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Comments: 120 +- Hardware: The Laptop, Circa 1968 on Saturday July 04, @03:28PM
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Harry writes "In 1968, computers tended to occupy entire rooms, and were therefore hard to take with you. But Computerworld reports on Anderson Jacobson's 75-pound Teletype-terminal-in-a-case, an early attempt to let folks compute from anywhere. (Well, anywhere they had power and access to a telephone for the Teletype's acoustic coupler.) Wheels were optional."
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Technology: 45-Year-Old Modem Used To Surf the Web 622 comments
Submission: The Laptop, Circa 1968 by Anonymous Coward
QOTD:
"I'm not really for apathy, but I'm not against it either..."
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Aristotle (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Aristotle (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
this was (for the time) a lighter alternative to a desktop
Yeah, you actually had a door big enough to fit this through.
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Re:Aristotle (Score:5, Insightful)
...Or they didn't move as much. I don't think this was carried around in the way that a laptop was but rather this was (for the time) a lighter alternative to a desktop, similar to the mini-PCs today like the Mac Mini.
Why do people wildly speculate like this when it comes to vintage computing? The people from back then are still around, and you can just ask them.
Yes, we did carry these around like a laptop. Not from room to room during the day, but commuting between home and office and to other offices/sites.
Parent
Once upon a time (Score:5, Interesting)
Just for comparison, 300 baud is so slow that you can read the text faster than it downloads. That teletype is honestly not the most convenient device.
Re:Once upon a time (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd trade my current 6MB connection and today's web sites, email, blogs, etc for the 300 baud modem I had in the 70s/80s and the BBSs, news groups, talk/chat, and useful information on the other end.
People knew how to put lots of information in a few sentences or at most a couple of paragraphs. I may have seen the info show up slowly, 1 character at a time, but after 30-60 seconds I had what I want. Now I have megabytes show up in seconds, but it may take minutes to find the useful information (if useful information is even there)
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Re:Once upon a time (Score:5, Insightful)
No thanks. I'll take youtube, flickr and wikipedia instead, and I was in the BBS scene back in the late '80s early '90s.
Parent
Re:Once upon a time (Score:4, Funny)
Think about what could porn could you look at back then, then tell me if you would still make the trade.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
It was called TTY Art (Score:3, Informative)
Hah (Score:5, Insightful)
What is funny is I was contemplating how to make a statement like yours and get it +5 funny! You aren't insightul, you are forgetful.
BBS's didn't have wikipedia. 99% of your BBS buddies were local. You couldn't order books on your BBS. You couldn't book a vacation to some far off land online--you'd have to use a travel agent. You couldn't play any kind of game with 10,000 other users at the same time. You couldn't be on a bus, a coffee shop, a library, or a park and instantly connect to any BBS in the world all at the same time. Elections weren't won or lost in part because of the effectiveness of a candidates BBS strategy. You didn't have entire political revolutions organized using BBSes either. If Iran was in the midst of a revolution during the BBS era, the US government wouldn't be telling some random BBS not to perform system maintenance because so many iranians were relying on it for communication!
Information? Forget it! You couldn't "google" a BBS and pull up schematics for some random IC. Which BBS did you dial into when you wanted to get a corporations SEC filings? Which BBS had information about the number of legs on a centipede? Which BBS contained streaming, real-time video coming from the olympics and for that matter, which BBS had the scores for every olympic game updated by the second? Which BBS had the wiring digram for a vintage VW bug?
I'm sure right now, some dillegent Slashdotter is going to post some BBS who did those things, but let me ask them this--how did you know of that BBS's existance? There was no Google, Bing or Yahoo for BBSes, and if there was, you'd have to know its phone number (which would probably be non-local).
No sir, you aren't insightful. You are my "+5 Funny" comment only serious. I had fun with BBSes too--but we have moved on. The amount of information available *instantly* at my fingertips is many, many orders of magnitude higher than the sum of all information found on all BBS systems that ever existed.
It is okay to be nostalgic about ANSI art, ACID draw, renegade BBSes, and 16 color gifs of madona in her swimsuit, but don't fool yourself into thinking you are feeling anything else.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
All true, but to be fair, the GP was mostly focused on 80's style "social media", and the kind of posts you would find, or chats you would have. YMMV, but really good, quality posting and discussion that's extremely rare on today's discussion boards and tweets and such were the norm back then.
On the other hand, I don't believe there's less of it today than there was then. I think, in fact, there's a lot more. But that's kinda hard to see or keep in mind sometimes when back in the day, it was >50% of t
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I'd trade my current 6MB connection and today's web sites, email, blogs, etc for the 300 baud modem I had in the 70s/80s and the BBSs, news groups, talk/chat, and useful information on the other end.
