some ways (I tend
to rate that as a plus), but it provided a ready and willing pool of
programmers to develop learning applications for schools and college
departments at very cheap prices.
I don't doubt that the strict controls remaining from the earliest days of
Plato could have been used for nefarious purposes, but so can many computer
systems.
One of the noteable features of Plato was an anonymous posting flag provided
in the notesfiles. This preceded the current use of remailers for usenet by
many years. Though the anon could be broken, it took considerable effort to
do so. I know of only one case where this was done on the CERL system, when it
was broken by setting up a tracking program to find out the identity of a
suicidal, and threatening poster to one of the self help related notesfiles.



Kyle L. Webb                                       Dept. of Physics + Astronomy
kwebb@astro.phys.unm.edu                           University of New Mexico
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Sender: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"

Subject: Early interactive games

In 1956 or possibly early 1957 I visited the Franklin Institute in
Philadelphia and one of the exhibits was a "computer" that played
tic-tac-toe. My memory says it was a Univac but that is becoming
increasingly unreliable. What I do recall is that it was big and
the display was a tic-tac-toe matrix with illuminated "X"s and "O"s.

Do recall deciding that if you went first you could not lose (unless
you made a mistake) and if you went second, you could not win.

                                                Warmly,
                                                        Padgett
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______________________________________________________________________
Some interest has been expressed in the Doug Engelbart demo
in the Fall of 1968. (And somebody commented on this list a few
days ago that his attendance at that demo inspired him to a
life of computerism.)

The show was the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
Engelbart did his big demo on a platform in front of an audience of
in the San Francisco Civic Auditorium (yes, Nourse Auditorium). Conceivably,
this was a repeat performance, after an earlier demo, but I know this was a
big deal, with special projection equipment set up in the auditorium.

I didn't get to his performance, because I was trying to show the
union projectionist how to thread a 16mm projector (he'd seen only
35mm equipment) for the Computer Science Theater upstairs, but I went
by the open doors to that hall repeatedly, and could tell that a big
production was in progress.

We gave a paper in the session following that one in that auditorium.
While only a fraction of the following item from a recent ABQ Correspondent
treats the Engelbart demo, the rest may be helpful context.
                        ------------------------
NOT ENTIRELY CLEAR VISION
A few years have passed since techniques for using computers to generate
motion pictures left the care of pure experimenters, and really went into
the movies; digital effects are now so common that the novelty has worn
off. Morphing has become trite. The "invisible" digital work that looks
like ordinary reality remains fresh and effective.

A trade magazine recently published an interview with two of the leading
commercial producers of digital effects, Ed Jones of Cinesite and Phil
Feiner of Pacific Art & Title, and their comments have a familiar ring.
They note, for example, that software is not wholly reliable, that the
incompatibility of systems makes life difficult, and that they are
strangling for bandwidth. A single movie frame at the resolution required
for theatrical screening may require 90 megabytes of data. With 1440 frames
in a minute of film, it's easy to choke any computer system with data. (The
fellows commented that the average scene they process is five feet or less
...a little over three seconds in 35mm.) They long for better data
compression techniques.

Back in 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco (when
the IBM 7090 was still a monster computer), Paul Honore and I gave a paper
about computer generated graphics...in which we noted the lack of reliable
software, system incompatibility, and the horrifying number of bits that
must be processed to make a picture.

On the other hand, the future of computer graphics was transparently clear.
We could describe, but could not yet produce, the effects that are now taken
for granted. We figured we'd eventually be able to extract Rudolf Valentino
from The Sheik, Marilyn Monroe from The Misfits, and the sets from The Ten
Commandments, and combine them in a new movie, showing action and angles
that did not occur in the originals. A couple of days ago [1996], Paul
Harvey dramatically reported that a Hollywood visionary has just predicted that
we'll eventually be able to produce movies in which actors are generated
digitally. Hot news!

It's taking longer than we thought it would. One reason is that movie
production is not a big potential market. No huge payoff awaits the people
who make the tools available. It also takes a long time for experts to take
new ideas seriously.

At that conference, we stood on a high lecture platform surrounded by
equipment that Doug Engelbart of SRI had just been using to demonstrate
nteractive computing to a thousand or so computer professionals. They
were somewhat puzzled, and offended by his presentation. For example, he
demonstrated what he called a "mouse," with which a body could move a
"cursor" about a television screen displaying text and images. CRT monitors
were novel then; hardly anybody knew why one might want to monkey with text
in a computer. Worse, these techniques were immorally self-indulgent,
wasting expensive cycles on work that could easily be accomplished by a
programmer/operator with a decent amount of self-discipline.

Maybe things will move faster, now that we've sampled what's possible, and
nothing we see is frighteningly new. Really new stuff will have to wait.
                        --------------------------

The enthusiasm for interactive computing at that show must have come
chiefly from younger people, who were not steeped in the stolid old ways
of the trade. The reports I heard at the time were more grudging (probably
representing the views of the Xerox executives who couldn't see much
value in what the folks were producing at Xerox PARC).

A few years later, when I went by SRI to interview friend Donn Parker
("Do you want one-n Don or two-n Donn," the receptionists and phone
operators used to ask.) for an article on computer crime, he led me to
an unused office larger and quieter than his own. It was Doug Engelbart's
then abandoned SRI lab.

By the way, there is now apparently a "Marilyn Project" that is creating
a digital Marilyn Monroe to perform in new movies. It's an odd form of
immortality.

...and by 1968, surely the 7090 was a relic. The piece should have referred
to the CDC 6600 or some such as the commercial monster of the time.

