Questions tagged [history]
History of computers, digital electronics, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
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What key factor led to the sudden commercial success of MS Windows with v3.0?
Microsoft Windows was originally introduced in 1985, ostensibly to compete with the Apple Macintosh, and other computers shipping with graphical shells by that time. However, early versions of Windows ...
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Retrocomputing software development process/methodologies
This is a test question based on this meta post. If the question can be reworded to be more on-topic, please feel free to suggest improvements. This is an open ended question about software ...
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It's now safe to turn off your computer
One thing I remember very well from my childhood is the screen you got at the end of a shutdown process on old computers:
I don't know if this was a Windows 95/98/2000/ME only thing but I wonder why ...
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How were the first ZX Spectrum games written?
Being a child of the 80s I loved my ZX Spectrum, did my best to learn BASIC but I felt like the games I was playing (Jetpac, Dizzy, Renegade etc) were perhaps not written using BASIC.
I wondered: how ...
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Back in the late 1980s, how was commercial software for 8-bit home computers developed?
When hobbyists wanted to write software for e.g. the Commodore 64, they either used the built-in BASIC interpreter (with all its limitations) or some native tools, like compilers for other languages ...
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Why did 80x25 become the text monitor standard?
Prior to the 1981 release of the IBM PC, the VT05 (72x20 1970), VT50 (80x12 1974), VT52 (80x24 1975), and VT100 (80x24 1978) text terminals were used on many Unix machines and the PDP-11 (probably the ...
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Why are the symbols on the number keys of PC & Mac keyboards different to ASCII keyboards?
On a US-layout PC keyboard, the symbols above the number keys are as follows:
Whereas the keyboard on an Apple II is different:
Note, for example, the '(' and ')' symbols are now above 8 and 9, and '...
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What is the oldest computer capable of running a modern version of GNU/Linux?
A bit of a trivia question: What is the oldest hardware capable of running a modern Linux-based operating system, including user-space? (Not necessarily GNU userspace, but running a standard GNU/Linux ...
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Why did the IBM 650 use bi-quinary?
The IBM 650, announced in 1953, was the world's first mass-produced computer. It represented numbers in decimal, which is understandable, both because it needed to work with exact money amounts, and ...
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Was there a clearly identifiable "first computer" to use or demonstrate the use of virtual memory?
The NPR.org news article and podcast How The World Has Changed! Science During The 40 Years Of 'Morning Edition' includes the photo below with the caption
Before the introduction of the personal ...
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History of Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q for flow control
Which OS was the first to use Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q on the console for pause and continue?
I first discovered Ctrl-S in IBM PC DOS 1.1.
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First commercial DOS game?
What was the first commercial game sold for use on IBM/MS/PC DOS after the IBM August 12, 1981 release.
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Historical price of ROM
Historical price charts for RAM are quite readily available, e.g. in the mid-seventies a ballpark figure was a penny a byte. What was the price of ROM (assuming you were getting the chips produced in ...
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Cheapest type of Read-Only Memory allowing Random access before Year 1970
Back in the 50s and 60s people had:
random access, read-write memories like Magnetic Cores.
sequential access, read-write memories like Delay Lines and Magnetic Tapes.
And:
sequential access, write ...
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Filesystems with versioning
I've been reading through The Unix Hater's Handbook. It has many, many very valid criticisms. (I'm still raging that terminal escape codes aren't in the terminal driver...)
There is one anomaly though:...
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Why did 8-bit Basic use 40-bit floating point?
Nowadays floating point is usually either 32 or 64 bits, sometimes 16, occasionally 128. But of course, the Basic interpreters on the 8-bit machines, having to implement floating point in software ...
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What was the IBM PC cost saving for using the 8088 vs 8086?
The decision to use the 8088, a version of the 8086 with the data bus restricted to 8 bits, in the original IBM PC, seems strange on the face of it, certainly hurt performance and intuitively shouldn'...
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What early home computers have more than one CPU, where both could be used by the programmer? [closed]
I am interested to know if any computers that are on-topic for this site had more than one CPU, where this plurality could be leveraged by a programmer.
Some cases I don't so much care about:
The ...
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What was the first programming language to support “operator chaining”?
The Python language has a neat feature: An expression like x < y <= z is interpreted, according to mathematical convention, as equivalent to x < y and y <= z. Operands are evaluated only ...
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Graphics chips in 1980
Suppose you were trying to build a computer with a color graphics display in 1980, you have limited engineering resources and time to market is critical, so you want to get as many of the parts off ...
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Why were relays prevalent in early 1940s computers when vacuum tubes were also available?
Many of of the computers built in the 1940s used relays for logic (see here and here):
Bell Labs Model I, 1940
Bletchley Park Bombe, 1940
Zuse Z2, 1940
Zuse Z3, 1941
Bell Labs Model II, 1943
Bell ...
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Why do all the Speech Synthesizers have that same Voice?
The first time I ever played with software speech synthesis on a microcomputer (not hardware synthesis, like in TI's Speak & Spell) was around 1983, using S.A.M for the Commodore 64.
A year later,...
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Where does the hierarchical directory structure originate from?
Windows, Macintosh, Unix/Linux: today, they all support a hierarchical directory structure. The differences are in the details (mount points vs drive letters), but all use a hierarchical directory ...
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What was the purpose and history of the C64's special keys?
I never had a Commodore 64 but I've always been curious what the purpose and history of some of the special keys were. In particular:
C=
Run/Stop
Clr/Home
Restore
I'm mostly used to the standard ...
