The Sorcerer’s Apprenctice
Atari, Altair, Commodore, Kaypro, Macintosh Plus, Sinclair and TRS-80. If you know what these names stand for, or God forbid, actually remember wanting to buy one of them then you may remember a time when computing made the transition from science fiction to something you wanted to buy in the store. Measured on the timescale of species existence the advent of personal computing came in the blink of an eye. The ancestors of the first consumer PCs appeared in 1975, the same year the Rubik’s Cube was introduced. They weren’t cheap. An Apple Lisa cost $10,000 — in 1983. And yet they took the world by storm.
Strange as it might seem to people growing to adolescence today, the computers of the 1980s could not easily share information. That would come in the 1990s with the development of the world wide web. Thus, a computer was “yours” in a way that it has never been since. Assembling a new computer and bringing it to life with the aid of marvelously boxed software packages was an exercise in wonder.
They were not yet the throwaway things of today. The software manuals of that era were printed in full color on glossy paper; professionally bound and edited. The software itself came in something called ‘diskettes’ encased in layers of protective bubble wrap and plastic, all of which had that new car smell. And they were mysterious. Trying to read the program contents via a utility like EDLIN only deepened the mystery because it only revealed a string of high end ASCII characters confirming that you had trespassed into the realm of wizards.
Once started up, the computers did things that were so magic in comparison to pencil and paper it was as if there was no limit to what they could do. The whack on the side of the head that came from watching Visicalc recompute columns or Aldus Pagemaker reformat text was almost akin to a mystical experience. Because very few people had computers as yet, the mere act of assembling them imparted a feeling of entering some kind of science-fiction elite; of crossing the frontier from the mundane world into the Land of Tomorrow in a single step.
Not a 90 Pound Weakling Any More
But in fact the opposite was happening. The crossing was all in the other direction. What had been the preserve of computer scientists and engineers was becoming a mass experience. And it was inevitable that the crowds would imbue what was essentially a branch of applied mathematics with the colors of magic.
The actual word cyberspace was coined by William Gibson, who used it in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Gibson described a scenario where ‘console cowboys’ could put on their cyberspace helmets and project their awareness into three-dimensional ‘ virtual ‘ environments. Here Gibson was anticipating that the human imagination would create its own perceptual ‘ realities’ within a technological setting …
In her recent book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, science writer Margaret Wertheim argues that the Internet is providing us with a new concept of space that did not exist before – the interconnected ‘space’ of the global computer network …
However, it is the actual nature of the cyberspace experience that Wertheim finds so fascinating. When one person communicates with another online there is no sense of physicality, for cyber-journeys cannot be measured in a literal sense. ‘ Unleashed into the Internet,’ she says, ‘ my “location” can no longer be fixed purely in physical space.
Appealing as Wertheim’s idea seems, the notion of “being nowhere” is of course pure hogwash. Most of us give up our locations the instant we enter ‘cyberspace’. In actuality, it physically tracks us as never before, as you will read in my book No Way In. Our cellphones and tablets report our position — and certainly our computers do — unless we physically disconnect them from power — in the case of cellphones, take the battery out. People who understand this, like jihadi terrorists, for instance, stay as far away from cyberspace as they can and communicate with pencil and paper and by physical courier.
But psychologically Wertheim makes a valid point. The ordinary person in cyberspace feels as though he were traipsing through an uncharted spiritual dimension. And since for some people, feelings are enough, it was not long before the objections of sober applied mathematicians were cast aside and systems of technopaganism began to arise.
The idea of technopaganism is really simple: people have always wanted magic and were disappointed with the rise of science which showed that magic didn’t really work. But now that we really have magic, why we can now safely re-enter the magical world and pick up where we left off. Here’s how one guy is making it happen — for those who want it.
Mark Pesce is in all ways wired. Intensely animated and severely caffeinated, with a shaved scalp and thick black glasses, he looks every bit the hip Bay Area technonerd …
Pesce is also a technopagan, a participant in a small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism …
If you hang around the San Francisco Bay area or the Internet fringe for long, you’ll hear loads of loopy talk about computers and consciousness. Because the issues of interface design, network psychology, and virtual reality are so open-ended and novel, the people who hack this conceptual edge often sound as much like science fiction acidheads as they do sober programmers. In this vague realm of gurus and visionaries, technopagan ideas about “myth” and “magic” often signify dangerously murky waters.
But Pesce is no snake-vapor salesperson or glib New Ager. Sure, he spends his time practicing kundalini yoga, boning up on Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic magic, and tapping away at his book Understanding Media: The End of Man, which argues that magic will play a key role in combating the virulent information memes and pathological virtual worlds that will plague the coming cyberworld.
If he ever succeeds in creating this world of Dungeons and Dragons, Pesce will make a mint. Count on it. For the urge to magic and spirituality never really died. The major reason for the success of the American Left lay in its ability to destroy the Judaeo-Christian tradition in the name of ending religion only to supplant it with another. They understood that people had an eternal and compulsive reason to believe. Take one belief system from them and you would have to provide them with another. Rid yourself of Moses and switch over to Marx. That’s called progress. Anyway, they both have beards.
One possible reason for the astounding popularity of the late Steve Jobs was that many people saw him as the new Timothy Leary (well if you’re old enough remember the Amiga, you’re old enough to remember Leary). The new guru. One of his admirers writes, “Panentheistically visioned, Buddha-nature corresponds with the primordial nature of God. Buddha –nature is innate unlimited potentialities for creation. Therefore, knowledge of Buddha-nature expounded in Zen Buddhism is a highly motivating force for a visionary Buddhist like Steve Jobs to strive for the extraordinaries.”
That sentence is completely incomprehensible, but then if one could understand such sentences then you would be one of them, and alas, I am not. But I do understand the attraction of magic; and felt it on that day in the 80′s when we drove across the border to New Hampshire to buy an early model IBM PC at lower rates than Massachusetts could offer. Felt it as I opened up the Peachtree manuals; sensed it in the keyboard; and saw it winking back at me on the green phosphor screen. I have lost it now; that sense of wonder; and occasionally ask myself if it was real. For an answer, all I can recall are the closing lines of Charwoman’s Shadow, which describes the fate of the last magician on earth.
And there came upon him at last those mortal tremors that are about the end of all earthly journeys. He hastened then. And before the human destiny overtook him he saw one morning, clear where the dawn had been, the luminous rock of the bastions and glittering rampart that rose up sheer from the frontier of the Country Beyond Moon’s Rising. This he saw though his eyes were dimming now with fatigue and his long sojourn on earth; yet if he saw dimly he heard with no degree of uncertainty the trumpets that rang out from those battlements to welcome him after his sojourn, and all that followed him gave back the greeting with such cries as once haunted valleys at certain times of the moon. Upon those battlements and by the opening gates were gathered the robed Masters that had trafficked with time and dwelt awhile on Earth, and handed the mysteries on, and had walked round the back of the grave by the way that they knew, and were even beyond damnation. They raised their hands and blessed him.
And now for him, and the creatures that followed after, the gates were wide that led through the earthward rampart of the Country Beyond Moon’s Rising. He limped towards it with all his magical following. He went therein, and the Golden Age was over.
It was as real as only magic and youth can be; meant to live in our memory and not in our waking day lest we should lose it.
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No Way In at Amazon Kindle $3.99, print $9.99
Being near in age to you, Mr. Fernandez. I too looked upon the first real computers in awe and wonder. I was the ecstatic recipient of an Atari game console at the age of nine and me and my brothers wore that thing out, literally. Then I got to take it apart! Learning all I could absorb about electronics and the electrical theory I knew when my Dad bought a Lisa and we set it up that we as a society were heading down a road untraveled by mankind.
