7 ms·

A new video captures a 1968 demo of IBM’s Executive Terminal

332 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

calrain 2y ago
Recording the history of computing for future generations will be so important for a wide range of studies. It's great people collect, restore, and publish valuable historical pieces like these.
- 10729287 2y ago
  That messsage taped on the box was so moving to read. I felt so proud and thankful toward the man
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    I love that people properly document important stuff like that. My grandma died last year aged 94 or so, and in her inheritance was a load of stuff that she wrote tiny notes on. I've got a plastic ibex head with a barometer on my wall now from the 60's or whatever with a tiny handwritten note taped to the back when and where it was bought. I mean it's worthless in both collectability and sentimental value, but the little note gives it a bit more personality. I should do the same with anything I think is collectible / not trash / may end up in someone else's hands. For example, I bought some LPs over time, I should document when and where I bought them from at least. Maybe print out some information about the band / artist and include it, as the music themself is only part of the "product".
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  I'm not disagreeing, but I'm not necessarily convinced there's real value "for future generations". I love nostalgia, but it seems pretty useless beyond the entertainment value. What benefits do you, or others, see in looking back at these computer systems? Thanks.
  - nxobject 2y ago
    I think history is worth mining for future ideas for producitvity software – especially when we finish mining everything LLMs and RAG can do, we might go back to past experiments in information retrieval. We might know the history now that we're reading this thread... but who's to say that a developer in 2030 who's never read HN has?
  - inatreecrown2 2y ago
    it must be recorded, otherwise it will seem like magic
  - mongol 2y ago
    This is no different to me than other historical artifacts. Old furniture, cars, clothes, books and so on tell a lot about the time they were created, and the people that lived during those times. It is not just about nostalgia. It is about knowing about the past. History and archeology are scientific disciplines where this is crucial.
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      Agreed on the first sentence... I like history too (now I'm middle-aged). I see some benefit, but mostly that seems to be entertainment too. One perhaps can't separate the useful bits from the other bits. Like, those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. But, those who do are mostly doomed to watch from the sidelines as other people repeat it. And even the things that are possibly obviously bad ideas without historical analogues get done...
grapesodaaaaa 2y ago
Can someone explain why the font looks so disjointed on the presentation screen?
- K0balt 2y ago
  I am also curious about this.
- pulvinar 2y ago
  It's clearly a vector display, and my guess is that the beam is being turned off a little too early at the end of each character's final stroke, leaving it lopsided. The bar over a letter must mean that it's true upper-case. Cheesy, but it's what we did when characters were expensive.
tracerbulletx 2y ago
I visited the Computer History Museum this year during Vintage Computer Festival West. When not only can you tour the museum, but the upstairs rooms are crammed full of hundreds of amazing personal collections of vintage computing hardware all powered up and usable. It was a religious experience.
- PaulWaldman 2y ago
  It will be interesting to see the durability of print vs digital content of time. Many web properties are no longer accessible due to M&A activity and Small/solo publishers unable or unwilling to maintain their assets. Archives like WayBack Machine mitigates some of the loss of digital content so long as the archives themselves are still maintained. Will spinning rust be as durable as Microfiche?
  - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
    > Will spinning rust be as durable as Microfiche? Not sure how long microfiche lasts for but someone posted a link here not too long ago about how record companies had embraced magnetic hard drives in the 1990s to store music masters and are starting to find that the drives are no longer readable.
    - kevindamm 2y ago
      It depends a lot on the humidity and heat or light in the environment where the microfiche are being stored. But they should be able to retain their data for 500 or so years. CDs and Laserdiscs are also seeing bitrot. The layer of material that is etched does degrade over time. Error correction helps some, but if it's a writable CD or DVD it's only likely to last a decade or two. M-Drives are CDs that are designed to retain their data for about 1000 years and can be writable by specific consumer drives. Not sure how long the professionally pressed CDs last but it's not that long.
      - sgc 2y ago
        Googling from your comment led to M-Discs, which are available in dvd or blu ray, up to 100gb discs. That looks extremely useful.
MichaelZuo 2y ago
Some of those screen images seem incredibly modern, like a Windows 2000 machine attached to a CRT with a BW filter.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Most of what we do with computers (maybe with the exception of the current AI and ML stuff) was invented or prototyped in the 1970s or earlier. It's just gotten faster, a bit more polished, and a lot more affordable.
Animats 2y ago
That's an early version of the system. I've seen pictures of a later version, which was an IBM 3270 display with a phone handset, but no keyboard. The idea was that the executive would pick up the phone and be connected to someone in a call center who would then do spreadsheet-type operations for them. Don't know if that was deployed much.
- snthpy 2y ago
  Very prescient! That's pretty much how my execs work with MS Teams and my Excel models - they call me and I manipulate them on the screen for them :-D
  - gorkish 2y ago
    In the early days at my company, we had an arrangement where the CEO had 3 monitors on his desk. Two faced him, and one faced the other direction and mirrored one of his screens. There was a second keyboard and mouse attached so that someone could sit on the other side of the desk and collaborate. He could keep private data like email on one monitor and other applications on the shared screens. Somewhat comically these were enormous 21" CRT's so by "desk" I actually mean "dining table" I really enjoyed working this way and kind of wish the same experience could be replicated between multiple machines and with more than 2 people. I would like it if anyone could drag an application onto a shared screen where multiple people could control/interact with it while still having the option to take a window from the shared display back to a private display, ie passsing an application from one system to another.
