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Matt Madison

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Computer History Photos, Images

Nov 13, 2015

Some nice pictures of the exhibition being put on by the New York Historical Society.

Silicon City: New York's forgotten role in the history of computers

theverge.com

Peter Walker: +Ed S

My guess is that it isn't. Looks Motorola to me.

The magnifier slides along over different chips so the description is underneath. That's just general blurb at the end. Another shot further in the article makes it a little clearer.

Ed S: Ah, so it could be anything... looks like the 1990 lines up though. It's neither a 68000 or a 88000. We could expect some connection to New York, given the exhibition. So, IBM or Bell/Western Electric?

Guille Farfan: I'm late on this but it is the IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC). I posted about this unique machine before here in the CHC when I was touching the Columbia University computer history online collection of documents (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/ssec.html)

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Matt Madison

Retro Computing Curiosities

May 9, 2015

Those were the days.

2-41. Guru Meditation |

collegeofcuriosity.com

Darren Schebek: Looks like a bus error, if I recall correctly. :)

Chris McClelland: I read somewhere that the "Guru Meditation" phrase dates back to when Amiga, Inc masqueraded as a supplier of unusual input devices as a front to their real product: the Amiga computer. One such device was a flat square-ish thing intended for surfing games - as you stood on it, shifting your weight triggered one or more of the peripheral microswitches.

The folklore goes that the guys working on early versions of the Amiga hardware and software used to de-stress by "meditating" on one of these boards, the point being to balance and hold one's weight precisely such that none of the microswitches triggered. Thus, the Guru Meditation was born.

Probably apocryphal, but fun nonetheless.

Chris McClelland: Duh. Note to self: read the article before commenting.

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Matt Madison

Retro Computing Home Computers

Mar 15, 2015

With video

First look at relaunched ZX Spectrum

telegraph.co.uk

Alex Pring: Can't see the point in this at all to be honest. A gimmick nothing more.

Laura Ess: nostalgia is the point

Alex Pring: I have over 85GB of spectrum nostalgia all accessible with Spectaculator and other emulators. If this new keyboard from Elite systems let's you use it with other emulators on PC and Tablet/phone, then I can see a use for it. In the meantime websites like worldofspectrum.org are my first port of call for anything nostalgic with regards to the speccy.

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Matt Madison

Computer History Documents,Books,Essays,Articles,Blogs,Wikis

Feb 15, 2015

Many, many links on this page to Internet resources of all kinds related to computer history.

(via DragonFly BSD Digest)

Cosma - computer preservation

cosma.org

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Matt Madison

Retro Computing Discussion

44w

Some photos I took while attending day 1 of VCF West XI yesterday.

VCF West XI

photos.google.com

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Matt Madison

Computer History Documents,Books,Essays,Articles,Blogs,Wikis

Sep 27, 2015

An interesting article on popularization of computing history, with some not-so-kind words for Walter Isaacson's The Innovators.

Innovators Assemble: Ada Lovelace, Walter Isaacson, and the Superheroines of Computing

cacm.acm.org

Mark Miller: While I have been a student of computer history, Jean Sammett's contribution with Cobol completely slipped by me. Going back to my teen years in the 1980s, I had always heard that Hopper was the driving force behind Cobol, though later articles more accurately attributed Cobol's predecessor, Flow-Matic, to Hopper. It was also informative to hear how women were involved in constructing the hardware of ENIAC. This was the first I'd heard mention of that. The stories I'd read elsewhere had implied that "the men constructed the hardware," and stated that, "The women did the programming." I can see the author's point that we should not diminish their roles as operators of ENIAC, but the way I've always seen it expressed is that "operating" and "programming" with it were meshed together. As the article says, part of programming it was really to rewire it. What often doesn't get mentioned is the role that punch cards played in the programming. In any case, it was impossible to separate the roles with the way it was designed.

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Matt Madison

Computer History Movies,Videos,Presentations

May 6, 2015

I just finished listening to this brief BBC Radio4 series that aired last month. It's about computer languages, with episodes on FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Java, and finishing with coverage of today's Tower of Babel variety of languages. Being for a general audience, it's not particularly technical, but the episodes are only about 15 minutes each and easy to listen to.

Also available in iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/codes-that-changed-the-world/id984502014?mt=2

Codes that Changed the World

Aleks Krotoski tells the story of the languages that have been used to talk to machines.

bbc.co.uk