While it does seem magical to most, to me it was a clear example of us taking the next step to the stars. When we leave this planet to go out beyond the milky way someone will be awed by the majesty of space and look toward the next step.
Ya yes, I reminisce of the days of Binary/Hexadecimal coding on the Z8080 and 6800, I learned the slide ruler just in time to never use it again! Worked on Planners boards that cost tens of thousands of dollars replacing simply IC chips and bad Transistors and Resistors all that in a very short While became dinosaurs, Loved my Amiga 500 and then 4000, the only true “Multi-Tasking” PC every built! Haven’t laid hands on one in 17 years. Resist the cloud, the more you use it the more you give up your soul! RESIST WHILE YOU CAN!
YA! Forgot the best ever Flight simulator was the Commodore 64 “Gunship”!
My Digital Group Z80 based computer, assembled from bags and bags of chips, awoke on New Years eve with the message “Read Z80 initialize cassette”.
Having spent over a thousand dollars, my skeptical wife was finally convinced that I wasn’t a dummy. I wasn’t so sure myself; now that I had a computer, what was I going to do with it.
Don’t forget that transition device of RPN on HP.
Timex-Sinclair to TI-94 to Amiga 500 with 14.4 modem for BBS and Usenet to a Windows 98 PC and ever onward.
At a young age I knew computers would be the future of the world. I remember Heathkits, punchcards, Wang computers, and helping a friend connect his Commodore 64 via a telephone line to what must have been one of the very first internet chat forums. Even so, even then, I was too late to the party, destined to remain somehow out of the technological loop.
The year Steve Jobs introduced the Mac, I began work at a horse farm in Cambridge. And yet still… I have memories of that time that are truly magical, and in no way connected to the world of computing.
Does anyone remembers mainframes and minis of 60-th and 70-th?
Or machines with vacuum tubes and tumblers, and perforated cards and tapes?
Owned one of each. Kept and used the TRS-80 (Model 4p) until ~1994.
Now I have a local network and a PC with 16GB of RAM running Slackware64 13.37 with more disk space than I would have dreamed as remotely useful back in 1980 or so. (Good God, that’s a 10 Mb hard drive! What could you put on that to fill it up?) Heh.
I had an Atari 600. We were “poor”.
Funny how Jobs made several bible references over his career- including the company logo, the Apple rainbow, the pricing of their very first product… “Eve” from “Steve” is a stretch.
Watch the extras on the 2001 blu-ray release. There are Apollo-era documentaries where they almost flatly state that the movie is true, and that scientists had a responsibility to tell us through science fiction. Moreover the tale represents a consistent interpretation of prophecy: history cycles with the rise of technology, which inevitably destroys us. Our only hope for rebirth is that some entity is watching, however hidden its existence.
The instruction manual for my IBM was slightly smaller than the 2 volume edition I have of the OED.
Yeah – I remember using punched cards for computer input, and even knew at one time how to wire up the control boards for the IBM punch card accounting machines. And then there was a scientific IBM computer with 20 K decimal digits of storage.
I love your last sentence…”It was as real as only magic and youth can be; meant to live in our memory and not in our waking day lest we should lose it.”…
….because it encapsulates a possible explanation for this unending deification of Steve Jobs.
And, the continuing growing monetizing of that commercial wizard……combined and supplemented by Apple’s superb Marketing division.
Are we loosing our common sense?…. and becoming electronic lemmings running on our shortened, abbreviated electronic legs into a frenzied world of Must! Communicate! Right! Now! Everywhere!…it seems so.
It’s an abyss….right in the middle of, and consuming, “…our waking day”.
It’s nauseating.
Some bits of history of the computer industry in Silicon Valley and the cross-currents of drugs and consciousness and such:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0670033820
My first job out of college was to work for Data General, building and selling minicomputers before Apple was founded or the IBM PC was invented, and what a long, strange trip it’s been. I was working for Xerox AI Systems selling AI Workstations, when Count Zero – the follow-up to Neuromancer – was published, serialized in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I remember reading the first part and putting it down, feeling like I’d been beaten with sticks. Of course ran out and found a copy of Neuromancer immediately. OMG. Then Jaron Lanier showed up and embraced the idea of “virtual reality”, though of course the movie Tron (1982) had beaten everybody to it.
Magic?
Yet in some ways the computer is the exact opposite of magic, since without a crew of nerds building all the parts, including software and imagery, you got nothing. Under the covers it’s all absolutely mundane, nowhere for any magic to hide. And yet, that doesn’t stop it from looking like magic, acting like magic, and making many think that it could really be magic. Indeed, even pen and ink can produce magic from mundane materials, and isn’t that the real magic?
Indeed, even pen and ink can produce magic from mundane materials, and isn’t that the real magic?
You’ll get no argument from me, Josh.
I remember CP/M (control program for microcomputers) the operating system that was the Godfather to DOS. I remember 8 inch floppy disks. Then there was the amazing day when Winchester hard drives arrived – CAD $10,000 for 10 megabytes of disk space. Later, the question of the day became “who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?” I loved those little green screens with glowing command lines and the ever eager cursor brazenly winking its sexy invitation “wanna type another command line?”. When I upgraded from an 8 mhz cpu to a 16 mhz cpu, I thought it was so fast that I would never need to buy another computer.
grrr@ 7,8
Yup – CDC, Honeywell, IBM mainframes. Punched cards and FORTRAN code. Carry your program in a box and leave it in the pigeonhole for the computer elves to take and feed it to the monster. Come back next day to get the error messages on a paper printout. Correct the errors (maybe) and leave it in the pigeon hole once more. Eventually the code actually compiled and then you could run the program to start finding out what else was wrong with your code.
Time lasted longer in those days. I have noticed that at any point in history, the length of a second is inversely proportional to the width of the television screens that are for sale. Before TV, time lasted for ever.
Timex-Sinclair, HP-41, to IBM PC that my XO delivered to Diego Garcia on a squadron deplayment. Still have all three, but I bet the IBM would take 30 mins to boot, if at all.
First software program? Edlin on Dos 2.0. Yikes!
I had a Sinclair ZX-81 I built and in fact I still do, somewhere. Modded my old B&W Zenith 13 inch TV and the computer for direct video input to give a better picture – a significant accomplishment since I did it entirely without any instructions or schematics that showed how – just my copy of the Radio Amateur’s Handbook. Spent all one Sunday afternoon rewriting some little program for the ZX-81 to make it a pursuit tracking function. And spent one Saturday afternoon setting up the Sinclair so it would display an indecent proposal to my girlfriend when she pushed a button.
Computer stores in the mid to late 70′s were few and far between, and wonderous places. Old B&W TV sets were hooked up to boxes that had a whopping 4K of memory. “What can you do with it?” I asked. The reply was, “Nothing, until we get more memory.” The wonder is that they still kept working on it.
From the ZX-81 I moved on to the Atari 520ST, a truly wonderful little machine that I still have in a box in a closet somewhere.
Then came the days of the 40 MHZ AT; there was no Plug and Play. It was Plug and Chug. I bought a fantastic new invention for mine, a CD drive, for $150. It was a separate box half the size of a toaster. Then I could buy Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe – and find that I could not run it. Went to a bookstore and read in the computer books section until I found out that I had to modify the Autoexec.bat file to reserve memory in the lower addresses. That got the game running.
