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who on here is interested in computer history?

akoako https://soundcloud.com/a-ko 3,418 Posts
edited November 2007 in Strut Central
this stuff is so fascinating to me...i dont mean ENIAC and stuff, i mean like, the birth of GUIs and modern computing. for example thinking about the xerox star in the mid-70s, or doug engelbart's 1968 demonstration of copy/paste, hypertext, basic modern computer functions, and the mouse (watch it here and get blown away):http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.htmlor see the first video of 9 on youtube instead:

its amazing to see how long this stuff has been going on. i also found a website that is currently being run from an Apple Lisa, a thought that was kinda to me.anyway this stuff blows my mind. nobody seems to share this interest with me in the REAL WORLD so i take it to the strut. where my modern-computing history nerds at?

  Comments

  • SPlDEYSPlDEY Vegas 3,375 Posts
    I fix so many computers, that I honestly can't care about anything like this.

    - spidey
  • karlophonekarlophone 1,697 Posts
    thats ultra cool. i like how computers jumped into the forefront of importance in the late 90s, but untill then were just creeping up slow. looking back on how it actually went down and when stuff was pioneered is cool indeed. its sorta like back when i figured out that there was rap before "the message", but had no clue what went down. and now theres books like "cant stop wont stop" and such to learn what happened.
  • HamHam 872 Posts
    I love this. i can lose hours just following links on wikipedia pages about old apple computers, xerox etc. i'm like you, mainly interested in the 70's when they started with the home computers and everything surrounding it...
    and especially cause i get super nostalgic when i think about the early to mid 90's when i was a kid and we got our first PC and everything

    they had a mouse in 1968? that blew my mind, i thought that was muuuch later...
  • akoako https://soundcloud.com/a-ko 3,418 Posts
    I love this. i can lose hours just following links on wikipedia pages about old apple computers, xerox etc. i'm like you, mainly interested in the 70's when they started with the home computers and everything surrounding it...
    and especially cause i get super nostalgic when i think about the early to mid 90's when i was a kid and we got our first PC and everything

    they had a mouse in 1968? that blew my mind, i thought that was muuuch later...

    sounds like we can relate in the same sense, ive spent hours upon hours reading wikipedia articles and the related links. definitely all goes back to the early 90s when we got our first computer (an 8088 before we upgraded to a 486 in '93)

    i wish there was an updated version of windows 3.1 that could run XP programs, id totally use that shit on here. program manager for LIFE

    makes me miss the 90s like nothing else.
  • HamHam 872 Posts
    I love this. i can lose hours just following links on wikipedia pages about old apple computers, xerox etc. i'm like you, mainly interested in the 70's when they started with the home computers and everything surrounding it...
    and especially cause i get super nostalgic when i think about the early to mid 90's when i was a kid and we got our first PC and everything

    they had a mouse in 1968? that blew my mind, i thought that was muuuch later...

    sounds like we can relate in the same sense, ive spent hours upon hours reading wikipedia articles and the related links. definitely all goes back to the early 90s when we got our first computer (an 8088 before we upgraded to a 486 in '93)

    i wish there was an updated version of windows 3.1 that could run XP programs, id totally use that shit on here. program manager for LIFE

    makes me miss the 90s like nothing else.


    i think we had a 386, then a 486. i'd really like to find a 486 somewhere cause i have so many old games here that i can't get to work with any kind of emulator or dosbox or anything. and i definately remember like, trying to play that version of cannons with two apes throwing bananas at eachother in q-basic, and someone writing "echo off" in dos, and me thinking they destroyed the computer, stuff like that haha
  • karlophonekarlophone 1,697 Posts

    they had a mouse in 1968? that blew my mind, i thought that was muuuch later...

    the level of advancement is freaking me out - remember, we had not put a man on the moon yet - NASAs computers could not[/b] do what this guy was doing. so what gives???? its crazy.
  • akoako https://soundcloud.com/a-ko 3,418 Posts
    i think we had a 386, then a 486. i'd really like to find a 486 somewhere cause i have so many old games here that i can't get to work with any kind of emulator or dosbox or anything. and i definately remember like, trying to play that version of cannons with two apes throwing bananas at eachother in q-basic, and someone writing "echo off" in dos, and me thinking they destroyed the computer, stuff like that haha

    im sure you could find one fairly easy at a goodwill or something, for a while old towers and stuff were seriously a dime a dozen. im pretty sure we still have our 486 lying around somewhere, and i know i have both the 8088's i had. ive been collecting vintage computers since then, and have a decent amount of essentials (atari 800, commodore vic-20 and 64, sinclair micro......)

    thats strange if you couldnt even get them to run in dosbox, ive gotten some AAAANCIENT software to run in dosbox.
  • akoako https://soundcloud.com/a-ko 3,418 Posts

    they had a mouse in 1968? that blew my mind, i thought that was muuuch later...

