Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers From: wilson@nutec.com (Wilson Roberto Afonso) Subject: alt.folklore.computers FAQ - Part 0/3 Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 22:35:08 GMT Archive-name: afc-faq-0 Last-modified: 08-Apr-1994 This is the alt.folklore.computers list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). It is maintained by Wilson Afonso (wilson@nutec.com). All contributions and corrections are welcome, but I'm ultimately responsible for what appears here. Contributors are acknowledged, if possible. This is a four-part file. The first part contains only administrative comments. The second contains mostly generic questions. The third is a small history of computers, and the fourth is a list of books which are more or less related to computer folklore. The third part (file 2) is mantained by Mark Brader (msb@sq.sq.com), and contributions related to it should go to him. File 0: 0 - Administrivia File 1 (this file): I - Introduction II - Generic questions III - General folklore IV - Origins V - Firsts VI - Jokes VII - Net Resources VIII- Acknowledgements IX - Things I am looking for File 2: X - A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952) File 3: XI - List of computer-folklore related books ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0 - Administrivia 0.1 - General comments Finally, I am back to the net and back to posting it. Now, I am also closer to "where the action happens", what means it will be easier for me to keep up with news, mail etc. I hope this FAQ keeps going, and I hope I'll receive more contribuitions. Sadly, contributions that went to my old address in the last months were lost, so, if you sent me something, just send me it again, and it will used. Thanks again. Also, somebody asked for the file with the "net celebrities". I lost the address of that person (it was something like "provers@.nl"); please, contact me again on my new address and you'll have the file in no time. 0.2 - Changes since last month There are not that many changes, but some things were updated, some changed and some added (for example, the 8-bit bytes question). -- -- Wilson Roberto Afonso Nutec Corporation +1 415 988-9781 2685 Marine Way Suite 1319 FAX: +1 415 988-9782 Mountain View, CA 94043 Article: 33560 of alt.folklore.computers Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Path: tridom!emory!swrinde!sgiblab!barrnet.net!infoserv!nutec!wilson From: wilson@nutec.com (Wilson Roberto Afonso) Subject: alt.folklore.computers FAQ - Part 1/3 Organization: Nutec Corporation Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 22:37:22 GMT Message-ID: Keywords: faq, folklore Lines: 814 Archive-name: afc-faq-1 Last-modified: 08-Apr-1994 This is the alt.folklore.computers list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). It is maintained by Wilson Afonso (wilson@nutec.com). All contributions and corrections are welcome, but I'm ultimately responsible for what appears here. Contributors are acknowledged, if possible. This is a four-part file. The first part contains only administrative comments. The second contains mostly generic questions. The third is a small history of computers, and the fourth is a list of books which are more or less related to computer folklore. The third part (file 2) is mantained by Mark Brader (msb@sq.sq.com), and contributions related to it should go to him. File 0: 0 - Administrivia 0.1 - General comments 0.2 - Changes since last edition File 1 (this file): I - Introduction I.1 - What is folklore ? II - Generic questions II.1 - What is the origin of the term XXX ? What does XXX mean ? II.2 - Is {famous person} on the net ? II.3 - What are some good books on computer folklore ? II.4 - Where can I find {interesting file} ? II.4.1 - How does on try Archie ? III - General folklore III.1 - NASA probe that was destoyed because of a typo III.2 - How Gary Kildall missed the chance to put CP/M in the PCs III.3 - Is there really a Coke machine attached to the Internet ? III.4 - Poke command to damage the hardware III.5 - What should I do to an old CD ? III.6 - Cat printed on Sun IPX SPARCstations III.7 - Why the 8088, and not the 68000, in the IBM-PCs ? III.8 - Is the 8088 processor really code compatible with the 8080 ? III.9 - What does VAX mean, and why "11" on their name ? III.10- Why do we use 'i' as loop counters ? III.11- Does Apple use Crays while Cray uses Apples ? III.12- Did Bill Gates write MS-DOS ? III.13- Is '2' the lowest possible numeric base ? III.14- What about that story about viruses in printers during Gulf War ? III.14.1- Would it be possible, anyway ? III.15- Why does MS-DOS use '\' and not '/' ? III.16- Is it ok to discuss soft drinks in this group ? III.17- Why do bytes have 8 bits ? IV - Origins IV.1 - Usenet IV.2 - C IV.3 - Unix IV.4 - Structured programming V - Firsts V.1 - When/what/where/who/... was the first {something} ? VI - Jokes VII - Net Resources VII.1 - Who do I call if I have a problem with {something} ? VIII- Acknowledgements IX - Things I am looking for File 2: X - A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952) File 3: XI - List of computer-folklore related books ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I - Introduction I.1 - What is folklore ? According to Webster's: Folklore: 1. Traditional customs, tales, or sayings preserved orally among a people. 2. A comparative science that investigates the life and spirit of a people as revealed in their folklore [recursive definition?] 3. A widely held unsupported specious notion or body of notions In this newsgroup, all of the definitions above seem to be supported. One can say that discussions in this group approach discussion about history of computing, but that is not quite right. Ultimately, the difference between history and folklore is that history deals with great and important facts and folklore deals with minor, day-to-day facts. We obviously discuss facts that fit in "History", too, but that is a side-effect of the overall discussion. II - Generic questions II.1 - What is the origin of the term XXX ? What does XXX mean ? Answer to questions like this can be found in a big (I mean it!) file called The Jargon File. This file contains, among other things, the meaning of thousands of words used by computers people. If you ever heard of a computer-related word, it is probably in this file. Be aware, however, that this file is not a lexicon of technical terms. It mostly contains words that you _don't_ find in computer dictionaries. You can get it by anonymous ftp, in prep.ai.mit.edu (18.71.0.38), in directory pub/gnu, as the file named jargon300.ascii.gz. It uncompresses to a file with more than 1 megabyte. It is also a published book, _The New Hacker's Dictionary_ (see below, question II.3). In this file, you can find answers to questions as "Does UNIX means anything ?" or "What does PDP means ?", and "Why the h**l are hard disks called winchesters ?", and a LOT more. The Jargon File is also a repository for other history, poems, and anecdotes. A little grepping will probably find what you're looking for, and it will probably also be faster and more accurate than posting to a.f.c. II.2 - Is {famous person} on the net? There is also a file with information on it. It was posted to a.f.c in Feb. 26th, 1993. I managed to contact the mantainer of this file, and the last thing I heard was that he was updating it. I was told, however, that he is no longer in the net. More news when I have something. (Meanwhile, I have a copy of that file, and if somebody wants it, let me know. It is a little out of date, though.) II.3 - What are some good books on computer folklore? Look at the third file of this FAQ. It contains a large list of such books. II.4 - Where can I find {interesting file} ? Try archie. But, sometimes it is really difficult to know the name of the file, even if you know the title of the article. I include a small list below: - 'Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language', by Brian Kernighan : it was posted to a.f.c. as ASCII. It is also available as a PostScript file in research.att.com:netlib/research/cstr/100.Z - 'Real Programmers don't use Pascal', by Ed Post: it was posted to a.f.c, too. It is available via FTP from leif.thep.lu.se (130.235.92.55) as pub/Misc/realprog; also in ftp.uni-kl.de:/pub/humor/realp.tex.Z - 'The Tao of Programming': it is copyrighted material, so it cannot be distributed via FTP. Anyway, it was posted to a.f.c in Feb. 1993. - This FAQ: vaxa.crc.mssm.edu. Let's see if the guys at rtfm.mit.edu will begin archiving it... - humorous file: sunsite.unc.edu has a large collection of such files, under the directory /pub/docs/humor II.4.1. How does one try archie ? Archie is a way to find files in the net. Usually, all you need to do is type "archie" at the OS prompt, and you'll have a good explanation. If not, type "telnet archie.sura.net" and log in as archie. There is a good on-line help. III - General folklore III.1 - I heard that one of the NASA space probes went off course and had to be destroyed because of a typo in a FORTRAN DO loop. Is there any truth to this rumor? As revealed by past discussion in comp.risks (Risks Digest) as well as alt.folklore.computers and occasionally other newsgroups, this turns out to be a confusion of two separate events. The space probe that the DO-loop story has been wrongly attached to is Mariner I (or 1), which was intended for Venus (not Mars). Several incorrect or partially correct versions of what really happened were posted in comp.risks; the best of these cited a NASA publication called "Far Travelers" by Oran W. Nicks, but still did not have the whole story. Then in issue 8.75 we found out what really happened... | Date: Sat, 27 May 1989 15:34:33 PDT | From: Peter Neumann | Subject: Mariner I -- no holds BARred | | Paul Ceruzzi has written a truly outstanding book for the new show | that opened two weeks ago at the Smithsonian National Air and Space | Museum. The exhibit and the book are both entitled "Beyond the Limits | -- Flight Enters the Computer Age". Both are superb. Go for it (them). | | Paul has dug into several cases treated previously in RISKS and in | issues of the ACM Software Engineering Notes, and has been able to | resolve several mysteries. In particular he considers the case of | Mariner I, about which various inaccurate stories have been told. | Intended to be the first US spacecraft to visit another planet, it was | destroyed by a range officer on 22 July 1962 when it behaved | erratically four minutes after launch. The alleged missing `hyphen' | was really a missing `bar'. I quote from Paul's book, pp. 202-203: | | # During the launch the Atlas booster rocket was guided with the help | # of two radar systems. One, the Rate System, measured the velocity of | # the rocket as it ascended through the atmosphere. The other, the | # Track System, measured its distance and angle from a tracking | # antenna near the launch site. At the Cape a guidance computer | # processed these signals and sent control signals back to the | # tracking system, which in turn sent signals to