I used to take home a terminal from work in the mid 70s. Same principle but portable. It had two rubber cups which the two ends of the phone would push into and after dialing up I was ready to go. I felt space age.
Acoustic coupler for the win !
The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
11–20 of 54 posts
Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
#12That man, Rex Malik, participated in (among other things) the 1982 BBC series “The Computer Programme” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme), typically in a small section at the end on an episode but also as narrator in other parts and is credited as “Programme Adviser”:
Episode 1 - “It’s Happening Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc
Episode 4 - “It’s on the Computer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXqb1QT_tI
Episode 5 - “The New Media“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GETqUVMXX3I
Episode 10 - “Things to Come”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLL7HmbcrvQ
Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
#13I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: https://youtu.be/6orsmFndx_o Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with mov…
It definitely is survivorship bias. Go and watch videos from the retrocomputing enthusiasts. There are loads of branches in computing history that are off-trajectory in retrospect, inasmuch as there can be said to be a trajectory at all.
Microdrives. The Jupiter Ace. Spindle controllers. The TMS9900 processor. Bubble memory. The Transputer. The LS-120. Mattel's Aquarius. …
And while we remember that we had flip-'phones because of communicators in 1960s Star Trek we forget that we do not have the mad user interfaces of Iron Man and that bloke in Minority Report, that the nipple-slapping communicators from later Star Trek did not catch on (quelle surprise!), that dining tables with 3-D displays are not an everyday thing, …
… and that no-one, despite it being easily achievable, has given us the commlock from Space 1999. (-:
Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one of the reasons why touchscreen smartphones dominated the market in less than one decade. They made the dream of "real-time videotelephony from a rectangle" come true, a dream which had been present in literature and culture for around hundred of years.
And yet, while 90's (and earlier) TV was talking breathlessly about video communication, it feels like it just "snuck in" to our daily lives when webcams and e.g. Skype became mainstream, and it never felt magical. Of course, the demos were tightly scripted and stifled.
I saw a BBC archive video about AMSTRAD. AMSTRAD owned a PC manufacturer called Viglen. In the archive the CEO of Viglen was having a video call to someone offsite presumably on what looked like Windows 3.11. This was 1995.
https://youtu.be/XX53VbgcpQ4?t=793
In the same video the salesman was selling a Pentium 75MHZ machine. So it must have run on a PC of similar specification.
People had seen the tech working in some form on TV for some time. It just wasn't mainstream.
Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
#15I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: https://youtu.be/6orsmFndx_o Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with mov…
It definitely is survivorship bias. Go and watch videos from the retrocomputing enthusiasts. There are loads of branches in computing history that are off-trajectory in retrospect, inasmuch as there can be said to be a trajectory at all. Microdrives. The Jupiter Ace. Spindle controllers. The TMS9900 processor. Bubble memory. The Transputer. The LS-120. Mattel's Aquarius. … And while we remember that we had flip-'phon…
The Jupiter Ace was unreal, but only from a computer science perspective. You had to know a lot to know how to program Forth which was the fundamental language of that white but Spectrum-looking dish of a PC, in spite of a manual that read like HGTTG. Critically, it didn't reward you from the start of your programming journey like Logo or Basic did, and didn't have the games of the ZX Spectrum. I knew a person who tried to import and sell them in Australia. When I was young, he gave me one for free as the business had failed. RIP IM, and thanks for the unit!
https://80sheaven.com/jupiter-ace-computer/
Second Edition Manual: https://jupiter-ace.co.uk/downloads/JA-Manual-Second-Edition...
Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
#16I wonder why they didn't find somebody with a CRT display if they were doing a story about the future instead of those horrendous teletypes.
I think in 1967, an affordable computer terminal was not more than 2-way fax machine. Being able to drive a CRT sounds significantly harder than driving a typewriter.
Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
#17I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: https://youtu.be/6orsmFndx_o Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with mov…
It definitely is survivorship bias. Go and watch videos from the retrocomputing enthusiasts. There are loads of branches in computing history that are off-trajectory in retrospect, inasmuch as there can be said to be a trajectory at all. Microdrives. The Jupiter Ace. Spindle controllers. The TMS9900 processor. Bubble memory. The Transputer. The LS-120. Mattel's Aquarius. … And while we remember that we had flip-'phon…
The Transputer as an implementation has failed, but all modern server/workstation CPUs have followed the Transputer model of organizing the CPU interfaces, starting with some later models of the DEC Alpha, followed by AMD Athlon and then by all others.
Unlike the contemporaneous CPUs and many later CPUs (which used buses), the Transputer had 3 main interfaces: a memory interface connecting memory to the internal memory controller, a peripheral interface and a communication interface for other CPUs.
The same is true for the modern server/workstation CPUs, which have a DRAM memory interface, PCIe for peripherals and a proprietary communication interface for the inter-socket links.
By inheriting designers from DEC Alpha, AMD has adopted this interface organization early (initially using variants of HyperTransport for peripherals and for inter-CPU communication), while Intel, like always, has been the last in adopting it, but they were forced to do this eventually (in Nehalem, i.e. a decade after AMD), because their obsolete server CPU interfaces reduced too much the performance.
Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
#18The first person with a home computer in the UK, not just a terminal, was probably computer music experimenter Peter Zinovieff, who bought a DEC PDP-8/S for his studio in the late 1960s, for the insane cost of around £80,000 (inflation adjusted to today.)
By the mid-70s the studio had turned into this:
https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/listen_peter-zinovief...
Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
#19I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: https://youtu.be/6orsmFndx_o Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with mov…
That's Ivan Sutherland though. He's one of the living legends of computing.
His doctor advisor was Claude Shannon and some of his students include the founder of Adobe, The founder of SGI and the creators of both Phong and Gouraud shading.
He also ran the pioneering firm Evans & Sutherland, a graphics research company starting in the 1960s. They produced things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Drawing_System-1
He was a key person during the Utah school of computing's most influential years - when the Newell's famous Teapot came out for instance.
Saying his predictions are right on is kinda like saying Jony Ives predictions about what smartphones would look like was accurate
Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]
#20I wonder what that kid ended up doing for a profession and what he thinks of today's computers. That BBC news report is interesting as it puts about 60 years of tech/computing progress into perspective. Now extrapolate 60 years hence—right, today's mind just boggles.
I was also thinking something similar. If it was me as a child it would be quite nostalgic to see a video of myself at 4 years old with my father.