But one cover artwork from a computer magazine of the 70′s has always stuck with me. It showed a personal computer sitting on a desk that looked out on a dirty, decaying, polluted city of Victorian era buildings and smokey air, while on the computer screen was a image of a super-modern clean new city of gentle white domes and green grass under a blue sky. That summed up both the promise and the danger of the computer geeks’ vision. They thought what they could visualize they surely could create – and then lost the distinction between creation and visualization. They were not going to dirty their hands building that bright future; that was someone else’s job. If there were not any Cyberdyne T-888′s around to build that new city, well, looking at the computer screen was good enough.
Well, I spend so much time reading PJM, the missus thinks computers are the devil!
Started with a Trash-80 and then splurged on a two floppy drive Mac-SE and an extravagant 20 MB external HD. Has anyone else noticed that every new Mac model, come inflation deflation or massive leaps in technology, came in at $1,000?
Other generations got a sense of wonder and freedom from building crystal radios or jalopies or shooting off Estes rockets. What will the children of tomorrow build in attics and basements?
Since we are playing geek games:
I got a job once because I knew RSX11M+ the O/S for the DEC PDP11/53.
But that started with Fortran 77 on VAX main frames via the VI editor.
We live in an age of miracles and magic. The youth understand nothing and rail against the gods because they cannot have it instantaneously.
The 0th Law is your prison.
We found an old MITS Altair that used CP/M in the old office building. Gave it to the Abq Childrens Museum. It still is running last I saw. stevesmith – Um, not quite. The local legend has it that Ed Roberts was approached by Gates with the news that he could buy DOS for $50k from IBM(?). Roberts did not think it had a future. Gates and Allen both worked for MITS I think and struck off on their own. Gates got the money somewhere and the rest is history.
Now I work at the source in semiconductor. Make the LEGO blocks for geeks.
It is all happening within single person’s memory… an explosion. And it doesn’t look like slowing down, just the opposite.
1. JFSanders
…it was a clear example of us taking the next step to the stars. When we leave this planet to go out beyond the milky way someone will be awed by the majesty of space and look toward the next step.
Such a wonderful dream, one I shared myself for most of my life. Sadly, I now fear we’re but crabs in a bucket. Those who attempt to climb out to reach the stars will only be dragged down and consumed by the writhing, ravenous mass below.
Magic? When we and everything we behold consist of atoms and subatomic particles spinning in invisible orbit … who needs magic.
The Internet used to be this big, exciting “place” to explore – just like a “hacker!” I remember how amazed I was to be able to download the weekly cafeteria menu from the University of Waikoto, NZ, while sitting in my den.
Now I find the experience is the reverse of what it was back in ’93. With wi-fi now almost ubiquitous, I can travel anywhere in the developed world and still see the same, familiar Internet I’ve been using for twenty years. Whether I’m at home, at the office, or vacationing on an island off Nova Scotia, my Facebook page is always there, my bookmarks are always there, and I can always be reached at the same email address. My physical location changes constantly, my virtual location stays put. This is certainly not what the cyberpunks envisioned.
In 1962, the week before the Cuban Missile Crisis, my math class went on a field trip to the Point Mugu HQ of the Pacific Missile Range, and got a tour of the analog computer used to analyze the telemetry from the old Regulus I and II missiles. I’d seen one shoot down a high-flying drone – probably a radio-controlled B-17, one afternoon, along with about 10,000 other civilians for an Armed Forces Day, or some such thing.
What I recall was the sight of thousands of bright yellow telephone cords with 1/4″ jacks at each end, each one connecting one single circuit to another single circuit. The cords were draped and festooned in an insane profusion, spilling out of what seemed to be closet doors around the central room housing all the vacuum tubes, rectifiers, flashing lights, hiccupping tape hubs, and technicians in skinny ties and horn-rimmed glasses.
Three years later, I used an IBM Selectric with a type ball to very tediously “set the text” for articles to be photographed and printed in a high-school newspaper (which is why I KNEW Dan Rather and that lot were a bunch of LYING BASTARDS in the business of the faked Texas Air National Guard memos.)
Another three years, and I owned a couple of high-density tapes for a PDP-10, and was using Hollerith Cards and another IBM Selectric to write extremely primitive Fortran programs for an IBM 360. (Decades later, visiting the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, I saw a silvery polished metal drum labeled as a 64kilobyte capacity Hard Drive for a late model 360…)
In the Spring of 1970 I had the good fortune to spend a few months in a seminar with Nick Negroponte, then head of the MIT Media Lab. One afternoon he described a project they’d set up: a football helmet with some sort of radio sensor tracking the helmet’s orientation and position in a large empty gymnasium, communicating in real time with a mainframe. The mainframe processed the helmet sensor’s data, and sent back STEREO vector graphics to be displayed on two small CRTs – one for the left eye and one for the right eye of the helmet’s wearer, allowing the person to gingerly look and walk around in a space using just the two eyepiece CRTs.
Virtual reality, proof of concept, but vastly cumbersome.
I was a LOUSY programmer, but went on to do traditional animation, abandoning the technical stuff of computer science after drafting a description of an interactive program to serve a traditional animator. So What? I couldn’t BEGIN to describe the algorithms, much less do any coding. Any animator should be able to describe what the computer needs to do…
Well, several million hours of human toil later, by programmers, artists and technicians around the world, and Eh, Voíla! In 1993 I was rigging and animating high-resolution Hero characters for Atari Games in Silicon Valley, using a WaveFront application on a Silicon Graphics system.
Another words, the folks who could do the job best, DID. And we artists and sloppy creative types now reap the benefits.
Who’da thunk that all those earnest types working out the protocols of the world wide web for DARPA would now be indulging in hand weaving and vegetable dyes, music, cheese-making, medieval dance and heraldry, and fermenting their own mead?
Meanwhile, I can in 7.2 seconds look up 487,679 websites that explain how Bush personally planted the explosives that brought down the Twin Towers.
Progress.
Ya gotta love it.
I can’t keep up with this group but I still have a few memories, like:
Seeing my first TI calculator in 1974
Booting up an early IBM PC and wondering who this Microsoft Corp was
Seeing a bumper sticker in 1980 for Apple, and wondering what that was
This article from ZDNet does a good job of framing the present problem:
Wretchard, thanks for the awesome topic. I recall the majik quite well. I’m a Gen Xer, so I grew up at the same time that PCs did. I can’t really add to your beautiful prose, just confirm that I know exactly what you are talking about. The Aldus Pagemaker reference really fired off some long-dormant synapses.
14 @Josh
Hey, are you mentioned in The Soul of a New Machine somewhere?
#27 Mad Fiddler
Three years later, I used an IBM Selectric with a type ball to very tediously “set the text” for articles to be photographed and printed in a high-school newspaper
What I recall as technological liberation was the year my graduate school officially permitted students to input and print out doctoral dissertations on word processors rather than compelling them to hire a professional typist to retype their already laboriously typewritten masterpieces. I also knew of at least two professors (there were certainly others) who were still delivering handwritten manuscripts to the university press as late as the mid-1980s.
27. Mad Fiddler
Funny read, thanks.
dw @ 30: Hey, are you mentioned in The Soul of a New Machine somewhere?
No, but I knew the guys who were.
Frankly, if I’d been on the project it might have succeeded and DG might have survived another few years.
I was actually on a different project that was terrific, the product worked – and then was kiboshed by a confused marketing department.
A few more stories like that, and we understand why ol’ DG went away.
