Questions tagged [history]
History of computers, digital electronics, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
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When did CMOS processors become the fastest?
The earliest CMOS microprocessors (RCA 1802, HP Stirling RISC, et.al.) were slower than contemporaneous NMOS microprocessors and Bipolar logic computers. (IIRC, both the 1802 and the 6502 could be ...
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Which historical Unixes supported terminal I/O with five or six bits per character, and with what character sets?
The specification for termios.h includes a facility for controlling the number of bits per character sent over the serial line, the CSIZE and CSn constants. You can request five, six, seven, or eight ...
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when did command line applications start using "-h" as a "standard" way to print "help"?
I am interested to hear about the history because I have a prominent command line product that has decided to use -h for something that does not print a help message.
when did command line ...
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Why does cat with no argument read from standard input?
In advice about how to design good CLI commands I read:
If your command is expecting to have something piped to it and stdin is an interactive terminal, display help immediately and quit. This means ...
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What was 'Maclogal'?
While reading about the ATOLL Checkout Language in the April 1965 issue of DATAMATION (pp 33-35), I came across one letter to the editor (pg 12), discussing the volume required to house the ~1QB ...
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Why did Windows 3.0 fail in Japan?
According to The launch of Windows 3.1 in Japan was such a big event that they even called it “Windows Day” (Bullfrag):
When Microsoft released Windows 3.0 in the United States in 1990, they were ...
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Did Digital Research clean-room MS-DOS?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS
DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in ...
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When did Kay Nishi offer a million dollars for a competing DOS?
The development of Digital Research's fully-compatible MS-DOS competitor, DR DOS, was encouraged when, according to https://retrotechnology.com/dri/dri_wein.html
After DOS Plus for Philips we did a ...
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Looking for help understanding a 'Reciproot' routine on the Manchester Mark I (1951)
I'm hoping to understand a routine written for the Manchester Mark I [NOTE: a comment from Raffzahn suggests this may be the Ferranti (wikipedia link) and not the Manchester Mark I] which computes ...
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What did Windows 2 do about varying aspect ratio?
There was a time when computer graphics had to deal with non-square pixels. Happily that time ended once everyone had VGA or better.
But Windows 2 supported both EGA and VGA. And while the latter has ...
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Which is the first version of DOS to support more than one reserved sector in a FAT file system?
I'm trying to fix a problem when trying to use DOS stuff on SSDs. The problem is sector alignment in an SSD is completely different from what DOS expects, and writes to FAT do funny things when the ...
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Was ∆ used in APL as a substitute for space because ECMA-17/ISO 2047 specified △ as graphical representation for space?
Wikipedia on naming conventions in programming states (without source):
In APL dialects, the delta (Δ) is used between words, e.g. PERFΔSQUARE (…)
This is an unusual choice, but I notice that ECMA-...
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When did the 386 overtake the 286?
The Intel 80386 was released in 1985, but was initially expensive, and took a long time to fully displace the earlier 80286 from the market; subjectively, I remember significant numbers of 286 ...
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What were the 189 GUI design elements that Apple claimed 'look and feel' copyright over?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp.
Apple listed 189 GUI elements; the court decided that 179 of these elements had been licensed to Microsoft in the ...
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Were there cross-compiler online services for the public?
Compiling takes computing power, and to a lesser extent, storage and memory. Back in the 70s and 80s personal computers weren't powerful enough to compile codes in high-level languages or if capable ...
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Did Pascal programmers really move on to Java in the 90s?
According to this video Pascal suffered great loss of percentage in the 90s. There is, contrary to the common belief that C prevailed over Pascal, a counterargument that Pascal programmers moved on to ...
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What was the first backlit keyboard and were the shift characters illuminated?
I recently bought a Logitech G915 TKL Keyboard. https://www.logitech.com/assets/65840/g915-lightspeed-wireless-rgb-mechanical-gaming-keyboard-qsg.pdf
It's great but a massive disadvantage is that ...
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What were top-10 popular programming languages in the 60s, 70s, and the 80s?
TIOBE index has been tracking the most popular programming languages since 2001, which reflects the dominance of C/C++/Java in the first score of 21st century. However C derivatives hadn't beat Pascal ...
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What is the earliest use in C of indexing the bits of a float or double to sample a table lookup?
One common way to produce an approximation of a function like the logarithm or the exponential is to precompute a table of values (a lookup table) for the output or some intermediate stage of the ...
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Did RapidLok etc knock floppy drives out of alignment?
From https://www.filfre.net/2016/01/a-pirates-life-for-me-part-3-case-studies-in-copy-protection/
But balanced against the one great advantage of RapidLok for the legitimate user was at least one ...
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Circuit design tool mentioned in AT&T Unix promotion
In this video from AT&T about Unix is a circuit design tool displayed that is claimed to be based on YACC (timestamped link).
Does anyone have information about this tool?
Like:
Documentation
...
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History of High Availability in the mainframe and minicomputer eras?
When tracing the source of High Availability, I found to my surprise it led to a company named Tandem Computers which since 1974 made a series of minicomputers called NonStop system, to my surprise ...
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Mainframe Hater's Handbook?
The famous The UNIX-HATERS Handbook claims this mailing list had been inspired by TWENEX-HATERS(1) and other *-LOVERS mailing lists, a long tradition of MIT.
Moreover, the quote below implies there ...
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Origin of "string"
When did people start referring to an ordered group of characters as a "string"? Did this name come from before / outside of the computing field, or is it special to computing?
The metaphor ...
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How did relay computers handle inductor flyback?