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Why were early personal computer monitors not green?
Green was traditionally the most common color for computer monitors; it combines strain-free readability with low cost.
Given this, it's surprising that the first versions of the Commodore PET and ...
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Limiting factor on sprite sizes
Early consoles and home computers that were optimized for games, tended to provide sprites. From a game programmer's viewpoint, these were good to have. Of course, one always wanted more and larger ...
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What was the earliest system to explicitly support threading based on shared memory?
The notion of multiple processes has been around a long time, at least since the IBM 360. Multiple processes running at the same time, in separate memory spaces with protection from each other.
(In ...
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Why did 3.5" floppies win (and not another size)?
It's an open question whether desktops would've kept using 5.25" until the end of the floppy era, but laptops meant something smaller was going to be introduced; that much was essentially ...
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Did Nintendo pay WDC for their use of the 65816 core?
When Nintendo used the 6502 core in the NES (as part of the Ricoh 2A03/2A07 microprocessor and sound generator), they circumvented the 6502's patent protection by disabling the BCD arithmetic. As a ...
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Over its lifetime, how many Apple II computers were sold?
It would be nice to break it down by model if possible.
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First computer emulator in Windows
I released my ZX Spectrum emulation Wspecem, and GPL sources first time publicly in the Internet at large, the 15th May 1996, for Windows 95.
I am quite sure it was the first ZX Spectrum emulation ...
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How were 4-digit IC part numbers assigned?
It seems that integrated circuits of the 1970s tended to have 4-digit part numbers. This includes not only the ones that came to be well-known like CPUs (Intel 4004, 8008, 8080, 8085, 8086, 8088, ...
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How was the Traf-O-Data 8008 simulator developed?
Traf-O-Data was the first business partnership between Paul Allen, Bill Gates and Paul Gilbert. In order to develop the software for their custom-built Traf-O-Data machine (Intel 8008 Inside™), ...
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Where and when did the `0x` convention for hexadecimal literals originate?
By the early 1980s, C was using 0x as a prefix to indicate integer literals expressed in hexadecimal, e.g., 0xCAFE. This did not exist in B as of 1972, though B did support octal integer literals via ...
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Why did the stock Amigas not have a battery for keeping the time/date?
The Amiga computers were advanced machines meant to do all sorts of things, including file management. They had a GUI OS (Workbench) and everything right from the very start. They were not some games-...
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Why green phosphor instead of amber?
According to this answer to Why were early personal computer monitors not green? they had a severe disadvantage in that you had to choose between 'too dim' and 'rapid burn-in' whereas amber could ...
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Was there an input device capable of entering all Algol 60 symbols with correct appearance?
This question was inspired by recent discussion on early keyboards and character sets, and mention in passing about how the COBOL designers were concerned about not using "non-existent" ...
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When did smart terminals arrive?
In the days of mainframes and minicomputers, a common user interface was a serial terminal where each keystroke was sent to the computer, which could respond with an update to the contents of the ...
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Does anyone have the source code of an early program written in Assembly? [closed]
I am interested in looking at the source code of any program that was written in Assembly just about when the Assembly language was invented.
If anyone have a source code for such a program, please ...
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Why was `!` chosen for negation?
It seems that the use of the exclamation mark ! to denote negation started with the C programming language (as far as I can tell from my Google research). Nowhere though is mentioned who and why chose ...
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How exactly did Windows become the OS of the home PC?
As far as I understand it, the whole personal computing revolution that Microsoft Windows did was not entirely by its own design. Is it true that the Windows OS at its core was originally designed to ...
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What technological factors drove the rise of "high-speed" modems in the early 1990s?
The first inexpensive modem I ever purchased was a 300 baud direct-connect unit for the C64 User Port in late 1983. I recall that a couple of years later (1986), 1200 baud modems were affordable and I ...
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Did any compiler fully use Intel x87 80-bit floating point?
There is a paradox about floating point that I'm trying to understand.
Floating point is an eternal struggle with the problem that real numbers happen to be both essential and incomputable. It's the ...
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Why does nobody attempt to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine?
The Difference Engine was built in the 90s.
Why has nobody succeeded in building the Analytical Engine?
Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine as a general-purpose computer to succeed his ...
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Is there any code in Firefox (as of 2020) that comes from Netscape Navigator?
Inspired by comments on the previous question Is it true that Netscape Navigator eventually became Mozilla Firefox? (Answer: Yes).
In 1998, Netscape released a large amount of their existing source ...
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Why were single quotes ('…') chosen for characters, and double quotes ("…") for strings?
In C, '' is used to denote a character, while "" is used to denote a string. Why was this syntax chosen?
I tried to research this using Wikipedia’s Timeline of Programming Languages along ...
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Where does this esoteric Pascal operator come from?
In the documentation for an implementation of Pascal for a Soviet computer, I've encountered a very weird language extension. I'll try to translate it:
Branching operator (branch)
Syntax
&...
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What did code on punch cards do with the other six bits per column?
In the fifties and sixties, program source code was typically stored on punch cards, one card per line.
The most common card format was the IBM 80 column by 12 row. For source code, this was commonly ...
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Why were floppy drives not any faster?
180rpm to 360 rpm, unlike 12000rpm on optical discs, was how fast floppy disks got.
I am not sure, whether all drives had the same speed, but 360rpm is not close to the physical stress limitations of ...
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What accounted for the cost of ENIAC?
I'm used to the fact that first-generation computers were very expensive, which I had always assumed was because they contained large numbers of vacuum tubes, each of which is a rather complex, high ...
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