History Of Digital Computers

[steve_bank]

I was a fieldenginer in 1970 for Automatic Data Processing(ADP). The used mainframes and what were called minicomputers. The PC of the day. It had a backplane/motherboard. A 29 meg hard drive, and a tape drives.
To cold start the system you had to enter boot addresses into registers with switches to set bits for addressing the boot rom which loaded a boot loader from tape.

The processor was TTL logic made up of ALU(CPU) called bit slices. The OS was Pick.A manual for one of the systems.

Microdata

Pictures
http://www.radio-astronomie.com/multi4.htm
http://pichotjm.free.fr/Multi8/Multi8.html

Maintenance manual
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/microdata/800/70-1_0800-004_Micro800_Maint_Aug70.pdf

Anybody remember the Radio Shack portable TRS 80?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

 

[steve_bank]

My first computer circa 1979. It cost around $300 in in 70s dollars. About $1000 today. It had a hex display, a rom monitor that allowed peek and pole to memory. You entered in hex for code. 4kram. 6502 processor and some IO to play with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYM-1

 

[steve_bank]

Used the IBM 1130 in college. You keypunched a deck of cards and submitted them to the computer center to run. Bebugging was a laborious task. 32k 16 bit words magnetic core memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130

Also the Nova

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Nova

 

[steve_bank]

Univ Illinois ILLIAC

https://archives.library.illinois.edu/blog/birth-of-the-computer-age/

computer.[2]


Cyberfest included a screening of the film 2001 accompanied by a forum in the Digital Computer Lab with researchers from IBM and Carnegie-Mellon University and Stephen Wolfram, a symposium on artificial intelligence featuring literary critic N. Katherine Hayles and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, and a live interview with Arthur C. Clarke via webcast at the CyberGala hosted by Roger Ebert. Though only a week-long event, the planning of Cyberfest had begun three years earlier when the Dean’s Office of the College of Engineering suggested forming a planning committee to organize a campus-wide event in celebration of the birthday of HAL and “birth of the computer age,” showcasing Illinois as a “leader in computer science and computers in education and research.”[3] Cyberfest underscored the importance of the computer and the technologies it yielded, while giving rise to discussions about its future.


Photo of ILLIAC I (ca. 1950s). Found in Record Series 11/1/12.
The University of Illinois is the birthplace of another computer: ILLIAC I, the first automatic electronic digital computer owned by a university.[4] Identical to ORDVAC, a computer created for the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland in 1951, ILLIAC became operational on September 22, 1952.[5] ILLIAC incorporated architectural components outlined in John von Neumann’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945). Louis N. Ridenour, Dean of the Graduate College, was in many ways the computer’s true architect though, as Ridenour’s prior experience working on ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania and for the Radiation Laboratory at MIT during World War II shaped the direction of the project to create a high-speed computing machine. Recruited to Illinois in 1947, Ridenour immediately established a committee chaired by Nathan M. Newmark, who directed the work of chief engineer Ralph E. Meagher and mathematician Abraham H. Taub. ILLIAC’s main features comprised an arithmetic unit, memory storage consisting of 40 cathode ray tubes and 2,800 vacuum tubes, devices for input and output of information to and from the machine, and the ability to transfer information.[6] As a digital computer, it handled numbers as sets of digits having discrete values; it came to be called the “electronic brain” however, due to its electronic circuits for storing, transmitting, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers in digital form, facilitating its ability to rapidly process information.[7]

 

[Tigers!]

I used a PDP-11 to code basic with punched cards at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) in 1981. If you made a mistake you had to wait a week for another turn.

My 1st computer at home was the Sinclair ZX81. My version had 2K(!) of RAM and needed a TV for display. The CPU was a z80.

in 1951 the CSIRO built CSIRAC (https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/articles/1337) the 4tn stored memory computer and the first to play music. It is the only 1st generation computer still largely intact.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

1988, job-related access to the NCIC system. Half my job was keeping people from looking up old girls.