  - Animats 2y ago
    I'm trying to find a reference for this. I remember it from some ancient IBM ad. The system in the article sounds fancier but more like a one-off demo. The later system was just a second remote display plus a voice line; more deployable. The concept comes from NASA's Apollo Mission Control in the 1960s. These screens on the consoles were all just TV receivers. All the display data went onto a cable TV network. Any console could view any source. The network was remoted out, and displays outside the control room could look, too. Any display could be routed to the big screens, too. The same technology was still in use in some USAF facilities well into the 1980s. (Long story. Short version: the 1970s upgrade project failed.) That kind of switching remains a feature of military command and control centers. Some display may suddenly become important, and others need to look at it.
airstrike 2y ago
Huge "Control" vibes from this article. If you like the aesthetics, action gaming, and the paranormal...yet for some reason have not played this game yet, definitely give it a try. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game)
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  More like CONTROL from Get Smart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Smart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Smart
- moomin 2y ago
  I remember getting to the end, “Fear of a Blank Planet” starts to play and I was “Yes, that’s exactly this game’s aesthetic.”
  - airstrike 2y ago
    I didn't know that song before playing the game (honestly before reading this), but it's exactly the game's aesthetic indeed. Thanks for mentioning it!
    - moomin 2y ago
      Oh, there's a LOT more where that came from. One of my favourite bands. I saw them play live last year and Porcupine Tree have so much great material (and yes, they played Fear of a Blank Planet).
- YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  ‘If you like action gaming’ would actually be a contraindication here. Control’s gameplay is utterly unremarkable, and I suspect you’d actually recommend it to someone who’s never played a 3rd person shooter before, so the pedestrian shooting isn’t so noticeable.
  - airstrike 2y ago
doomlaser 2y ago
Cool.
inatreecrown2 2y ago
Looking at this it is absolutely amazing and almost incomprehensible how far technology has advanced in the years since then.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I think the biggest "shock" is how quickly these things got normalised, but this is in part down to how we used to see this stuff; back in the 90's I first saw stuff on TV about video calls and computers and the like (but turns out that was decades after that kinda thing was first presented and probably a hundred years since it was used in sci-fi), but the way it's presented is all in marketing fashions, like, very intentionally sitting at a desk, dialing a number for a very formal conversation. "real" video calling sort of snuck in through the back doors once people got webcams and MSN / Skype, and became mainstream / common in the 2000's with always-on internet, remote work, etc. And at one point the smartphone and mobile internet got in people's hands and (video) calls became casual. I think the other part there is that it's normal people using them. What I mean by that is that in these videos, it's all very formal corporate people. And then the first people that really get interested in this kind of technology or who have an interest in futuristic stuff are / were the "nerdy" types. (I am probably living in a bubble though). But it was the average joe that normalised this technology.
  - mylastattempt 2y ago
    tl;dr when normal people start using things, it becomes noramlised!
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  This was not even "the technology" of then. This was what engineers were barely capable of, with the technology that did exist, but even most executives who were the type of user it was envisioned for never knew anything about it, much less had anything like this much desktop technology ever. Everybody else in the non-executive category, even more of a complete fantasy. IOW the difference between what you see there vs now is minor, compared to the real "backward" state back then. Even though things like transistor radios were already common, you have to realize that in a huge percentage of dwellings in the US, and way more in the rest of the world, there was still not yet a single transistorized product. I was a young math & electronics geek and was aware of more stuff like this than average. Along with all the much more mature people, like the extremely rare engineering students who might want to work for IBM or something, this was exactly the kind of thing that was inspiring the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" which came out the next year. Anyone who had any clue something like this was already possible, could basically agree how cool it would be and was really looking forward to the 21st century when it would be here. If the world was not destroyed by nuclear war before the 21st century got here :\
unit149 2y ago
-Dunlop saw the opportunity to run another experiment in 1967-68, which he called the “Executive Terminal.” Accessing Dunlop's archives on the Xerox Star that would not have been a stand-alone system ended up requiring a Memorex machine that was accessed through multiple time-sharing CRT models. Piecing together the original audio in archival footage moved restoring the tape in an information management system to Englebart's accelerated NLS database.
bitwize 2y ago
I find it interesting how Dunlop was trying to solve the same kinds of problems Engelbart was, with the added constraint of preserving the shifgrethor of the top IBM executives. The fact that late-20th-century businessmen viewed such things as typing to be subordinates' work has had a more profound effect on the adoption of computer technologies, their development, and their marketing that we in modern times could guess without having known. I'm also reminded of the Ashton-Tate software package Framework, which is one of my favorites from the 1980s. It's what they used to call "integrated software", which was a package of several productivity applications: word processor, spreadsheet, maybe a communications program or database or graphing capability, bundled together and sold as a unit. Unlike, say, Microsoft Works or DeskMate, Framework featured powerful versions of these tools and the ability to create composite documents, as well as a programming language with Lisp-like semantics to automate workflows. Because of this, Ashton-Tate pitched Framework as an executive decision-making tool, which was quite a bit different from how competitor programs like Lotus 1-2-3 were marketed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQMc0yIbvDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQMc0yIbvDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIx-TGUkiSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIx-TGUkiSg
