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The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

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Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#41

Post by nxobject »

kristopolous wrote: post #19
a1371 wrote: post #3

I 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…

NB: Sutherland is co-directs a lab on asynchronous logic with a colleague at Portland State. As the site says: "Please visit us when you are in the neighborhood!" The lab takes summer students, too, although Portland State is broke so don't expect compensation.

https://arc.cecs.pdx.edu

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#43

Post by Tuna-Fish »

kristopolous wrote: post #19
a1371 wrote: post #3

I 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…

Yeah. Ivan Sutherland did not predict the future. He decided what the future should be and made it happen.

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#44

Post by fzzzy »

zahlman wrote: post #39
undebuggable wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jetsons cartoon, Back to The Future, Space Odyssey, even more distant predictions [1]? That's from the top of my head without even searching thoroughly. [1] - https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2021/09/1280px-Franc...

So the claim is that video calls are the interesting thing, not having a touchscreen interface or having the display cover an entire surface or being a single unfolded piece? (I had been struggling to understand what was special about "from a rectangle", since non-smart phones have had raster displays for much longer.) Yeah, that really just never figured into my visions of "the future" as anything significant, I hav…

The point is it was a predicted future for 100 years and now it actually is here. Gen Z actually makes video calls all the time when elders would make normal calls.

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#45

Post by vincent-manis »

W-Stool wrote: post #28
beardyw wrote: post #5

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.

TI Silent 700?

I had one of those, dunno what happened to it...fun story, I was living in Boston at the time, and there was too much line noise on the phone system for 300 baud, but 110 baud worked like a charm.

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#46

Post by dreamcompiler »

pixelpoet wrote: post #30
kristopolous wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I always fund it amusing that Phong was actually the guy's given name, but Vietnamese family name ordering isn't the same as in the US so everyone thought it was his surname and just rolled with it.

I've used Phong interpolation for decades and never knew this. I also didn't know he died of cancer two years after getting his PhD.

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

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#47

Post by vincent-manis »

KevinMS wrote: post #6

I 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.

The terminal in the video was a rebadged KSR-33, which was common as a computer console. A few people at MIT and Bolt Beranek and Newman had them at home at that time. A KSR-33 went for about $1000, according to Perplexity. There were few video terminals available then; the most common were the IBM 2260 series, a character-mode device that I remember as being very clunky. But you couldn't have used one at home, it relied upon a very clunky control unit, and therefore couldn't be used remotely.

One additional example of the technology of that time. In 1968, I was a computer science student, and found myself called upon to arrange a demonstration of remote computing. The university at that time had no timeshared computing facility, so we used IBM's Call/360 service. The terminal was an IBM 1052 (big clunky printing terminal) with an acoustic coupler. To move this across campus, we arranged for a truck with 2 or 3 people to put the thing on a dolly, put it into the truck, and move it into the student union building. Later that day, the truck, and the helpers, came back and we reversed the process.

I really like my ThinkPad!

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#48

Post by kristopolous »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #46
pixelpoet wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always fund it amusing that Phong was actually the guy's given name, but Vietnamese family name ordering isn't the same as in the US so everyone thought it was his surname and just rolled with it.

I've used Phong interpolation for decades and never knew this. I also didn't know he died of cancer two years after getting his PhD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bui_Tuong_Phong

Yes! He is greatly missed among his colleagues. I went to an event in Utah in 2013 and multiple people spoke quite fondly of him, including Blinn and Jim Clark.

When they were showing old photos of Ivans VW Bug they were taking measurements of, there was an obvious grief pause whenever he was in one.

There's videos of these on YouTube. I sat next to Sutherland in the room btw

That is 2nd to when I had a buffet breakfast showing up early to an event when it was just me and woz in the room and I talked to him for an hour not realizing who he was.

Actually my bullshit flags went up thinking "this guy sure likes to tell fantastic exaggerated stories!"

Kinda like talking to, say Harrison Schmitt, not knowing him, and saying "you? Landed on the moon? Sure old man. Stepped foot on the moon... then you were a senator? alright."

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#49

Post by dreamcompiler »

kristopolous wrote: post #48
dreamcompiler wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Phong interpolation for decades and never knew this. I also didn't know he died of cancer two years after getting his PhD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bui_Tuong_Phong

Yes! He is greatly missed among his colleagues. I went to an event in Utah in 2013 and multiple people spoke quite fondly of him, including Blinn and Jim Clark. When they were showing old photos of Ivans VW Bug they were taking measurements of, there was an obvious grief pause whenever he was in one. There's videos of these on YouTube. I sat next to Sutherland in the room btw That is 2nd to when I had a buffet breakf…

Schmitt's one of our local heroes here in New Mexico. He's the only moonwalker who was not a military aviator. (He's a geologist.)

I'm not a big fan of his climate change denialism but yeah, he did walk on the moon.

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#50

Post by smokel »

zahlman wrote: post #38
smokel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One might also take on the more cynical perspective and be disappointed that we are still stuck with these early achievements. FCOL most of us are now happy to have our AI overlords type out software on 80 column displays in plain ASCII because that is what we standardized on with Fortran.

(I've never seen "FCOL" before and had to look it up. For onlookers: "for crying out loud", apparently.) We aren't stuck with the terminal and CLIs. We stick with them, because they actually do have value. 80 columns is a reasonable compromise length, once you've accepted monospace text, that works with human perception, visual scanning of text etc. But many programmers nowadays don't feel beholden to this; they use…

Perhaps I should've made myself more clear.

Monitors, keyboards, programming in textual representations, all seem quite unnatural. They were all the result of incremental technical progress, not the result of an ideal thought process. Just look at the QWERTY layout, and the limited number of people actually able to do programming.

If one reads science fiction novels from the 1970s, this is typically not the way people envisioned the 21st century.

I agree that the solutions have value, but I'm certain that we are stuck in a local optimum, and things could have been wildly different.

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