the rocket. Its | # primary function was to ensure a proper separation from the Atlas | # booster and ignition of the Agena upper stage, which was to carry | # the Mariner Spacecraft to Venus. | # | # Timing for the two radar systems was separated by a difference of | # forty-three milliseconds. To compensate, the computer was instructed | # to add forty-three milliseconds to the data from the Rate System | # during the launch. This action, which set both systems to the same | # sampling time base, required smoothed, or averaged, track data, | # obtained by an earlier computation, not the raw velocity data | # relayed directly from the track radar. The symbol for this smoothed | # data was ... `R dot bar n' [R overstruck `.' and `_' and subscript n], | # where R stands for the radius, the dot for the first derivative | # (i.e., the velocity), the bar for smoothed data, and n for the | # increment. | # | # The bar was left out of the hand-written guidance equations. [A | # footnote cites interviews with John Norton and General Jack Albert.] | # Then during launch the on-board Rate System hardware failed. That in | # itself should not have jeopardized the mission, as the Track System | # radar was working and could have handled the ascent. But because of | # the missing bar in the guidance equations, the computer was | # processing the track data incorrectly. [Paul's EndNote amplifies: | # The Mariner I failure was thus a {\it combination} of a hardware | # failure and the software bug. The same flawed program had been used | # in several earlier Ranger launches with no ill effects.] The result | # was erroneous information that velocity was fluctuating in an | # erratic and unpredictable manner, for which the computer tried to | # compensate by sending correction signals back to the rocket. In fact | # the rocket was ascending smoothly and needed no such correction. The | # result was {\it genuine} instead of phantom erratic behavior, which | # led the range safety officer to destroy the missile, and with it the | # Mariner spacecraft. Mariner I, its systems functioning normally, | # plunged into the Atlantic. The DO-loop incident did happen at NASA, and at about the same time. As told by Fred Webb in alt.folklore.computers in 1990: | I worked at Nasa during the summer of 1963. The group I was working | in was doing preliminary work on the Mission Control Center computer | systems and programs. My office mate had the job of testing out an | orbit computation program which had been used during the Mercury | flights. Running some test data with known answers through it, he was | getting answers that were close, but not accurate enough. So, he | started looking for numerical problems in the algorithm, checking to | make sure his tests data was really correct, etc. | | After a couple of weeks with no results, he came across a DO | statement, in the form: | DO 10 I=1.10 | This statement was interpreted by the compiler (correctly) as: | DO10I = 1.10 | The programmer had clearly intended: | DO 10 I = 1, 10 | | After changing the `.' to a `,' the program results were correct to | the desired accuracy. Apparently, the program's answers had been | "good enough" for the sub-orbital Mercury flights, so no one suspected | a bug until they tried to get greater accuracy, in anticipation of | later orbital and moon flights. As far as I know, this particular bug | was never blamed for any actual failure of a space flight, but the | other details here seem close enough that I'm sure this incident is the | source of the DO story. Project Mercury's sub-orbital flights were in 1961, and its orbital flights began in 1962. I forwarded the above to comp.risks, slightly abridged, and it appeared there in issue 9.54. The erroneous claim that the DO-loop bug was the bug that killed Mariner I apparently originated with, and certainly was propagated by, the book "Software Reliability: Principles and Practices" by G(lenford) J. Myers (John Wiley & Sons, 1976). I haven't read it myself; I've seen the page numbers 7 and 275 attributed to the assertion. I expect both are right. This book also describes the bug as a "billion-dollar error", which is too large by a factor of about 50. In some earlier postings it was suggested that Myers be located and asked about his sources (the book gives none), but nobody successfully did this; his employer at the time of publication didn't have his current address. My guess is that he simply made an error or more likely accepted someone else's wrong recollection, and didn't feel it necessary to go to original sources to verify what was only an illustrative point anyway. This answer by Mark Brader . Quoted items in it have been reformatted but not abridged. III.2 - I heard that Gary Kildall missed the chance to make CP/M the IBM PC operating system because he decided to go flying on the day the IBM reps had an appointment. Is this true? This answer comes from the book "Hard Drive"; it says there are two versions of this story. One is from Jack Sams, the guy from IBM who went to DR to meet Kildall. He says that Kildall was out, flying on his plane, and Kildall's wife and a DR's lawyer met with him (Sams). They did not want to sign a non-disclosure agreement with IBM, so IBM went away without even talking with Kildall. (That agreement said that DR could not tell IBM confidential information, but if DR did so, IBM could not be sued for using it; and DR would be sued if it used any confidential information that IBM gave them.) That night, they went to Seattle and made the deal with Microsoft. But Kildall tells a different history: he says he really was out on his plane, but he was on a business trip at San Francisco, and he was back to DR in time to meet with the IBM guys. He signed the agreement, had the meeting, and apparently thought that they and a deal. That night, he and his wife went to Miami with the IBM guys (in the same plane; the IBM guys were coming back to Boca Raton, and the Kildalls were going to Caribe), and Kildall was told to contact them when he returned. When he eventually returned to the US, he was unable to find Sams, and later heard they had a deal with Microsoft (this is strange, since IBM kept that project as a secret, and nobody knew about Microsoft being on it). Kildall says that the plane story was first told by Gates, in an interview to the London Times. This is Microsoft's version, he says, but History always tells the winners' version, not the losers'. III.3 - Is there really a Coke machine attached to the Internet? They say so. Actually, it's address is coke.elab.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.209.43). It cannot be fingered every time (sometimes it refuses connection, and sometimes it answers an empty line). And, in RFC1288 (The Finger User Information Protocol), the use of vending machines on the net is supported : #2.5.5. Vending machines # # Vending machines SHOULD respond to a {C} request with a list of all # items currently available for purchase and possible consumption. # Vending machines SHOULD respond to a {U}{C} request with a detailed # count or list of the particular product or product slot. Vending # machines should NEVER NEVER EVER eat money. # III.4 - I heard there was a POKE command on the {your computer here} that would physically damage the hardware. Is this true? For those not used to it, a POKE command puts some value in some position in memory. Thus, POKE 16510,0 changes the number of the first line of a BASIC program in a Sinclair ZX81 to 0 by overwriting the real number in that position. About physical damage: apparently, you could make the monitor of a PET computer catch fire with a POKE. The poke controlled the size of the screen for the electron beam (which was under computer control). The idea was that you could change the screen size if you wanted to get around variations on the screen. Anyway, setting to zero meant the computer would try to paint the entire screen in the center of the screen, thus burning out the phosphor on the monitor. Also, in some IBM PC hardware you could burn the flyback transformer inside the monitor with an OUT, reprogramming the MGA video card. III.5 - What should I do to an old CD ? Microwave it. Put in in the microwave oven, above a cup turned upside down (the cup, not the disk), set the power to HIGH, the timer to 5 seconds, turn off all the lights, and make sure you watch. You will never use this CD again. The microwave oven is left apparently intact. III.6 - Is it true that there is a cat printed on the motherboard of Sun SPARCStations IPX ? Why ? Yes, it is true (don't believe me ? open yours !). It is supposed to be the comic strip caracter "Hobbes" (from Calvin and Hobbes). The Sun internal name for the IPX is "Hobbes" (the SparcStation 2 is Calvin). III.7 - Why did IBM choose the 8088 rather than the 68000 as the processor for their first PC? The IBM PC was supposed to be a low-end model machine that would compete with CP/M machines and the Apple II, but not with IBM's planned larger "PC's" (which never left the ground). For that reason, it needed a 16-bit CPU, but not too much memory. With its 8-bit data bus, the 8088 would lead to cheaper hardware than a 68000-based machine. The limited address space (1MB, further reduced by IBM's designers to 640 KB) wasn't perceived as a problem since nobody could imagine anyone needing so much RAM in a PC anyway. Also, the 8088 has the advantage of allowing easy porting of 8080/Z80 code. This meant that lots of software could be produced very quickly by porting existing CP/M programs (such as Microsoft Basic and the WordStar word processor). III.8 - Is the 8088 processor really code compatible with the 8080? No, not on the binary level; the opcodes are different. However, the instruction sets are so similar that assembly language programs can be machine translated from 8080 assembler to 8088 assembler. III.9 - What does VAX mean? Why did early VAXen have model numbers starting with "11",like 11/780, 11/750, and so on? Rumour has it that the 11/780 was originally intended as the PDP 11/78 with "Virtual Address eXtension" (i.e. virtual memory), but Digital choose to present their new 32-bit line of computers under the name "VAX" rather than "PDP". The 11/xxx series of VAX machines all had a special "compatibility mode" in which they can run PDP-11 code. III.10- Why is 'i' typically chosen as a loop counter, in constructs such as for(i=0; i<10; i++); ? There are several possible answers to this, and most of them seem to support the idea of 'computer centrism' from the guys who work with computers (I mean 'all of us'). For example, - FORTRAN (on which many people learned to program) used the initial letter of variables to determine their data type. A variable would be assumed integer if the initial letter was in the range I-N (some have commented that these are the first two letters of INteger). So if you wanted a quick int variable as a loop counter, you would start with i, proceed to j, and so on. - This is all very well, say the math oriented, but we're using 'i' in equations as a sample variable like this : ___ \ /__ X