–
rd @ 22: you might look up the details on Gates and DOS, it sounds to me like you have it just about backwards. Of course CP/M and DOS were clones of DEC’s RSX-11 and DG’s RDOS anyway, which were junior clones of MIT’s Multics, before Multics was again cloned as Unix.
I’m not a computer programmer, but I have some memories of the evolution of computers.
In junior high in the early 70s, I visited the school’s computer club and saw the printouts of punched paper tape. I never joined, though.
I took a beginner’s programming course in community college in the early 80s, and wrote a program in BASIC that used punch cards. I think I got a B, but didn’t pursue programming any further than that.
A few years later I was an office worker in a large insurance company, and part of my job was data entry at a computer terminal that had a green plain-text screen.
I took a job in a small printing company in 1990. A few months earlier the owner had purchased a Macintosh SE/30 running Aldus PageMaker. Only one employee knew how to use it. She was leaving and gave me less than two weeks of training. After she left, the company owner gave me some instruction on the IBM Selectric Composer, which had been his typesetting workhorse before he bought the computer.
Needless to say, I gravitated towards the Mac and PageMaker. I’m still working there 22 years later, and today the composer sits under a dust cover buried under a pile of junk in my office, forlorn and forgotten. That’s a pity, since it was a sophisticated and expensive machine in its day. I arrived there right at the transition point from the composer to the computer.
(The IBM Selectric Composer had a final day in the sun when it became a headline news item during the Texas Air National Guard memo flap in the 2004 presidential campaign. I enjoyed being one of the comparatively few people who knew what it was, and of the difference between proportional and fixed spacing.)
I bought my first home computer in 1994. It was a 386 PC from Gateway. The early Pentium machines were out, but too expensive for me. About six months later, they were the same price I paid for my 386. At the time Apple had a tiny market share, and it looked like it might go the way of the dodo. I had never used Windows before, but I thought I better learn it. My first online experience was via CompuServe.
I kept that computer until 2001, long after it had become obsolete. I mostly used it for e-mail and astronomy and chess programs. I experimented with Linux in the late 90s but never got it to work properly. There was a short time where I surfed the Web in plain-text mode.
I didn’t have a home computer between 2001 and 2004, but I started reading blogs around 2002. I would stay late after work to read them. Finally I bought a Power Mac in 2004, and replaced it with an Intel-based Mac Pro last year, which is the same computer I use at work.
Today I’m on the internet all the time at home, but I use Courier as my default font when writing e-mails. On the rare occasions when I have to write a paper letter, I write it in Adobe InDesign on a Mac Pro using the Courier font, so that it looks like a typewritten letter. Why? Just because.
Although I’m not a computer professional, I feel privileged to have witnessed so much history of the evolution of computer technology.
I was in silicon valley today chatting up business ideas with a bunch of marketers. The conversation had a lot of same ricochet into all corners of the universe that we hold to here. One guy had a great facebook model for doing information products. I’m first going to test my ebook “How Bill Gates or you –if you have the moxy chutzpah, sand guts–can spark the next revolution”. It will show how he can collapse the cost of water desalination and transport.
But in reading the most recent issue of forbes, I see an article by Rich Karlgaard in which he asks the question … is progress slowing. He notes that airplanes and cars and skyscrapers and power tools have been around for quite some time. There just hasn’t been all that radical change in the real physical environment in the last say 40 years. whereas in the first half of the 20th century there was a lot of big change in the real physical environment in everything from skyscrapers to washing machines.
The big change in the last 40 years is the computer world morphed to the cyber world. Where the change has been fast and has been accelerating.
Kaarlgard argues that that will change here in the coming decade. What will happen is that the cyberworld will erupt into the real world. The cyber world is about to jump its orbit and pull the physical world with it.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2012/03/21/is-progress-slowing-part-ii/
Examples of this are 3d printing. In this model instead of designing products in the USA and manufacturing them in china–the products will be designed and printed out locally. (beats me how this will work for anything complicated but that’s what’s they say is in the offing.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2012/03/27/3d-printing-industry-will-reach-3-1-billion-worldwide-by-2016/
3D Printing Industry Will Reach $3.1 Billion Worldwide by 2016
26. Bugs
Now I find the experience is the reverse of what it was back in ’93. With wi-fi now almost ubiquitous, I can travel anywhere in the developed world and still see the same, familiar Internet I’ve been using for twenty years. Whether I’m at home, at the office, or vacationing on an island off Nova Scotia, my Facebook page is always there, my bookmarks are always there, and I can always be reached at the same email address. My physical location changes constantly, my virtual location stays put.
………
I actually like being able to go anywhere and do my work. I like going to an airport, rent a car plugging in the gps for the destination and flying off to my destination. because with gps driving feels like flying. The precision is just astounding and greatly satisfying. San Francisco airport is just a maze. With GPS I can make six mistakes and never really get worried or flustered.
I’m up in a hotel in the Marriott in downtown SF this evening. I find it entirely enjoyable to chat with friends and family about this that and what not.
C @ 35: I see an article by Rich Karlgaard in which he asks the question … is progress slowing.
Not in the least.
We’re still digesting the last pig in the python, the Internet and related communications technologies. We are refining the last generation technologies, new cars and airplanes are much more efficient, safer, and cheaper (maintenance) than the previous. We are digesting a huge lump of globalized economics, and it is giving us indigestion, but it’s better than a large war. We are shaking our Islamic neighbors to see if they want in on the party, or whether their fate is going to be something else. Progress in biotech is astonishing and accelerating. Our society is rich beyond the dreams of two generations back, and we’re still not sure what to do with it all.
We may be on the edge of new technologies in fracking, thorium, and if you say so desalination, that will turn the world around about 720 degrees. Computer-driven cars are on the horizon.
We are not accelerating towards the technological singularity like some coneheads have feared (or cheered), but I sure don’t see much slowing.
My first computer was a VIC-20 from Commodore, I asked my very cheap father to buy it for me in 1982, he was even more enthusiastic about it than I was. I have to say it changed my life, I work as a Java programmer today.
Ah, Courier 72!
12 pitch, 10 pitch.
IBM mainframe: EBCDIC, PL/1.
Memories.
as Spock would say – fascinating – thanks for the memories and the stories
and it is fascinating , what has been done in one generation, if not 3 — my grandmother used to tell us about riding a horse, for several days, canvas tent camping on the way to visit friends at South Point, from Holualoa where she lived in a house she and her Husband built with hand tools – it’s still there, His brother told me ww1 stories of Gallipoli and the Donkey Man – a few times, I got to fire his WW1 .45 military revolver, and my fathers ww2 Browning M1911
we had a ’47 jeep and an 30′s A model Ford – luxury, we could go to South Point and back, in a day, Martial Law was lifted just before I was born, and it was nice, once again. My parents and grandparents, who went through ww1 and 2, were greatly relieved, that it was over, and greatly saddened at the losses of friends and family.
after The War, the 2nd one, my father went into the newspaper business – all mechanical, as a young lad I worked there as a copy boy, early ’60′s, and dreamed of one day running a Linotype machine – but things moved on – I remember well the 60′s gigantic German made rolling press, very impressive, noisy and dangerous – and then I remember the day he took me down into the basement of the press building – and there were rows of very large – computers – a word I was not familiar with, in a locked air conditioned room, run by very geeky guys in white coats – and soon after the Linotype, as well as the mechanical typewriters, vacuum tube copy distribution system, and copyboys – disappeared – end of a fantastic mechanical era.
then came the electronics – i bought the first computers in my area, Atari 600 – 800 – subscribed to magazines with pages of code in them to run them, painfully typed in, – and then floppy disks of code glued to their back page – and then – modems – i could connect to others, bbs’s, fax,
and now I sit with a small light macbook air – connected wirelessly to the world.
