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The best small computer in the world (1968) [pdf]
- sengstrom 12y agoNothing like having Don Draper make promo shots for your new computer.
- waterlesscloud 12y agoThat photo of Herbert J Richman is a pure classic.
- mjbellantoni 12y agoThis actually does remind me of classic Oglivy work.
- johnohara 12y agoBefore "The Soul of a New Machine."
- mjbellantoni 12y agoI actually just finish reading that and it's what lead me to this!
- greenyoda 12y agoHere's a picture of the Eclipse MV/8000 "Eagle", the machine they were building in the book: http://www.foxdata.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Data-General-Eclipse-MV8000.jpg http://www.foxdata.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Data-... "The Soul of a New Machine" is a great book, by the way, even if the technology in it is a bit old at this point. Hackers of hardware and/or software should definitely read it. Another interesting book about the creation of a large system is "Show-stopper", by G. P. Zachary, which describes the building of Windows NT.
- peterfirefly 12y agoDoes anybody know more about FHP (the Fountainhead Project) than what little I can read here: http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fhp.html http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fhp.html
- greenyoda 12y agoHere's an account of the Fountainhead Project written by Rich Wingerter, who was a programmer working on the project: http://www.sonic.net/~richw/FHP.html http://www.sonic.net/~richw/FHP.html While searching for this I also found an interesting paper on the Eagle project: "Flight of the Eagle: The Birthing and Life of a Super-Minicomputer" (1996) http://www.faughnan.com/papers/eaglecomp.pdf http://www.faughnan.com/papers/eaglecomp.pdf
- PhantomGremlin 12y agoIt's not just computer nerds who thought that The Soul of a New Machine was a great book. Tracy Kidder received the Pulitzer Prize for it. But that Eclipse picture is boring. Here's how a computer should look. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:360-91-panel.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:360-91-panel.jpg
- e3pi 12y agoSilently and spastically splaying taut fingers to get you the fuck out of his office and stop interrupting a man who works for a living, the great Tom West past 19 May 2011: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_West http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_West
- watmough 12y agoWhat would be the typical use of a machine like this? I'd assume basic roll-up accounting, with programs written on a custom basis per client. Anyone with practical experience?
- jonjacky 12y agoThey were marketed for embedded control and data acquisition in laboratories and factories. See the text on page 5, in "The hardware", where it tells how you can send your program on paper tape to DG and they send you back a read-only memory you can plug in - so your program begins running on power-up without help from an operator. I recall seeing a Nova used in an experimental psychology lab. The first production medical CT scanner included a Nova, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_computed_tomography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_computed_tomography.
- jejones3141 12y agoWow... my first exposure to a computer was a Supernova, set up with four ASR-33 Teletypes and running Data General BASIC, for about eight or nine evenings in the spring of 1971. Changed my life--the next year, without a computer to use, I wrote programs in a notebook which I wish I had kept. Thanks, Data General, NSF, and thanks to Dr. Richard V. Andree.
- muyuu 12y agoI find it quite amusing that the photo-models are the president and the vice president looking manly.
- awor 12y agoand smoking!