- Nition 2y ago
  Not related to this discussion but, it's fun to see a word from The Left Hand Of Darkness here.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    Near as I can tell, shifgrethor means something like personal dignity, prestige among peers, legitimacy, autonomy, and authority -- all at once. King Argaven considers Genly Ai's existence (and his offer of union with the Ekumen) a threat to his sovereignty as king, because of that Karhide's sovereignty as a nation, also because of that his worth as an individual. He can't separate these concepts because they are all one, they are all shifgrethor. This insight helped me understand the mindset of the IBM executives, which I wouldn't have before; just dismissed it as wrongheaded pre-boomer silliness. The executives saw demeaning themselves with the scutwork of looking things up for oneself as an attack on their position, their dignity and worth as individuals, and the organization as a whole -- perhaps even society as a whole. Those filthy hippies with their (sissy voice) "collaborative work environments" and their "interactive terminals". They're working for the Reds, I tell ya, trying to unravel the nation from the inside! I owe LeGuin a profound debt for opening my mind to mentalities vastly different to my own, yet still essential to the history of the computing world I live in.
db48x 2y ago
> Once the results were assembled, the information specialist conveyed all this information to the executive, cutting from one video feed to another, guided by the executive’s interest and direction. Anyone else reminded of A Deepness in the Sky?
rightbyte 2y ago
Interesting video. It seems like they imagined some sort of pair programming but with the boss sitting behind you. I wonder if it failed it practice due to no boss having the patience of watching a programmer slowly writing out a program. Like, the video reminds me more of scifi computer interaction than actual programming. The boss voice sounds like the robot cops when beating the protagonist in TXH123 or whatever it is called.
- ManuelKiessling 2y ago
  > Interesting video. It seems like they imagined some sort of pair programming but with the boss sitting behind you. I definitely cannot imagine a more wonderful vision of going about my day job as a programmer :-D
deleted 2y ago
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adamc 2y ago
I love that one of the examples is a shopping list for groceries. Given the cost of the system...
- qingcharles 2y ago
  Honeywell Kitchen Computer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42296485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42296485
robocat 2y ago
ĀN ĒXAMPLE is "An Example". Uppercase characters are represented using a bar/macron over the top - I was a bit slow to work that out and I don't remember seeing that convention before. Link just to video: https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k Edit: pulvinar said "It's clearly a vector display". You can see a graph using vector lines at 24:13, zooming at 20:50, and there's graphic lines mixed with text at 28:36.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  IIRC, it was a vector display in front of a raster camera. The same arrangement was used throughout the Gemini and Apollo mission control and up to the early shuttle program - images would be rendered in the RTCC (real-time computer complex(?)) and piped to the slow-scan CRTs in the panels. At the panel the operator could select which video stream they wanted to see. One of the streams was a "channel guide".
hater-nation 2y ago
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HaterState 2y ago
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IAmKozAMA 2y ago
It's comforting to know the demo gods have been cursing us since the 60s. https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k?si=lDjot4Ie6EiQ_IOW&t=573 https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k?si=lDjot4Ie6EiQ_IOW&t=573
wrs 2y ago
Reminds me a bit of Chile’s Project CyberSyn room. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
mrandish 2y ago
Very interesting contrasting visions between IBM's hierarchical approach and Englebart's Mother of All Demos. The IBM vision isn't really even computing based. it's obvious from the video which shows an on-demand point-to-point analog video link between a senior executive's office and a central reference library. The video is only from the library to the executive but the audio is bi-directional allowing the researcher to receive requests, assemble materials which could include documents placed on a video camera stand, transparencies, microfilm or the display output of a video terminal and then display them on the video feed using a video source switch box. It's really more a demo of a dedicated corporate video calling system. > Dunlop’s 1968 video demonstration of the Executive Terminal and the Information Center proceeds in three acts. The article doesn't make this clear but the linked videos are not a video demonstration but instead unedited B-roll shots without audio probably captured to be cut-aways edited into a narrated video demonstration. Unfortunately, that video demonstration isn't part of this collection (or was never created).
vincent-manis 2y ago
One very small correction: QUIKTRAN wasn't a “mathematical utility”, but an early timesharing system, I think running on a 7044 (coincidentally, my first mainframe). It offered an interactive Fortran system, with editing and debugging facilities. IBM's later CALL/360 system was a successor to this, adding PL/I and Basic. Interesting UX fact: IBM researchers looked at user satisfaction on this system. They found that it wasn't poor response time that bothered people, but variability of response times. If users couldn't predict how long an operation would take, that bothered them. So they inserted delays so that average response times were maybe longer, but variance was lower. And users were happier.
urbandw311er 2y ago
Wow: “I don’t know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologise. It started that way and we never did change it” Truly a sense of looking back into the past and seeing history in the making.