I really miss the old days, but I also like the new days, in many odd ways – and somewhat nervously look forward to our biocybernetic future – and the Technological Singularity
Now I’m getting flashbacks to the Friden Electro-Mechanical Calculator in University stats labs. Can this be true of 1966 or were they just left over from a previous era because they never died? The Friden company had filled those not-so-little devils chock full of numbers, so that they weighed a ton.
Definitely not magical but certainly reliable.
if you want the magic back, shut down this blog, and start coding again. or not.
I touched my first computer repairing circuit cards such as inverters and flip-flops, surface mounted, that were the precursors to chips. The hard drive was the size of a washing machine. It was a special purpose computer obviously. I built my first x86 machine (an AMD 386, 40Mhz) by buying the discrete components at the monthly expo at the Pomona Fairgrounds, building and learning by doing. I have been repairing and building them as a hobby ever since.
First exposure to a computer was in Trig/Math Analysis in high school. As an “incentive” we had a terminal to a GE computer at Denver University and they tried to teach us Dartmouth A Basic. We punched our programs on paper tape, then fed them through a tape reader.
In college it was FORTRAN IV, Hollerith cards, IBM Keypunch machines, and taking the decks to the High Priests tending the CDC 6400.
First personal computer was a Coleco ADAM, followed by an Apple IIe, and a series of Windows machines to date. And I stay behind the bleeding edge on purpose. I’m running a P4 and XP. I haven’t got the need for anything more powerful, and I’ve seen people go crazy trying to make Vista and 7 work right.
I don’t play online shoot ‘em ups, and Moore’s Law has passed me by.
Subotai Bahadur
Back in the day, I ended up in the S3 shop for the Rangers; only a few of the guys who wanted in that outfit knew how to type. In 82 got issued an Osborne “laptop” – 1 disk for the program, 1 disk for the data. Made it easier to do operations orders on the fly. Just once, I loaded it into my ruck (instead of the 60 pound SATCOM radio/Vinson encryption device) and jumped it. It survived. Very happy to have left before every hot wash consisted of back to back Powerpoint presentations. Oh yeah – only slightly off topic – also learned to send Telex messages and dial in fax transmissions on AM radio frequencies (had to match the two tones with a dial). Keep waiting for voice recognition software to an acceptable level – that’s been a promise forever . . .
Thought this was just personal computers but first one I “played” with was a PDP8 that I discovered in a basement room of a college tech building in the early 70s. 3 walls of teletypes with paper tape punches and running Basic. Nobody stopped me from just setting down and playing around to teach myself. It wasn’t until years later when I got my Amiga that I felt the same thrill.
Couple of videos on 3d printing in concrete.
I guess it’s true, you always remember the first time.
Josh (33),
Don’t you mean RT-11 (the single-user/single-tasking variant)?
I was coding FORTRAN on punchcards in college, too. Although I got my first personal computer rather later. It was an Atari 800. I loved the Apples, but no way I could afford one. I finally got my first IBM clone when COMPAQ released its “low priced” line of 286′s around 1983, for $3,000. Add in a couple thousand more for a C compiler and it broke the bank to pieces. CompuServe almost killed me with the per minute and per article charges that accrued stealthfully on my credit cards. Dug a huge hole for myself burning those electro-dollars!
When I first saw Linux I almost fell off my chair. A whole UNIX’ish development environment for a PC, and for free! How does something go from $10,000 to free?
Those were magic times, lasting up through the Internet revolution which began in the 90′s. The signal-to-noise ratio was amazing, and I’m still in touch with some of the many amazing folks I’d casually meet on the bulletin board services and on the likes of Prodigy. The Belmont Club is special place on the net, a rare one that retains the feel and the quality of those old communities. Facebook, Twitter, and most of the high traffic sites just don’t cut the mustard, for me at least.
In fact, I have to say I’m underwhelmed and disappointed at how it has all turned out. The magic did die, and the Internet remains for me a vast, vast wasteland with few and far between sites to recommend it and gobs of roving banditos along the way. The early burst of creativity that the World Wide Web brought in the way of experimenting with creative content has settled down into formula. USENET is a ghastly fright compared to the promise it held. Even academia retreated behind the paywalls of white paper aggregators.
There’s no small amount of melancholy looking at where we’ve arrived today, remembering that no strange magic and the unrealized possibilities that used to stir.
If you have the opportunity, tour the Computer History Museum, refer to:
http://www.computerhistory.org/
I sometimes take family to this museum but it’s humiliating because they keep trying to hire me as a docent. Many of the computers there I used professionally when they were state of the art. One of the museum’s crown jewels is the last working IBM-1620. The IBM-1620 was the first computer that I programmed. I learned Fortran, machine language and assembly language on the IBM-1620.
It’s bizarre walking through this museum and seeing so many machines that once seemed so advanced and modern. The ultimate statement is their calculator collection. Amongst their many antiques is an HP-67. I still use an HP-67 professionally (maybe the last guy on Earth to do so). Like CharlesWhite, I began training in the use of the slide rule just as they became obsolete. My first calculator was an HP-45. I still prefer to use “reverse-Polish” but I believe the technique is now considered obsolete. I’m a bit sorry that I never became proficient with a slide rule.
I remember from a few years ago, some guys were cleaning out Al Seiff’s office shortly after he died. They found Al Seiff’s old slide rule (it was really big and accurate to 4 significant digits). It was like finding Wyatt Earp’s Buntline pistol. I have no clue who ran off with Seiff’s slide rule (unfortunately, it wasn’t me).
I am old enough to remember what a snake oil salesman Timothy Leary was. He promised that LSD would unleash the magic. So the girl who lived across the street, a popular cheerleader type, decided to try it while off at college. She went to the top of a tall building and decided she could fly. Isaac Newton disagreed. He won the debate.
So I went into that world of digital computing from my normal world of Log-Log Duplex Deci-Trig slide rules. And with my colleagues at Grumman we made MAGIC! While I was working on the A-6E, which became famous for the Bab al-Azizia Barracks in Tripoli and the Highway of Death in Kuwait as the weapon of vengeance against thugs like Qaddafi abd Saddam, some of them were putting men on the Moon.
Now that is REAL MAGIC by those whose motto is
No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy!
While it is amazing how much personal computers can do now, it’s equally amazing to me how the reliability has decreased so markedly.
My Atari 520ST had one thing go wrong with it, once. And I fixed it by following the recommendation in Byte Magazine to pick it up and drop it a few inches to the desk, to reseat the I/O Glue chip that was known to work loose out of its socket.
My 40 MHZ AT ran for years and nothing ever went wrong with it. I did eventually find that they had accidentally run a screw through the one of the wires during assembly, which is why the “turbo” light never went off.
But I’m on my 4th home computer since 1999, all due to failures. And at work I’m on my 4th as well, also due to failures. Used to be they told you that if all else was lost, shut the thing off and turn it back on again. But in 2004 my Win2K Dell machine at work lost power during a boot-up sequence, – and that was bloody well that! Had to buy a new HD, reload all of OS and applications software, then copy it off the old HD. A week’s worth of studying Microsoft technical notes did not yield any way to recover the system. My next computer suffered memory failures and HDs that had to be replaced, and finally became infected with a virus that led me to abandon it. The new HP the company bought me proved to be so hard to use that I gave up on it and built up another Dell out of a junk MB and some new parts. And some software we use at work has become simply uninstallable on certain computers; following the MS detailed instructions to address the problems simply does not yield the results that it is supposed to.