People knew how to put lots of information in a few sentences or at most a couple of paragraphs.
You aren't insightul, you are forgetful.
BBS's didn't have wikipedia. 99% of your BBS buddies were local.
I think you just proved his point for him. :)
Well, there is something to be said about "local" (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at why facebook is popular. I wager almost your entire friends list is people you know (or knew) in person.
If I were a betting man, my hunch would be that we'll figure out people dont really like socializing with random people on in the internet and what we really want is ways to better communicate with the people geographically and socially close to us. In otherwords, we'll go from "random people scattered across the globe talk about Linux" (slashdot) to "random people scattered across my city talk
There is a reason it takes more effort (Score:2)
Because we haven't figured out how to make it take less. We even have a name for what you describe--"information overload". We've got access to limitless amounts of information now days. Your brain can't handle it. Our technology can barely handle it.
If you could somehow take all the information we have on the internet and "BBS-ize" it, I promise you it would take a hurculean effort for you to find anything.
I gave examples like "IC schematics" and "wiring diagrams" because I'm posting on slashdot. You
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Information overloaded happened as soon as the first libraries were constructed. We only don't feel it when we're in a library because we already know the system (wing > aisle > shelf, fiction by author, non-fiction by topic, etc).
FWIW I think the various social bookmarking sites, although not always super useful, move the work of filtering information from an algorithm to a groups of people with similar tastes who you can link up with. Not quite the same as a BBS but when combine that with forums, it
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OTOH I love nostalgia; the older I get the better I was.
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An ASR-33 is 110 baud.
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It was 10 characters or 110 bits per second. You could read a lot faster than it could print and it only did upper case.
The Teletype was fully mechanical, so you could really understand how it worked and even repair it yourself. They sold cool, reasonably priced tool kits and parts were available.
Anderson Jacobson just packaged a standard Teletype with an accoustical coupler in a huge fiberglass case with casters. I had one of those and got four f
Even back then... (Score:3, Funny)
"Can't wait till they come out with the 300 baud version"
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Actually it was CAN'T WAIT UNTIL {Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.}
But you had to yell to be heard over the machinery inside the Teletype.
Re:Even back then... (Score:5, Funny)
- "But can they run asynchronous?"
Parent
Portables vs. Transportables (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Portables vs. Transportables (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Spinal Tap Stonehenge prop inversion (Score:2, Interesting)
For me anything bigger than 13' isn't portable, but "transportable".
Thirteen feet?! Sheesh, for me anything bigger than 13 feet isn't "transportable" but bloody enormous.
Incidentally, the fact about 2009 that might have most surprised by short-trousered self circa 1968 is the ubiquity of inches. It's not just the Burmese, the Liberians aind the Youessians who're talking about "13 inch screens", "1200 dpi" and so forth these days. it's (for example) Yodobashi Camera hawking consumer durables to people in Tokyo. Can we please go back to the 1968 future of SI?
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13' of sheet and a projector ;)
1976 TI Silent 700 Terminal - $1995, 13 lbs. (Score:5, Interesting)
TI Silent 700 Ad [computerhistory.org]: See how much progress was made in 8 years? :-)
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Re:1976 TI Silent 700 Terminal - $1995, 13 lbs. (Score:5, Informative)
Um, yeah, that "progress" was called the microchip.
Yes, what I think a lot of people may have failed to realise with the ASR-33 is that it's all mechanical. The only electrical part is the solenoid that flips some pins sticking out of the shifter drum back and forwards.
When you press a key, the keypress is turned into a stream of data by a mechanical shifter. When you receive a character, the serial data is unshifted and printed by a mechanical shifter. No electronics to be found at all.
Parent
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Let's not go overboard. The modem is electronic. It is almost certainly also digital. It would just be discrete parts, such as the 7400 series invented in 1964 -- with no microprocessors or any other chip with more than a handful of gates.
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Let's not go overboard. The modem is electronic. It is almost certainly also digital.
Early FSK modems, below 1200 baud, were analog devices. The output side was just an oscillator switched between two frequencies, and the input side was a pair of filters. This was a version of the technology used for radioteletype (RTTY), where it had often been implemented with tubes. (There are some very retro radio hams still using all-tube demodulators with mechanical teletypes.)
At 1200 baud and above, modem tech
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Yes - the excact same mecahnism, actually: It was a current-loop - if current flowed it was a 0, if it stopped, it was a 1! (In some cases, it was +/- current, and in other cases it was 15mA for 1 and 4mA for 0. There were probably several other "standards" as well.)
The true first portable modern computer... (Score:5, Funny)
However, the true* first portable computer began its early development in 1956, got approved in 1958 and entered active service in 1962: (*=The one that melts your face off)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/05/tob_minuteman_1/print.html [theregister.co.uk]
quote from TFA:
the American government was already rocking a line of cutting-edge portable computers that -- had they only been more widely released -- would have melted any tech lover's heart. And their face. And probably most everything within a mile radius.
