A Personal History of Computing.
Well, at 110 baud, it's a slow trip! But is sure beat the alternative.
This Teletype is identical to the one I used in to access a computer timeshare system. Back in the mid-'70s, practical personal computers were still a ways off, and even minicomputers (like the DEC PDP-11) were far too expensive for most agencies to purchase. The affordable way to computer power was to buy a subscription to time on a mainframe computer, and dial in on their telephone lines. I'm no longer sure of the system we used, but Burroughs is stuck in my mind. Or was it Unisys? My son was using Raytheon computers in high school. Raytheon had a few facilities in Norwood, Massachusetts, at the time. That's where we were living.
My first exposure to the computer was a room sized IBM monster in graduate school in the early 1960s.
We used the ASR-33 above to interact with the computer. The dial on the right was used to call one of the access numbers; if it was busy, we tried the next one. As I recall, we had three numbers on which we had access, and if all three of them were busy (other users of the service), we had to wait until a line was free. For those who have grown up never having used a rotary phone, there was no such thing as speed dial or automatic redial!
We could use the paper tape reader on the left of the machine to feed in a program, or to save a program from the computer's memory. At the blazing speed of 10 characters per second, it took a LONG time to feed in a program - sometimes 30 minutes or more. We had a couple of large filing cabinets full of paper tape rolls, programs that other students had written or ones which the company supplied to us.
The computer output was printed on the typewriter in the center of the console. It used a roll of paper that was about 8" wide, and in our case was a dull yellow color.
Yes, I'm old, but your turn is coming, kids - someday your children will be laughing at the idea of your beloved iPod
The history of this period of time is pretty obscure! I look back and it seems as though it happened overnight. Seems like only yesterday that as a member of the Boston Computer Society in the 1970s I was waiting outside an MIT classroom for a radio modem to log into the DEC system at Harvard... My old college buddy from my hometown, Paul Steinback (PhD), was the head of CyberNet at Data General earning a whopping $15K a year! Can you believe it. Paul did much better at Boeing.
One might think that this era in history is the most well documented that has ever existed. Why, we have photography and sound recording and movies (and their digital equivalents.) Everything, it seems, has been saved for posterity. How much better preserved we are than our forebears!
Yep, you'd think so. And you'd be dead wrong. I was there to witness much of it early on. But the earlier origins were top secret.
There are huge gaps in our archival record, and oddly enough they have to do with the very things that should be most easily chronicled: our technology. Obsolete technology is disappearing, and with it a vital understanding of what we as a species have accomplished in this world. Decorative arts seem to be deemed worthy of perpetuation, no matter their relative importance, while everything else is consigned to the scrap heap.
Take just the computer - there are surprisingly few organizations who have made an effort to preserve this recent technology. With programmable computers being no more than about 60 years old, we should have a very good record of all that has passed in their development. We don't. Old computers are rare, and the earliest (physically largest) machines are virtually all gone. Of those first pioneers we have nothing but a few bad photos and the occasional fragmentary drawing.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other gaps in our historical records through which technologies, people, organizations, and companies have fallen. There are a few places attempting to preserve bits and pieces of our technological past, and one of them is the Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation (SMECC).
SMECC maintains a fascinating site that gives a good feeling for the breadth of their collections. Particularly valuable are the first-person chronicles of the people who actually made the things in the museum's collection.
A warning: their site is perhaps the worst example of Microsoft FrontPage design. It's not nice to look at, not well laid out, and you'll have to poke around to find the gems. It feels like a throwback to the early '90s internet, which I suppose one could argue is appropriate for a museum. (With all that, it's still better than the average MySpace page.)
Any self-respecting geek could easily spend days there. Whether you're into computers, radios, or microscopes, SMECC has something for you.
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