And now with our new virus programs at work for the first hour or so after you boot up the computer is all but unusable. It’s too busy with Norton and MS and Adobe issues to bother with your silly-ass little requests to actually do something.
A few weeks back I watched, shocked, as the new anti-virus program on one of our office computers deleted the program I was using even as I worked on it. It was only the program that enabled me to fill out my timesheet and get paid; no big deal. After untold hours of unpaid work over the last decade to get the office computers up and running I guess that it is only logical that the machines prevent me from being paid for the work I actually got done despite them.
We seem to be iterating toward some ultimate imperfection, where everything checks out from the computer science perspective but nothing useful actually works.
Eggplant #50:
I learned to use a sliderule in high school. When I got my first 4 function handheld calculator I used to check the results I got with it by using a sliderule. After all, I knew how the sliderule worked. Years later the situation reversed itself and if I had to use a sliderule I would check it with a calculator.
I remember splicing paper and mylar tape to make changes in NC machine tool programs.
You use the tool and the tool uses you:
http://artofmanliness.com/2012/03/25/the-tool-works-at-both-ends/
Did anyone but me have an Eagle? The guy that was CEO drove a brand new Ferrari off a cliff in the mountains between Silicon Valley and the coast the day it went public. HUBRIS !!!!!!
We had an IBM 360 and 2 Amdahls for the university and punch cards. Cromemco’s, DEC PDP’s, and TR-80′s for development work. I sold modified 286/386 systems with GIS and Landsat image processing software a LONG time ago.
In the early 60s, my father who was an IBM technician, would moon light on Friday and Sunday nights. Many IBM users, never owned their machines, but rented them from IBM. It was pretty expensive to rent, and to power. They were massive. Having bread boards, mechanical gearing and about the size of a freezer. There were tape machines and key card punch machines as well. Because they were expensive, use was strictly for business, e.g., tracking purchases and accounting. My father, working off the books would disconnect the timing clocks to these machines on Friday night, then return on Sunday to reconnect. IBM was being ripped off, but, I was too young to realize it. I remember using a phone modem in high school (approximately 1966), a clunky device that would send our minimal program in basic code to some computer via a tape reader, being located 20 miles away. It never occur occur to me that I too could have access to such a machine with such power, but here I am. In retrospect, it was President Kennedy’s space program, that got solid state going, over time solid state transistors became chip sets which where cheap to purchase, run, and much more durable than any IBM 360 machine.
” … Internet remains for me a vast, vast wasteland with few and far between sites to recommend it and gobs of roving banditos along the way.”
Correct—acres and acres of mud wrestling, hockey games, and Al Sharpton interspersed with an oasis here and there.
Oh my. Memories. Bought a $1300 Osborne in ~1982 for personal use, the 1A rev (I’d check my bag and put the what the cabin crew would call a sewing machine in the overhead). Was asked to go help a dev team in a quickly growing hardware company add support to their system for a Control Data RJE terminal (Remote Job Entry – a dedicated purpose printer and card-reader station). When I first walked in the door I found they were using green-screens and an Amdahl to host development. And the beast would fail several times per day (with more than one screen worth of writing lost – but since they couldn’t call IBM and say “unacceptable” – it wasn’t getting fixed).
These interruptions would cause screams of anguish up and down the hall, fists pounding walls and worse. Over time they’d come stand by my office where this fellow was heads down typing away, working from listings and using wordstar to craft a virtual card deck of edits to their OS on this tiny 64kbyte CPM machine w/ 100K data floppy. When the mainframe came back up I’d upload the file, single function-key invoke a JCL script I’d written that ran their source management batch editor, did a build, put the new OS image on a tape and be ready to boot in maybe 10 minutes (about the time it took to walk down to the lab). Finished the job in three weeks. Other teams (much less singletons) with smaller tasks hadn’t completed theirs in three months.
Story behind the story was they had a big customer contract in trouble for lack of delivery of this RJE feature. After the first week getting started on the mainframe I talked to the business manager and asked what he’d pay for early delivery (their first estimate was 12 weeks which was viewed as aggressive given average dev productivity). He said $10k. He laughed writing the check in 30 days, offered quite a bit for me to stay but I had other commitments unrelated to programming. It was clear the world had changed (for me at least – that company took a decade to embrace any form of distributed computing).
In 1979 I wrote a story for the computer trade magazine Datamation that said “the success of these volunteers suggests that the microcomputer has come of age.” The term “personal computer” was new, and still considered slang. We spoke of the “hobbyist market” and wondered if these small machines would ever become useful in business. My story suggested they might, since it was about automating a business-like task: logistics support for the visit of Pope John Paul II to the town of Dayton, Ohio.
Legions of volunteers had pulled together to plan for the event, and one of them had the idea to use computers. It took her a while to find someone to donate them; Radio Shack said no, but a local Apple dealer managed to get Apple HQ to send several. Someone in the community who had the arcane knowledge wrote some special programs to manage the tasks they wanted to automate.
The volunteer effort took place at the home of the local Bishop, who made himself available to me for an interview. I loved what he said about having seen the computer for the first time, and was delighted that he approved the quote for publication: “It blew my mind,” said the Bishop.
I have an old Apple III (?) gathering dust in the basement. Bought it used c.1985 for $400. A mistake on my part. Anyway, it sits there with the printer and tractor paper, and maybe 6 or 7 manuals that came with it.
Kind of like having a relic from the stone age.
kp @ 48: Don’t you mean RT-11 (the single-user/single-tasking variant)?
Yes probably, I never really used CP/M or either DEC system enough to recall the details now, and did even MS-DOS support multi-threading? Heck, Windows NT only barely did. DOS-hosted Windows x.x had such a complex of threads, windows, and message loops that it was impossible to get right, back in Petzold-days.
Data General’s RDOS however did support two (foreground/background) sessions and multi-tasking primitives for more, fwiw. Then there was DEC RSTS. My project at Data General, that never saw the light of market, was a virtual machine like a next-generation RSTS. Marketing decided that the “business Cobol” on a minicomputer should be the company’s only entry in that segment. It succeeded modestly for about two years, while my system would have been good for a decade or more and much more widely used. Grrr.
–
db @ 54: Did anyone but me have an Eagle?
No, but I tried programming one of the miserable things, they had very poor compatibility of their BIOS, and yes I remember that Ferrari story.
My father claimed that a guy he knew back in New York named Kay was the founder of another clone company Kaypro, but Googling it now, I think that may not have been the case.
–
sr @ 58: In 1979 I wrote a story for the computer trade magazine Datamation …
That was a great magazine, back in those days. When there were things like trade magazines, or magazines at all, or people who read.
There was a Kaypro and our group might have had one. There were all sorts of machines and operating systems floating around before Gates cloned IBM and standardized the operating system.
Funny story from the early space/computer age:
There was only one really powerful computer on Vandenberg AFB in the late 50′s and early 60′s. They used it to guide Atlas rockets via a radar tracking and guidance system called GERTS.
But there were no Atlas launches on Fridays. Because they were using the same computer to process payrolls.
