Re: [ATM] Aging atm's (1950's)

[Mark Holm <mdholm@telerama.com>]

Kevin Whitefire wrote:
> How often do you old folks have to change tubes in
> those computers you do e-mail on?
> 
> :-P
I first started using computers when I was in 10th grade.  That was in
1970.  At that point, the tubes were pretty much gone.  I didn't use a
computer with a CRT display output till about 1973 or 4.  That
represents a reemergence of vacuum tube technology into computing.  (Of
course the first CRT displays were introduced before tubes were entirely
out of the processors.)

Fortunately, my first experiences were not on those card eating
monsters.  I probably never would have warmed up to the things if I had
to punch cards and submit decks.  I did a very small amount of that
later, and hated every bit of it.  DD//  or was it //DD, whatever, it
was /*HELL*/

The first machines I had any access to were time shared over phone lines
using modems.  Not so different from a home hookup to the Internet.  The
terminals were noisy teletype terminals.  Programming language was one
version or another of BASIC.  Not too many utility programs available.
The first processors were NCR, then HP.  When I got to college, they had
time sharing terminals running on a series of increasingly powerful
PDP-11's.  Operating system was RSTS and main user programming language
was an enhanced version of BASIC.  We had a text editor, TECO which
worked a lot like the line input editors beloved of real *ux nuts.  The
file system was a lot like what you have on current pc's.  None of that
//DD nonsense.  The user experience wasn't all that different from using
a modern pc running *ux in text mode. In fact, Unix was just being
developed at the same time on very similar machines, mostly in the PDP
family from DEC.  The guys who did UNIX must have used the DEC OS's to
get started, and/or in parallel.  There are many similarities.

The big difference now is the GUI, but if you know anything about what
goes on behind the GUI, you realize that you are doing the same basic
tasks.  Biggest differences are the greatly increased flexibility and
ease of use of many application programs, the huge variety of highly
flexible preprogrammed applications, the tremendous advantages of widely
accepted standards covering a lot of basic infrastructure, and of
course, since the Internet became available to the public, the huge
variety of nearly every imaginable kind of data and the ease of global
communication.  None of those things would have been possible without
the tremendous improvement in processing and memory capacity and
tremendous decrease in cost since then, but most of the conceptual
underpinnings were already in place by the mid 70's.

People who didn't work on those DEC minicomputers or on the similar
machines from other vendors, don't realize how much of the PC revolution
they presaged and laid the foundations for.  Really, the PDP-8 and
PDP-11's were the first pc's in a lot of ways.  Although too expensive
for the vast majority of individuals, college and research types could
pretty easily pry loose the grant money necessary to have one available
for one or a small group of people.  They could be used for text
processing (I wrote a couple of papers on them.), experiment control (I
had a lab course specifically centered on using a PDP-11 to real time
control experiments and take in analog and digital data.), machine
control, networking, databases, general purpose programming and on and
on.  In other words, the PDP-11s were used for a whole host of things
you now see PCs and embedded microprocessors doing.  There were even
computer games to play on them, including a few real time video games.

-- 
Mark Holm
mdholm@telerama.com

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