i=0 i and FORTRAN obviously stole the idea from us. As to which one is actually true? Well, no one is quite sure. Programmers probably picked up the practice from FORTRAN, which in turn probably took it from the mathematicians. All I know is that every programming book around uses 'i' as the first loop counter. Of course, there are many programmers who use 'F' or 'N' as loop variables, as a consequence of using Sinclair computers in their first days of programming. These computers had the BASIC keywords assigned to keys, and you could get FOR by typing F, and NEXT with N. So, it was easy to type 'FOR F=...' and 'NEXT N'. By the way, the word 'TO' was also on the F key; '=' was on the L, with LET. III.11- Is there any truth to the rumor that the people at Cray design their supercomputers with Apple computers, and that Apple designers use Cray's? The comment was made when Apple bought its Cray to design the next Macs. Dr. Cray wrote them a note saying that he found that quite ironic, since he was designing the next Cray on a Mac... Keep in mind that each one uses the other's machines to do quite different things, probably. Apple uses a Cray to do heavy calculations, and Cray probably uses Macs in CAD, or something like this. III.12- Did Bill Gates write MS-DOS ? No, no and no. Microsoft bought MS-DOS from a Seattle company, and it was called QDOS then (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Some say it is not quick anymore, but the rest stays the same. True, Microsoft made some modifications to it, and probably Bill Gates helped in it, but he did not write the OS in the true sense of these words. By that time, MS was in dire need of an OS to use with IBM PC, because IBM could make business with Digital Research (see above, III.2), and QDOS was their salvation. III.13 - Is '2' the lowest possible numeric base ? No. There's a lot more in the matter of bases than most people can dream. Although one usually only encounters number systems with positive integer bases (binary, decimal, hexadecimal, octal), it is also possible to use non-integral, negative, irrational, or even complex bases. For a comprehensive discussion, see Knuth's 'Art of Computer Programming'. Although it is not a positional system, one sometimes talks about a system with base one (the unary system) where the integer N is represented as a string of N ones. This number system is especially popular among theoretical computer scientists when discussing Turing machines. The discussion about bases seems to surface in a.f.c about once every semester, and it seems to hold endless fascination for CS students (like me, for example). III.14 - What about that story about viruses in printers during Gulf War? The latest information I have is that all of this is an April-Fool joke, which was published by a US magazine. Several months after that, some news service found the article and fell for it. It was repeated all over the world several times since then, by a number of reputable news services. III.14.1 - Would it be possible, anyway ? This is a folklore newsgroup, not a technical one. But there are some chances for it to be possible (fumbling with a PostScript printer is one). III.15 - Why does MS-DOS use '\' as the path separator, while Unix uses '/'? Version 1 of MS-DOS didn't have subdirectories or paths, and wasn't much like Unix at all. The '/' character was used to denote command options (like '-' in Unix); this was rather common in CP/M, and is the standard in many DEC operating systems. In version 2.0 of MS-DOS, many new Unix-like features were added, including subdirectories. Since '/' was used for command options by many programs, that character couldn't be used in paths. Apparently Microsoft thought '\' was the second best alternative. It's interesting to say that is the shell who requires '\' as the path separator; the real DOS is quite happy with '/', and when you program in C (for exemple), you can write a path as "c:\\foo\\bar\\..." or "c:/foo/bar/...", and both work. Also, there was an undocumented feature of DOS which allowed the user to change the switch char, and freed '/' to be used as a path separator in the command line. This no longer exists in DOS 5.0, and probably is absent in DOS 6.0, as well (I couldn't test this). III.16 - Is it ok to discuss about soft drinks in a computer folklore newsgroup ? Yes, it is. Soft drinks, specially colas (and specially Jolt Cola(TM)) have a lot to do with computer folklore, and there is a claim that, if you don't know why, you shouldn't be discussing computer folklore to begin with. III.17 - Why do bytes have 8 bits ? They weren't like this ever. Older computers used to have "strange" (by today's standards) word/byte sizes, usually multiples of 6. The 8-bit byte (and probably even the word "byte") didn't appear until the advent of IBM's System/360. From the early 1970's on, most computers used 8-bit bytes and multiple-of-8-bit words, and the non-standard became a de-facto standard. Now, why did the System/360 have 8-bit bytes ? Probably, because of the use of BCD data (or "packed decimal"); you need 4 bits to represent one digit (0-9), so one 8-bit byte can represent two digits. The System/360 had instructions that allowed one easily to handle BCD data, and that made much easier the lifes of people writing accounting systems. It would be hard to use 6-bit bytes to represent BCD, so 8 bits was the obvious solution. IV - Origins IV.1 - What are the origins of Usenet ? Read the FAQs :-). Actually, it is posted to news.answers, with the subject "USENET software: History and Sources". IV.2 - ... C ? Quoted from _The_Secret_Guide_To_Computers (a GREAT book, by the way), (c) 1991 by Russ Walter (15th edition): In 1963 at England's Cambridge University and the University of London, researchers developed a ``practical'' version of ALGOL and called it the Combined Programming Language (CPL). In 1967 at Cambridge University, Martin Richards invented a simpler, stripped-down version of CPL and called it Basic CPL (BCPL). In 1970 at Bell Labs, Ken Thompson developed a version that was even more stripped-down and simpler; since it included just the most critical part of BCPL, he called it B. Ken had stripped down the language _too_ much. It no longer contained enough commands to do practical programming. In 1972, his colleague Dennis Ritchie added a few commands to B, to form a more extensive language. Since that language came after B, it was called C. So C is a souped-up version of B, which is a stripped-down version of BCPL, which is a stripped-down version of CPL, which is a ``practical'' version of ALGOL. IV.3 - ... Unix ? There are several versions of this story. Some say that it was designed as a system "by programmers and for programmers", others say that it was mainly a word-processing system, and others say that Thompson's primary goal was playing Space War. This is a quote from Ritchie and Thompson themselves, in "The Unix Time-Sharing system", published in "The Unix Time-Sharing System", thematic issue of Bell System Tech. J. vol 57, no 6 part 2 (1978): "There have been four versions of the UNIX time-sharing system. The earliest (ca 1969-70) ran on the Digital Equipment Corporation DPD-7 and -9 computers. The second version ran on the unprotected PDP-11/20 computer. The third incorporated multiprogramming and ran on the PDP-11/34, /40, /45, /60 and /70 computers [...] Since PDP-11 UNIX became operational in February, 1971, over 600 installations have been put into service. Most of them are engaged in applications such as computer science education, the preparation and formatting of documents and other textual material, the collection and processing of trouble data from various switching machines within the Bell System, and recording and checking telephone service orders. Our own installation is used mainly for research in operating systems, languages, computer networks, and other topics in computer science, and also for document preparation. [...] The first version was written when one of us (Thompson), dissatisfied with the available computer facilities, discovered a little-used PDP-7 and set out to create a more hospitable environment. This (essentially personal) effort was sufficiently successful to gain the interests of the other author and several colleagues, and later to justify the acquisition of the PDP-11/20, specifically to support a text editing and formatting system. [...] ...because we are programmers, we naturally designed the sustem to make it easy to write, test and run programs." While it doesn't mention Space War (which I suppose isn't serious enough for a research journal), this makes very clear that *both* stories are correct: Unix was initially developed by programmers, for programmers, but word processing became an important application very early. By the way, in "AT&T Bell Labs. Tech. Journal", Oct. 1984, they say that when they found the first PDP to put Unix in it, they were trying to find a machine to run a gamed named Space Travel (not War). Thompson and Ritchie seemed pretty proud about the 600 installed systems in 1978; I wonder what they'd have said if somebody had told them back then that there'd be millions of Unix systems within 15 years... IV.4 - ... structured programming ? The 1st reference to it seems to be the following article: E. W. Dijkstra, ``Structured programming,'' in Software engineering techniques, J. N. Buxton and B. Randell [Eds.], NATO Scientific Affairs Division (Brussels, 1970), 84-88. V - Firsts V.1 - When/what/where/who/... was the first {something} ? - Computer: look at the third file of this FAQ. It contains a little history of computers. - Computer programmer: Lady Ada Lovelace was one of Lord Byron's daughters, and a friend of Charles Babbage. She wrote numerous programs for the Analytical Engine, and so qualifies as the world's first computer programmer. - Stored program to run: The Manchester Mark-I-Prototype ran the first stored program in the world (a program to find greatest common factors) on 21st June 1948. - E-mail message: probably internal messages were around for as long as there was systems providing it. It can be probably by 1963 or 1964. - Computer game: people have been programming games for as long as there have been computers. There was research in getting computers to play Tic-Tac-Toe, chess and checkers going on already in the early 1950's. Also, the following quotation sheds some light in the issue: "...The Mark I's random number generator ... supplied some fun and games. F.C. Williams ... wrote a little gambling program that counted the number of times a given digit, from 0 to 9, was produced by a run of the generator. But Williams adjusted the generator to lean toward his favorite number, and he enjoyed betting against unsuspecting visitors. The beginnings of computer crime!" -Bit by Bit, Stan Augarten p. 212, ISBN 0-89919-302-1 - "Adventure" game: ADVENT, also known as Colossal Cave, by Crowther and Woods (see the rec.