We used GERTS – with different computers – right on up until the last Atlas E launch in the early 1990′s. The system was an enormous pain, always doing things we did not quite understand during the run up to launch. The oft heard phrase, “Pray for Guidance” did not mean anything religious. GERTS had only two things to recommend it:
1. It was the most reliable space booster guidance system ever developed.
2. It was the cheapest space booster guidance system ever developed.
50. Eggplant
Thanks for the link to the Computer History Museum. I would love to be able to visit it in person but my traveling days are behind me now. Browsing the web site, however, evokes fond memories of my own experiences as a student at Chapel Hill with some of those early machines, e.g. PDPs, Wangs and the IBM 360/370s at T.U.C.C. (Triangle Universities Computation Center – shared by UNC, NC State and Duke).
Although I was never interested in programming as a career I’ve always maintained an interest in the history of hardware evolution. Several years ago I was in a discussion group and a guy had an old Cray model they were going to scrap. He offered to give it to me if I’d come pick it up, but I was never able to arrange it. It would have made an interesting addition and conversation piece for my study!
52. RWE
I learned to use a sliderule in high school. When I got my first 4 function handheld calculator I used to check the results I got with it by using a sliderule. After all, I knew how the sliderule worked. Years later the situation reversed itself and if I had to use a sliderule I would check it with a calculator.
Another example that demonstrates my contention that the universe runs on irony. I still have both of my sliderules, and a belt holster.
Not in the least.
Huh? The basic Win32 threading works just fine, and has since at least NT 4.0 (no actual experience with 3.51 or earlier here…)
@8. Steeple:”Seeing my first TI calculator in 1974″
And I sold them in SEARS: the first price was $124.99 for six months then $99. The price just kept dropping.
The mid-to-late 1970′s led to the invention and proliferation of the personal
computer (as opposed to mini & mainframes) owned and operated by ordinary
people.
The 1980′s were the decade of the “personal” personal computer. You owned it,
put the software on it you wanted, and it wasn’t connected to much of anything,
except maybe a common printer via the office LAN. The 1980′s were spent
providing every office/white collar worker in the developed world who could
use a personal computer with one.
The 1990′s connected all these computers together. I think the World-Wide-Web
went on-line in 1995 with only 6 nodes (at big universities).
The video games of late 1970′s (PAC-MAN, Centipede, Gallaga, etc) seem more
innocent and magical then today’s super-high end games (Call of Duty, Modern
Warfare 3, etc).
Some machines, languages and Operating Systems I remember well from the 1980(s):
PDP-11/RSX
VAX/VMS
DEC/Ultrix
vi
edit/edt
CMS
Fortran4 / Fortran77
Basic
Pascal
c-shell
VAX-11/780
TRS-80
Commodore64
Apple 2
Apple Macintosh
Motorola 68000
Intel 8086
Zilog Z80
Those were the good old days.
Began programming in 1961 on a roomful of IBM gear with a gigantic 8K main memory. And had to negotiate access through a series of palace guards with forms and lofty attitudes, and suffer the demands of punch cards and error messages.
So when my first very own Osborne Executive (will soon be IBM-compatible!) was unpacked, and it did everything that old 1620 would do right at home, it was a religious experience. It was real magic right there on the desk, and expanded my own powers by an order of magnitude, without any by-your-leave. Creative destruction did in Osborne, but not that religious experience and those new powers.
WHAT IS THE HUMAN BRAIN LOSING?
Punch cards, paper tape, FORTRAN, COBOL, etc., I have war stories and reminiscences too, but I’m going to skip those, especially since everyone else has covered that quite well in the above comments.
I’m more interested in speculating about how people are changing in how they train their brains. I imagine that there are definitely some pluses, especially among many younger users of new digital technology, but I have a feeling that certain cerebral functions are being atrophied by too much reliance on external devices. Rote memorization, long division by hand, and being able to do complex figures in one’s head have great value that may be disappearing. Or not. The rest of you can weigh in if you like.
I find that I can do Google searches better than many younger people simply because us early boomers (and our predecessors) were challenged more to learn more facts, figures, and concepts, and to learn them in volume. The databank in my head is much larger than that of a whole lot of much younger people, and no, it’s not just because of my age. The ability of those of us who’ve had to learn using more “primitive” tools to cross-reference in our heads is one reason there are so many wonderful and varied and well-informed posts here at BC.
Is humanity losing these abilities? I don’t know, and am only asking. While external digital devices are bringing out more and more cleverness and ingenuity in many more individuals, what about the effect on core abilities that lead to original thoughts and breakthrough ideas? Do digital tools, help or hinder? Or do they make no difference?
Slide rules had a limitation for manufacturing in that you couldn’t get enough significant figures for required precision. So you broke out trig tables and did interpolation, subtracting, multiplying, and etc. “They’ve got a Wang computer and it does trig funcitions!” Then you along come the HP calculators with their LED displays and all of a sudden you were learning Reverse Polish Notation. I think Keuffel and Esser shut down their slide rule engraving machines in 1975.
I was in the “high tech” industry, developing microprocessors, minicomputers, mainframes, destops, and chip sets from 1978 onwards. Watching how free markets can work has been very satisfying. I’m typing this on a laptop with unimaginable compute power and connectivity available at a price that nobody predicted or believed possible when I started.
Did my job “change the world”? Yes it did. That is very satisfying.
Thinking of voting for Obama? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4nvhAZ0vr0 – enjoy!
My first computer was a TRS80 model III. I believe that it had only 16K memory and it had no disk drive of any type. I loaded and saved programs on a cassette tape. Most of the games at the time were written in BASIC and I spent a lot of time modifying them. Such fun. Eventually, I added a 40K floppy drive and brought the memory up to 48K. Those were the days!!!
Who remembers the comic book story of the future when the computers have conquered the world and enslaved Man? The cleaning lady for the room where the Master computer was located found an old, dusty electric plug. Her job was to keep everything spanking clean – therefore, in order to clean around this obstruction, she proceeded to pull the plug and,lo and behold, Man was set free as all the computer taskmasters ceased to function.
I’m reminded of that story every time the computer in my clinic freezes up and needs a “boot”. With all the problems, my equipment today still captivates me, just like my old NEC laptop.
Docbill @ 54:
“Did anyone but me have an Eagle?”
I’m assuming this is an AMC Eagle. I don’t own an AMC Eagle but I do own a 1964 AMC Rambler American Model 220. My Rambler has a flat head engine, generator, points ignition system, vacuum windshield wipers, all drum brakes, leaf spring suspension, no radio and not a single semiconductor in its circuitry (mechanical vibrator voltage regulators). My Rambler was utterly obsolete the day it was made which was 48 years ago.
RWE @ 52 said:
“While it is amazing how much personal computers can do now, it’s equally amazing to me how the reliability has decreased so markedly. … But I’m on my 4th home computer since 1999, all due to failures. And at work I’m on my 4th as well, also due to failures. … But in 2004 my Win2K Dell machine at work lost power during a boot-up sequence,…”
The key is to avoid bleeding edge technology and go for N-1 technology (the technology just behind bleeding edge that is fully debugged). Seymour Cray understood this basic rule when he designed his supercomputers. Also, if you want computer reliability, buy a three year old server from eBay with a Supermicro or Tyan motherboard. Servers are designed to be reliable but tend to be significantly more expensive than garden variety home computers. By buying an older server you’re trading off performance for reliability (it’s also nicely burned in and all the BIOS bugs have been discovered).
Finally, avoid Microsoft products. They’re unreliable, badly written, have built-in obsolescence and attract viruses. Linux is by far the best. If you must run a Microsoft product then run it within Virtual Box that is running on a Linux operating system. Virtual Box tames most of the evil that is intrinsic to Microsoft products. Also with Virtual Box, after you’ve created a Microsoft environment as a virtual machine, you can duplicate it an arbitrary number of times as standby virtual machines. If one virtual machine goes bad due to a virus, Microsoft evil or system administration screw-up then simply toss it out and use a standby backup virtual machine. The key is to treat the Microsoft virtual machines like pieces of toilet paper to be tossed out the moment they do not perform acceptably.