--Nels Winkless
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nelson Winkless                   Email: correspo@swcp.com
ABQ Communications Corporation    Voice: 505-897-0822
P.O. Box 1432                     Fax:   505-898-6525
Corrales NM 87048 USA             Website: http://www.swcp.com/correspo
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Resent-Date:  Mon, 17 Jun 1996 09:39:48 EDT
Resent-From:  "Michael S. Mahoney" 
Resent-To:    Community Memory 
Resent-Reply-To: "Michael S. Mahoney" 

A. Padgett Peterson writes:

>>BUIC was a SAGE derivative that ran on the Q-8.  I believe it had
>>significant amounts of code in JOVIAL (SAGE was all in Q-7 machinecode).
>>BUIC was rising as SAGE declined, about the time I left SDC (early 1962)
>
>Do not think the Jules Own Version is that old (Mil-Std-1889 ?), more like
>mid-late '70s. Was a perfect match for the Mil-Std-1750A processor, neither
>had any real provision for I/O (I used to refer to the 1750 as a "co-
>processor in search of a processor in later days).
>
Schwartz gave a full account of the development of JOVIAL at the first ACM
History of Programming Languages Conference in 1978, the proceedings of
which were published in the ACM Monograph Series in 1981.  According to him,
design of JOVIAL began in 1958, the first description appeared in 1959, and
the first compilers were up by 1960.  Chris Shaw described the standard J3
version in 1960.  Mil-Std-1589 is version J73 and does date to the '70s.

o=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3D=
o=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3D
Michael S. Mahoney      Department of History     Princeton University
mike@princeton.edu       303 Dickinson Hall       Princeton, NJ  08544
phone 609-258-4157                                    fax 609-258-5326
             WWW Home Page http://www.princeton.edu/~mike
o=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3D=
o=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3Do=3D
=DFMichael S. Mahoney  Community Memory     6/17/96 CM> Bogus etymology
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Resent-Date:  Tue, 23 Jul 96 09:27:03 EDT
Resent-From:  "Michael S. Mahoney" 
Resent-To:    Community Memory 
Resent-Reply-To: "Michael S. Mahoney" 

Project MAC was set up while Licklider was head of DARPA's Information
Processing Techniques Office.  Although Licklider invited the proposal
for Project MAC and took part in its design, the principal architect and
director of the project was Robert M. Fano.

For an extensive account of Licklider's leadership at IPTO, see Arthur
L. Norberg and Judy O'Neill, _A History of the Information Processing
Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency_
(Minneapolis: Charles Babbage Institute, 1992)

For Project MAC, including an extensive interview with Licklider,
Fano, and others, see Vol. 14, nos. 1 and 2 of _IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing_.

Mike Mahoney

o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=
Michael S. Mahoney      Department of History     Princeton University
mike@princeton.edu       303 Dickinson Hall       Princeton, NJ  08544
phone 609-258-4157                                    fax 609-258-5326
             WWW Home Page http://www.princeton.edu/~mike
o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender:  (Peter Capek)
Subject: SQL History

Austin Meredith writes:

> New topic now: could someone recall some memories that would help
> construct a dateline for the origin of the RELATIONAL DATABASE?

See

http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/Paul_McJones/System_R/SQL_Reunion_9

for a transcript of a reunion last year of most of the people who did the
early work.

         Peter Capek
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            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "christopher f. chiesa" 
Subject: Re: CM> Core Memory in the IBM 650.



On Thu, 1 Aug 1996, keith reid-green wrote:

> It was years
> and years before the punched card mentality died out, if in fact it has.
> There are, no doubt, a few hermits hiding in caves who still design for the
> 80-character record. :-)

I notice that we're all using 80-column terminals, or at least are
formatting our text into approximately 80-column format. :-)  Is it true
that the 80-column "standard" terminal width has anything to do with the
forerunning 80-column CARD standard?

The VMS operating system uses files that are composed of "records," rather
than consisting of a "stream of bytes" as seems to be the case in most, if
not all, other "current" OS's.  This has traditionally (well, since at
least the mid-80s, for me ;-) ) imposed a bit of complexity in the art of
transferring files between VMS and other OS's...

Also, IBM's VM/CMS environment appears to operate "as though" each line of
text typed at the terminal -- particularly when those lines are commands
-- were coming from cards.  The command is typed at the bottom of a screen
and is then echoed to a sort of "running list" of output higher up on the
screen, and is THEN acted upon.  So the line at the bottom is kind of like
a single-card input area...  I find it kind of awkward, personally.

Chris Chiesa
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Community Memory and Moving Barkhausen Discontinuities

> Peter da Silva commented:

> > Pretty much anything that can change state quickly enough and retain that
> > new state for a while has been used for memory.

> Nicely put.

Ta.

> I've no idea if anything ever came of the MBD memory work.

Sounds a lot like magnetic bubbles, which were one of those things that
were going to take over from disks... since they were solid state and
non-volatile they'd have a big reliability advantage. I don't know if
they're still in use, but they lost out in most areas because they were
so slow and expensive compared to battery-backed static RAM and the like.

Moving Barkhausen Discontinuity sounds a lot niftier...

A web search on Barkhausen brings up a page published by the IENGF Materials
Department (http://alpha.ien.it/) which refers to "Barkhausen effects (domain
walls)", which sounds like it's related to magnetic bubbles (basically free-
standing magnetic domains, as I recall). The abstract of one paper on these
beasties certainly sounds like something out of Vonnegut:

Quoting :
        Abstract. Using the results of a theory of the Barkhausen
                effect based on a Langevin approach to the domain wall
                motion in a medium with brownian properties, we
                calculate the scaling exponents of the durations and
                sizes distributions of the Barkhausen jumps. The
                Barkhausen signal is found to be related to a random
                Cantor dust having a Hausdorff dimension which is a
                linear function of the applied field rate.  Using
                simple properties of the fractal geometry, the
                distributions are easily calculated. [...]

On another subject: I was browsing through my old Doctor Dobbs Journals
and came across an article on computer networks from about 1980 or so. Most
of the networks listed there are now dust (or never happened, including the
famous Xanadu effort), but one jumped out at me. It was something called
the Community Memory Project...

[Moderator's Note: That's not a coincidence.  Anyone out there ever use the
original Community Memory?]

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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: timesharing endures

> Timesharing did exactly what it was intended to do: bring down the
> cost of interactive computing by an order of magnitude.  It did that,
> is still doing that and will probably continue to be an important
> element of computer services for at least another half-century.

For what it is worth, I am currently logged into a shell account
running a VT-100 emulator on a DOS-based PC.  I also do a lot of work
with folks in developing nations, many of whom do not have IP
connectivity.  (One still sees a lot of Fido or UUCP networking in
developing nations).

Peer-peer vs timesharing is not all or none -- the economics,
supporting infrastructure, applications, user skills, etc. must all be
considered, though the trend is clear.  (Batch processing did not
disappear over night).

Lar
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            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Sender: thvv@best.com (Tom Van Vleck)
Subject:

Les Earnest wrote:
>Thanks, but I don't buy this argument.  Who was the unnamed person who:
>   "thought of one or a few central computers (one even proposed siting
>   it in Kansas City), accessed through a jack in the wall just like
>   you get electric power?"
>Doesn't sound like any timesharing pioneer that I know of.

