Questions tagged [history]
History of computers, digital electronics, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
725
questions
9
votes
1answer
301 views
Unknown device in MANIAC I machine room
In my answer to the question about the LANL MANIAC I posted a picture of it in its natural habitat. In the picture there's a mystery device electrical-taped to one of the columns by the system ...
15
votes
1answer
1k views
Is the MANIAC in the movie 'The Magnetic Monster' the real MANIAC computer?
I just watched the movie The Magnetic Monster, which is a 1953 science-fiction thriller. The main premise is hokum, but there's an amount of reasonable-seeming background "science" around.
...
5
votes
1answer
161 views
Why did the Atari 5200 revert to only two controller ports?
The Atari 5200, released in 1982, had four controller ports, an unusual feature which as far as I know had never been seen before, and would not be seen again until the late nineties.
The 1983 ...
6
votes
1answer
201 views
What hardware was used for Magic circa 1985?
Magic, which is described as a "smart" layout system for integrated circuits, was open-source and available by the end of 1983. As far as hardware and OS requirements, early documentation ...
10
votes
1answer
984 views
Why was the Microvitec Cub monitor made of metal?
In British schools in the early eighties, the iconic microcomputer was the BBC Micro, typically connected to the equally iconic Microvitec Cub color monitor, as described in this video.
Why this ...
7
votes
0answers
170 views
1990s BBS game featuring mining elements from a planet
Sometime in the 90s (sorry, can't be more specific) I used to dial in to a BBS and play a multi-player game that involved manually mining elements from a planet. It was very detailed, you got employed ...
10
votes
4answers
1k views
Anecdote in Weinberger's Psychology of Computer Programming: is it ARPANET?
Gerald Weinberger, in the 1971 book The Psychology of Computer Programming, gives the following anecdote:
The numerous stages [of reporting?] can produce interesting effects, as a result of filtering ...
15
votes
0answers
354 views
When was an image of an apple first used to promote the APL language
The APL community is contemplating the adoption of a common logo but some are worried about trouble from Apple lawyers. Now, IBM and others have been using apple motifs in promoting APL for a long ...
2
votes
0answers
152 views
Did other Acorn keyboards use two-shot molding?
The BBC Micro hardware specification includes the clause:
The legend on the keys will be achieved by two-shot moulding
This is a process by which the glyphs are made to run all the way through the ...
5
votes
1answer
175 views
What were the characteristics of the Siemens 8160 and 9750 terminals?
An answer to a recent question https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/22332/4274 referred to the Siemens 8160 and 9750 terminals, which struck me as interesting enough to ask about separately in ...
2
votes
1answer
159 views
Were any form-based applications designed for more than 80 columns?
The traditional standard display for business computers was 80 column text (with either 24 or 25 rows).
Business software, roughly speaking, falls into two categories:
Horizontal applications like ...
1
vote
2answers
496 views
Was server operating systems ever created with a terminal operating system in mind? [closed]
I have always thought that in the case of Microsoft's server operating systems that they were created with the idea that the end-user of those servers would use Windows. I also thought the same for ...
8
votes
1answer
808 views
Why did IBM want to keep ICL alive?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limited
International Computers Limited (ICL) was a British computer hardware, computer software and computer services company that ...
6
votes
4answers
1k views
What was the first Ethernet hub?
An Ethernet hub is – well, Wikipedia does an impeccable job of summarizing what it is:
An Ethernet hub, active hub, network hub, repeater hub, multiport repeater, or simply hub is a network hardware ...
20
votes
5answers
6k views
Was 10BASE5 a mistake?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 gives a succint but vivid description of the physical layer of the first version of Ethernet and its subsequent replacement:
10BASE5 (also known as thick ...
14
votes
2answers
1k views
Who considered multimedia capability a liability for a business computers, and why?
For technical reasons, business computers of the late '70s usually had little multimedia capability. There have been modern claims (e.g., in the comments on this video) that such capability was ...
3
votes
2answers
1k views
What was the first CPU/FPU without a hardware square-rooter?
The first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, ENIAC had a "square rooter":
five of the accumulators were controlled by a special divider/square-rooter unit to ...