332 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

Recording the history of computing for future generations will be so important for a wide range of studies. It's great people collect, restore, and publish valuable historical pieces like these.

10729287 2y ago
That messsage taped on the box was so moving to read. I felt so proud and thankful toward the man
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I love that people properly document important stuff like that. My grandma died last year aged 94 or so, and in her inheritance was a load of stuff that she wrote tiny notes on. I've got a plastic ibex head with a barometer on my wall now from the 60's or whatever with a tiny handwritten note taped to the back when and where it was bought. I mean it's worthless in both collectability and sentimental value, but the little note gives it a bit more personality. I should do the same with anything I think is collectible / not trash / may end up in someone else's hands. For example, I bought some LPs over time, I should document when and where I bought them from at least. Maybe print out some information about the band / artist and include it, as the music themself is only part of the "product".
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
I'm not disagreeing, but I'm not necessarily convinced there's real value "for future generations". I love nostalgia, but it seems pretty useless beyond the entertainment value. What benefits do you, or others, see in looking back at these computer systems? Thanks.
- nxobject 2y ago
  I think history is worth mining for future ideas for producitvity software – especially when we finish mining everything LLMs and RAG can do, we might go back to past experiments in information retrieval. We might know the history now that we're reading this thread... but who's to say that a developer in 2030 who's never read HN has?
- inatreecrown2 2y ago
  it must be recorded, otherwise it will seem like magic
- mongol 2y ago
  This is no different to me than other historical artifacts. Old furniture, cars, clothes, books and so on tell a lot about the time they were created, and the people that lived during those times. It is not just about nostalgia. It is about knowing about the past. History and archeology are scientific disciplines where this is crucial.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    Agreed on the first sentence... I like history too (now I'm middle-aged). I see some benefit, but mostly that seems to be entertainment too. One perhaps can't separate the useful bits from the other bits. Like, those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. But, those who do are mostly doomed to watch from the sidelines as other people repeat it. And even the things that are possibly obviously bad ideas without historical analogues get done...

grapesodaaaaa 2y ago

Can someone explain why the font looks so disjointed on the presentation screen?

