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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Book recommendation: Endless Loop
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thwill Guru  Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4311 |
... The History of the BASIC Programming Language ISBN 978-1974277070 Shedders with an interest in the history of BASIC and the early micro-computer industry might like this ... or possibly have lived through it ;-) It's a bit short (170 pages) but I devoured it with interest. Though my go to recommendation on micro-computer history is still the outstanding: Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer ISBN 978-1937785765 Best wishes, Tom MMBasic for Linux, Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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hitsware2 Guru Joined: 03/08/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 719 |
> Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer YES ! I ' ve read that several times ! my site |
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RetroJoe Senior Member  Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
A few of my faves in this vein: "Accidental Empires" - Robert X. Cringely "West of Eden - the End of Innocence at Apple Computer" - Frank Rose "The Soul of a New Machine" - Tracy Kidder "Computer - the History of the Information Machine" - Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray For Commodore fans, there is a documentary on Netflix (in North America - YMMV). Mediocre at best, but Jack Tramiel's route to computing legend has to be one of the weirder ones - he started out by repairing typewriters in the U.S. Army! Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
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OregonJim Newbie  Joined: 24/01/2021 Location: United StatesPosts: 3 |
You can also hear it from the horse's mouth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYPNjSoDrqw I grew up near Dartmouth when this all was happening. Unfortunately, I was a bit too young at the time and didn't get interested until a decade later... -Jim W7JLL - C,ASM,CP/M,DOS,PDP-11,Z-80,6502,68HC11,65C816,80x86,8051,PIC,AVR,ARM,etc. |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
WHAT A SENSATIONAL FIND! I'm very glad that the Dartmouth trustees decided to fund this very well produced video and I'm pleased to note that they claimed the copyrights to the film. I've added it to my permanent bookmarks! I visited Dartmouth, I think in 1963, and met Kemeny and Kurtz. I had finished my work at Cornell in 1960 and was working for Bolt Beranek and Newman on the unsuccessful Architectural Acoustics design work for Philharmonic Hall. BBN had, in 1962, implemented a time sharing system running on a PDP-1 and operated directly by nurses and physicians in Massachusetts General Hospital. Both Kemeny and Kurtz wanted to pump me for whatever I knew about the BBN Time Sharing system. Unfortunately I knew very little about it and could not help them. I was essentially just expanding on the assembler work I had been involved in at Cornell on the IBM 1401 assembler. Acoustical simulation requires a lot of number crunching! We spent quite a lot of time discussing ways to eliminate the Hollerith cards and I kept going back to Hanover every few years until about 1972 to say hello. They were then both interested in how Boeing had managed to multiplex 10 channels of stereo audio plus the controls for all the passenger reading lamps, gasper air outlets and stewardess call signals for up to 160 passenger seats onto a single 72 ohm coax thus triming almost 2500 pounds off the weight of the finished B747 aircraft. I had to tell them that the whole system was initially unstable having been built using the first generation 7400 series TTL devices which did not like the extremely dirty aircraft power supply system and tended to produce psychedelic flashing reading lamp displays. The TTL devices were eventually replaced with CMOS. I remember taking a ride in Kemeny's Thunderbird with the "BASIC" New Hampshire license plate. Damn, I'm really older than dirt! Paul in NY Edited 2021-01-29 15:23 by Paul_L |
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| RetroJoe Senior Member Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
Perhaps, but all that means is you have much better stories to tell - fascinating stuff!! I've always wondered what the median age is around here - I will hazard a guess that >95% of us remember the world before the Internet :) FYI, one of my favorite time traveler fantasies is visiting 1975 or so... and bringing an iPad with me. P.S. Being of Hungarian descent myself, I'm perpetually intrigued by the statistical anomaly of the "Many Hungarians" who have had such a disproportionate impact on the evolution of computing (John Von Neumann, John Kemeny, Andy Groves) and theoretical physics (Leo Szilard, Edward Teller). Don't know what was in the paprika in the 1920s and 1930's, but it must have been strong stuff! Edited 2021-01-29 17:19 by RetroJoe Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
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| OregonJim Newbie Joined: 24/01/2021 Location: United StatesPosts: 3 |
1975 would put me back to being a freshman in high school. Two years later, I built my first computer based on the Cosmac ELF articles in Popular Electronics magazine. I brought it to school - my math teacher pulled me aside and put me in charge of the brand new "computer lab" which consisted of a PDP-11/03 and a couple of VT-52 terminals donated by DEC. Two years after that, I was working for DEC as a technician repairing PDP-11 CPU boards and tape & disk drive controllers. My first "real" computer was a PDP-11, cobbled together from "rejected" parts. I added 14-bit ADC & DAC boards to it (cutting edge at the time) - the same ones used by Boeing to do wind tunnel tests on the 747. I used them to digitize audio and play it back. Having only 256K of memory and 1MB of disk space, I had to find a way to compress the data in order to get more than a few seconds of sound. This was well over a decade before MP3 was invented! Anyway, the seeds had been planted in my career path, and have been growing steadily for more than four decades. :) Edited 2021-01-30 03:35 by OregonJim W7JLL - C,ASM,CP/M,DOS,PDP-11,Z-80,6502,68HC11,65C816,80x86,8051,PIC,AVR,ARM,etc. |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
It's a statistical anomaly. That says it all. Mikolaj Kopernik (1473-1543) was a Polish monk who had trouble getting his Commentariolus published until he changed his name to Nicholaus Copernicus. The population of the Kingdom of Poland (966-1569) is estimated to have been about 3.9 million (at about 1490) of which 1.69 million were ethnic Poles, 1.95 million ethnic Ruthenians, and about 0.26 million Lithuanians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Poland#Kingdom_of_Poland_(966%E2%80%931569) At the same time the population of Europe is estimated to have been 61.6 million. https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/Demographics Which means that the geocentric hypothesis was replaced by the heliocentric hypothesis by the efforts of one Polish monk from an ethnic group of 1.69 M /61.6 M or 2.74% of the european population of that time. I wonder what was in the Keilbasa and Kapusta Zasmazana of that time???? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNIFwtbWngU Then there's this list! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Polish_mathematicians Just some more statistical anomalies! Pavel Artur Jan Waclaw Lepkowski in NY There's no reasonable logic which accounts for Polaks ... we're here just to confuse the rest of you. Edited 2021-01-31 07:04 by Paul_L |
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