Posted on 07/04/2009 5:35:25 PM PDT by sionnsar
In 2009, portability is the default state of affairs with computers, since laptops outsell desktop PCs. But in the 1960s, the typical computer was a room-filling mainframe; minicomputers, which were merely the size of a refrigerator, were the small computers of the day.
Which didn’t mean that folks weren’t craving the concept of mobile computing even back then. I was just rummaging through Google’s invaluable archive of several decades of Computerworld, and came across a short item from March 1968 on carrying cases for the typewriter-like Teletype terminals that were then used to interface with mainframes and minis. Anderson Jacobson sold the cases both separately and as a package with a Teletype pre-installed. (Sadly, the Computerworld story doesn’t say how much you had to pay for one of these portable Teletype systems. Maybe if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford one.)
One model of Teletype weighed a trim 75 pounds in its case; another, was an even more featherweight 65 pounds. The cases offered optional wheels in case you wanted to roll your Teletype along. The gent in the photo below didn’t need the wheels–I wonder if he tried to store his Teletype below the seat in front of him when he traveled by airplane?
Of course, putting a Teletype in a case didn’t really give you access to a mainframe’s mighty computing power anywhere; the Teletype had to be plugged in and connected via a dial-up modem (with an acoustic coupler that attached to your telephone’s handset). What it did was help you move a big, bulky piece of equipment from place to place with a little less difficulty. But the yen to go mobile was there. Wonder how the guy in the photo would have reacted if you’d shown him even the most mundane notebook from 2009?
Well, let's ask him. He's probably still alive. :D
My Dad worked for GEIS and he often brought one of these home to fool around with. The first ones you actually typed up your batch file on ticker tape and then dailed into the compiler and uploaded the batch file. This was pretty much the same as any data center except that instead of punch cards you had a ticker tape.
The laptop (mine), circa 1986.
Probably. I still know one AndJac employee from that time.
First CALCULATOR I ever used was in 1967, in the physics department of the college I attended; size of a big typewriter — it took a whole minute for it to give the answer to a square root. It’s hard to imagine those times, even though I lived them.
I used a 150 BAUD acoustic coupler (with the suction cups and the little box to keep external noise from interrupting) to a Hazeltine terminal about the size of today’s kitchen microwave — and was glad to have it! It beat the heck out of driving into the office at midnight!
I guess that qualifies me for your Geezer Geek list...?
This reminds me of the ancient modem they tried out a few weeks back, it had a wooden case! It was 300 baud or something
We still have an Osborne.
You are killing me here — I remember all that stuff.
>>This reminds me of the ancient modem they tried out a few weeks back, it had a wooden case! It was 300 baud or something<<
And IIRC, it worked! The RS-232 standard still stands.
Back when I carried a briefcase it contained snacks, a couple of pens, and a very realistic rubber giant flying bug.
I read recently that the typical cellphone of today has about the same amount of computing power as the Apollo 11 lunar module had.Amazing!
I’m too young to remember these things. Sometimes I wish I was old. This is one of those times.
yes it did work, amazing
My first experience with a minicomputer was with a DEC PDP 11/45 that you booted via paper tape.
God forbid anything happened to that tape :) We stored two fresh duplicates in a bank vault.
>> Back when I carried a briefcase it contained snacks, a couple of pens, and a very realistic rubber giant flying bug.
Did you ever see “Falling Down”, with Mike Douglas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Down
IIRC, the contents of HIS briefcase came into play in the movie...
The first “desktop computer” I used was a Wang in the mid to late 1970’s. It had about an 8” green screen with tiny dots that made up the letters and numbers showing on it. They were easiest to see in dim light, so we had to remove half the lights in the room that it was kept in. It did not have a hard drive or floppy discs. It has an ordinary cassette tape for storing programs. It had 8K of memory (which was a costly upgrade from the 4K standard). With a pinwheel printer, it cost nearly $20,000. Of course, we had to write our own programs in Fortran.
Cool! Does it still work? What are you going to do with it?
I have an old Heathkit H-89 from that era. CP/M, and 2 “hard sectored” floppies, each holding a whopping 90Kbytes. Last time I pulled it down and fired it up it seemed not to work.
OMG!!!! Hayward was still in the (415) area code!!!!
“This reminds me of the ancient modem they tried out a few weeks back, it had a wooden case! It was 300 baud or something”
I just threw away a bunch of those a few months ago. Kept the power supplies though.
“It had about an 8” green screen with tiny dots that made up the letters and numbers showing on it. They were easiest to see in dim light, so we had to remove half the lights in the room that it was kept in. “
I had one of those. I found out that you could reverse the pixels and get black letters on a bright green screen and it was easier to read. People would wonder what command I used to do that, but I never told them.
$1795 in 1981 = $4199 in 2008.
The computer's RAM was magnetic core memory (2 kibiwords, where a kibiword is 1,024 words) and ROM was implemented as core rope memory (36 kibiwords). Both had cycle times of 11.72 micro-seconds. The memory word length was 16 bits: 15 bits of data and 1 odd-parity bit. The CPU-internal 16-bit word format was 14 bits of data, 1 overflow bit, and 1 sign bit (ones' complement representation).