K0balt 2y ago
I am also curious about this.
pulvinar 2y ago
It's clearly a vector display, and my guess is that the beam is being turned off a little too early at the end of each character's final stroke, leaving it lopsided. The bar over a letter must mean that it's true upper-case. Cheesy, but it's what we did when characters were expensive.

tracerbulletx 2y ago

I visited the Computer History Museum this year during Vintage Computer Festival West. When not only can you tour the museum, but the upstairs rooms are crammed full of hundreds of amazing personal collections of vintage computing hardware all powered up and usable. It was a religious experience.

PaulWaldman 2y ago
It will be interesting to see the durability of print vs digital content of time. Many web properties are no longer accessible due to M&A activity and Small/solo publishers unable or unwilling to maintain their assets. Archives like WayBack Machine mitigates some of the loss of digital content so long as the archives themselves are still maintained. Will spinning rust be as durable as Microfiche?
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  > Will spinning rust be as durable as Microfiche? Not sure how long microfiche lasts for but someone posted a link here not too long ago about how record companies had embraced magnetic hard drives in the 1990s to store music masters and are starting to find that the drives are no longer readable.
  - kevindamm 2y ago
    It depends a lot on the humidity and heat or light in the environment where the microfiche are being stored. But they should be able to retain their data for 500 or so years. CDs and Laserdiscs are also seeing bitrot. The layer of material that is etched does degrade over time. Error correction helps some, but if it's a writable CD or DVD it's only likely to last a decade or two. M-Drives are CDs that are designed to retain their data for about 1000 years and can be writable by specific consumer drives. Not sure how long the professionally pressed CDs last but it's not that long.
    - sgc 2y ago
      Googling from your comment led to M-Discs, which are available in dvd or blu ray, up to 100gb discs. That looks extremely useful.

MichaelZuo 2y ago

Some of those screen images seem incredibly modern, like a Windows 2000 machine attached to a CRT with a BW filter.

SoftTalker 2y ago
Most of what we do with computers (maybe with the exception of the current AI and ML stuff) was invented or prototyped in the 1970s or earlier. It's just gotten faster, a bit more polished, and a lot more affordable.

Animats 2y ago

That's an early version of the system. I've seen pictures of a later version, which was an IBM 3270 display with a phone handset, but no keyboard. The idea was that the executive would pick up the phone and be connected to someone in a call center who would then do spreadsheet-type operations for them. Don't know if that was deployed much.

snthpy 2y ago
Very prescient! That's pretty much how my execs work with MS Teams and my Excel models - they call me and I manipulate them on the screen for them :-D
- gorkish 2y ago
  In the early days at my company, we had an arrangement where the CEO had 3 monitors on his desk. Two faced him, and one faced the other direction and mirrored one of his screens. There was a second keyboard and mouse attached so that someone could sit on the other side of the desk and collaborate. He could keep private data like email on one monitor and other applications on the shared screens. Somewhat comically these were enormous 21" CRT's so by "desk" I actually mean "dining table" I really enjoyed working this way and kind of wish the same experience could be replicated between multiple machines and with more than 2 people. I would like it if anyone could drag an application onto a shared screen where multiple people could control/interact with it while still having the option to take a window from the shared display back to a private display, ie passsing an application from one system to another.
- Animats 2y ago
  I'm trying to find a reference for this. I remember it from some ancient IBM ad. The system in the article sounds fancier but more like a one-off demo. The later system was just a second remote display plus a voice line; more deployable. The concept comes from NASA's Apollo Mission Control in the 1960s. These screens on the consoles were all just TV receivers. All the display data went onto a cable TV network. Any console could view any source. The network was remoted out, and displays outside the control room could look, too. Any display could be routed to the big screens, too. The same technology was still in use in some USAF facilities well into the 1980s. (Long story. Short version: the 1970s upgrade project failed.) That kind of switching remains a feature of military command and control centers. Some display may suddenly become important, and others need to look at it.

airstrike 2y ago

Huge "Control" vibes from this article. If you like the aesthetics, action gaming, and the paranormal...yet for some reason have not played this game yet, definitely give it a try. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game)

