Questions tagged [history]
History of computers, digital electronics, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
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Was there any computer since about 1960 without interrupt support?
The invention and spread of interrupts in the 1950s is reasonably well known but I am curious: were there any systems after which didn't support them?
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What was the rationale for the 'INPUT' button on an ICL 1900 console teletype?
ICL 1900 computers were always supplied with 'executive' software tailored to the specific installation. Exec provided simple program load and run facilities. There were no 'lights and switches' on ...
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Why did Linux standardise on RTS/CTS flow control for serial ports
I've recently been working out how best to wire up a serial cable for a vintage plotter, and it's thrown me down the rabbit hole of RS-232.
As far as I can tell, many RS-232 devices which act as DTEs (...
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Who invented file extensions in file names?
Do we know when and where the idea of adding a suffix to filenames was conceived? I have found a lot of information about the history of specific file formats, but I am curious about when the need for ...
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What was the first desktop computer with fully-functional input and output?
What was the first desktop computing system that satisfied the following features:
It fully fit on desktop
It included the full alpha-numeric keyboard
It included a full text display, terminal or ...
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Which computer language was the first with two forward slashes ("//") for comments?
Apparently COMAL created around 1975 had 'em. Anything earlier?
(This Q&A over at the langdev stack doesn't answer this question.)
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What does it mean to "publish machine code"?
The Wikipedia article on “An Open Letter to Hobbysts” says that Bill Gates complained about hobbyists pirating his software, and due to piracy he refused to publish the machine code of his Altair ...
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How were the signs for logical and arithmetic operators decided?
I'm curious as to how exactly some of the logical and arithmetic operator signs were decided? The plus and minus operators make sense, but how was decided that / was the division operator or that * ...
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Why did the Motorola 68000 processor family fall out of use in personal computers in the 21st century?
In the '80s and '90s the Intel x86 and Motorola 68000 families were the two leading microcomputer architectures in the 16-bit/32-bit personal computer scene. The 68000s were even preferred by the ...
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What made the ENIAC "programmable"?
The ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. However, it was programmed by "rewiring", and this is what I do not understand.
When we say "...
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How did Jon von Neumann come up with the idea of the Von Neumann architecture? [duplicate]
The Von Neumann architecture has the following components:
A processing unit with both an arithmetic logic unit and processor registers
A control unit that includes an instruction register and ...
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How was the Amiga console supposed to work with only 32KB of RAM?
During the development of the Amiga, one of the targets was a game console with 32KB of RAM. How was it supposed to work?
by blitting ahead of the beam with the Copper to avoid double buffering?
was ...
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Where can I find the code of the ancestors of the WebKit family of web browsers?
I want to trace the development of the web browser back to the earliest point.
The code that would become WebKit began in 1998 as the KDE HTML (KHTML) layout engine and KDE JavaScript (KJS) engine.
--...
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Did the Soviets need industrial espionage to get IBM software pre-1970?
Due to lack of the OS-level file system on the BESM-6, and to deficiencies of data visualization tools which could help people decide which blocks of a system disk could be reused (the line of ...
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First machine with dedicated scatter/gather?
I know the Cray-1 had scatter/gather addressing, but I am curious if anyone knows what the first machine with this feature might be?
I suspect it is one of the vector machines from this era, perhaps ...
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Did a serial port card reader sink the prospects of consumer chip card readers?
According to https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/z4sm_W1MZXg
at the start of the century there were several efforts for secure
payments involving chip cards (and chip readers).
in ...
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Were punching tools for punch cards with rectangular holes easier to keep sharp than those for round holes?
There is a question here on retrocomputing if round punch card holes where mechanically stiffer:
Were round punchcard holes mechanically stiffer?
I wondered if the reason for the rectangular holes on ...
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Relay computer performance
I'm looking for performance data on relay based computers, and even human based computers. Performance, as in, time to perform an addition, multiple, etc.
The Nordhaus data is all I have been able to ...
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Did the IBM ServiceFree really reach 80 MIPS in 1975?
According to Computer Wars by Charles H Ferguson and Charles R Morris, page 40-41, an IBM researcher named Cocke in the early 70s built a RISC minicomputer called the ServiceFree (because it was meant ...
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How many units of the ZX81 RAM pack were sold?
The Sinclair ZX81 was an extremely popular low-cost home computer, on strength of price, being a computer for less than 100 pounds. It sold over 1.5 million units, according to https://web.archive.org/...
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What is the earliest computer technology to be referred to as "Artificial Intelligence"?
It seems that in recent years, when people talk about "AI", they are usually referring to neural net-based technologies (ChatGPT being the most well known example at the moment). But ...
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Why were OS/360 PL/I procedure calls so expensive in terms of stack space?
In 1977, Guy Steele published a paper entitled Debunking the “expensive procedure call” myth or, procedure call implementations considered harmful or, LAMBDA: The Ultimate GOTO. The paper was the ...
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How much did it cost to develop the 8-bit era graphics chips?
I'm interested in the development cost of different kinds of chips in the 70s and 80s, both for its own sake and because it aids in the understanding of historical events; in technology and business, ...
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Were the Apple II patents, obstacles to cloning?
The Apple II was a simple design relative to its retail price, so attractive to cloners. This naturally led to many lawsuits, at least one of which actually established new copyright law. https://en....