Many early computers were relay-computers. Like any other inductor, when the coil in a relay is shut off, the current through the coil continues to flow. This is a result of Faraday's Law of ...
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In what sense would the Atari 3200 have been a 10-bit machine?
The Atari 3200 was a canceled project that would have produced a compatible successor to the 2600. Little seems to be known about it; about the best reference I have been able to find is https://...
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Who invented garbage collection?
Google tells me that John McCarthy invented garbage collection, for Lisp in 1959. However, a video on C that I was watching (‘Learn C Programming with Dr. Chuck’, c. 6:40) mentions the lack of a ...
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When was the term ‘directory’ replaced by ‘folder’?
I started using computers with MS-DOS and as far as I can remember the data structure holding files was called a directory (it held other directories as well), DIR is still used to list the content of ...
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Why is Ctrl-V the Paste shortcut?
We now casually use the Ctrl-C to Copy.
We also use Ctrl-X to Cut. I understand this choice. We cannot reuse Ctrl-C and the 'X' represents a cross. Crossing something out on a sheet of paper was ...
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What are the most historically relevant implementations of Prolog? And what platforms?
Does anyone know what are the most historically relevant implementations of Prolog, in the sense of being extensively used, and producing representative programs written in this language? And what ...
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Why did it take 2 hours to switch to a standby VAX? [closed]
According to this section of an excellent book on the history of Novell,
I had actually started a business attempting to do some phases of what we are doing here at Novell. My plan was to develop to ...
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How could early UNIX OS comprise so few lines of code?
I start my journey to become a hardware / software specialist with an internship in two weeks time and decided to start studying the C language early.
I came across this video, Learn C Programming ...
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What is the history of SysV i386 calling convention for struct return?
I would like to understand historical roots of the quirk in the SysV calling convention for the 32-bit x86, which was inherited by the ELF standard, and so remains used on Linux to this day. Consider ...
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What cultural problems did TSMC Camas run into in 1995? [closed]
According to a speech made by Morris Chang in Arizona, transcribed at https://interconnect.substack.com/p/globalization-is-dead-and-no-one
When I started TSMC back in 1987, I had a dream. Probably ...
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Did anyone ever run out of stack space on the 6502?
Unlike its main rival the Z80, the 6502 had a size limit of 256 bytes for the hardware stack. That sounds like a very tight limit, but in my experience, it was never actually an issue; by the time you ...
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When was the CHS (cylinder - head - sector) system invented and what was before it?
There is some information about the CHS (Cylinder/Head/Sector) addressing system and its design flaws and limits. As long as CHS was not compatible with Zone Bit Recording, which became very popular ...
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References for the complexity of the COBOL language
One thing that struck me about the design of COBOL was that it was surprisingly complex, particularly for the era. As in, if I were trying to squeeze a compiler into a few tens of kilobytes of memory, ...
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Did Microsoft really reserve secret APIs in Windows?
In the nineties when the antitrust case was building against Microsoft, various accusations of abuse of monopoly power were leveled against the company, some of which were proven true.
One of the more ...
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What was the second platform supported by SAP?
SAP, the well-known ERP software company, started out in the 1970s, with the first version of their software running on IBM mainframes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_R/2
What was unique about R/2 ...
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What was the first commercial route planning software for home computers?
Nowadays route planning applications are ubiquitous on smart phones, on embedded or dedicated devices, and on the web. With these applications, you input a destination and a starting point (or the ...
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Why does the FAT file system have separate ‘hidden’ and ‘system’ attributes?
File systems used by DOS and Windows have used file attribute bits as a relatively prominent feature. The first of them, FAT, exposes four attributes to the user: read-only, archive, hidden and ...
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What was IBM's internal Specification Language of the 1980s?
Within IBM's internal Development community, there was a move in the 1980s to bring our skills up to date. As part of this, we were introduced to a specification language, independent of the ...
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What motivated stack being invented originally?
In the very early days (the earlier the better! Babbage maybe?) when something like a stack was developed, what motivated it originally?
I am aware that these days it makes many features possible, ...
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Did they forget to add the physical layout to the USB keyboard standard?
USB keyboards must have been one of the first devices that could be connected to a USB port.
When you are from the US it's possible that you have never faced this problem.
But in all other parts of ...
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Why did x86 support self-modifying code in the 80s and 90s?
In this question, by 'self-modifying code', I mean software that writes to a section of code that the CPU will very soon fetch and attempt to execute.
I am not here talking about the software ...
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Was any DRAM ever slower than 2 MHz?
4096-bit dynamic RAM chips were commonly used for main memory in microcomputers of the late seventies. According to the Mostek MK4096 datasheet, it was sold in various speed grades, with the slowest ...
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Why were nested functions excluded from B and C?
I'm learning C and was curious as to why the language does not allow nested functions.
From what I've read, the lack of nested functions seems to have been a simplification that was inherited from its ...
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Was any indentation-sensitive language ever used with a teletype or punch cards?
Most programming languages delimit block structure with punctuation e.g. { ... } or keywords e.g. begin ... end. However, some languages such as Python and Haskell delimit it with indentation (...
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When did the natural number of branch delay slots become greater than 1?
Some early RISC CPUs had branch delay slots, the theory being that this would make the CPU both cheaper and faster; you could omit some interlock circuitry, and at the same time, in some cases, ...
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Did underclocking the early Z80 chips improve yield?
The Z80, one of the most successful and well-known of the 8-bit microprocessors, was released in July 1976 at an initial clock speed of 2.5 MHz.
The TRS-80 Model I, released the following year, is ...
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