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
More like CONTROL from Get Smart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Smart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Smart
moomin 2y ago
I remember getting to the end, “Fear of a Blank Planet” starts to play and I was “Yes, that’s exactly this game’s aesthetic.”
- airstrike 2y ago
  I didn't know that song before playing the game (honestly before reading this), but it's exactly the game's aesthetic indeed. Thanks for mentioning it!
  - moomin 2y ago
    Oh, there's a LOT more where that came from. One of my favourite bands. I saw them play live last year and Porcupine Tree have so much great material (and yes, they played Fear of a Blank Planet).
YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
‘If you like action gaming’ would actually be a contraindication here. Control’s gameplay is utterly unremarkable, and I suspect you’d actually recommend it to someone who’s never played a 3rd person shooter before, so the pedestrian shooting isn’t so noticeable.
- airstrike 2y ago

doomlaser 2y ago

Cool.

inatreecrown2 2y ago

Looking at this it is absolutely amazing and almost incomprehensible how far technology has advanced in the years since then.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I think the biggest "shock" is how quickly these things got normalised, but this is in part down to how we used to see this stuff; back in the 90's I first saw stuff on TV about video calls and computers and the like (but turns out that was decades after that kinda thing was first presented and probably a hundred years since it was used in sci-fi), but the way it's presented is all in marketing fashions, like, very intentionally sitting at a desk, dialing a number for a very formal conversation. "real" video calling sort of snuck in through the back doors once people got webcams and MSN / Skype, and became mainstream / common in the 2000's with always-on internet, remote work, etc. And at one point the smartphone and mobile internet got in people's hands and (video) calls became casual. I think the other part there is that it's normal people using them. What I mean by that is that in these videos, it's all very formal corporate people. And then the first people that really get interested in this kind of technology or who have an interest in futuristic stuff are / were the "nerdy" types. (I am probably living in a bubble though). But it was the average joe that normalised this technology.
- mylastattempt 2y ago
  tl;dr when normal people start using things, it becomes noramlised!
fuzzfactor 2y ago
This was not even "the technology" of then. This was what engineers were barely capable of, with the technology that did exist, but even most executives who were the type of user it was envisioned for never knew anything about it, much less had anything like this much desktop technology ever. Everybody else in the non-executive category, even more of a complete fantasy. IOW the difference between what you see there vs now is minor, compared to the real "backward" state back then. Even though things like transistor radios were already common, you have to realize that in a huge percentage of dwellings in the US, and way more in the rest of the world, there was still not yet a single transistorized product. I was a young math & electronics geek and was aware of more stuff like this than average. Along with all the much more mature people, like the extremely rare engineering students who might want to work for IBM or something, this was exactly the kind of thing that was inspiring the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" which came out the next year. Anyone who had any clue something like this was already possible, could basically agree how cool it would be and was really looking forward to the 21st century when it would be here. If the world was not destroyed by nuclear war before the 21st century got here :\

unit149 2y ago

-Dunlop saw the opportunity to run another experiment in 1967-68, which he called the “Executive Terminal.” Accessing Dunlop's archives on the Xerox Star that would not have been a stand-alone system ended up requiring a Memorex machine that was accessed through multiple time-sharing CRT models. Piecing together the original audio in archival footage moved restoring the tape in an information management system to Englebart's accelerated NLS database.

bitwize 2y ago

I find it interesting how Dunlop was trying to solve the same kinds of problems Engelbart was, with the added constraint of preserving the shifgrethor of the top IBM executives. The fact that late-20th-century businessmen viewed such things as typing to be subordinates' work has had a more profound effect on the adoption of computer technologies, their development, and their marketing that we in modern times could guess without having known. I'm also reminded of the Ashton-Tate software package Framework, which is one of my favorites from the 1980s. It's what they used to call "integrated software", which was a package of several productivity applications: word processor, spreadsheet, maybe a communications program or database or graphing capability, bundled together and sold as a unit. Unlike, say, Microsoft Works or DeskMate, Framework featured powerful versions of these tools and the ability to create composite documents, as well as a programming language with Lisp-like semantics to automate workflows. Because of this, Ashton-Tate pitched Framework as an executive decision-making tool, which was quite a bit different from how competitor programs like Lotus 1-2-3 were marketed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQMc0yIbvDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQMc0yIbvDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIx-TGUkiSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIx-TGUkiSg