{games,art}.int-fiction FAQ's for more info). There was an earlier precursor, though: "Hunt the Wumpus", which is not an adventure game as we know it, but it is the first game with a stored map. See the Jargon File under "Wumpus". - Graphics computer game: SpaceWar, originally played on oscilloscopes - Use of microprogramming: Maurice Wilkes on the EDSAC. - Use of virtual memory: Atlas at Manchester University. - High level language : Fortran, designed at IBM in 195?. VI - Jokes There are a lot of parodies and generally "computer-related" jokes around. It's really easy to find them in posts, and in FTP sites. Particularly, you can find a great numbers of them in sunsite.unc.edu, directory /pub/docs/humor. VII - Net resources VII.1 - Who do I call if I have a problem with ? I was told that the FAQ files of alt.uu.announce and alt.uu.comp.misc have a list of "volunteers". Try them. Anyway, to questions relating a.f.c ONLY, you can try peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva), he seems to know almost everything. VIII - Acknowledgements Contributions were received from (if your name is here, and you want it out, just tell me; or, if it's not but it should, also, just tell me): "T.G.A." Rushton Arnt Gulbrandsen Bernie Jones Dave (whitten@fwva.saic.com) Dik.Winter@cwi.nl Eric Grosse Geoff@equinox.gen.nz (Geoff Mccaughan) MJ STODDARD Magnus Olsson Malcolm Shute Mark Harrison Murray_Moffatt@kcbbs.gen.nz (Murray Moffatt) Nik Clayton Peter Neumann S.R. Atkins <90sra@eng.cam.ac.uk> Stig Venaas (venaas@nvg.unit.no) Thayne Forbes Tony.Duell@lambada.oit.unc.edu alien@acheron.amigans.gen.nz (Ross Smith) bryan o'connor dcd@houston.geoquest.slb.com (dan day) del+@CMU.EDU (Daniel Edward Lovinger) eeyimkn@unicorn.nott.ac.uk (M. Knell) faught@zeppelin.convex.com (Danny R. Faught) forbes@cbnewsf.cb.att.com (Scott Forbes) gmw1@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Gabe M Wiener) ig25@fg70.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (Thomas Koenig) jelson@circle.cs.jhu.edu (Jeremy Elson) klaus@diku.dk koen@stack.urc.tue.nl (Koen Holtman) msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) mshield@ukelele.GCR.COM (Michael Shields) nelson@eagle.natinst.com (Nelson Bishop) payson@cs.wisc.edu ( Payson) silveira@inf.ufrgs.br (Fernando da Silveira Montenegro) simutis@ingres.com (John Simutis) stuckey@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (Anthony J. Stuckey) tcorcora@sunlab.cit.cornell.edu (Travis Corcoran) thompsn@ccu.UManitoba.CA (Adam Thompson) vieth@convex.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de (Ulrik Vieth) weisberg@ee.rochester.edu (Jeff Weisberg) IX - Things I am looking for: - has anybody already took a SPARCstation 2 open to look for a Calvin printed on it ? Did you find it ? (yes, nobody answered yet; I am sure somebody at Sun should now it) - the books section need newer entries; I am sure there are a lot of books which qualify, and I intend to go to a bookstore someday this month and get a list; if you have any ideas, just tell me -- -- Wilson Roberto Afonso Nutec Corporation +1 415 988-9781 2685 Marine Way Suite 1319 FAX: +1 415 988-9782 Mountain View, CA 94043 Article: 33561 of alt.folklore.computers Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Path: tridom!emory!swrinde!sgiblab!barrnet.net!infoserv!nutec!wilson From: wilson@nutec.com (Wilson Roberto Afonso) Subject: alt.folklore.computers FAQ - Part 2/3 Organization: Nutec Corporation Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 22:39:19 GMT Message-ID: Keywords: faq, folklore Lines: 856 Archive-name: afc-faq-2 Last-modified: 05-Apr-1993 This is the alt.folklore.computers list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). It is maintained by Wilson Afonso (wilson@nutec.com). All contributions and corrections are welcome, but I'm ultimately responsible for what appears here. Contributors are acknowledged, if possible. This is a four-part file. The first part contains only administrative comments. The second contains mostly generic questions. The third is a small history of computers, and the fourth is a list of books which are more or less related to computer folklore. The third part (file 2) is mantained by Mark Brader (msb@sq.sq.com), and contributions related to it should go to him. File 0: 0 - Administrivia File 1: I - Introduction II - Generic questions III - General folklore IV - Origins V - Firsts VI - Jokes VII - Net Resources VIII- Acknowledgements IX - Things I am looking for File 2 (this file): X - A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952) File 3: XI - List of computer-folklore related books ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- What was the first computer and who built it? It turns out that this is more a question of definition than a question of fact. The computer, as we now understand the word, was very much an evolutionary development rather than a simple invention. This article traces the sequence of the most important steps in that development, and in the earlier development of digital calculators without programmability. It may help you to decide for yourself whether you think the first computer was the ABC, the V3 (aka Z3), the ENIAC, the SSEC, the Manchester Mark I, the EDSAC, or perhaps yet another machine -- and how to apportion the honor of invention among John Atanasoff, Charles Babbage, Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Konrad Zuse, and others. ---------------------------------------------------- This article has evolved from an original version that I drafted in 1988, and has been posted to various Usenet groups several times. It has been prepared primarily from two sources: Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers by Stan Augarten 1984, Ticknor and Fields, New York ISBN 0-89919-268-8, 0-89919-302-1 paperback A History of Computing Technology by Michael R. Williams 1985, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ ISBN 0-13-389917-9 Either of these books is well worth a trip to the library to read. (Unfortunately, finding either one in a bookstore today would be an unlikely proposition.) Augarten is a journalist; he writes very readably, but occasionally does not say exactly what he means. Williams is a computer science professor; his book is superior in technical depth, and covers additional subject areas including analog computing and computing in ancient times. For some material in the last part of the chronology I also consulted: Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering, 2nd ed. editor Anthony Ralston, associate Editor Edwin D. Reilly Jr. 1983, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York ISBN 0-442-24496-7 Portraits in Silicon by Robert Slater 1987, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA ISBN 0-262-69131-0 The Computer Comes of Age / Ainsi naquit l'informatique by R. Moreau, English translation by J. Howlett 1981, translated 1984, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA ISBN 0-262-36103-2 The August 1988 issue of Scientific American contained a article about the Atanasoff-Berry machines. There is also a book by Clark Mollenhoff about them, some information from which was forwarded to me by email. The February 1993 issue of Scientific American contained an article about Babbage's difference engines and the modern-day completion of one of them. ---------------------------------------------------- I've tried to mention in this chronology each machine within the relevant time period that meets the following criteria. First, it must do arithmetic digitally; this eliminates, for instance, the slide rule. Second, it must actually do the arithmetic rather than just assisting the user's memory; I consider this to eliminate the abacus as well as, say, Napier's Bones. Third, it must do essentially the whole computation, with little or no assistance from the user; you could subtract 16 on a 6-digit Pascaline by adding 999984, but this doesn't mean we should say that a Pascaline could subtract. And finally, the machine must have either been technologically innovative, or else well known and influential. For certain concepts of special importance, I have also listed the first time they were *described*, although they were not implemented at that time. Where I do not describe the size of a machine, it is generally suitable for desktop use if it has no memory and is unprogrammable or if it is a small prototype, but would fill a small room if it has memory or significant programmability. The term "full-scale" is used, in contrast to "prototype", to refer to a machine with sufficient capacity to do regular useful work. For the sorts of machines described toward the end of the chronology, I generally consider them "completed" when they first run a program, even though they may be subject to further modifications and debugging. The names Tuebingen, Wuerttemberg, and Mueller should have an umlauted "u" in place of the "ue" used in this ASCII text. ---------------------------------------------------- A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952) ---------------------------------------------------- 1623. Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635), of Tuebingen, Wuerttemberg (now in Germany), makes his "Calculating Clock". This is a 6-digit machine that can add and subtract, and indicates overflow by ringing a bell. Mounted on the machine is a set of Napier's Rods (or Bones), a memory aid facilitating multiplications. The machine and plans are lost and forgotten in the war that is going on. The plans are finally rediscovered in 1935, only to be lost in war again, and then re-rediscovered in 1956 by the same man! The machine is reconstructed in 1960, and found to be workable. (Schickard is a friend of the astronomer Kepler.) 1644-5. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), of Paris, makes his "Pascaline". This 5-digit machine uses a different carry mechanism from Schickard's, with rising and falling weights instead of a direct gear drive; it can be extended better to support more digits, but it cannot subtract, and probably is less reliable than Schickard's simpler method. Where Schickard's machine is forgotten -- and indeed Pascal is apparently unaware it ever existed -- Pascal's becomes well known and establishes the computing machine concept in the intellectual community. He makes more machines and sells about 10-15 of them, some supporting as many as 8 digits. (Several survive to the present day.) Patents being a thing of the future, others also sell copies of Pascal's machine. (Pascal is also the inventor of the bus.) c.1668. Sir Samuel Morland (1625-1695), of England, produces a non-decimal adding machine, suitable for use with English money. Instead of a carry mechanism, it registers carries on auxiliary dials, from which the user must reenter them as addends. 1674. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), of Leipzig, designs his "Stepped Reckoner", which is constructed by a man named Olivier, of Paris. It uses a movable carriage so that it can multiply, with operands of up to 5 and 12 digits and a product of up to 16. The user has to turn a crank once for each unit in each digit in the multiplier; a fluted drum translates the turns into additions. But the carry mechanism requires user intervention, and doesn't really work in all cases anyway. Leibniz's machine doesn't get forgotten, but it does get misplaced in an attic within a few years -- and stays there until 1879 when it is noticed by a man working on the leaky roof! (Leibniz, or Leibnitz, is also the co-inventor of calculus.) 