    the level of advancement is freaking me out - remember, we had not put a man on the moon yet - NASAs computers could not[/b] do what this guy was doing. so what gives???? its crazy.

    there was a recent article in the Onion...something along the lines of "experts say NASA will have Wireless access by the year 2012" or something, i thought it was pretty funny.

    that 1968 demonstration is beyond impressive to me. i think i just like stuff that is ahead of it's time in pretty much every category. for example, as far as cars go, from a year earlier, the 1967 NSU Ro80 was BEYOND ahead of it's time in styling (and mechanics...although the motor was this car's downfall), good luck finding anything even similar till the 80s:

    IMG src=http://www.madle.org/ms06ro80.jpg>

    insanely ahead of its time. and the funny thing is it seems pretty much everything that is a true ancestor to something commonplace today comes from the late 60s, music, design, computers...im a firm believer that everything that exists today was born in the late 60s, one of the reasons if i ever get a time machine im heading STRAIGHT for 1968....(followed by 1990). its the earliest era where i think i could officially live comfortably.
  • JuniorJunior 4,853 Posts
    i think we had a 386, then a 486. i'd really like to find a 486 somewhere cause i have so many old games here that i can't get to work with any kind of emulator or dosbox or anything. and i definately remember like, trying to play that version of cannons with two apes throwing bananas at eachother in q-basic, and someone writing "echo off" in dos, and me thinking they destroyed the computer, stuff like that haha

    im sure you could find one fairly easy at a goodwill or something, for a while old towers and stuff were seriously a dime a dozen. im pretty sure we still have our 486 lying around somewhere, and i know i have both the 8088's i had. ive been collecting vintage computers since then, and have a decent amount of essentials (atari 800, commodore vic-20 and 64, sinclair micro......)

    thats strange if you couldnt even get them to run in dosbox, ive gotten some AAAANCIENT software to run in dosbox.

    Sounds like you shoudl talk to this guy:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/11/guardianweeklytechnologysection.news

    Meet the time lord of technology
    Sellam Ismail has been collecting rare computers since he was a child. Liz Todd finds out how an expensive hobby transformed into a lucrative business opportunity
    Liz Todd The Guardian Thursday October 11 2007

    It can be an ordeal upgrading your computer, transferring files or switching from a PC to a Mac. But what if you've got valuable data stored on an archaic machine that went out of production sometime in the Jurassic period? How do you retrieve vital information stored on a stack of mouldy punch cards? What if you weren't even born when those now-obsolete files were created?

    For self-confessed computer nerd Sellam Ismail, it's all in a day's work. The Silicon Valley-based expert collects old machines, and has more than 3,000 of them. He's also the brains behind Vintage Tech, a data retrieval service promising to get back that crucial information no matter how outmoded the software.

    Ismail, 38, did actually sell a computer once. It was 1983, and his mother made him get rid of his Mattel Aquarius when he upgraded to an Apple II Plus. He was devastated.

    "I really regret selling it now - I had such an attachment to it," he says. "After that I vowed that I would never get rid of an old computer when I upgraded, because I felt so bad about it. That's when I became an accumulator."

    By the time he was 17 he had at least eight machines, and to keep his mother happy he told her he would start a museum one day. "I was mostly joking, but then the idea of being an archivist started forming," he says. "I collected software and very meticulously maintained it. I would collect applications I would never use, but there was something about it that compelled me to hold on.

    "I got one computer from an old boss, and then another time I was at a car boot sale in 1993 or 1994 where there were loads of computers from the 80s for sale. I was so excited that I walked away at first, because I didn't want to tip the guy off that I wanted them all. I filled my car boot with 22 computers - all the ones I would lust after when I was a kid."

    In the late 1990s, Ismail hooked up with fellow vintage collectors online. He was working as a software engineer when money was being thrown around Silicon Valley and he spent all his spare cash on the retro machines.

    "It really has a lot to do with the dotcom explosion," he said. "All of a sudden you had people like me, these computer nerds who were going back with new-found wealth and looking for the computers that first inspired them.

    "It went from 25 computers to 500 in a few years," he says. "Now I just say I have around 3,000, it's that many."

    Tracking the paper trail

    But Ismail was also collecting manuals, brochures, posters, printers - anything associated with computers in the early days. That's what makes his massive collection so special - and so useful.

    "People started contacting me because they had heard about all this stuff I had, and they started approaching me to ask if I could help them," he says.

    "One of the first was a patent lawyer who needed to compare old computers - it was all about the patent on a little cover latch, and who came up with it first. I found out then it was a lucrative industry."

    A lot of Vintage Tech's business involves lengthy patent battles, but Ismail also loans his materials out for films and documentaries. One of his Teletype machines featured in Richard Gere's 2006 film The Hoax, while some of his older Apple computers were used in a documentary on the early days of the tech revolution, with Ismail even standing in as the typing hands of Steve Wozniak.