18
votes
3answers
5k views
Did anyone ever put half a megabyte of memory in an Altair?
The Altair 8800 typically, at least in the early years after its release in 1975, operated with no more than a few kilobytes of memory, for the excellent and sufficient reasons that memory was ...
25
votes
3answers
4k views
When did 5.25″ floppies exceed the capacity of 8″?
When 5.25″ floppies were introduced, in the mid-to-late seventies, they would have had less capacity than the older 8″ because, well, less area on which to store data.
On the other hand, being cheaper ...
8
votes
4answers
1k views
Why Kansas City Standard (KCS/CUTS) differs from Bell 103/202/212 modem protocol?
While both were data transfer protocols serving streams at 300/1200 baud, why did they choose different frequencies, marks, modulation, and anything else?
I understand that they serve different ...
0
votes
0answers
277 views
What is the origin of the "my" variable/method/et-al in didactic materials?
I think back to many tutorials and code snippets in which I have seen variables, functions, and files with "my" or "my_" prepended. What is the origin of this convention?
21
votes
3answers
3k views
What windowing system had the first size-proportional scroll bar?
I came across a link to a site that shows the history of the scroll bar. While the content of the site is pretty thin and devoid of explanation, it does show Xerox Star, Lisa, Mac, Amiga, Windows, ...
5
votes
2answers
479 views
What was the reason that the original Western NES console had a "cartridge bed" that had to be pushed down to play?
In Japan, they had the Famicom. You put in the cartridges on the top, just like with the later SNES and other consoles.
But for Europe and the USA (and the entire "West"), the "NES"...
36
votes
6answers
7k views
Why couldn't early C compilers handle variable declarations between statements?
In modern C, you may place variable declarations between statements:
do_something();
int x;
x = something_else();
However, older C compilers required that variables are declared before all statements:...
5
votes
2answers
242 views
Did any computer ever signal floating-point overflow purely with a sticky flag?
Every implementer of floating-point arithmetic, needs to think about how to signal overflow.
One possible way to do it is by raising an exception, though this creates the problem that 'exception' can ...
11
votes
2answers
448 views
Was `wchar_t` ever widely adopted by the Unix culture in actual practice?
My very rough understanding of character encoding history as it relates to the Unix family of platforms/languages is that:
They started using single-byte (7/8/9-ish bit) character sets like ASCII/...
7
votes
1answer
110 views
Which versions of TECO had merged G- and Q-registers?
In this answer to 'Why were TECO variables called Q-registers?' I reference documentation indicating that the original Q-registers were separate from the same-named G-registers. (I.e., X1 would store ...
10
votes
6answers
2k views
How prevalent is the CR (classic MacOS) line ending today? [closed]
In a parser library I am maintaining, I stopped recognizing singular Carriage Return characters as line endings to reduce complexity in the tokenizer's position tracking code, a perennial source of ...
5
votes
1answer
197 views
What was the first control display unit with selector keys around the display?
If not the first, then the one that became popular first (in any application; this is not limited to aviation systems).
A control display unit, CDU for short, is fairly common in aviation, perhaps ...
27
votes
3answers
3k views
Odyssey game console: what's the deal with "English Control"?
I've just read about the original Magnavox Odyssey console. Interesting story. But what I'm wondering about are the game controllers, and in particular the knob labeled as "English". This ...
3
votes
1answer
469 views
Were any 680x0 features specifically requested by a customer?
The Motorola 680x0 processor family was used in a variety of systems, including Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Sharp X68000, and Sinclair QL systems. Had any of these customers wanted a ...
9
votes
1answer
310 views
How did the HP 9100 use base 14?
Wikipedia's page on numeral systems claims:
14 Tetradecimal
Programming for the HP 9100A/B calculator and image processing applications; pound and stone
Exactly how did the HP 9100A/B use base 14? ...
16
votes
5answers
6k views
What is the source of the Apple logo?
What is the source of the Apple logo? I heard that it was a reference to Alan Turing, who died of cyanide poisoning after eating an apple.
19
votes
3answers
5k views
Which language had the first scanf?