1775. Charles, the third Earl Stanhope, of England, makes a successful multiplying calculator similar to Leibniz's. 1770-6. Mathieus Hahn, somewhere in what is now Germany, also makes a successful multiplying calculator. 1786. J. H. Mueller, of the Hessian army, conceives the idea of what came to be called a "difference engine". That's a special-purpose calculator for tabulating values of a polynomial, given the differences between certain values so that the polynomial is uniquely specified; it's useful for any function that can be approximated by a polynomial over suitable intervals. Mueller's attempt to raise funds fails and the project is forgotten. 1820. Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar (1785-1870), of France, makes his "Arithmometer", the first mass-produced calculator. It does multiplication using the same general approach as Leibniz's calculator; with assistance from the user it can also do division. Machines of this general design, large enough to occupy most of a desktop, continue to be sold for about 90 years. 1822. Charles Babbage (1792-1871), of London, having reinvented the difference engine, begins his (government-funded) project to build one by constructing a 6-digit calculator using gear technology similar to that planned for the difference engine. 1832. Babbage and Joseph Clement produce a prototype segment of his difference engine, which operates on 6-digit numbers and 2nd-order differences (i.e. can tabulate quadratic polynomials). The complete engine, which would be room-sized, is planned to be able to operate both on 6th-order differences with numbers of about 20 digits, and on 3rd-order differences with numbers of 30 digits. Each addition would be done in two phases, the second one taking care of any carries generated in the first. The output digits would be punched into a soft metal plate, from which a plate for a printing press could be made. But there are various difficulties, and no more than this prototype piece is ever assembled. 1834. George Scheutz, of Stockholm, produces a small difference engine in wood, after reading a brief description of Babbage's project. 1834. Babbage conceives, and begins to design, his "Analytical Engine". Whether or not this machine, if built, would have constituted a computer depends on exactly how "computer" is being defined. One essential feature of present-day computers is absent from the design: the "stored-program" concept, which is necessary for implementing a compiler. The program would have been in read-only memory, specifically in the form of punch cards. (In this chronology, such machines will be called "programmable calculators".) Babbage continues to work on the design for years, though after about 1840 the changes are minor. The machine would operate on 40-digit numbers; the "mill" (CPU) would have 2 main accumulators and some auxiliary ones for specific purposes, while the "store" (memory) would hold perhaps 100 more numbers. There would be several punch card readers, for both programs and data; the cards would be chained and the motion of each chain could be reversed. The machine would be able to perform conditional jumps. There would also be a form of microcoding: the meaning of instructions would depend on the positioning of metal studs in a slotted barrel, called the "control barrel". The machine would do an addition in 3 seconds and a multiplication or division in 2-4 minutes. 1842. Babbage's difference engine project is officially canceled. (The cost overruns have been considerable, and Babbage is spending too much time on redesigning the Analytical Engine.) 1843. Scheutz and his son Edvard Scheutz produce a 3rd-order difference engine with printer, and the Swedish government agrees to fund their next development. 1847-9. Babbage designs an improved, simpler difference engine, which will operate on 7th-order differences and 31-digit numbers, but nobody is interested in paying to have it built. (In 1989-91, however, a team at London's Science Museum will do just that. They will use components of modern construction, but with tolerances no better than Clement could have provided... and, after a bit of tinkering and detail-debugging, they will find that the machine does indeed work.) 1853. To Babbage's delight, the Scheutzes complete the first full-scale difference engine, which they call a Tabul- ating Machine. It operates on 15-digit numbers and 4th-order differences, and produces printed output as Babbage's would have. A second machine is later built to the same design by the firm of Brian Donkin of London. 1858. The first Tabulating Machine is bought by the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, and the second one by the British government. The Albany machine is used to produce a set of astronomical tables; but the observatory's director is then fired for this extravagant purchase, and the machine is never seriously used again, eventually ending up in a museum. The second machine, however, has a long and useful life. 1871. Babbage produces a prototype section of the Analytical Engine's mill and printer. 1878. Ramon Verea, living in New York City, invents a calculator with an internal multiplication table; this is much faster than the shifting carriage or other digital methods. He isn't interested in putting it into production; he just wants to show that a Spaniard can invent as well as an American. 1879. A committee investigates the feasibility of completing the Analytical Engine and concludes that it is impossible now that Babbage is dead. The project is then largely forgotten and is unknown to most of the people mentioned in the last part of this chronology -- though Howard Aiken is an exception. 1885. A multiplying calculator more compact than the Arithmometer enters mass production. The design is the independent, and more or less simultaneous, invention of Frank S. Baldwin, of the United States, and T. Odhner, a Swede living in Russia. The fluted drums are replaced by a "variable-toothed gear" design: a disk with radial pegs that can be made to protrude or retract from it. 1886. Dorr E. Felt (1862-1930), of Chicago, makes his "Comptometer". This is the first calculator where the operands are entered merely by pressing keys rather than having to be, for example, dialed in. It is feasible because of Felt's invention of a carry mechanism fast enough to act while the keys return from being pressed. 1889. Felt invents the first printing desk calculator. 1890. US Census results are tabulated for the first time with sig- nificant mechanical aid: the punch card tabulators of Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) of MIT, Cambridge, Mass. This is the start of the punch card industry. The cost of the census tabulation is 98% *higher* than the previous one, in part because of the temptation to use the machines to the fullest and tabulate more data than formerly possible, but the tabulation is completed in a much shorter time. Another precedent is that the cards are read electrically. (Contrary to popular impression and to earlier versions of this chronology, Hollerith's cards of 1890 are not the same size as US paper money of the time; they are much smaller. Other sizes of punch cards will also appear within a few years.) 1892. William S. Burroughs (1857-1898), of St. Louis, invents a machine similar to Felt's but more robust, and this is the one that really starts the office calculator industry. (This machine is still hand powered, but it won't be many years before electric calculators appear.) 1906. Henry Babbage, Charles's son, with the help of the firm of R. W. Munro, completes the mill of his father's Analytical Engine, just to show that it would have worked. It does. The complete machine is never produced. 1919. W. H. Eccles and F. W. Jordan publish the first flip-flop circuit design. 1931-2. E. Wynn-Williams, at Cambridge, England, uses thyratron tubes to construct a binary digital counter for use in connection with physics experiments. 1935. International Business Machines introduces the "IBM 601", a punch card machine with an arithmetic unit based on relays and capable of doing a multiplication in 1 second. The machine becomes important both in scientific and commercial computation, and about 1500 of them are eventually made. 1937. George Stibitz (c.1910-) of the Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs), New York City, constructs a demonstration 1-bit binary adder using relays. 1937. Alan M. Turing (1912-1954), of Cambridge University, England, publishes a paper on "computable numbers". This paper solves a mathematical problem, but the solution is achieved by reasoning (as a mathematical device) about the theoretical simplified computer known today as a Turing machine. 1938. Claude E. Shannon (1916-) publishes a paper on the implementation of symbolic logic using relays. 1938. Konrad Zuse (1910-) of Berlin, with some assistance from Helmut Schreyer, completes a prototype mechanical binary programmable calculator, originally called the "V1" but retroactively renamed "Z1" after the war. It works with floating point numbers having a 7-bit exponent, 16-bit mantissa, and a sign bit. The memory uses sliding metal parts to store 16 such numbers, and works well; but the arithmetic unit is less successful. The program is read from punched tape -- not paper tape, but discarded 35 mm movie film. Data values can be entered from a numeric keyboard, and outputs are displayed on electric lamps. Nov 1939. John V. Atanasoff (1903-) and graduate student Clifford Berry (?-1963), of Iowa State College (now the Iowa State University), Ames, Iowa, complete a prototype 16-bit adder. This is the first machine to calculate using vacuum tubes. 1939. Zuse and Schreyer begin work on the "V2" (later "Z2"), which will marry the Z1's existing mechanical memory unit to a new arithmetic unit using relay logic. The project is interrupted for a year when Zuse is drafted. (Zuse is a friend of Wernher von Braun, who will later develop the *other* "V2", and after that, play a key role in the US space program.) 1939-40. Schreyer completes a prototype 10-bit adder using vacuum tubes, and a prototype memory using neon lamps. Jan 1940. At Bell Labs, Samuel Williams and Stibitz complete a calculator which can operate on complex numbers, and give it the imaginative name of the "Complex Number Calculator"; it is later known as the "Model I Relay Calculator". It uses telephone switching parts for logic: 450 relays and 10 crossbar switches. Numbers are represented in "plus 3 BCD"; that is, for each decimal digit, 0 is represented by binary 0011, 1 by 0100, and so on up to 1100 for 9; this scheme requires fewer relays than straight BCD. Rather than requiring users to come to the machine to use it, the calculator is provided with three remote keyboards, at various places in the building, in the form of teletypes. Only one can be used at a time, and the output is automatically displayed on the same one. In September 1940, a teletype is set up at a mathematical conference in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a connection to New York, and those attending the conference can use the machine remotely. 