Nition 2y ago
Not related to this discussion but, it's fun to see a word from The Left Hand Of Darkness here.
- bitwize 2y ago
  Near as I can tell, shifgrethor means something like personal dignity, prestige among peers, legitimacy, autonomy, and authority -- all at once. King Argaven considers Genly Ai's existence (and his offer of union with the Ekumen) a threat to his sovereignty as king, because of that Karhide's sovereignty as a nation, also because of that his worth as an individual. He can't separate these concepts because they are all one, they are all shifgrethor. This insight helped me understand the mindset of the IBM executives, which I wouldn't have before; just dismissed it as wrongheaded pre-boomer silliness. The executives saw demeaning themselves with the scutwork of looking things up for oneself as an attack on their position, their dignity and worth as individuals, and the organization as a whole -- perhaps even society as a whole. Those filthy hippies with their (sissy voice) "collaborative work environments" and their "interactive terminals". They're working for the Reds, I tell ya, trying to unravel the nation from the inside! I owe LeGuin a profound debt for opening my mind to mentalities vastly different to my own, yet still essential to the history of the computing world I live in.

db48x 2y ago

> Once the results were assembled, the information specialist conveyed all this information to the executive, cutting from one video feed to another, guided by the executive’s interest and direction. Anyone else reminded of A Deepness in the Sky?

rightbyte 2y ago

Interesting video. It seems like they imagined some sort of pair programming but with the boss sitting behind you. I wonder if it failed it practice due to no boss having the patience of watching a programmer slowly writing out a program. Like, the video reminds me more of scifi computer interaction than actual programming. The boss voice sounds like the robot cops when beating the protagonist in TXH123 or whatever it is called.

ManuelKiessling 2y ago
> Interesting video. It seems like they imagined some sort of pair programming but with the boss sitting behind you. I definitely cannot imagine a more wonderful vision of going about my day job as a programmer :-D

deleted 2y ago

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adamc 2y ago

I love that one of the examples is a shopping list for groceries. Given the cost of the system...

qingcharles 2y ago
Honeywell Kitchen Computer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42296485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42296485

robocat 2y ago

ĀN ĒXAMPLE is "An Example". Uppercase characters are represented using a bar/macron over the top - I was a bit slow to work that out and I don't remember seeing that convention before. Link just to video: https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k Edit: pulvinar said "It's clearly a vector display". You can see a graph using vector lines at 24:13, zooming at 20:50, and there's graphic lines mixed with text at 28:36.

rbanffy 2y ago
IIRC, it was a vector display in front of a raster camera. The same arrangement was used throughout the Gemini and Apollo mission control and up to the early shuttle program - images would be rendered in the RTCC (real-time computer complex(?)) and piped to the slow-scan CRTs in the panels. At the panel the operator could select which video stream they wanted to see. One of the streams was a "channel guide".

hater-nation 2y ago

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HaterState 2y ago

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IAmKozAMA 2y ago

It's comforting to know the demo gods have been cursing us since the 60s. https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k?si=lDjot4Ie6EiQ_IOW&t=573 https://youtu.be/UhpTiWyVa6k?si=lDjot4Ie6EiQ_IOW&t=573

wrs 2y ago

Reminds me a bit of Chile’s Project CyberSyn room. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

mrandish 2y ago

Very interesting contrasting visions between IBM's hierarchical approach and Englebart's Mother of All Demos. The IBM vision isn't really even computing based. it's obvious from the video which shows an on-demand point-to-point analog video link between a senior executive's office and a central reference library. The video is only from the library to the executive but the audio is bi-directional allowing the researcher to receive requests, assemble materials which could include documents placed on a video camera stand, transparencies, microfilm or the display output of a video terminal and then display them on the video feed using a video source switch box. It's really more a demo of a dedicated corporate video calling system. > Dunlop’s 1968 video demonstration of the Executive Terminal and the Information Center proceeds in three acts. The article doesn't make this clear but the linked videos are not a video demonstration but instead unedited B-roll shots without audio probably captured to be cut-aways edited into a narrated video demonstration. Unfortunately, that video demonstration isn't part of this collection (or was never created).

vincent-manis 2y ago

One very small correction: QUIKTRAN wasn't a “mathematical utility”, but an early timesharing system, I think running on a 7044 (coincidentally, my first mainframe). It offered an interactive Fortran system, with editing and debugging facilities. IBM's later CALL/360 system was a successor to this, adding PL/I and Basic. Interesting UX fact: IBM researchers looked at user satisfaction on this system. They found that it wasn't poor response time that bothered people, but variability of response times. If users couldn't predict how long an operation would take, that bothered them. So they inserted delays so that average response times were maybe longer, but variance was lower. And users were happier.

urbandw311er 2y ago

Wow: “I don’t know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologise. It started that way and we never did change it” Truly a sense of looking back into the past and seeing history in the making.