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Was hardware scrolling patented?
One of the most valuable graphical features on early computers that had it, was hardware scrolling, that allowed the horizontal position of the screen to be adjusted by one or more pixels, thereby ...
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Did Atari lobby against FCC regulation change?
In the 1970s, FCC limits on RF emissions applied to 'anything that plugs into a TV', and were stringent and difficult to pass. Atari went to extraordinary lengths regarding this when designing their ...
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Why does the VIC-20 have its cartridge area at a higher adress than the I/O area?
Why did the designers of the Commodore VIC-20 chose to put the main cartridge ROM area at $A000, beyond the character ROM area at $8000 and the I/O area at $9000? Flipping the two around, with the ROM ...
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Which CPU was the first to clear the carry and overflow bits after performing logical operations?
As I work on implementing support for old architectures for the Reko decompiler (https://github.com/uxmal/reko) I notice over and over how consistently most 1980's CPUs echo a pattern.
Since an ...
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What was the cost difference between single and double sided 5.25" floppy drives?
5.25" floppy disk drives for 8-bit computers were by and large single-sided, but the IBM PC used double-sided drives. It would be tempting to explain this by saying, well of course the double-...
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Why does the Commodore 64 have 4K of non-banked RAM at $C000?
I wonder why the Commodore 64 memory map was created as it was. Naively, it seems to be that it would have been more logical to put I/O and the character ROM at $B000 to $BFFF, have the ROMs in a ...
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Were cartridge slots cheaper at the back?
I'm remembering a difference in the design of Commodore computers like the Vic and 64, versus the Atari 8-bits, and game consoles from the likes of Atari and Nintendo: they all had cartridge slots, ...
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Historical installed base figures for early lines of personal computer?
Lately I've been curious about early personal computers and how they became popular. Something I've realized is that my idea of which computers were most prevalent, and when, was quite wrong. I grew ...
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What capabilities did the Mark I Perceptron demonstrate? [closed]
The Mark I Perceptron, developed by Frank Rosenblatt in 1958, was a pioneering supervised image classification learning system. Many articles explain the mathematics behind it, and its shortcomings, ...
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In what ways was the Windows NT POSIX implementation unsuited to real use?
Windows NT implemented POSIX compatibility because some US government contracts required such. It is said that the POSIX implementation was only pro forma, not intended or suitable for real use (i.e. ...
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Difference between program and application [closed]
When I started learning about computers in the mid nineties, all books used the word program to reference any executable that ran under MS-DOS (.exe, .com, .bat).
Applications was a math concept, at ...
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Why was MacOS unix certified?
As I understand it most Linux distros adhere to the UNIX specifications while only a few actually get UNIX certified. If plenty of Linux distros can happily adhere to the standard without being ...
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Anyone know of older mentions of the word "trap" for software interrupts than the IBM 704 manual from 1955?
I've dug into the origin of the word "trap" in computer engineering. The older documented mentions of the term I can find, is the "trapping mode" in the IBM 704, specifically in ...
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Where/when did the sentence "a good developer is lazy" first appear?
The title says it all. Where/When was "a good developer is a lazy developer" (or its equivalent) first said, in which context and for what purpose?
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Why was there never added C/C++ (native) support to HTML web pages? [closed]
I wonder why they never added an interface to run native code (for example assembly/C/C++/Rust...) to HTML web pages? Because without it CPU intense games will never run in the browser.
Some people ...
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What were the release dates for the NEC V series CPUs?
I am trying to determine when the NEC V series CPUs became available. So far I have:
1982 µPD8088
1984 V20
???? V40
???? V41
1981 µPD8086
1984 V30
1988 V33
???? V50
???? V51
???? V53
1986 V60
1987 ...
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Did the rm project remove itself during early development?
Is it true that Brian Kernighan while developing rm accidentally tested the project so that it removed itself? Then, according to story, he had to start over from the beginning because there was no ...
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What was the release date of the MOS 8502?
I have been unable to find when the MOS 8502 was first released to customers. The process it was made on was available from 1979, but MOS don't appear to have used it for their own parts at that time.
...
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How was the order of Unicode block-quadrant characters chosen?
Unicode codepoints 0x2596–0x259f can help you draw primitive graphics by offering all the combinations of on or off for the four quadrants of a glyph. They're available in this order:
▖ ▗ ▘ ▙ ▚ ▛ ...
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Is an X Window System older than release 10 available online?
I'm looking for any copy of the X Window System older than release 10.
The oldest on x.org is X10R3.
Bob Scheifler doesn't have anything.
Jim Gettys may have something, but has yet to retrieve it ...
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Was the Game Boy CPU a completely new layout?
As explained on the Wikipedia Game Boy article and Is the Game Boy Sharp LR35902 object-compatible with the 8080/Z-80?, the Game Boy used a custom CPU that was fairly close to being a superset of the ...
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What happened to Doug Engelbart's NLS?
Apparently, it was sold to "Tymshare" in 1977, but what happened to it after that? Who has the software now? Could it ever be emulated?
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When did HTTP start compressing text?
HTML tends to compress well, typically consisting of text interspersed with repetitive tags. Transparently compressing it for download is a fairly obvious optimization to save bandwidth.
When did Web ...
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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 ...