As a companion to the question "What was the first programming language to have 'printf'?", which language had the first scanf?
It doesn't have to be literally called scanf, but I am looking ...
26
votes
3answers
7k views
In what ways was the Soviet STRELA computer "designed to function during a nuclear winter"? Or at least parts of it?
From Strela computer:
Strela computer (Russian: ЭВМ Стрела, arrow) was the first mainframe computer manufactured serially in the Soviet Union, beginning in 1953.
This first-generation computer had ...
12
votes
2answers
1k views
Transition from static to dynamic shared libraries
A static library, also known as an archive, is one intended to be statically linked. Originally, only static libraries existed. Static linking must be performed when any modules are recompiled. (From ...
45
votes
3answers
5k views
How did varargs in C develop?
C has a feature for variadic functions, my understanding is this feature was originally a hack, relying on the simple stack-based parameter passing used by early C implementations and that some time ...
10
votes
1answer
279 views
What sort of intermediate representation did the first Fortran compiler use?
Proebsting's Law asserts that improvements to compiler technology double the performance of typical programs every 18 years, but even granted that this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it's not really ...
11
votes
1answer
1k views
What computer programs did Grace Hopper work on during World War II?
Admiral Grace Hopper was a computer pioneer. She wrote the first linker and one of the first compilers; was a proponent of human-readable computer languages, machine-independence of languages, and ...
39
votes
11answers
7k views
What's the origin of terminating strings by setting the high bit of the last character?
I was looking at a hex dump of the ROM BASIC from the original IBM PC and found some byte strings like this (ASCII dump is on the right):
50 52 49 4e d4 9d 4c 49 53 d4 9e 50 4f d3 1b 45 PRIN..LIS.....
15
votes
1answer
2k views
What was the first programming language to use `+` for string concatenation?
Many reasonably modern programming languages (Java, Python, C++, Ruby) use + to represent string concatenation. "A" + "B" is the string "AB".
Languages with a more ...
7
votes
2answers
1k views
What are the "other crontabs" that /etc/crontab refer to? [closed]
The /etc/crontab file on ubuntu has a header that reads:
# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when ...
20
votes
6answers
5k views
Why did some video games apparently use "interlaced" video modes?
I was under the impression that "interlaced" video modes was only a thing for remote television content because it saved bandwidth to only send 50% of the data to the homes, so you could fit ...
3
votes
1answer
225 views
Why were procedure parameter specifications optional in the ALGOL 60 Revised Report?
In Algol 60 procedure declarations, the 'specification' part was optional for by-name parameters. The specification is what gives (loosely speaking) the type of parameter - whether it's real, integer,...
16
votes
4answers
3k views
Why does Pascal have numeric labels?
Pascal was intended, in part, to be a simple language to implement. Some of the design decisions reflecting this are
Declarations/definitions must be given in a strict order (labels, constants, types,...
5
votes
0answers
229 views
What was the first device to "beep" in lieu of tactile feedback to button presses?
I'm splitting this question off of When was beeping invented, in a user interface sense? because I think it's more answerable on its own and I suspect likely to still be computing-related.
At some ...
5
votes
2answers
437 views
When was beeping invented, in a user interface sense?
UPDATE: thanks all, lots of good discussion but I think this question is a bit too vague to be answerable. I'm casting my own close vote against it and will re-ask a more specific one.
Specifically I ...
-6
votes
4answers
406 views
Is UTF-8 responsible for a lot of the cpu-needed bloat in the last ten to fifteen years? [closed]
Some say UTF-8 was the best solution.
The price you pay is that it basically makes all parsing optimizations that rely on a fixed relationship of byte offset to character position unusable.
Compilers, ...
31
votes
3answers
11k views
Why do some people say PHP was "Pretty Home Page"? Was it once PHP's real name?
"Pretty Home Page" is not found in official PHP history. But I saw several people call PHP that way on the internet, and even in some books, teaching & publications:
An Experimental ...
36
votes
3answers
3k views
Why does make only accept tab-indentation?
The syntax for Makefiles requires that indented lines start with a tab, and not a space. So far as I can tell, this has been the case even for very early implementations of make. But even modern-day ...