We're speaking, of course, of the first-ever guidance system baked into the US Minuteman 1 nuclear missile. Maximum portability: about 9,700 km (6,000 mi). Target demographic: Commies.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I cut my teeth back in 1962 on the D17-C computer used by Autonetics in the Minuteman I missile system.
My task was to optically aim the missile by using the North star (Polaris) to transfer azimuths to a collimated light beam... and also to program the computer both to operate in flight and to indicate where the different targets were located in the world. The on board computer would then figure out the shortest path from the launch tube to the target.
USAF reliability efforts. (Score:5, Insightful)
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the USAF put a huge amount of effort into making electronics more reliable, with considerable success. One of their more interesting efforts involved marking a few percent of the Air Force's inventory of electronics boxes with a sticker instructing users that the unit was part of the USAF's Reliability Program, and if it broke, it was to be replaced as a unit, not fixed in the field. The broken unit was to be sent back to a lab (at Wright-Patterson AFB, I think) for analysis.
At the lab, the unit was tested and the failing component(s) found. The, the failing component was disassembled and analyzed. This involved opening up transistor cans and looking at the component under a microscope, and if necessary, an electron microscope. The USAF was trying to understand why components failed in the field. Did a "hermetic" seal leak? Was a bonding wire badly soldered to a pad? Was something mispositioned? Was the transistor substrate damaged?
Results were published in Aviation Week. With enlarged pictures of the defect. Part numbers and names of vendors were given. The USAF deliberately did this to apply pain to vendors.
Over time, parts got much better. By the 1980s, though, the USAF wasn't buying a big enough fraction of the output of the electronics industry to get much attention, much to the annoyance of senior USAF types.
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I used one of these... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I used one of these... (Score:4, Funny)
(Yes, I'm a bit above the median age for slashdot readers.)
I could have never guessed by your username...
Parent
No display (Score:3, Insightful)
Dynabook (Score:3, Interesting)
Alan Kay imagined the Dynabook in 1968. Have a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook [wikipedia.org]
It was to be programmed in Smalltalk, which Kay created over the next few years.
Smalltalk what Objective-C and Cocoa were modeled on. However, even Smalltalk-80 (as in 1980) was more advanced in many ways than Objective-C and Cocoa are in 2009.
I used one of those (Score:5, Interesting)
We had one of those at Sperry Vickers (Troy, Michigan) in 1971, with the acoustic coupler in the wooden case. Even then, it was on the way out; we were moving to Uniscope CRT terminals and UNIVAC DCT 300 printers, connected to a UNIVAC 1108 computer.
Power was supplied to the modem as 120 VAC over otherwise-unused pins in the DB-25 connector from the Teletype Model 33 ASR.
Things were really clunky back then. We still had a full set of mechanical Remington Rand 90-column card gear, programmed by wiring up "connection boxes", mechanical plugboards which used flexible cables like bike brake cables to transmit data from input to output. That, too, was on the way out, but it was still used for a few jobs.
Video Display Printer (Score:2)
This section of the scanned Computerworld page was interesting:
"The new CC-310 Videoprinter is a CRT display printer for use with the..."
I had not heard that terminology before: CRT display printer. Welcome to the paperless society O_o
The suit and hair are classic too.
Slashdvertizement! (Score:3, Funny)
Shame on you, astroturfers.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They don't really call it a laptop, they use 'laptop' to draw a comparison between the somewhat portable teletype and modern portable computers.
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*sheesh!* Kids now days![Ryiah (1324299) that you replied to, not you]
Hell, compared to the first computers I experienced at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1975 and 1976, these 'laptops' would almost be considered 'handhelds' since you did not need a forklift and 20 engineers to move them around.
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LOL!
That was the year I graduated from High School.
I was actually a subcontractor employee with Bendix Field Engineering Corp., working at Goddard's NTTF facility in the Logistics Department, on the graveyard shift then.
No more than a 'parts man' with a security clearance for the Computer Science Corporation's tech's and engineers that had to be on duty 'just in case'.
I was playing a text-based baseball game, and blackjack on those behemoths, not actually 'doing work' on them...much less understanding them!
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Re:CFLAGS (Score:4, Funny)
Have anyone installed gentoo on it? I would like which CFLAGS to use whit it so to have lightning fast system.
Still compiling the kernel. I'll let you know in 2014.
BTW Anyone had compiz running on it?
Now you're pulling my leg.
Parent
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I used:
export CFLAGS="-O2 -march=circa -pipe"
export CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=circa -pipe"
export CHOST="Teletype-circa"
export MAKEOPTS="-j0.01"