Well, Corbato & Vyssotsky wrote, in "Introduction and Overview of the
Multics System" (1965 FJCC) (http://www.best.com/~thvv/fjcc1.html)

One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is
capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of
a large computer utility. Such systems must run continuously and reliably
7 days a week, 24 hours a day in a way similar to telephone or power systems..."

The idea of computing delivered via a wall jack was suggested often
at Project MAC in the 60s.
______________________________________________________________________
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: Engelbart demo

> anyone on the list who witnessed first hand Engelbart's famous "mother of
> all demos" where he showed his mouse-windows system to an audience in San

I did not see the demo, but did visit the lab for a demo in the mid
60s.  I was working on interactive multivariate data analysis (on the
Q-32 at SDC) and two guys called Ball and Hall at SRI were working on
interactive cluster analysis.

I have seen a video of the demo, and believe it is still available from
ACM.

Lar
______________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"

Subject: re: Mel and Machine Language

XP[@PPD]5`P(f#(f((f?5!QP^P_u!2$=po}l=!!rZF*$*$ =0%GF%!!%PP$P$Ps-
%gmZ$rl6lW$rm6mWlVl6m=ldmAlv%fmvmB$Vm6lW$Vm6mWl6m6m=ld%ylVmqlJmq
lRmqlNmqlBlWl6m6l/m'l/m3mWl7m7mrm4mql:lXl7m7mAl2l\m2lYm2m6mPm&mP
l&$h$^%`%Vl&%Y%b%^$`l&%^$Xl&%a%[%X$\$`$[m#$Xl&$a%`l&$`%[$[%`l&%|
l&%il#$h$q$|l&%z%v%w%wl$pp

Some of us never stopped. The above is an executable DOS (.COM) file for
a PC. The first line still crosses my eyes & took about three weeks to get
right & down to 64 bytes. Used a lot of "P"s for fun.

Terrible expansion but like I said, important stuff is in the first line,
rest is boring.

Used to use a lot of EQUIVALENCES on the VAX. One value goes in to
a variable & something entirely different comes out another. My hand never
left my arm.
                                Warmly,
                                        Padgett
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Bill_von_Hagen@transarc.com
Subject: Re: CM> Hacker folklore, "The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer."

Seeing the story of Mel reposted (and in free verse - I never saw this
"legend" in that format before!) made me think of a related post I
sent to alt.folklore.computers a few years ago.  I've included an
abridged version for those interested in the story of Mel, etc.

  Bill

************************************************************************

Date: Sat, 11 Jun 1994 00:04:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill_von_Hagen@transarc.com
To: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: New Light on the Legend of Mel?

The legend of Mel, meister programmer, is an occasional topic in this
group and others.  In the legend, Mel worked for Royal McBee, an early
computer company.  In the recent Boston Computer Museum Email Auction,
I bought a set of manuals and a Read Flip Flop (5" square PCB, 4
tubes, etc.) for an Royal McBee LGP-30.  The docs are dated 1959, and
have some *great* illustrations of how drums work (all 4096 words of
storage, on this particular system), what users will look like, etc...

One of our local systems wizards recently posted the legend on one of
our internal bboards to warm our hearts, which got me interested in
reading the LGP-30 manuals I'd acquired (I'm funny that way.)  In the
manual for the LGP-30 ACT 1 (Algebraic Compiler and Translator)
Compiler, the preface contains the following attribution from Clay S.
Boswell, Jr. (apparently ACT 1's designer):

>> I wish to acknowledge my appreciation to the many people who
>> offered suggestions and criticisms of the ACT 1 System.  In
>> particular... Mel Kaye of Royal McBee who did the bulk of the
>> programming.

Perhaps Mel Kaye is the one true Mel - how many master programmers
named Mel could there have been at Royal McBee?  Interesting data to
ponder, regardless. I thought I should post this here, since the
legend comes up every so often and the docs for these systems can't be
all that common.

       Bill von Hagen
       wvh@transarc.com
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: John Cowan 
Subject: CM> Licklider, Timesharing, and Popular History

Les Earnest wrote:

> Thanks, but I don't buy this argument.  Who was the unnamed person who:
>    "thought of one or a few central computers (one even proposed siting
>    it in Kansas City), accessed through a jack in the wall just like
>    you get electric power?"
> Doesn't sound like any timesharing pioneer that I know of.

A version of this scheme was proposed in John Kemeney's book
*Man And The Computer*, which was (especially in its later chapters)
an idealized design of a universal timesharing utility, with
big iron in major cities.

--
John Cowan                                              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "Stephen W. Commiskey" 
Subject: Re: CM> What's in a name: Vector Graphics, US Robotics?

Carl Dick  wrote:
   Does anyone know why they called the company Vector Graphics?  For years, as
   I recall, the only graphics they sold were raster graphics.

   Or how US Robotics sells modems, not robots?

I can't help you with Vector Graphics, but US Robotics is named for a fictional
company in Isaac Asimov's short stories and novels about robots with
"positronic brains."  The company, if I recall the name correctly, is
The United States Robots And Mechanical Men Corp.  I seem to recall reading
that the founders of USR were fans of Asimov's writing and named their company
as an inside joke.  I'm not sure where I read this, so if anyone has definitive
sources for this information (whether confirming or denying) please send it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Stephen W. Commiskey                  commiskey@urvax.urich.edu              -
- Chemistry Major                       swc4e@mathcs.urich.edu                 -
- Email addict                          afn46373@afn.org                       -
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: lutz@as-node.jena.thur.de (Lutz Donnerhacke)
Subject: CM> Modem connection in the former GDR

> [Moderator's Note: It would be interesting to hear about the evolution of
> computing and information technologies in former Soviet/Communist countries
> of Europe.  For instance, I read that COMECON, the economic planning

I'm too young to know much about COMECON, but I deal with early modem
developemnts in the GDR. The main problem was the material, because the
communist economy does not produce phase modulation chips. We are
(self)organized in large groups of interested people i.e. the Jenaer C64
club (which serves an area of about 1/5 of the GDR). Due to the 'near' FRG
(about 150 kilometers away) and some personal connection the phase chip
was illegaly 'imported'. So an acustic 'modem' was born in 1986. It was
used to made connections between Rudolstadt (where one of the first BBS in
the GDR was situated) and Jena. I lost the plans during my army time, they
were confiscated by the Stasi (intelligence agency) together with some
assembly lessons describing how to write an (intelligent) disc device
resident virus.

