5 ms·

What do you know about the history from before you were born? Punchcards? Vacuum tubes?

scarygliders 3y ago
I learned about punch cards, when I discovered my high school in Scotland, in the 1980's, had card readers that were lying on a shelf unused for years. It was the Physics teacher who ran a computer club I'd joined in the school. We got to use those old HP "calculators" which were big bulky machines which had a display consisting of a single line of I think, 80 character LEDs, ran a form of BASIC, had a built in cassette tape reader (and writer) to load or store programs. The card reader attached to these clunky big things. I asked the physics teacher why they weren't used - I remember him saying it was because they weren't working. My 13 year old mind kind of fixated on them; the cards were in the same format as punched cards, except you marked them by drawing a single diagonal line across one of the rectangles which represented an ASCII character; each card had an array of such characters and you wrote a complete BASIC program by correctly marking each card. It took many such cards to write a program. Long story short, I got the card readers working again. The physics teacher just nodded his head - he was one of the old-skool kinda guys with a beard, who showed they were impressed, by displaying such stoic reactions. It was at that point that I learned about punched cards; basically the same principle but using punched holes rather than marking the individual rectangles. As I was born in 1969, I feel I had the priviledge of growing up during the various eras the article speaks of; by the time I attended high school I was growing up with Sinclair ZX81s (My first home computer), VIC-20s, C= 64s, Amiga 500s (My first Amiga). Amiga 1200s. My first PC was some 386 thingy I bought from a pal. This article reminds me of a lot of common knowledge I'd completely forgotten over the ensuing decades - such nostalgia!
- dboreham 3y ago
  I think we went to the same school. Except my physics teacher had no beard.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
There used to be a fairly standard history that started with Jacquard loom punched cards, moved along to Hollerith's census processor, then through the early electronic versions of same, perhaps via a flashback to the telegraph. Then the first valve-based stored program computers after WWII ("incredibly unreliable"), and the transistor revolution which made reliable computing possible, via punched cards and DECtape. Then command-line timesharing, graphic systems, workstations, GUIs, and the rest, through to the 90s. It felt like a very logical and connected progression. Anyone in the business would be familiar with it, if only in overview. The UK had a preview of commodity computing with its cheap 8-bit micro scene in the early 80s. In the US computers remained far too expensive to be widely used. That seemed to change in the late 90s. Computing came to mean desktop and eventually handheld devices connected to the Internet. There were - still are - supercomputers, but they're a tiny niche. It became about commodity hardware appliances for commodity users with commodity software and tooling. The software also became appliance-ised. In a sense computing stopped having a history, in the same way other consumer goods like fridges, cars, and microwaves don't have a history. (Of course they do, but no one thinks about it while using them or buying them.) It was a huge and under-noted cultural shift. The next shift - AI - is already happening, and I'll guess we'll see the same lack of interest in "manual" computing history from the 1990s to the 2020s when AI-assisted computing becomes mundane and pervasive.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Where is that history published? I never encountered the full thing, though I picked it up in bits and pieces. Is there a serious, well-written history someplace? > (Of course they do, but no one thinks about it while using them or buying them.) Wrong crowd! :) Every time I see a microwave, I think of the chocolate-melting-in-pocket story. Cars have endless associations. Fridges - I wonder how efficient ice boxes were, how long they stayed cold, etc. (obviously the convenience of having the 'cold' delivered over powerlines is hard to beat).
adamrezich 3y ago
I was born in 1991 and my elementary school growing up had Apple ][s and in middle school (2002–2005) we learned to use Hypercard in computer class—so my baseline level of knowledge about computers from before I was born, before self-directed learning came into play, is more than kids these days, at least.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Why did they have Apple ][s?? How did they maintain them?
  - adamrezich 3y ago
    Apple used to be heavily invested in getting its computers into public schools in the US, kind of like how Google is with Chromebooks now. we didn't get candy-colored iMacs until I was in like 4th grade.
fortyseven 3y ago
All well before my time, but still fascinating to read and learn about. Even when I was in my teens, reading in Steven Levy's "Hackers" about the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and the genesis of modern hacking culture was addictive to me. Being uninterested in history is a fault of the individual, not necessarily an age concern.