My cell phone has about 20 Megabytes of user memory available, which is several thousand times the storage capacity of the AGC's RAM.
I don’t know, in the geek world it almost makes you a god.
a typical cell phone of today (2009) has at least 10000 (ten thousand) times the computing power of the Lunar Excursion Module Guidance and Navigation System Computer.
The price really wasn’t all that bad. As I recall my H-89 in 1983 was $1999 for similar capability (but definitely NOT portable).
Interesting wiki about the rise and fall of Osborne Computer Corp:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation
THANK YOU!!!
I have been looking for that clip; it cracked me up when I saw it the first time but I couldn’t recall the guy’s name (or even which plug-interchangable talk show he was on).
Actually, the average cellphone has a 32bit ARM chip running at 200mhz...good cells have much better than that.
That is easily more powerful than not only the Apollo on board system but more powerful than the systems on the ground as well....and by a large margin.
That’s why I’m getting an Iphone - not for the phone part (keeping Verizon for that) but for the apps - a handheld computer has been a dream since the Jetsons days (also the personal flying car but that can wait).
We had a paper tape reader on a gubermint aircraft I used to fly on. The reader would spit the tape out into a big rats nest in the middle of the aisleway. You had to hunt around in various cabinets for the rewinder (hoping the battery was still good), while trying not to step on the paper tape.
leading bit lsd or msd?
Ugh.
Ouch.
But is it PC comptible? Can you play Flight Simulator?
I asked what else was available. I was told the IBM PC was just out at a mere $6000. I declined.
Then, he said, we have something they're calling the Volkswagen of computers, the Osborne I. It had a software bundle including word processing (WordStar), spreadsheet (SuperCalc) and, this month only, a certificate for a free copy of dBASEII. In addition it had two disk drives, a display that would scroll to 80 characters and was portable -- the first of its kind! And, best of all, just $1795 drive out.
To this very day I thank the late Adam Osborne that I was able to get started computing with that machine. In time I bought a second one to use at the office, then I bought out a CPA firm, three more machines. Today I still have two of them and my son has another.
I think I'll try to fire one of them up one day before long. With a Cape Cod or two in my glass, it ought to be a sweet journey down memory lane.
Think any of 'em still work?
---
Send treats to the troops...
Great because you did it!
www.AnySoldier.com
If you read the description of the instruction set, the leftmost bit was the sign bit, and the next leftmost bit was the msd. It’s all pretty much a moot point, I think, because the IS doesn’t include any bitwise instructions.
Bit significance depends on if you system used Little or Big Endian alignment. Started with and old Honeywell 2020 in college, all programming done on Hollerith 80 column cards. Hated it when you dropped your program of 1-2 thousand cards and they weren’t numbered like you could do with the later IBM punch card machines, of which at that time were in short supply. First remote terminal was an old Texas Instruments hardcopy thermal printer. I think it was a model 300, don’t remember anymore, had a 300 baud acousta coupler that was about circa 1982-3 time frame I would log into customers field test systems for DEC’s testing of 11780’s in a cluster environment. Pretty heady days in the computer industry at that point.
Now days most of our code is written in foreign countries and who knows what type of phone home code they are slipping in and even our DOD uses that crap. I’m coming to the close of my career in the industry. But those 70’s and 80’s were great days in the business.
Seeing those old machines brought back a lot of memories.
Those Kaypros had way too big of a screen!!! However, I interfaced my Osborne with a 12 inch amber monitor, just to keep ahead of them Kaypro'ers... What fun!!!
Ronnie was still President of a respectable USA, then, too... (sob)
Yes. Did they use punched tape, cassette or floppy? If something is going to stop working it is probably the item with moving parts. I'm not sure how good the magnetic media was or is. I doubt they ever imagined that someone would still be trying to boot-up 30 years in the future. Do you think you'll remember how to make them work? I think my brother-in-law owned one, I remember drooling over it.
OK. OK. I'll bite.
what kinda snacks?
At the time I thought “Who the hell is going to need these things?” 1Gig? Oh well, I got em free. I called some friends who pointed me in the right direction and sold them for $900 a piece. I thought “Those things are stupid”.
And today I can buy an 16gig flash drive,that is portable, or 80 bucks!
sorry need to ammend. That is $80 for the 16gig mini flash for my phone.
You are correct
Do rocks live as long you have?
I started working at GTE Data Services in 1977 as a computer operator. We had Honeywell DPS 66/60 mainframes that filled an entire room. The ‘hard drives’ were as big as washing machines and had what looked like large LPs stacked on top of each other. Data could also be stored on tapes, paper tapes or card decks.
This was considered the “time-sharing” part of the business. GTE Telephone Operations employees could log into the mainframe via a ‘dumb’ terminal (3270) and a dial-up modem at 300 baud. When they went to 1200 baud everyone thought that it was the best. Thirty-second response time was considered good. This was WAY before anyone ever heard of a PC. Now there is more computing power in a credit card sized calculator than one mainframe tower.
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