    He stores everything in a huge warehouse on the aptly named Research Drive, on the eastern edge of Silicon Valley. The shelving goes from floor to ceiling in a soaring 18-foot high space.

    "Keep in mind that a computer can be anything from a refrigerator-sized beast to a handheld device," he says. "I have a 45,000 square foot warehouse and it is wall-to-wall shelving."

    He also has stacks of manuals spilling out from his library, and thousands of books stacked in boxes towering up to 10ft high. Ismail needs these to recreate some of the more obscure software required to retrieve hard-to-get-at data.

    "I always end up doing really interesting work with the data conversion," he says. He spent almost five years working with treasure hunters on his own salvage mission, trying to access photos of tens of thousands of Spanish coins retrieved from a wreck off the coast of Florida.

    "There were 65,000 of these doubloons that were pulled up, and the archaeologists took digital photos of the front and back of each individual coin because they were all unique," he says. "It was very early digital technology back in the mid-80s, and they had all these tapes and discs that they couldn't access. All this was before jpegs and gifs and today's standard formats."

    On another job Ismail had to go back in time to resurrect the dead from a huge graveyard in California. The cemetery records stretched back to the 1950s and 60s on 50,000 punch cards, and staff no longer knew who was buried where and what plots were already taken.

    "None of the data was printed on the top of these cards, so you could not have had a human doing the job," Ismail says. Instead, he hooked up his technological time machine and came up with a system that could read up to 200 cards a minute.

    Resurrecting classics

    Ismail's talents stretch to his own computer workshop, where he has built replicas of some of the earliest machines from scratch. "The one that's in demand is Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP 1 from 1961," he says. "It stands for program data processor and it cost $120,000 (??60,000) new, but it wasn't called a computer. Budgets were scrutinised and if it had said 'computer' on the request it would've been turned down."

    The PDP 1 featured the first ever video game, Spacewar!, before there was such a thing as a gaming industry. Ismail has made a replica for a Japanese display on the history of computers and gaming, and he is working on another one for a touring exhibition of videogames.

    He's also something of a second-hand salesman, brokering deals on rare and collectable computers. He's been involved in the sales of six Apple I computers, but admits the $20,000 tag puts it out of his price range. He hasn't given up hope though, and believes somehow fate will one day bring them together.

    In the meantime, he refuses to pick a favourite model. "I have so many and they are all interesting to me," he says. "But there are ones that will always be a bit of a favourite." Such as? "The Mattel Aquarius I even tually found!"
  • MjukisMjukis 1,675 Posts
    they had a mouse in 1968? that blew my mind, i thought that was muuuch later...

    I had a mouse, an Atari Falcon, some weird modulator system, and a homemade Final Scratch system in 1968, dammit!
  • funky16cornersfunky16corners 7,175 Posts
    This is a great history of the development of computers/software from the 50's on...
  • overpriced_artisan_butteroverpriced_artisan_butter 318 Posts
    Several years ago I bought the estate (i.e. library and papers) of a gentleman named Albert Auerbach. He'd worked with Eckert and Mauchly starting in the late forties, held several patents with Eckert, and was instrumental in developing BINAC. His papers were mindblowing --hundreds of manuals for obscure 50s and early 60s computers. Fascinating stuff.
  • DJBombjackDJBombjack Miami 1,665 Posts
    the level of advancement is freaking me out - remember, we had not put a man on the moon yet - NASAs computers could not[/b] do what this guy was doing. so what gives???? its crazy.

    According to Mos Def, we still haven't
  • akoako https://soundcloud.com/a-ko 3,418 Posts
    Several years ago I bought the estate (i.e. library and papers) of a gentleman named Albert Auerbach. He'd worked with Eckert and Mauchly starting in the late forties, held several patents with Eckert, and was instrumental in developing BINAC. His papers were mindblowing --hundreds of manuals for obscure 50s and early 60s computers. Fascinating stuff.

    wow....do you still have the stuff? museums might be interested. haha
  • overpriced_artisan_butteroverpriced_artisan_butter 318 Posts
    Several years ago I bought the estate (i.e. library and papers) of a gentleman named Albert Auerbach. He'd worked with Eckert and Mauchly starting in the late forties, held several patents with Eckert, and was instrumental in developing BINAC. His papers were mindblowing --hundreds of manuals for obscure 50s and early 60s computers. Fascinating stuff.

    wow....do you still have the stuff? museums might be interested. haha

    Museums WERE interested! Sold off almost all that stuff pretty quickly... Still have a clothbound UNIVAC operating manual.
  • jaybreeziejaybreezie 161 Posts
    I'm working on a library science degree and my program is always hyping up internships at the Computer History Museum.

    http://www.computerhistory.org/

    I've never been myself, but it's not too far from San Francisco if you're ever in the area.
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