Questions tagged [history]
History of computers, digital electronics, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
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What happened to Spatial Freedom and the Astroid controller?
I've been doing some research into 3D mice. Pretty much the only game in town is the space mouse from 3Dconnexion.
In doing this I discovered that its original designer John Hilton left after the ...
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How many kinds of mass-producible ROM is avaliable before 1970? [duplicate]
Back in the days before mask ROM (when invented?) we got core rope memories, or Little Old Ladies memories, which required lots of human labor to build.
Were there any kinds of ROMs which were ...
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What is the story behind 'goto' vs 'go' 'to' in ALGOL-60?
Preamble
As Algol-60 had no reserved words, the language keywords had to be specially marked, e.g. prefixed with an underscore with a trailing space or semicolon (_begin _integer i;i:=42_end), or ...
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Performance characteristics of the DEC Type 30 graphical display
The DEC Type 30 was an early vector graphics display, that was used for an astonishingly wide range of applications for the 1960s. It used a 16-inch circular CRT with high persistence phosphor ...
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Looking for the source code of a sophisticated Pascal pretty-printing program
I'm trying to find a 70s or very early 80s source code of a Pascal pretty-printing program which is more advanced than the version mentioned on the Prettyprint wiki page which is undated and somewhat ...
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Did any notable product use Intel's first RAM?
The 3101 SRAM was Intel's first product. At $99.50 for 64 bits, it had enough memory to store the characters expensiv. (Sorry, the final e costs extra.) Is there a record of any product using it?
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Why did the Bell 103 modem specification use 1070Hz, 1270Hz, 2025Hz and 2225Hz?
The Bell 103 modem spec gives the following frequencies to use:
Transmit Side: 1070Hz (space) and 1270Hz (mark)
Receive Side: 2025Hz (space) and 2225Hz (mark)
Why were these specific frequencies ...
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What was the earliest that it would have been practical to manufacture a USB-C plug for consumers?
In the early 1980's, plugs with low pin density like DB-25 were common on home computers. The industry was still relatively small, not everything in the manufacturing chain was automated. I assume a ...
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How were card sequence numbers typically checked?
Although average punched cards had eighty columns, often only seventy-two were used for characters; the remaining eight were ignored by software. Hence arbitrary metadata could be included with each ...
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Did the PDP-8 designers consider a stack?
The PDP-8 was a remarkable exercise in minimalist computer design; some of the aspects of its design are discussed in detail at PDP-8 transistor count
One feature it did not have was a stack. Instead, ...
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What was the rationale behind 32-bit computer architectures?
Though today various power-of-2 word sizes seems to be the norm, back in the 50-60s multiple-of-6 word sizes was more popular and was required by Department of Defense(DOD) in particular.
36-bit ...
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Were any vacuum tube computers built with wire wrap?
I'm trying to gain some understanding of how early computers were built; as discussed in What accounted for the cost of ENIAC? the cost of first-generation computers was not necessarily mostly about ...
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Did other computer companies need to license Fortran from IBM?
Reading a fascinating online book about the history of computing, I came across this passage on http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/bitbybit/bit-by-bit-contents/chapter-seven/7-5-assembly-language-...
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Why ASCII paper tape has lower bit punched from the narrow side?
ASCII was presented on paper tape where the lower 5 bits cross sprocket holes as following
While FIELDATA chose the other way
I found placing the higher, flag bits at the narrow side appealing, ...
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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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Did any core-memory computers have a read-and-erase instruction?
Magnetic core, the primary form of computer memory from the mid-fifties to the early seventies or thereabouts, had the slightly awkward property that reading it erased it, so every time the CPU ...
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How many 6SN7 tubes did it take to store a bit?
One of the most important components of a computer is a circuit called a flip-flop, which has two stable states (that it can flip-flop between, hence the name); it is used for temporary storage of a ...
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Could early computers use existing punch card machines?
In the early decades of the industry, computers used punch cards for data storage and transmission, partly because they were already widely used for pre-computer data processing; indeed, a major ...
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When did double-keying cease to be a common practice in verification?
In an IBM service bureau in the early 1960’s all data was keyed twice. The first time the holes were punched into cards. The 2nd time a verifier checked that the correct holes had been punched. ...
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Why was IBM's Scientific Subroutine Package superseded?
It is a familiar fact that scientific software tends to do a lot of vector arithmetic and similar, that one does not want to keep rewriting the low-level code for such, so the usual practice is to use ...
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Why were programs entered on punch cards instead of paper tapes?
Dale Fisk's Programming With Punched Cards is a fascinating account of programming in the days of punch cards.
The fundamental dynamic was that early computers did not yet support timesharing.
The ...
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How many transistors in the CDC 1604?
The CDC 1604, released in 1960, was Seymour Cray's first supercomputer, and also one of the first computers made of transistors. (The IBM 7090 was released only the previous year.)
How many ...
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Why didn't early color TV sets accept RGB input?
Early PCs generated RF signal, and later Composite video or S-video, to use a TV set as monitor. Why didn't color TVs of those days expose a analog RGB interface for direct connection from VCR/PC or ...
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Was there a specific benefit to inverted (XOR) mouse cursors other than aesthetics?
As far as I can remember the inverted (aka "XOR") style of mouse cursor has been around as long as there have been mice. I mean something like this:
(source)
where the cursor shape is ...
