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What Google would have looked like in the 1960s

masswerk.at

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Re: What Google would have looked like in the 1960s

#11

Post by ams6110 »

hawkharris wrote: post #10
fexl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get pangs of nostalgia watching this thing. I'm old enough to have worked with punch cards, teletypes, mag tapes, line printers, front panel switches, and such -- in the '70s anyway. (... now where the hell are my cigarettes ...)

This 60s Google app is very cool, and I can see how it might inspire nostalgia. But whenever I think about how prevalent cigarette smoking used to be in those days, I feel sad that so many people smoked without fully understanding the health risks. Both of my grandfathers lived and worked in that era, and both died of lung cancer.

The risks were pretty much fully understood in the '70s

Re: What Google would have looked like in the 1960s

#14

Post by kyro »

This makes me a little sad that I wasn't born early enough to experience the rise of that sort of technology. On the other hand, I'm also a little sad that I was born too early to not live through the era of hyperdrive and mass consumer space travel.

I guess I'm a little greedy.

Re: What Google would have looked like in the 1960s

#15

Post by iMiiTH »

sp332 wrote: post #4
alexhancock wrote: post #2

It takes so long to use, but the "printout" feels a lot more permanent and awesome than the modern digital list of search results.

I used to have a box of crummy line-feed paper that I used in a dot matrix printer hooked up to my Apple IIe. I liked the endlessness of the accordion-fold paper. Also I felt like it was very cool (and a bit surreal) to take data that is inside the computer and print it out and leave it in piles on the desk. I wasn't tied to a tiny screen anymore... I just re-watched Colossus: The Forbin Project and I thought it was…

I just spent my morning watching that movie, and now I'll probably spend the rest of the day reading the book. Awesome movie, thanks for posting it.

Re: What Google would have looked like in the 1960s

#16

Post by kps »

Nice. They capture the 360-era console style well. Should use a fast vac-column tape drive, though — it only reads a few contiguous blocks, so I'm not able to suspend disbelief that there is no actual search depicted.

The same author has done PDP-1 Spacewar " rel="nofollow">http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/> with a pretty good re-creation of the original display — see Notes on the CRT-Emulation down the page.

Re: What Google would have looked like in the 1960s

#17

Post by mark_l_watson »

I love that. I got my first access via a teletype console in 1962, and a few years later in high school I took a programming extension class at a local university: punched cards! After college, we would run our own data general minicomputers, VAXes, etc. I remember backing up my tapes because it would have been catastrophic to loose programs and data.

Re: What Google would have looked like in the 1960s

#18

Post by nationcrafting »

ams6110 wrote: post #11
hawkharris wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 60s Google app is very cool, and I can see how it might inspire nostalgia. But whenever I think about how prevalent cigarette smoking used to be in those days, I feel sad that so many people smoked without fully understanding the health risks. Both of my grandfathers lived and worked in that era, and both died of lung cancer.

The risks were pretty much fully understood in the '70s

Indeed. My father quit smoking from one day to the next in the mid-60s, when a surgeon friend showed him photos of a smoker's lung. The info was available.
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