After 1989 the AS-Node Jena was the first BBS in this area. Today I use
the same hardware as in 1990 execpt the upgrade to SCSI and 386DX (and
ISDN). The graphics adapter is still a 1981 IBM MDA.

--
|   Lutz Donnerhacke   +49/3641/380259 voice, -60 ISDN, -61 V.34 und Fax    |
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Les Earnest 
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider and Doug Engelbart.

Dirk van Nouhuys writes:
   It's been mentioned here before but it bears repeating that several of the
   features we associate with interactive use of personal computers were
   developed first in a timesharing environment by the Doug Engelbart group
   at SRI in the late 60's and early 70's. These include the mouse, hypertext,
   and two-dimensional editing. (This use of the screen two-dimensionally (as
   opposed to the previous standard, line by line) did not involve graphics or
   menus in the Engelbart group.)

While Engelbart's group did do some pioneering work, they were not the
first to do two-dimensional editing.  A display-oriented timesharing
system called Zeus was developed at Stanford University by John
McCarthy in the 1964-66 period based on a DEC PDP-1 computer with 8 or
so Philco CRT displays attached and included a 2-D text editor called
TVEDIT.  I'm sure that Engelbart's group knew of that work inasmuch as
they were located just two miles away and visited occasionally.

Zeus was subsequently used for a number of years by Prof. Patrick
Suppes in his research on computer-aided instruction, but was
eventually replaced by a DEC-10 system.

   Note that machines with a tiny fraction of the power of your desktop
   computer were "supporting" 30 or more people. Response was horrendous.

Not necessarily.  Our DEC-10 timesharing system could happily carry a
load of 30 or more people doing a mixture of editing and computing,
with fraction-of-a-second response times for editing.

   Several seconds commonly elapse between keying a command, say delete
   word, and the appearance of its execution. Later on in the 70's all the work
   in Menlo Park was being done on machines at BBN in Boston or ISI in Los
   Angeles through the (then called)ARPANet, partly to save money and
   partly to prove it was possible. It was barely possible.  [. . .]

I find this remark puzzling, inasmuch as SRI had substantial computer
facilities from the 1960s on.  Perhaps a few people there used
computers elsewhere via the ARPAnet, but not anyone I knew.

   The response and other time sharing problems was one reason some people
   left the SRI group for Xerox Park where they worked on the Star system and
   so on.

That would have been a dumb move, inasmuch as Xerox PARC was using the
same kinds of timesharing systems as SRI well into the 1970s.

   Engelbart was fully aware of the problems of time sharing for interactive
   work with the computer power and network bandwidth of the time and
   would have preferred to work on what would now be called personal
   computers, but was dragged into it by Licklider and others who were
   interested in the development of time sharing and controlled his funding.

This remark makes no sense to me -- at the time that ARPA started
funding Engelbart's group and for about another decade there was no
such thing as a personal computer, hence it is rather unlikely that
Lick dragged him away from working on that nonexistent device.

        -Les Earnest
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro, Fortune computer.

I had a look at the Fortune... it was a bit wordprocessorish for me. But what
really bothered me was that the default recommended action for a great number
of error conditions was to reboot the computer without syncing. I'd never
heard of a 'hardened' file system at that time, but even with hindsight it
seems a little foolish even if they *did* have a hardened fs (which is pretty
unlikely given its vintage).
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: John Oliver 
Subject: Re: CM> Hacker folklore, "The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer."

At 01:44 AM 8/1/96 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Sender: Philippe Chartier 
>Subject: RE: CM> Drums revolving swiftly, and machines that can't add
>
>
>Since we're talking about drums, it reminded me of that piece of hacker
>folklore I've read awhile ago. I'm still unable to understand half of it
>but I appreciate the dramatic effect.  Somehow I think it's appropriate
>for the list. I'd be curious to see what Old Timers would have to say on
>the accuracy of this story.

I had not heard THIS story before, but I sure recall the architecture and
the hacks involved ... especially self-modifying code and using stored
instructions as constants ... you could save 5 or 10 storage locations that
way ... well worth it!  The trick of using the wrap from biggest to smallest
memory location with a special bit set has been used in the not too distant
past to allow DOS machines to access the 64kb just above 1Mb.  Thanks so
much for submitting this story ... it really brought back memories.
--
John Oliver http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~oliver
 ... keeper of the [Netscape Navigator] UFAQ
     http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~oliver/faq/
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Dear participants,

As some of you have probably noticed, the listserver software controlling
the distribution of messages to Community Memory subscribers has had
persistent problems.  These include:

        o Mysteriously dropping subscribers.
        o Not forwarding approved messages for days at a time.
        o Not forwarding messages to me for approval, meaning, yes, some
postings never made it out to the list because they never made it to me in
the first place (those of you scratching your heads about why your
seemingly appropriate post never made it out should resend them, if you
wish).

My apologies for all this.

Now the better news: We are going to be moving the list to a robust
listserver located at St. John's University in Queens, New York.  It is
very kind of St. John's to host this list.

St. John's runs one of the Internet's most active listserv systems with
hundreds of active lists and hundreds-of-thousands-of-posts per day.  This
means that load generated by our list will supposedly be very manageable.
I mention this because it was our list load which led to the problems I
describe above -- the host computer was persistently running out of
diskspace and crashing, mangling the list data and leaving it in periodic
limbo (The load is approximately 1200 subscribers times 10 to 15 messages a
day, or 12,000 to 18,000 messages daily on *average*.).

The move will take place in the next two weeks, and I will keep you
informed of what to expect.  My main ambition is that you barely notice the
move, and that is all happen without entaglement or disaster.  In general,
this is what will happen chronologically:

I will work with St. John's to set up a new list, run some test posts to
myself.  Once the list appears to be up and running, with the appropriate
"Welcome" and "Goodbye" messages I will instruct our current overloaded
listserver to send me file containing all the email addresses of the
current subscribers at that moment.  This file will then be loaded into the
new listserver at St. John's.  The old list will be set to no longer accept
new subscriptions, sending out a message explaining how to subscribe to the
new list.  I will then send an announcement to the old list saying the new
list is running.  I will simultaneously send an announcement to the new
list, which you should receive too (if you only get a message from the old
list, then you know to contact me), saying welcome, with whatever new
unsubscribe, posing instructions, and so on.

Then we will pull the plug on the old list and continue as if nothing much
happened.

This should all take place by August 16.

As soon as the official email address of the new list is set, I will let
you know.

I thank you all for your participation and thanks for being patient about
these technical issues.