RWE also said:
“We seem to be iterating toward some ultimate imperfection, where everything checks out from the computer science perspective but nothing useful actually works.”
Along this line, the rule of thumb with “green technology” is it always runs worse than ordinary polluting technology and is significantly more expensive. White lead is a better and cheaper anti-seize than molybdenum-graphite grease but you can not buy white lead because it’s not-green and pollutes the environment. The same is true with lead-tin solder, leaded gasoline, etc. I was told that Los Angles county was actually using lead pipe for drinking water prior to World War II (says something about Los Angeles). The lead pipe was replaced with galvanized pipe in the 1950s and supposedly the old lead pipe had no corrosion issues (as good as new). Anyone else heard that story? Lead is certainly bad for children but does have use if its poisonous properties are respected (like asbestos).
Back in the Late Stone Age I was the Help Desk person at the late shift at my university. I knew nothing, but neither did everybody else. We ran MVS on an Amdahl with punch cards from when Men were Men and sheep were nervous, TOPS-20 on a DEC (remember the “Adventure” game? You are in a series of twisty rooms. There is a large clam.), Unix on a Pyramid, and next to my desk was a beta NeXT cube in spotless titanium that did nothing except for a pool game, Macs with I think OS 3.1 and PCs with DOS 2.03. The word processor was Wordstar on the PC which erased without a backup when a grad student decided to test a new font and hit 1m Select All 2. Space bar and 3. Save. Thus destroying 3 years of work. On the Mac we had Word Perfect withe friendly folks in Orem Utah.
wandering in these halls of magic. 640k of memory. TRS-80, Kaypro. TI, HP. I forget how old I am.
Returning to my theme, computer technology has increased productivity and prosperity to the point of Wil E Coyote running off the cliff with nothing below to support the infrastructure anymore.
Very much like pulling the plug. Enjoy it while we can.
Blast From the Past @ 74 said:
“remember the “Adventure” game? You are in a series of twisty rooms. There is a large clam”
I do remember the clam, the iron rod with the rusty star, XYZZY and the troll under the bridge (Pay troll!).
Classic adventure had a seldom used routine that caused me some embarrassment…
I was wandering around somewhere within Adventure and a wizard appeared out of a puff of greasy blue smoke. The wizard offered to answer any question that I had about Adventure. I initially assumed that the wizard was simply a parsing program like Eliza and gave it a simple machine syntax, e.g. “How open clam?” However the wizard kept coming back with complicated answers and could handle any syntax that I threw at it, i.e. Adventure kept passing the “Turing test”. Eventually it dawned on me that this wizard was another user in a privileged mode (the game was running on a TOPS-20 multiuser system). A big clue was off in the distance I could hear people laughing like hyenas every time I asked a particularly lame question.
It’s amazing to think that all modern computer games are descended from Adventure.
Started with the slide rule. Still have it. Also have my Dad’s. Started with Fortran on an IBM 360 during college. Hated it. I was sloppy and debugging did not go well. Loved the Wang at the Department. Found I had a knack for algorithms and parsing problems into solvable chunks. Used one of the first airborne computers in the A-7D. Whoever mentioned the HP-41 as the gateway drug was right. Anyone remember something called synthetic programming on it where you played with the middle layer of machine code? I still have an HP-41 and use it. Like RPN. First computer purchased was an Epson QX-10. Beautiful machine. One of the first attempts at all in one software – which was a disaster. We had a VIC-20 for a while. Back on the mainframe these days and using Ubuntu and Win7 at home. An amazing journey.
Speaking of the perils of computers…
Sunday I was passing the local branch of the Kennedy Space Center Credit Union and encountered two Japanese gentlemen looking for the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Center.
I pulled into the parking lot and proceeded to try to give them directions and drew some maps. Another carload of the same type of guys drove up while I was explaining. One guy kept handing me his GPS to get me to find the place with it. Fortunately it had a Qwerty keyboard display option as well as the buttons with the hen scratching on them. After unsuccessfully trying “KSC” as an entry I tried entering “Kennedy Space Center” and got a list of places, from which I was able to pick out the KSC Visitor’s Center and get them on the proper trajectory.
It wasn’t until I saw that list that I realized that they had punched in “KSC” rather than Kennedy Space Center into their GPS and ended up with directions to the KSC Credit Union branch office rather than KSC.
I wonder how often the Credit Union parking lot fills up with lost Japanese?
Wretchard – This subject might be better understood if you substituted another word for magic. Consider the effect of using sorcery, alchemy or invention.
To most people, a magician is someone who displays the ability to do magic. Most magicians are illusionists. They make that which is false appear to be true. Anyone can buy a book of magic and become a journeyman magician.
The alternate words infer a sense of truth or at least dedicated hard work. Alchemists were people who allegedly could turn ordinary base metal into gold through dint of knowledge and hard work. They ultimately could not, but they did put in the effort.
Invention, as Edison told us, is 1% inspiration and 99% persperation. In my book, putting the Grumman LEM on the Sea of Tranquility and having Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the Moon was “magical”, but it was also very, very real. It is FACT, it is TRUE. But it was realized by both a deep knowledge of the underlying science and the ability to apply that science to the task through both insight and very, very hard work.
Asking “Is there an app for that?” totally misses both the underlying insight and the effort. Magic in the sense of “invention” is necessary to advancing the human condition, but inventors are rare.
Supposedly there is a gold mine’s worth of data at NASA that nobody can read anymore because the formats are obsolete. Wouldn’t it make an interesting novel ala “The DaVinci Code” if somebody found something they weren’t supposed to, or a missing piece of the puzzle that we were working on right now? Perhaps that’s a job for Neal Stephenson, if not our intrepid moderator.
My hat’s off to all of you folks. My computer sciences degree lasted all of three weeks in programming Fortran/Cobol/etc. I remember the punch cards, but that’s about it. I think the field was better off without my presence…
Magic is simply a perceived phenomenon for which there is no logical explanation. The logic referred to here is the logic of any individual observer. For one who knows the “trick”, it’s not “magic”, but for those who aren’t in on the secret, it is magic. Santa Claus is “magic” for children until they realize, usually by talking to older “friends”, that their parents are acting as Santa Claus. That moment of understanding is essentially the same as the “monolith” moments in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Long strange trip, eh guys?
Good ride keeping up with everything new. I can still remember the first time I played pong at the bowling alley.
We ought to celebrate our achievements. Work is still happening and the USA can produce.
Subotai,
Hellcats over the Pacific. Helped my brother regain his motor skills after a stroke, and both of us continued to enjoy it until I learned Lightwave3D. At that point we got more pleasure out of learning and creating 3D animation.
Still, it’s pretty amazing how immersive and engaging a game can be with just crude 8-bit graphics, if the physics are fun.
f/a-18 Hornet was pretty good, too.
I loved the challenge of doing missions and doing “traps” on the deck of a moving carrier, even with a relatively forgiving program ai.
My first computer was a Kaypro II. CPM, with Perfect writer, and I was not a kid. I am now 75 and longing for an IPad, but I don’t NEED one so…
so far I haven’t been able to justify it to myself.
It’s a big drama. http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/dems_to_apple_hire_the_economically_disadvantaged.html