10.30 Modern computers

You've heard the story before, the Babbage Engine, ENIAC, et. al. I'm not going to repeat all that.

Nor do I really want to spend much time waving my hands at Gordon Moore and company, and the 8080 and exponential development (or the other Moore and FORTH), or re-hashing arguments as to why what happened shouldn't have. (Actually, I want to do that, but it's beside the point here.)

I don't think anyone will argue that the Crays were not computers. Nor will anyone argue that the HP 2100 series were not computers.

Radio Shack's TRS 80 Color Computer, which initially was ROM cartridge only, was also a computer, even without tape or disk drives. (It gets special mention here because it was my favorite computer from the era, in spite of Radio Shack's lack of attention to it.)

Some people (myself included, sometimes) want to argue that the original IBM PC was not really a computer, because it only pretended to be multi-tasking, but when we do that, we are, intentionally or otherwise, are being digital bigots.

When I say such silly things, my argument is that the IBM PC, in it's original design, was just a big, fancy adding machine. But, as I have already indicated here, that's defining computers much more narrowly than we should.

Yeah, my cell phone is more powerful than my first Macintosh, which, itself, had a faster processor and way more memory and disk than the computers I first used at college. In fact, before my iBook G4 broke its video generator chip loose (so that I have to keep re-soldering its fine-pitch surface contact leads with a very fat 1 mm soldering iron) I would sometimes amuse myself while walking home from the train, that the computer I had in my shoulder bag was a bit beyond my wildest dreams as a student, even when I transferred from Odessa College to Brigham Young University.

If I had the money and the need, I could now buy, for a quarter of the price I paid for my tangerine clamshell iBook G3, a new Lenovo notebook computer with an AMD dual processor design that is as much more powerful than the iBook G4 as it was more powerful than the tangerine. (I want to avoid supporting INTEL right now, until somebody can break through to their management on the idea that making the best possible x86 processors by no means excuses the predatory marketing practices they have used to eliminate their competition in so many fields.)

(Yeah, I was a bit short-sighted when I was a student. I couldn't see the desire people have for making machines do the repetitive calculation tasks, even when it would often be so much easier to do them by hand. Or, I could see it, but I didn't want to feed that demand. Complex calculation is not at all what makes us human, but it is part of us, and I think we lose something when we aviod doing it.

But that's all beside the point.

Maybe I should have tried turning my 6800 assembler student project into a real product, to support the microcontrollers Motorola would be making based on the 6801. I probably could have made some good money that way. I don't know. It doesn't matter to me now. Unless someone now wants to give me money to turn that assembler into one that supports some of Freescale's current crop of eight and sixteen bit CPUs.

Back to the subject.)

I'm not that old. (I keep teling myself.)

When I was in college, I talked with my EDP teachers about the theoretical limits of my 6800- (err, 6802-) based Micro Chroma 68 prototyping board. And we talked about the limits of the college's Univac 1100 series computer. (I think it was an 1106 that an oil field company had decided they didn't need, letting the college get it somewhat on the cheap.)

The college computer was definitely not cutting edge, but it wasn't that old at the time, either. Comparing the raw power of the machine as it was configured with the raw power that I could theoretically wire into my prototyping board, other than the number of CPUs, it was surprisingly close.

Roughly speaking, only a tenth as powerful (other than the number of CPUs and the OS), but at about a thousandth of the price.

And we talked about the Apple (II) and the news we were hearing about the IBM PC.

My teachers got excited, and started taking PCs much more seriously. Pretty soon we had an Apple II lab, with Pascal courses, and then an IBM PC lab with the PCs doubling as terminals to the 1100/10 (as I think they had updated it).

I almost got excited, but at the time I was sure I was going on to a higher level college, to be a physicist.

(Sometimes I wish I had let myself get excited and follow in the footsteps of Jobs and Wozniak. It could have been interesting to have introduced a set of hobby computers, somewhere between the Altair 8800 and the IBM PC, but with Forth built into the bootstrap ROM instead of BASIC, well before Sun started their push with Open Firmware. Sweet dreams, indeed.)

Before I get lost in my own personal daydreams of revisionist history fiction, let's see if there is something to learn from this short history.