All the best,
db
Sender: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"

Subject: "Other" memory devices

Peter da Silva commented:

> Pretty much anything that can change state quickly enough and retain that
>new state for a while has been used for memory.

In the mid-seventies I did some examination of the potential for hydraulic
computers - were quite common in the hydro-mechanical controls used
for military gas turbine engines such as the P&W F-100 series.

There were a whole series of bistable devices that operated through steering
of liquid streams via small jets on the periphery. Part of the output
stream could be fed back to the steering jets to make the output more or
less stable.

Design of all flavours was posible: bistable (flip-flop), monostable
(single-shot), or multivibrators.

Purpose was to avoid dependance on electrical signals in a world of EMP but
while adequate for engine control, the speeds were not there for other
uses and Rad-hard devices took care of the vulnerabilitiy shortly thereafter.

                                                Warmly,
                                                        Padgett
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Ronda Hauben 
Subject: Re: CM> Licklider, Timesharing, and Popular History

On Thu, 1 Aug 1996, Les Earnest wrote:

>
> Sender: Les Earnest 
> Subject: CM> Licklider, Timesharing, and Popular History
>
> Paul Ceruzzi writes:
>    In an aside to a posting about J.C.R. Licklider, Les Earnest lamented
>    the tendency of popular histories, esp. recent PBS documentaries, to
>    credit interactive computing too much to the PC and not enough to
>    timesharing.
>
>    As one of the consultants and narrators of the PBS/BBC series "The
>    Machine that Changed the World," I plead guilty to this error. However I
>    offer as an apology my belief that the mental model of a "computer
>    utility," which early time-sharing advocates had, impeded progress. That

It didn't impede progress at all, but provided a helpful vision that
there was a need for universal access to computers and networking, in
a way similar to the need for universal access to telephones and
electricity.

(...)

> In the 1970s, commercial timesharing systems did provide needed
> computer services for many companies that were too small to afford a
> computer of their own.  As computer prices came down and companies

And for students as well, as I seem to remember reading
that the private school Bill Gates and Paul Allen attended
made use of one of the
early time sharing providers to make computers available to its students.

> grew, many of them were able to buy minicomputers and even larger
> systems that were more economical, but that transition would have been
> much more difficult had they not been able to access commerical
> timesharing services earlier.  Incidentally, the companies offering
> timesharing services learned early that the dominant cost in that
> business was not computer hardware or software but "hand-holding" of
> customers who were learning how to use a computer for the first time.
>
And this still seems to be a problem not being adequately dealt with
as when I talks in a local public library, there were lots of people
who came who wanted to know how to use computers and online resources.

> I note that most Internet access providers today use timesharing
> systems to provide that service and the proposed inexpensive "network
> computers" that some think will revolutionize Internet services amount
> to a new form of "dumb terminal" connected to a central timesharing
> system -- an old idea made new again.
>

Also, universities and other educational institutions are using
time-sharing systems internally to provide services for 40,000
or so students and faculty, staff etc.

> Paul Ceruzzi continues:
>    But it _is_ not only practical but preferable to have computing power
>    so distributed (with a few exceotions). That was what I was trying to
>    point out in the series. If I/we seemed to have slighted the time-sharing
>    pioneers, I apologize.
>
> Mr. Ceruzzi apparently believes that the early advocates of
> timesharing were somehow opposed to distributed computing, but he
> offers no evidence in support of this belief.  I believe that it is
> simply not true.

Also, he seems to be leaving out the significant contribution
to the creation of a worldwide computer network made by time sharing
pioneers, and the vision they had of ubiquitous access to
computers and to man-computer symbiosis that a computer utility
would make possible.


The September 1966 issue of Scientific American on "Information"
(which was later reprinted as a book "Information" and published by
W.H. Freeman and Company includes some articles demonstrating the
farsightedness of pioneers during this period. One of the articles
"Time-sharing on Computers" by R.M. Fano and F.J. Corbato described
the helpful vision that was being proposed of a computer utility
that predicts some of the impact computer networking is having on
communities today.

"All in all, the mass mories of our machines are becoming more and more
like a community library....It already has a rudimentary mechanism
whereby one person can communicate with another through a program in
real time, that is, while both are using the same program at the
same time. There have been cases in which a member of the faculty,
sitting at a teletypewriter at home, has worked with a student
stationed at a terminal on the campus. It is easy now to envision the
use of the system for education or for real-time collaboration between
the members of a research time....

"Looking into the future, we can foresee that computer utilities are
likely to play an increasingly large part in human affairs.
Communities will design systems to perform various functions --
intellectual, economic, and social -- and the systems in turn
undoubtedly will have profound effects in shaping the patterns of
human life...."(pg. 94-5)


>
> Timesharing did exactly what it was intended to do: bring down the
> cost of interactive computing by an order of magnitude.  It did that,
> is still doing that and will probably continue to be an important
> element of computer services for at least another half-century.
>
And it also sets the basis for computer networking and the Global
computer network we have today, as well as the challenge to connect
all to the Net that is being posed around the world and in the
U.S. today.


>         -Les Earnest

Ronda
rh120@columbia.edu
au329@cleveland.freenet.edu
---------
         Netizens: On the History and Impact
               of Usenet and the Internet
             http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Les Earnest 
Subject: CM> Early interactive games.

Padgett Peterson writes:
   In 1956 or possibly early 1957 I visited the Franklin Institute in
   Philadelphia and one of the exhibits was a "computer" that played
   tic-tac-toe. My memory says it was a Univac but that is becoming
   increasingly unreliable. What I do recall is that it was big and
   the display was a tic-tac-toe matrix with illuminated "X"s and "O"s.

I vaguely recall that someone at Bell Labs built a relay computer that
played tic-tac-toe sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s.  The
TX-0 computer at MIT also had a tic-tac-toe game when I started
playing with it in 1959.  It displayed the board on its CRT and you
selected moves by pointing with a lite pen.

   Do recall deciding that if you went first you could not lose (unless
   you made a mistake) and if you went second, you could not win.

I don't understand this.  If both sides play correctly it always ends
in a draw.

However, the TX-0 version of tic-tac-toe had a "feature" that allowed
you to usurp squares that the computer had already taken just by
pointing at them.  The really embarrassing thing was that after you
won by cheating in this way the computer gave you its uncritical
congratulations!

        -Les Earnest
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: lauren@vortex.com (Lauren Weinstein)
Subject: "toy" computers

Greetings.  Ah yes, the "toy" computers.  I also had (indeed, still
have) the book explaining how to build your own digital computer
from wooden dowels, paper clips, and other assorted "found around the
house" items.  I know exactly where that book sits; I'll try dig it up.