1940. Zuse is released from the army and completes the Z2. It works better than the Z1, but isn't reliable enough. (Later he is drafted again, and released again.) Summer 1941. Atanasoff and Berry complete a special-purpose calcu- lator for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, later called the "ABC" ("Atanasoff-Berry Computer"). This has 60 50-bit words of memory in the form of capacitors (with refresh circuits -- the first regenerative memory) mounted on two revolving drums. The clock speed is 60 Hz, and an addition takes 1 second. For secondary memory it uses punch cards, moved around by the user. The holes are not actually punched in the cards, but burned. The punch card system's error rate is never reduced beyond 0.001%, and this isn't really good enough. (Atanasoff will leave Iowa State after the US enters the war, and this will end his work on digital computing machines.) Dec 1941. Now working with limited backing from the DVL (German Aero- nautical Research Institute), Zuse completes the "V3" (later "Z3"): the first operational programmable calculator. It works with floating point numbers having a 7-bit exponent, 14-bit mantissa (with a "1" bit automatically prefixed unless the number is 0), and a sign bit. The memory holds 64 of these words and therefore requires over 1400 relays; there are 1200 more in the arithmetic and control units. The program, input, and output are implemented as described above for the Z1. Conditional jumps are not available. The machine can do 3-4 additions per second, and takes 3-5 seconds for a multiplication. It is a marginal decision whether to call the Z3 a prototype; with its small memory it is certainly not very useful on the equation- solving problems that the DVL was mostly interested in. Jan 1943. Howard H. Aiken (1900-1973) and his team at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (with IBM's backing), complete the "ASCC Mark I" ("Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator Mark I"), also called the "Harvard Mark I". This electromechanical machine is the first programmable calculator to be widely known: Aiken is to Zuse as Pascal to Schickard. The machine is 51 feet long, weighs 5 tons, and incorporates 750,000 parts. It includes 72 accumulators, each incorporating its own arith- metic unit as well as a mechanical register with a capacity of 23 digits plus sign. (See the ENIAC entry, below, for a more detailed description of such an architecture.) The arithmetic is fixed-point, with a plugboard setting determining the number of decimal places. I/O facilities include card readers, a card punch, paper tape readers, and typewriters. There are 60 sets of rotary switches, each of which can be used as a constant register -- sort of a mechanical read-only memory. The program is read from one paper tape; data can be read from the other tapes, or the card readers, or from the constant registers. Conditional jumps are not available. However, in later years the machine is modified to support multiple paper tape readers for the program, with the transfer from one to another being conditional, sort of like a conditional subroutine call. Another addition allows the provision of plugboard-wired subroutines callable from the tape. Apr 1943. Max Newman, Wynn-Williams, and their team at the secret Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, Bletchley, England, complete the "Heath Robinson". This is a specialized machine for cipher-breaking, not a general-purpose calculator or computer but some sort of logic device, using a combination of electronics and relay logic. It reads data optically at 2000 characters per second from 2 closed loops of paper tape, each typically about 1000 characters long. (The secrecy that surrounded this machine and its successors at Bletchley Park will still be partially in effect at the time of writing, hence the vague description. Newman knew Turing from Cambridge, and had been the first person to see a draft of Turing's 1937 paper. Heath Robinson is the name of a British cartoonist known for drawings of comical machines, like the American Rube Goldberg. Two later machines in the series will be named for London stores with "Robinson" in their names!) Sep 1943. Williams and Stibitz complete the "Relay Interpolator", later called the "Model II Relay Calculator". This is a programmable calculator; again, the program and data are read from paper tapes. An innovative feature is that, for greater reliability, numbers are represented in a biquinary format using 7 relays for each digit, of which exactly 2 should be "on": 01 00001 for 0, 01 00010 for 1, and so on up to 10 10000 for 9. (Some of the later machines in this series used the biquinary notation for the digits of floating-point numbers.) Dec 1943. H. T. Flowers and his team at Bletchley Park complete the the first "Colossus". This successor to the "Robinson" series machines is entirely electronic, incorporating 2400 vacuum tubes for logic. It has 5 paper tape loop readers, each working at 5000 characters per second. (10 Colossi will eventually be built. Turing also has an important role at Bletchley Park, but does not work directly on the machines.) 1944-5. Zuse almost completes his first full-scale machine, the "V4" (later "Z4"), which resembles his earlier designs. Its memory reverts to the Z1's mechanical design, storing 1000 words of 32 bits in less then a cubic meter; the equivalent in relays would have filled a large room. As the war begins to go very badly for Germany, Zuse's work is dis- rupted several times, and then abandoned for the duration. An air raid had destroyed the Z3 in 1943, but the incomplete Z4 survives the war's end in a basement. 1945. Zuse invents a programming language called Plankalkul. Jun 1945. John von Neumann (1903-1957) joins the ENIAC team and drafts a report describing the future computer eventually built as the "EDVAC" ("Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer" (!)); this is the first description of the design of a stored-program computer, and gives rise to the term "von Neumann computer". The first draft of the report fails to credit other team members such as Eckert and Mauchly; when this version becomes widely circulated, von Neumann gets somewhat too much credit for the design. The final version corrects the oversight, but too late. (Von Neumann, also noted for his mental calculating ability, is the only one of the principal computer pioneers in the US familiar with Turing's 1937 paper.) Nov 1945. John W. Mauchly (pronounced Mawkly; 1907-80) and J. Presper Eckert (1919-) and their team at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, complete a secret project for the US Army's Ballistics Research Lab: a program- mable calculator called the "ENIAC" ("Electronic Numerator, Integrator, Analyzer, and Computer"). The ENIAC's architecture resembles that of the Harvard Mark I, but its components are entirely electronic, incorporating 17,468 vacuum tubes. The machine weighs 30 tons, covers about 1000 square feet of floor, and consumes 130 or 140 kilowatts of electricity. The machine incorporates 20 accumulators (the original plan was for 4). The accumulators and other units are all connected by several data buses, and a set of "program lines" for synchronization. Each accum- ulator stores a 10-digit number, using 10 bits to represent each digit, and also incorporates circuits to add a number from a bus to the stored number, and to transmit the stored number or its complement to a bus. A separate unit can perform multiplication (in about 3 milliseconds), while another does division and square roots; the inputs and outputs for both these units use the buses. There are constant registers, as on the Harvard Mark I: 104 12-digit registers forming an array called the "function table". 100 of these registers are directly addressable by a 2-digit number from a bus (the others are used for interpolations). Finally, a card reader is available to input data values, and there is a card punch for output. The program is set up on a plugboard -- this is considered reasonable since the same or similar program would generally be used for weeks at a time. For example, connecting certain sockets would cause accumulator 1 to transmit its contents onto data bus 1 when a pulse arrived on program line 1; meanwhile several accumulators could be adding the value from that data bus to their stored value, while others could be working independently. The program lines are pulsed under the control of a master unit, which can perform iterations. The ENIAC's clock speed is 100 kHz. Mauchly and Eckert apply for a patent. The university disputes this at first, but they settle. The patent is finally granted in 1964, but is overturned in 1973, in part because of the previous work by Atanasoff, with which Mauchly was acquainted. (The BRL wanted the ENIAC to use on the difficult problem of making aiming tables for use by artillerymen. It isn't ready in time for the war, and overruns its original budget by 225% -- problems that will face Eckert and Mauchly again on later projects.) Feb 1946. The ENIAC is revealed to the public. Jul-Aug 1946. The Moore School gives a course on "Theory and Techniques for Design of Electronic Computers"; lectures are given by Eckert, Mauchly, Stibitz, von Neumann, and Aiken among others. The course leads to several projects being started, among them the EDSAC. Jul 1947. Aiken and his team complete the "Harvard Mark II", a large programmable calculator using relays both for its 50 floating- point registers and for the arithmetic unit, 13,000 of them in all. Sep 1947. A moth (?-1947) makes the mistake of flying into the Harvard Mark II. A whimsical technician makes the logbook entry "first actual case of bug being found", and annotates it by taping down the remains of the moth. (The term "bug" was of course already in use; that's why it's funny.) 1947. Frederick Viehe (?