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New chess engines on retro hardware
Does anyone know of any efforts to write modern chess engines for old hardware? (e.g. C64, A2e?)
I'd love to see how a pared-down Stockfish or Leela that could fit in RAM could do rating wise etc.
...
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Who are the people associated with Simula, Assembler and Fortran in this video?
I am watching a recording of a discussion panel ‘Unix50 - Unix Today and Tomorrow’, part of which contains Bjarne Stroustrup’s talk ‘From C to C++’, discussing the history of C++.
At 20:46 there is a ...
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Belated ascendancy of dynamic linkers
Old computer systems were supplied—by our present notion—with very little memory, thus conservation of both RAM and storage room has been tremendously important during those years of austerity. ...
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Hardware assisted Graphical User Interface?
I have read a fiction novel in which a manufacturer in the 80s provided GUI by adding a dedicated drawing hardware besides videocard or by extending videocard.
Fictional as it is, is this possible or ...
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Were there any filesystems support tag based key-value pairs before the 90s?
Attribute–value pair is quite common in programming languages, databases, URL query-strings, and Email/HTTP headers, which could also be used to organize, classify and version files.
Extended file ...
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Why was the Altair numbered "8800" even though the processor was an 8080?
The Altair 8800 was a computer using the Intel 8080 processor. Why the difference in numbers?
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Are ECMA and ANSI sister organisations?
ECMA was the body that formalized JavaScript while ANSI was as I understand it the body that formalized much of the early C programming language, what became known as ANSI C. Are these two ...
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Did the computing power of end users increase at a steady pace over the years? [closed]
Does the computing power of the average people in the household increase at a steady pace or has it wax and waned over the years? Are there some eras of computers where computing power grew faster ...
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What was the last personal computer to have the chips neatly arranged in rows and columns?
Once upon a time, the chips on the circuit boards of personal computers1 were arranged in a tidy grid pattern. Observe the board of the Apple ][+:
Or the Commodore 128:
Sadly, the zen of neat rows ...
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What was the first computer board to be wave-soldered?
The Wikipedia article on wave soldering does not give any information on its history. What was the first computer circuit board to use this process?
I am specifically looking for computers that were ...
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Where did the # (hash, number sign) notation for hexadecimal RGB colour triples originate?
The hexadecimal notation #RRGGBB for RGB colour triples has been popularised by HTML and is commonly associated with it, even though nowadays it is not usually used in HTML directly, but rather ...
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Did any equipment ship with odd serial parity by default?
The asynchronous serial protocol supported an optional parity bit, which could make the total number of "1" bits an even number or an odd number. As discussed in this question, parity could ...
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Where is the ancient preprocessor?
I found the old C compiler from V6, and, though it seems to the modern eye a little different from good, idiomatic C, evidently it uses things like #include and #define, but I do not see how it ...
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Have TCP connections ever been exclusive per port?
I came across an old service which listens on a range of TCP ports. Client connections are handled with this scheme:
Client connects to the first port
Server answers with a port number and closes the ...
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When did cross-platform C start assuming function prototypes? [closed]
The most important difference between the original 'K&R' C, and ANSI/ISO C89/90, was function prototypes. These started being supported by some compilers in the mid-eighties, were formally ...
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What aspect of portable floating point did Java back down on?
Java was released under the slogan 'write once, run anywhere'; while its adoption was probably more about 'now we have a language that provides garbage collection in a familiar workflow and with a ...
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How can extra (digital) data be hidden on VCR/VHS tapes? [closed]
For my new crime-novel I am in need of some more specific info on hiding digital data on analog VCR or VHS cassettes.
I have already read a lot online and seen the LCR oddware video on that case (...
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Besides the IBM 709 and its descendents, did any other machine have "slightly longer" registers?
This question occurred to me while I was formulating this answer about arithmetic versus logical shifts.
The IBM 709, and its descendant the 7090, etc., is a 36-bit mainframe with a classical single-...
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Which computers did Donald Knuth "mix" together to get MIX?
The MIX was a computer design that Donald Knuth used to illustrate computer instruction sets in his magnum opus The Art of Computer Programming.
MIX's model number is 1009, which was derived by ...
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What was the last non-monolithic CPU to come to market?
This answer to the question "What was the rationale behind 36 bit computer architectures?" makes the point that early computers were assembled by hand, rather than having central processing ...
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What were the differences between Xenix and Unix?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix by the beginning of the nineties, SCO was selling 32-bit 386 versions of both Xenix and Unix. According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...
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What did Prodigy use for pre-web GUI client?
Prodigy was a big early Internet service provider, and of course by the late nineties, the most popular Internet protocol was the web; most users spent most of their Internet time in a web browser.
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What did AOL use for pre-web GUI client?
AOL was a big early Internet service provider, and of course by the late nineties, the most popular Internet protocol was the web; most users spent most of their Internet time in a web browser.
But if ...
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When did AOL start offering Internet email?
AOL, one of the most successful early Internet service providers, started life in 1983 as a company called Control Video Corporation selling downloadable games for the Atari 2600; this became Quantum ...
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Origin of "arithmetic" and "logical" for signed and unsigned shifts
The assembly language for many processors use the phrase "arithmetic shift" to represent the bitwise shift of a signed value, and "logical shift" for an unsigned value. The two ...
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What HyperCard extensions did Myst use?
The original Macintosh version of Myst was written in HyperCard.
According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549685
Adding useful features, such as uploading those HTML files to a web server, ...
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