Someone already mentioned the Digicomp II (the unit that used
marbles).  I had a Digicomp I, which was a 3 bit system programmed
through a series of little plastic tubes.  The crazy thing actually
worked.  It's big design flaw was that the little metal spring clips
that held the vertical rods in place would always go flying and
be lost forever.  I replaced them with tiny little (orthodontic)
rubber bands, but I never found bands that didn't increase the
tension on the rods so much as to make operation rather difficult.
I'm pretty sure I still have this unit around somewhere as well.

It's easy to forget how rapidly we've moved our hardware from toys to the
current world.  Too bad that OS and application software design hasn't
kept pace.

--Lauren--
Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: Community Memory


> From: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)

> On another subject: I was browsing through my old Doctor Dobbs Journals
> and came across an article on computer networks from about 1980 or so. Most
> of the networks listed there are now dust (or never happened, including the
> famous Xanadu effort), but one jumped out at me. It was something called
> the Community Memory Project...
>
> [Moderator's Note: That's not a coincidence.  Anyone out there ever use the
> original Community Memory?]

I visited the CM project in the early 70s.  Lee Felsenstein and others
had an SDS timesharing system in a converted industrial building in
San Francisco -- it had been renovated and divided into many spaces
which were used by community-activists, artists, etc.  They had ttys
in a few places in the Bay Area.  It was a somewhat news-group like
with people posting and answering.  Lee wrote an article for SCCS
Interface with sample posts as I recall.

They had a lot of trouble keeping the TSS up as I recall.  Lee later
plotted to put a mini in a truck -- a mobile CM.

I think a lot of the inspiration came from Bob Albrecht with his
People's Computer Center in Menlo Park.  PCC offered walk-in computer
access and a news paper.  (In fact Jim Warren, Dennis Allison and Bob,
started Dr. Dobbs at PCC).  Bob's example inspired me to put TTYs in
some schools and a public library in LA -- mostly games, BASIC
classes, car pool matching (remember the gas crisis? -- I wrote a
program which searched concentrically out from Thomas Map book
coordinates to find people with nearby destinations and homes), etc.

Any PCC recollections out there?

Lar
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: short, obscure programs

> Sender: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"
> 



> l&$h$^%`%Vl&%Y%b%^$`l&%^$Xl&%a%[%X$\$`$[m#$Xl&$a%`l&$`%[$[%`l&%|
> l&%il#$h$q$|l&%z%v%w%wl$pp
>
> Some of us never stopped. The above is an executable DOS (.COM) file for
> a PC. The first line still crosses my eyes & took about three weeks to get
> right & down to 64 bytes. Used a lot of "P"s for fun.

Remember 1-card programs for the 1401?  It booted by automatically
reading one card into a hard-wired input area and executing the
program it found there.

Lar
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: early display-orieneted editors

Les Earnest writes:

> first to do two-dimensional editing.  A display-oriented timesharing
> system called Zeus was developed at Stanford University by John
> McCarthy in the 1964-66 period based on a DEC PDP-1 computer with 8 or
> so Philco CRT displays attached and included a 2-D text editor called
> TVEDIT.  I'm sure that Engelbart's group knew of that work inasmuch as

Is there documentation around on TVEDIT?

I have also heard of a program at MIT called "expensive typewriter."
Not sure which machine it ran on -- any recollections out there?

Lar

ps -- a bit pedantic perhaps, but I am not sure "2-d editing" is a
good term, because you are still editing a 1-d text string which is
displayed in 2-d with word wrap.  You cannot select an arbitrary
rectangle with a word processor.  Perhaps terms like "display" vs
"line-oriented" are better.

Lar
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: John Oliver 
Subject: 2-D text editing and interactive games

At 01:41 AM 8/3/96 -0700, you wrote:
>Sender: Les Earnest 
>Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider and Doug Engelbart.
 ...
>While Engelbart's group did do some pioneering work, they were not the
>first to do two-dimensional editing.  A display-oriented timesharing
>system called Zeus was developed at Stanford University by John
>McCarthy in the 1964-66 period based on a DEC PDP-1 computer with 8 or
>so Philco CRT displays attached and included a 2-D text editor called
>TVEDIT.  I'm sure that Engelbart's group knew of that work inasmuch as
>they were located just two miles away and visited occasionally.

Sometime around 1967 or 1968 the Astronomy department at UCLA purchased some
abolutely wonderful "TV Typewriters" whose proper name escapes me.  A box
about the size of a large home mail box contained enough core memory to
store 16 40 character lines of text. A keyboard and a standard TV set were
connected to the box.  Everything typed showed up on the screen, and there
were cursor keys, delete, etc.  When the "Interrupt" key was pressed, the
entire contents of the core was shipped downstairs to a 360 (either mod 90
or mod 91 ... I forget), and swapped with whatever the channel adaptor had
waiting.  This allowed 8 card full screen editing.  The operating system was
URSA and allowed all the expected functions ... file operations, text
listing, display of output etc.  The display was bit mapped and one of the
most powerful functions was the ability to switch to graphics mode and
preview the output of a CalComp plot on the screen instead of waiting for
hard copy.  I alone probably saved a tree as I debugged the figures for my
dissertation.  I must confess that one of the most interesting uses of these
terminals involved "Space War" ... The URSA system provided for message
exchange between user processes ... Courtney Seligman and I modified Space
War to be interactive. Each of two users started up their own copy ... the
copies exchanged all status info about 10 times/sec (when the system was not
heavily loaded).  Of course, each copy only displayed the appropriate info
for its user (unless JPO or CES typed "zap" in which case the code picked up
the coordinates of the enemy and used them as the firing coords ... "How'd
he do that? I thot I was out of range!")  Late at night one could find most
of the astronomy graduate students in two clusters, at opposite ends of the
"bull pen".  One terminal at each end would be running Space War ... another
would be in Calc ... Whoever had the con would be blindly banging commands
in as fast as human fingers could type, based on instructions shouted by the
commander, after consultation with the navigator.