I learned about punch cards, when I discovered my high school in Scotland, in the 1980's, had card readers that were lying on a shelf unused for years. It was the Physics teacher who ran a computer club I'd joined in the school. We got to use those old HP "calculators" which were big bulky machines which had a display consisting of a single line of I think, 80 character LEDs, ran a form of BASIC, had a built in cassette tape reader (and writer) to load or store programs. The card reader attached to these clunky big things. I asked the physics teacher why they weren't used - I remember him saying it was because they weren't working. My 13 year old mind kind of fixated on them; the cards were in the same format as punched cards, except you marked them by drawing a single diagonal line across one of the rectangles which represented an ASCII character; each card had an array of such characters and you wrote a complete BASIC program by correctly marking each card. It took many such cards to write a program. Long story short, I got the card readers working again. The physics teacher just nodded his head - he was one of the old-skool kinda guys with a beard, who showed they were impressed, by displaying such stoic reactions. It was at that point that I learned about punched cards; basically the same principle but using punched holes rather than marking the individual rectangles. As I was born in 1969, I feel I had the priviledge of growing up during the various eras the article speaks of; by the time I attended high school I was growing up with Sinclair ZX81s (My first home computer), VIC-20s, C= 64s, Amiga 500s (My first Amiga). Amiga 1200s. My first PC was some 386 thingy I bought from a pal. This article reminds me of a lot of common knowledge I'd completely forgotten over the ensuing decades - such nostalgia!

dboreham 3y ago
I think we went to the same school. Except my physics teacher had no beard.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

There used to be a fairly standard history that started with Jacquard loom punched cards, moved along to Hollerith's census processor, then through the early electronic versions of same, perhaps via a flashback to the telegraph. Then the first valve-based stored program computers after WWII ("incredibly unreliable"), and the transistor revolution which made reliable computing possible, via punched cards and DECtape. Then command-line timesharing, graphic systems, workstations, GUIs, and the rest, through to the 90s. It felt like a very logical and connected progression. Anyone in the business would be familiar with it, if only in overview. The UK had a preview of commodity computing with its cheap 8-bit micro scene in the early 80s. In the US computers remained far too expensive to be widely used. That seemed to change in the late 90s. Computing came to mean desktop and eventually handheld devices connected to the Internet. There were - still are - supercomputers, but they're a tiny niche. It became about commodity hardware appliances for commodity users with commodity software and tooling. The software also became appliance-ised. In a sense computing stopped having a history, in the same way other consumer goods like fridges, cars, and microwaves don't have a history. (Of course they do, but no one thinks about it while using them or buying them.) It was a huge and under-noted cultural shift. The next shift - AI - is already happening, and I'll guess we'll see the same lack of interest in "manual" computing history from the 1990s to the 2020s when AI-assisted computing becomes mundane and pervasive.

wolverine876 3y ago
Where is that history published? I never encountered the full thing, though I picked it up in bits and pieces. Is there a serious, well-written history someplace? > (Of course they do, but no one thinks about it while using them or buying them.) Wrong crowd! :) Every time I see a microwave, I think of the chocolate-melting-in-pocket story. Cars have endless associations. Fridges - I wonder how efficient ice boxes were, how long they stayed cold, etc. (obviously the convenience of having the 'cold' delivered over powerlines is hard to beat).

adamrezich 3y ago

I was born in 1991 and my elementary school growing up had Apple ][s and in middle school (2002–2005) we learned to use Hypercard in computer class—so my baseline level of knowledge about computers from before I was born, before self-directed learning came into play, is more than kids these days, at least.

wolverine876 3y ago
Why did they have Apple ][s?? How did they maintain them?
- adamrezich 3y ago
  Apple used to be heavily invested in getting its computers into public schools in the US, kind of like how Google is with Chromebooks now. we didn't get candy-colored iMacs until I was in like 4th grade.

fortyseven 3y ago

All well before my time, but still fascinating to read and learn about. Even when I was in my teens, reading in Steven Levy's "Hackers" about the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and the genesis of modern hacking culture was addictive to me. Being uninterested in history is a fault of the individual, not necessarily an age concern.