-1960), of Los Angeles, applies for a patent on an invention which is to use magnetic core memory. c.1947. The magnetic drum memory is independently invented by several people, and the first examples are constructed. (As noted below, some early machines will use drums as main memory rather than secondary memory.) Jan 1948. Wallace Eckert (1902-1971, no relation to Presper Eckert) of IBM, with his team, completes the "SSEC" ("Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator"). This technological hybrid has 8 vacuum tube registers, 150 words of relay memory, and 66 paper tape loops storing a total of 20,000 words. The word size is 20 digits, stored in BCD in the registers. As with the Harvard Mark I in its later form, the machine can be switched to read instructions from any of the paper tapes. There is also some use of plugboards in its programming. But it can also cache some instructions in memory and read them from there; thus, in effect, it can operate either as a stored-program computer (with a very small program memory) or not. Because it can do this, IBM's point of view is that this is the first computer. Jun 1948. Newman, F. C. Williams, and their team at Manchester Uni- versity, Manchester, England, complete a prototype machine, the "Mark I" (also called the "Manchester Mark I"). This is the first machine that everyone would call a computer, because it's the first with a true stored-program capability. It uses a new type of memory developed by F. C. Williams (possibly after an original suggestion by Presper Eckert), which uses the residual charges left on the screen of a CRT after the electron beam has been fired at it. (The bits are read by firing another beam through them and reading the voltage at an electrode beyond the screen.) This is a little unreliable but is fast, and also relatively cheap because it can use existing CRT designs; and it is much more compact than any other memory then existing. The Mark I's main memory of 32 32-bit words occupies a single Williams tube. (Other CRTs on the machine are less densely used: one contains only an accumulator.) The Mark I's programs are initially entered in binary on a keyboard, and the output is read in binary from another CRT. Later Turing joins the team (see also the "Pilot ACE", below) and devises a primi- tive form of assembly language, one of several developed at about the same time in different places. Sep 1948. The ENIAC is improved, using ideas from Richard F. Clipper of the BRL and Nicholas Metropolis of Los Alamos. Each program line is permanently wired for a different operation, and a new converter unit allows them to be addressed by a program, the way the function table can -- thus implementing, in effect, opcodes. With this change, the program can now be entered via the *function table*. (This conversion will sometimes be described as making the ENIAC into a stored-program computer, but the program memory is still read-only. However, setting up a program now takes a matter of hours, rather than days as before.) Fall 1948. IBM introduces the "IBM 604", a programmable calculator and card punch using vacuum tubes. It can read a card, perform up to 60 arithmetic operations in 80 milliseconds, and punch the results on the same card. The programming is by plugboard. All machines first mentioned in the chronology from here on are stored-program computers. 1949-51. Jay W. Forrester and his team at MIT construct the "Whirlwind" for the US Navy's Office of Research and Inventions. The vague date is because its advance to full-time operational status is gradual. Its original form has 3300 tubes and 8900 crystal diodes. It occupies 2500 square feet of floor. Its 2048 16-bit words of CRT memory use up $32,000 worth of tubes each month. There is also a graphical I/O device consisting of a CRT (only one dot can be displayed at a time) and a light pen. This allows the machine to be used for air traffic control. The Whirlwind is the first computer designed for real-time work; it can do 500,000 additions or 50,000 multiplications per second. Spring 1949. Forrester conceives the idea of magnetic core memory as it is to become commonly used, with a grid of wires used to address the cores. The first practical form, in 1952-53, will replace the Whirlwind's CRT memory and render obsolete all types of main memory then existing. April 1949. The Manchester Mark I, its main memory now upgraded to 128 40-bit words (on two CRTs), acquires a secondary memory in the form of a magnetic drum holding a further 1024 words. Also at about this time, two index registers are added to the machine. May 1949. Maurice Wilkes (1913-) and his team at Cambridge Uni- versity complete the "EDSAC" ("Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer"), which is closely based on the EDVAC design report from von Neumann's group -- Wilkes had attended the 1946 Moore School course. The project is supported both financially and with technical personnel from J. Lyons & Co. Ltd., a large British firm in the food and restaurant business. This is the first full-scale operational stored-program computer, and is therefore the final candidate for the title of "the first computer". Its main memory is of a type that had existed for some years, but had not been used for a computing machine: the "ultrasonic delay line" memory. It had been invented originally by William Shockley of Bell Labs (also one of the co-inventors of the transistor, in 1948), and Eckert had made an improved version in connection with radar systems. It works by repeatedly converting from the usual electrical data pulses to ultrasonic pulses directed along, typic- ally, the length of a tank of mercury; on arrival at the other end, the pulses are converted back to electrical form. The memory must be maintained at a particular temperature, and only the few bits currently in electrical form are accessible. In the EDSAC, 16 tanks of mercury give a total of 256 35-bit words (or 512 17-bit words). The clock speed of the EDSAC is 500 kHz; most instructions take about 1500 ms to execute. Its I/O is by paper tape, and a set of constant registers is provided for booting. The software eventually supports the concept of relocatable proce- dures with addresses bound at load time. Aug 1949. Eckert and Mauchly, having formed their own company, complete the "BINAC" ("Binary Automatic Computer") for the US Air Force. Designed as a first step to in-flight computers, this has dual (redundant) processors each with 700 tubes and 512 31-bit words of memory. Each processor occupies only 4 square feet of floor space and can do 3500 additions or 1000 multiplications per second. The designers are thinking mostly of their forthcoming "UNIVAC" ("Universal Automatic Computer") and don't spend much time making the BINAC as reliable as it should be, but the tandem processors compensate somewhat. Sep 1949. Aiken's team completes the "Harvard Mark III". This computer has separate magnetic drum memories for data and instructions. Only some of the data drums can be addressed by the CPU; the others serve as secondary memory. The total memory capacity is 4000 instructions, 350 16-bit words in the main data drums, and 4000 words more in the secondary memory. The machine contains over 5000 vacuum tubes and 2000 relays. May 1950. A group at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, complete the "Pilot ACE" (pilot project for an "Automatic Computing Engine"). This had been largely designed by Turing when he was there in 1945-47; he had left and gone to Manches- ter because the designs were not being implemented. The main memory of this computer is in the form of 200 separate ultrasonic delay lines, thus allowing better addressability than other ultrasonic- based machines. An additional group of short delay lines serve as registers, each of which performs a particular operation automatic- ally on a number directed to it. Most operations then consist simply of routing a number, or a counted stream of numbers, from one delay line to another. Punch cards are used for input and output; a drum will be added later for secondary memory. (A successor to this machine will be named "DEUCE".) 1950. Zuse's Z4 is finally completed and goes into service at ETH (Federal Polytechical Institute) in Zurich, Switzerland. The design is modified so that it can do conditional jumps. The machine also implements a form of intstruction pipelining, with the program tape being read 2 instructions ahead and various optimiz- ations performed automatically. The Z4 remains in use for 5 years at ETH and 5 more in France, and Zuse soon begins making his machines commercially. He eventually sells some 300 machines before being bought out by Siemens. 1950. Douglas Hartree (the leading expert in the country on the specialized computing machines called differential analyzers) gives his professional opinion to Ferranti Ltd., of Manchester: as the 3 existing computer projects will suffice to handle all the calculations that will ever be needed in Britain, Ferranti would be well advised to drop the idea of making computers for commercial sale. Feb 1951. A rather more optimistic Ferranti Ltd. completes the first commercial computer. This is yet another "Mark I", but is also known as the "Manchester Mark II", "MUDC", "MUEDC", and "MADAM"! It has 256 40-bit words of main memory and 16K words of drum, and includes 8 index registers. An eventual total of 8 of these machines are sold. (The index register's contents are added, not to the address taken from an instruction, but to the entire instruction, thus potentially changing the opcode! Calling Mel...) Mar 1951. Presper Eckert and Mauchly, having sold their company to Remington Rand, complete the first "UNIVAC", which is the first US commercial computer. (The US census department is the first customer.) It has 1000 12-digit words of ultrasonic delay line memory and can do 8333 additions or 555 multiplications per second; it con- tains 5000 tubes and covers 200 square feet of floor. For secondary memory it uses magnetic tapes of nickel-coated bronze; these are 1/2 inch wide, and store 128 characters per inch. Fall 1951. The Lyons company receives its reward for supporting the EDSAC, as T. R. Thompson and his team complete the "LEO I" ("Lyons Electronic Office I"), which is modeled closely after the EDSAC. Its ultrasonic memory is 4 times as large, and avoids the usual temperature dependency by using one delay line as a master and synchronizing the others to it instead of to a clock. The Lyons company wants the LEO I for its own use -- payroll, inven- tory, and so on; it is the first computer used for commercial calcul- ations. But other companies now turn out to be interested in the LEO, and Lyons will soon find itself in the computer manufacturing business as well. 1951. Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), of Remington Rand, invents the modern concept of the compiler. 1952. The EDVAC is finally completed. It has 4000 tubes, 10,000 crystal diodes, and 1024 44-bit words of ultrasonic memory. Its clock speed is 1 MHz. 1952. The IBM "Defense Calculator", later renamed the "701", the first IBM computer unless you count the SSEC, enters production at Poughkeepsie, New York. (The first one is delivered in March 1953; 19 are sold altogether. The machine is available with 2048 or 4096 36-bit words of CRT memory; it does 2200 multi- plications per second.) 