When I arrived at the University of Florida and discovered that my access to
computing was a keypunch and card reader, I was crushed ... It was not until
the advent of the 6502 and the TIM and then KIM that I really got back on
stride with computers.
--
John Oliver http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~oliver
 ... keeper of the [Netscape Navigator] UFAQ
     http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~oliver/faq/
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Sender: ACAD1036@SLCSL.StLawrenceC.on.ca
Subject: Uncl:


I have been enjoying the recent posts about the IBM 650 and timesharing.
I learned to program on the 650 in machine language and later SOAP. The
machine I worked on had IAS (Immediate Access Storage), floating point
harware, 4 tape drives as well as the card reader/punch(533 ?). We used
to put often used math routines in IAS. I believe the IAS was implemented
with tubes and I recall the unit being very large. The programmer viewed
the machine as being decimal although I think it was binary internally,
the idea of biquinary was used to interpret the lights on the console.
Our machine also had index registers. I used a time sharing system called
a GE 265, I believe it consisted of a GE 235 computer and a datanet 30 if
memory serves. I think the original Dartmouth machine was similar and of
course the language was BASIC.(in 1965). This activity took place in
Peterborough Ontario at General Electric. It was a great way to learn
computing as a teenager.
Jim

Regards,
James B. O'Brien Professor St. Lawrence College
2 Belmont St. Cornwall Ont K6H 4Z1, FAX (613)937-1523
(613)933-4693 ext 2167, acad1036@slcsl.stlawrencec.on.ca
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: CM> "Other" memory devices

> > Pretty much anything that can change state quickly enough and retain that
> >new state for a while has been used for memory.

> In the mid-seventies I did some examination of the potential for hydraulic
> computers - were quite common in the hydro-mechanical controls used
> for military gas turbine engines such as the P&W F-100 series.

In the late '70s I visited the HMAS Ovens, a world-war-2 vintage submarine
operated by the Australian Navy, in the company of a cousin who was an officer
on the vessel. He drew my attention to the ship's fluidic computer system,
and noted that the Ovens had "sunk" the Enterprise in recent war games with
the yanks.

There was a good Scientific American article on fluidic computers at the time.
Any good library shoudl be able to provide more details... and SA of that era
and earlier were a lot more interesting than today's pop-science books. They
would never have dreamed of putting an ad for vodka on the back in those days.
It'd more likely be an ad for the emerging ARPAnet. (anyone else remember the
PR pieces about networks of supercomputers about that time?)

Add Scientific American to the list of sources for our community memory.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "William F. Anderson" 
Subject: Re: CM> Fortune computer.

The Fortune was designed to compete with the Wang word processor, thus it
orientation towards word processing. The Word Processor actually
implemented all of the Wang options.

As to the file system, it was very stable. For example, Fortune implemented
a file reorganization program, called FROG, that would not corrupt the file
system even if the power plug was pulled while during the reorganization
process. When I released the product, I wanted to purchase (out of my
pocket) 500 small toy frogs and put them in the first 500 packages. Alas,
the head of manufacturing was an ex-marine and didn't see the humor in it.
I was tempted to get someone on the line to do it for me, but decided that
the backlash might be more than I could handle.

However, the French version of the package had to be renamed and the
jumping frog removed from the startup screen. The name frog just doesn't
fly in France.

The most exciting product to get on the market was the token-ring network
card. I inherited the project from R&D about two months before its release
date. At that point, it was 95% done and the schedule was sliding. I had to
release the product on time as there was aa $2.5 million dollar order
riding on the release. It was a lot of work, but we got the product back on
schedule. However, two weeks before the ship date QA found a problem
wherein the network would crash somewhere within a 48 hour period under
heavy loads. It turned out to be an interrupt problem caused by an ack
signal from one clock cycle trailing not clamping fast enough and appearing
in the next cycle. If the serial card received an interrupt acknowledgement
in the same cycle that the network card issued an interrupt request. The
network card would think that the ack was for it and hang.

With one week to go before shipping, you don't have time for any major
changes to the boards. Nor, do you want to make a change that would require
updates to motherboards, which was the real problem. To keep from getting
killed from manufacturing or field engineering, I authorized a change that
required only one cut and two jumps on the Network card. We simply slowed
down the acknowledgement detection by running it through another gate so
that the progation delay in the network card was longer than the trailing
edge of the previous acknowledgement signal. With this change the card work
fine and was shipped on schedule.

Anyone who ever worked in manufacturing has similar stories. Although I
don't know the full details, someone on the list should know about the
first Sun Workstation development woes. I remember that they had a problem
with not having enough memory to load the kernel. They managed to shrink
the kernel enought that it would load, but left little memory for running
any applications. I heard this story from an engineer at Sun, so it needs
to be verified.

Bill Anderson
Author, Consultant

[Moderator's Note: Jay Hosler , CM subscriber, informed
me that he has a Fortune computer he was going to throw away, but now,
after reading these posts, he is offering to give it away.  Anyone
interested should contact Jay.]
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: chris@envex.demon.co.uk (Chris.P.Burton)
Subject: Re: CM> J.C.R. Licklider and Doug Engelbart.

In message <359965117547.LTK.013@cpsr.org> cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM writes:
>
> Sender: wandd@netcom.com (Dirk H van Nouhuys)
> Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider
[.....]
> [Moderator's Note: What was the relationship between Licklider and
> Engelbart?  I know that Licklider funded Engelbart's work via ARPA, and
> Engelbart's lab managed the first ARPANET link with UCLA in September,
> 1969.  But these two men may have had different philosophies concerning the
> future of man-machine computer interaction.  It would be wonderful to get
> information on Engelbart's career and the contributions he made.  Is there
> anyone on the list who witnessed first hand Engelbart's famous "mother of
> all demos" where he showed his mouse-windows system to an audience in San
> Francisco?  Or anyone who worked at SRI at that time, or with Engelbart?]

Yes, I was in that big, full to overflowing, auditorium when the demo
was done, FJCC, December 1968. It was a daring tour-de-force for the
time. (How often does the simplest demo go wrong when only a small
audience is watching!) From my own background in industry in the UK
it was an eye-opener that the resources could be made available for
a researcher to tackle such apparently advanced ideas, namely the use
of a computer remotely, the novel input devices i.e. the chord keyboard
and mouse, and a video link with very large screen display (Eidophor
system, I think; monochrome, not colour) between SRI and San Francisco.
I must go and dig out the conference papers and remind myself what the
presentation was all about :-). They were "the Research Center for
the Augmentation of Human Intellect"

--
Chris P. Burton,  Wern Ddu, Llansilin, Oswestry, Shropshire, SY10 9BN, UK
Tel+fax: +44 1691 791274    A member of The Computer Conservation Society
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Sender: "Len Shustek" 
Subject: Re: CM> Computer Museum/Tinker Toy Computer?


> What about Danny Hillis' tinkertoy computer?
...
> I recall there was a tinkertoy computer at the Computer Museum in
> Boston in the late 1980's - is this the one being referred to?

 Yes, the tinkertoy computer that plays tic-tac-toe was donated to The
 Computer Museum by Danny Hillis and Brian Silverman in 1981, and is
 still on prominent display there.  It looks like it's in great shape,
 and it might even still work.  It's an amazing wood-and-string
 creation.

 -- Len Shustek 
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Sender: "Len Shustek" 
Subject: Re: CM> Adam Osborne.


> After Osborne Computer, Adam Osborne started Paperback Software,
> specializing in good quality cheap knock-offs of popular
> products. It was sued out of existence.
 ...
> I saw him a couple of times after that.  For a while he was peddling
> external SCSI hard drives.

 I think for a while (early 90's?) he was representing software
 engineers in India and signing up local companies to use their
 services.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Sender: "Woody Franke" 
Subject: 80 Character Line

On the topic of 80 character lines, that was the standard when I started
programming the IBM 1401 in 1964.  But I seem to remember that Univac (who was
then either Sperry or Sperry-Univac) had a card reader and keypunch standard
that had round hole punches instead of the IBM rectangle hole punch and,
because of the space the round hole took, had a standard 70 characters on a
punch card.  Is my memory correct?

On another note, I worked at CSC in Moorestown, NJ from 1972 to 1974 and
remember meeting Jules Schwartz during that time.  CSC considered it a coup to
have "the developer of JOVIAL" and used him to win several Air Force contracts.
______________________________________________________________________
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Sender: Ross 
Subject: Re: CM> Early interactive games.

> Sender: Les Earnest 
> Subject: CM> Early interactive games.
>
> Padgett Peterson writes:
>    In 1956 or possibly early 1957 I visited the Franklin Institute in
>    Philadelphia and one of the exhibits was a "computer" that played
>    tic-tac-toe. My memory says it was a Univac but that is becoming
>    increasingly unreliable. What I do recall is that it was big and
>    the display was a tic-tac-toe matrix with illuminated "X"s and "O"s.
>
> I vaguely recall that someone at Bell Labs built a relay computer that
> played tic-tac-toe sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s.  The
> TX-0 computer at MIT also had a tic-tac-toe game when I started
> playing with it in 1959.  It displayed the board on its CRT and you
> selected moves by pointing with a lite pen.

There was a Tic Tac Toe (or Noughts and Crosses as we call it in
England) game written for the EDSAC, the first fully functional
computer based on von Neumann's seminal draft report. The game was
written between 1949 (when the computer was first used) and 1951 (when
the architecture was significantly altered). I shouldn't think that it
is possible to find a "computer" based interactive game that appeared
before the EDSAC Noughts and Crosses.

For those that are interested, there is an EDSAC simulator for
Macintosh and Windows 95 (currently in beta-test) platforms, authored
by my PhD supervisor, Martin Campbell-Kelly. It comes with a half
dozen authentic 1949-1951 programs, plus the subroutine library that
was developed for the EDSAC at the time. Check out his EDSAC web page
for more details:

http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~mck/EdsacWWW/MacEdsac.html

>    Do recall deciding that if you went first you could not lose (unless
>    you made a mistake) and if you went second, you could not win.
>
> I don't understand this.  If both sides play correctly it always ends
> in a draw.

Neither of these claims contradicts the other. What's the problem? ;-)

Cheerio,
Ross

.----------Ross Hamilton, PhD Student in the History of Computing-------.
| http://quartz.dcs.warwick.ac.uk:8080/ | mailto:ross@dcs.warwick.ac.uk |
|       Department of Computer Science, | 12 Newbold Place, Leamington  |
|    Uni. of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL | Spa, Warwks, CV32 4HR, UK     |
`----------------- Office: 01203 528043 | Home: 01926 886146 -----------'
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______________________________________________________________________
From: "DAN WALTHER" 
Re: CM> 80 char line, early programming memories.

Woody Franke wrote
> On the topic of 80 character lines, that was the standard when I started
> programming the IBM 1401 in 1964.

When I began programming at Georgia Tech in 1960, the machine input/output was
paper tape.  You had to write your program onto paper tape using a Teletype.
The output of the machine [ENIAC if I remember correctly!] was also on paper
tape.  After your program ran, you fed the output paper tape into a Teletype
machine to print it out.  It seems to me that the Teletype was 40 or 64
characters wide (I just cannot recall).  I *do* remember 80 character lines
often referred to as "card images" so I assumed that that was the origin of
the 80 column width later used on CRTs.

The other predominate width in the late 60's was the line printer width of 132
positions.  Print position 1 (on IBM's printers anyway) was reserved for paper
control.  A blank moved to the next print line, a 0 doubled spaced, and a 1
ejected the next page.  How may times did someone start their printed
information in column 1 and just spew paper all over the computer room? :-)
There were 131 printable positions so that was the other standard width.  We
used pads of 11 x 17 paper marked off in those 132 columns to design output
reports (the screen would not show that width, you see).

> But I seem to remember that Univac (who was
> then either Sperry or Sperry-Univac) had a card reader and keypunch standard
> that had round hole punches instead of the IBM rectangle hole punch and,
> because of the space the round hole took, had a standard 70 characters on a
> punch card.  Is my memory correct?

In 1970, I worked on Honeywell (previously General Electric) process control
computers.  I remember seeing at the factory in Phoenix, some card readers and
keypunches (maybe they were Sperry) that used the round holes and had 96
characters on a card.  I don't know if this is the same thing you saw.
Honeywell promoted it because you could get more data on a card, but I think
the 80-column standard promoted by IBM was just too well entrenched.

  Dan..
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Sender: "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols" 
Subject: Book Alert

Yea, I have read a preprint and verily I say unto you that
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's Where Wizards Stay Up Late looks to
be one damn fine history of the net. I can argue with a few details, but
heck, it wouldn't be history otherwise. Let me put it this way, this
book is going the be the lankmark by which all later histories of the
net will be judged. S&S [Simon & Schuster] will be publishing it... tosses
PR papers about
fruitlessly... sigh, I think sometime 3rd quarter. Look for it.

Steven

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols                  sjvn@vna1.com
     http://www.access.digex.net/~sjvn/vna.html
QOTD: "Though lovers be lost love shall not,
And death shall have no dominion"--Dylan Thomas
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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