1952. Grace Murray Hopper implements the first compiler, the "A-0". (But as with "first computer", this is a somewhat arbitrary designation.) ---------------------------------------------------- A few things have happened since then, too, but this margin is too narrow... -- -- Wilson Roberto Afonso Nutec Corporation +1 415 988-9781 2685 Marine Way Suite 1319 FAX: +1 415 988-9782 Mountain View, CA 94043 Article: 33562 of alt.folklore.computers Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Path: tridom!emory!swrinde!sgiblab!barrnet.net!infoserv!nutec!wilson From: wilson@nutec.com (Wilson Roberto Afonso) Subject: alt.folklore.computers FAQ - Part 3/3 Organization: Nutec Corporation Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 22:40:16 GMT Message-ID: Keywords: faq, folklore Lines: 498 Archive-name: afc-faq-3 Last-modified: 05-Apr-1994 This is the alt.folklore.computers list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). It is maintained by Wilson Afonso (wilson@nutec.com). All contributions and corrections are welcome, but I'm ultimately responsible for what appears here. Contributors are acknowledged, if possible. This is a four-part file. The first part contains only administrative comments. The second contains mostly generic questions. The third is a small history of computers, and the fourth is a list of books which are more or less related to computer folklore. The third part (file 2) is mantained by Mark Brader (msb@sq.sq.com), and contributions related to it should go to him. File 0: 0 - Administrivia File 1: I - Introduction II - Generic questions III - General folklore IV - Origins V - Firsts VI - Jokes VII - Net Resources VIII- Acknowledgements IX - Things I am looking for File 2: X - A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952) File 3 (this file): XI - List of computer-folklore related books ------------------------------------------------------------------------- XI - List of computer-folklore related books -----------------8<-----------------8<---------------8<-------------8<-------- A good source for the following books is supposedly the Boston Computer Museum Catalog. Call them at (617)426-2800 (USA) and ask for one. ============================================================================= Accidental Empires How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millons, battle foreign competition, and still can't get a date. Robert X. Cringely 324p Reading MA, Addison-Wesley, c1992 0-201-57032-7 Accidental Millionaire The rise and fall of Steve Jobs at Apple Computer Lee Butcher 224p, ill New York, Paragon House, c1988 0-913729-79-5 Ainsi naquit l'informatique (The Computer Comes of Age) The people, the hardware, and the software [This book has a strong IBM bias] Rene Moreau, Translated by J. Howlett 227p, ill Cambridge MA, MIT Press, c1984 0-262-13194-3 Approaching Zero Data Crime and the Computer Underworld Bryan Clough and Paul Mungo 242 p Faber and Faber, 1992 0-571-16546-X Artificial Life The quest for a new creation Steven Levy 390 p New York, Pantheon Books, c1992 ???? ISBN Big Blue IBM's use and abuse of Power Richard Thomas DeLamarter 393p New York, Dodd Mead, c1986 0-396-08515-6 Paperback: Pan Books, London, 1988 0-330-30923-0 Bit by Bit An Illustrated History of Computers Stan Augarten 324p, ill New York, Ticknor & Fields, 1984 0-89919-268-8 (hard) 0-89919-302-1 (soft) Blue Magic The people, power, and politics behind the IBM personal computer James Chposky and Ted Leonsis 228p New York, Facts on File, c1988 0-8160-1391-8 Breakthrough to the Computer Age [???] Harry Wulforst 185p, ill New York, Scribner, c1982 0-684-17499-5 A Business and its Beliefs The ideas that helped build IBM Thomas J. Watson ??? p New York, McGraw-Hill, 1963 ???? ISBN Computer Engineering A DEC view of hardware systems design Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, John E. McNamara 585 p Bedford, Digital Press, c1978 0-932376-00-2 The Computer Entrepeneurs Who's making it big and how in America's upstart industry Robert Levering, Michael Katz, Milton Moskowitz 481p, ill New York, New American Library, c1984 0-453-00477-6 The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann Herman H. Goldstine 378p, ill Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1972 0-691-08104-2 Computer Lib; Dream Machines [texts bound together back-to-back and inverted] Ted Nelson 178p 153p, ill Redmond, WA, Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987 0-914845-49-7 A Computer Perspective Background to the computer age by the office of Charles & Ray Eames 174p, ill Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1990 0-674-15626-9 The Computer Pioneers The making of the modern computer David Ritchie 238p, ill New York, Simon&Schuster, c1986 0-671-52397-X Der Computer - Mein Lebenswerk [in German Language - Translations in other languages ???] Konrad Zuse Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, ..., 1984 ISBN 3-540-13814-5 ISBN 0-387-13814-5 The Conquest of the Microchip Hans J. Queisser 200 p Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988 ???? ISBN The Cuckoo's Egg Tracking a spy through the maze of computer espionage Clifford Stoll 326p New York, Doubleday, c1989 0-385-24946-2 Cyberpunk Outlaws and hackers on the computer frontier Katie Hafner and John Markoff 368p New York, Simon&Schuster, c1991 0-671-68322-5 The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer A view of the future of the software industry Edward Yourdon 352p, ill Englewood Cliffs NJ, Yourdon Press, c1992 0-13-203670-3 The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age Tales of the computer age Karla Jennings 237p, ill New York, W.W.Norton, c1990 0-393-02897-6 Digital Equipment Corporation The first twentyt-five years Kenneth H. Olsen ??? p New York, Newcomwn Society in north America, 1983 ???? ISBN Digital at Work Snapshots from the first thirty-five years edited by Jamie Parker-Pearson Digital Press, Burlington, MA, c1992, Softbound ISBN 0-13-213489-6 / Prentice-Hall ISBN 1-55558-092-0 / Digital Press Digital Order Number EY-J826E-DP Early British Computers The story of vintage computers and the people who built them Simon Lavington 139p, ill Manchester University Press, 1980 0-7190-0803-4 [hard cover] 0-7190-0810-7 [paperback] Bedford MA, Digital Press, c1980 0-932376-08-8 Electronic Computers A Historical Survey Saul Rosen Computing Surveys v1#1, March 1969 Father, Son & Co. My life at IBM and beyond Thomas J. Watson 468 p New York, Bantam Books, c1990 0-553-07011-8 Fire in the Valley The making of the personal computer Paul Freiberger 288p, ill Berkeley CA, Osborne/McGraw-Hill, c1984 0-88134-121-5 >From Dits to Bits A personal history of the electronic computer Herman Lukoff 219p, ill Portland OR, Robotic Press, c1979 0-89661-002-0 >From ENIAC to UNIVAC an Apraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers Nancy Stern ca. 290 p. / Hardbound Digital Press, Bedford, Mass., 1981 0-932376-14-2, Digital Order No. EY-AX013-DP Fumbling the Future How Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander 274 p New York, Quill, 1990 0-688-09511-9 Hackers Heroes of the computer revolution Steven Levy 458p Garden City NY, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984 0-385-19195-2 Hard Drive Bill Gates and the making of Microsoft empire James Wallace and Jim Erickson 426p, ill New York, Wiley, c1992 0-471-56886-4 Hermann Hollerith Forgotten Giant of Information Processing Geoffrey D. Austrian Columbia University Press, New York, 1982 0-231-05146-8 A History of Computing Technology From the earliest written numbers to the IBM 360 Michael R. Williams 430p Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, c1985 0-13-389917-9 A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century Edited by N. Metropolis, J. Howlett and Gian-Carlo Rota Academic Press Inc., New York, London, ..., c1980 0-12-491650-3 Hypergrowth The rise and fall of Osborne Computer Corporation Adam Osborne ??? p New York, Avon, c1985 ???? ISBN The Little Kingdom The private story of Apple Computer Michael Moritz ??? p. New York, Paragon House, c1988 ???? ISBN The Making of Microsoft How Bill Gates and his team created the world's most successful software company Daniel Ichbiah & Susan L. Knepper 304 p Rocklin, Prima Pub., c1991 1-55958-071-2 The Media Lab Inventing the Future at MIT Stewert Brand 285p, ill New York, Penguin Books, 1988 0-14-009701-5 Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer Maurice Vincent Wilkes The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1985 ISBN 0-262-23122-0 The Micro Millenium [???] Christopher Evans 255p New York, Viking Press, 1980 0-670-47400-2 Microchip The story of a revolution and the man who made it [Originally published as The Chip] T. R. Reid 240 p Pan, Collins, London, c1984 ???? ISBN The Mighty Micro The impact of the computer revolution Christopher Evans 255p London, Gollancz, 1982 ??? ISBN The New Alchemists Silicon Valley and the microelectronics revolution Dirk Hanson 364p Boston, Little Brown, c1982 0-316-34342-0 The New Hacker's Dictionary Jargon file in print Eric Raymond. 433 p The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, USA. 1991 0-262-68069 Odyssey Pepsi to Apple - A journey of adventure, ideas, and the future John Sculley with John A. Byrne 450p, ill New York, Harper&Row, c1987 0-06-015780-1 Once Upon A Time In Computerland The Amazing Billion-Dollar Tale of Bill Millard's Computerland Empire Jonathan Littman 413p Simon and Schuster / Touchstone, 1990 0-671-70218-1 0-671-69392-1 Pbk The Origins of Digital Computers Selected Papers/3rd Edition Brian Randell, ed. 580p, ill New York, Springer-Verlag, 1982 0-387-11319-3 Portraits in Silicon [Interviews with 30+ influential hardware and software inventors] Robert Slater 374p, ill Cambridge MA, MIT Press, c1987 0-262-19262-4 Programmers at Work Interviews with 19 programmers that shaped the computer industry Susan M. Lammers 391p, ill Redmond WA, Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1989 1-55615-211-6 Project Whirlwind History of a Pioneer Computer Kent C. Redmond & Thomas M. Smith 296 p. / Softbound Digital Press, History of Computing Series, Bedford, c1980 ISBN 0-932376-09-6, Digital Order No. EY-8351E-DP Reckoners The Prehistory of the Digital Computer ... Paul E. Ceruzzi Greenwodd Press, Westport, Connecticut - London, England 0-313-23382-9 The Soul of a New Machine [data general] Tracy Kidder 293p Boston, Little Brown, c1981 0-316-49170-5 Steve Jobs: the journey is the reward [???] Jeffrey S. Young ??? p. Glenville, Scott, Foresman, c1988 ???? ISBN The Sun Never Sets on IBM [???] Nancy Foy ??? p Cambridge, MIT Press, c1981 ???? ISBN Sunburst The Ascent of Sun Microsystems Mark Hall and John Barry 297p Chicago, Contemporary Books, c1990 0-8092-4368-7 The Tao of Programming Compuarcheological guide to the mysterious past of programming Geoffrey James ??? p Info Books, Santa Monica, Calif., USA. 1987 0-931137-07-1 Think A biography of the Watsons and I.B.M. William Rodgers ??? p London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970 ???? ISBN The Ultimate Entrepreneur The story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation Glenn Rifkin ??? p Chicago, Contemporary Books, 1988 ???? ISBN West of Eden The end of innocence at Apple Computer Frank Rose 356p New York, Penguin Books, c1989 0-14-009372-9 Zap ! The rise and fall of Atari Scott Cohen 177 p. New York, McGraw-Hill, c1984 ???? ISBN The Zen of Programming Koans, haiku, folktales and other stories of programming Geoffrey James. ??? p Info Books, Santa Monica, Calif., USA. 1988 0-931137-09-8 -- -- Wilson Roberto Afonso Nutec Corporation +1 415 988-9781 2685 Marine Way Suite 1319 FAX: +1 415 988-9782 Mountain View, CA 94043