Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: wilson@nutec.com (Wilson Roberto Afonso)
Subject: alt.folklore.computers FAQ - Part 0/3
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 22:35:08 GMT

Archive-name: afc-faq-0
Last-modified: 08-Apr-1994

This is the alt.folklore.computers list of Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ).  It is maintained by Wilson Afonso (wilson@nutec.com).  All
contributions and corrections are welcome, but I'm ultimately
responsible for what appears here.  Contributors are acknowledged, if
possible.

This is a four-part file.  The first part contains only administrative
comments.  The second contains mostly generic questions. The third is a
small history of computers, and the fourth is a list of books which are more
or less related to computer folklore.  The third part (file 2) is mantained
by Mark Brader (msb@sq.sq.com), and contributions related to it should go
to him.

File 0:
0   - Administrivia

File 1 (this file):
I   - Introduction
II  - Generic questions
III - General folklore
IV  - Origins
V   - Firsts
VI  - Jokes
VII - Net Resources
VIII- Acknowledgements
IX  - Things I am looking for

File 2:
X   - A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952)

File 3:
XI  - List of computer-folklore related books

 
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------

0 - Administrivia

0.1 - General comments

Finally, I am back to the net and back to posting it.  Now, I am also
closer to "where the action happens", what means it will be easier for
me to keep up with news, mail etc.

I hope this FAQ keeps going, and I hope I'll receive more contribuitions.
Sadly, contributions that went to my old address in the last months were
lost, so, if you sent me something, just send me it again, and it will
used.  Thanks again.

Also, somebody asked for the file with the "net celebrities".  I lost the
address of that person (it was something like "provers@<xxx>.nl"); please,
contact me again on my new address and you'll have the file in no time.


0.2 - Changes since last month

There are not that many changes, but some things were updated, some changed
and some added (for example, the 8-bit bytes question).

-- 
--
Wilson Roberto Afonso              Nutec Corporation
+1 415 988-9781                    2685 Marine Way Suite 1319
FAX: +1 415 988-9782               Mountain View, CA 94043


Article: 33560 of alt.folklore.computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Path: tridom!emory!swrinde!sgiblab!barrnet.net!infoserv!nutec!wilson
From: wilson@nutec.com (Wilson Roberto Afonso)
Subject: alt.folklore.computers FAQ - Part 1/3
Organization: Nutec Corporation
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 22:37:22 GMT
Message-ID: <CnypIA.FBy@nutec.com>
Keywords: faq, folklore
Lines: 814



Archive-name: afc-faq-1
Last-modified: 08-Apr-1994

This is the alt.folklore.computers list of Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ).  It is maintained by Wilson Afonso (wilson@nutec.com).  All
contributions and corrections are welcome, but I'm ultimately
responsible for what appears here.  Contributors are acknowledged, if
possible.

This is a four-part file.  The first part contains only administrative
comments.  The second contains mostly generic questions. The third is a
small history of computers, and the fourth is a list of books which are more
or less related to computer folklore.  The third part (file 2) is mantained
by Mark Brader (msb@sq.sq.com), and contributions related to it should go
to him.

File 0:
0   - Administrivia
0.1   - General comments
0.2   - Changes since last edition

File 1 (this file):
I   - Introduction
I.1   - What is folklore ?

II    - Generic questions
II.1  - What is the origin of the term XXX ? What does XXX mean ?
II.2  - Is {famous person} on the net ?
II.3  - What are some good books on computer folklore ?
II.4  - Where can I find {interesting file} ?
II.4.1  - How does on try Archie ?

III - General folklore
III.1 - NASA probe that was destoyed because of a typo
III.2 - How Gary Kildall missed the chance to put CP/M in the PCs
III.3 - Is there really a Coke machine attached to the Internet ?
III.4 - Poke command to damage the hardware
III.5 - What should I do to an old CD ?
III.6 - Cat printed on Sun IPX SPARCstations
III.7 - Why the 8088, and not the 68000, in the IBM-PCs ?
III.8 - Is the 8088 processor really code compatible with the 8080 ?
III.9 - What does VAX mean, and why "11" on their name ?
III.10- Why do we use 'i' as loop counters ?
III.11- Does Apple use Crays while Cray uses Apples ?
III.12- Did Bill Gates write MS-DOS ?
III.13- Is '2' the lowest possible numeric base ?
III.14- What about that story about viruses in printers during Gulf War ?
III.14.1- Would it be possible, anyway ?
III.15- Why does MS-DOS use '\' and not '/' ?
III.16- Is it ok to discuss soft drinks in this group ?
III.17- Why do bytes have 8 bits ?

IV  - Origins
IV.1  - Usenet
IV.2  - C
IV.3  - Unix
IV.4  - Structured programming

V   - Firsts
V.1   - When/what/where/who/... was the first {something} ?

VI  - Jokes

VII - Net Resources
VII.1 - Who do I call if I have a problem with {something} ?

VIII- Acknowledgements

IX  - Things I am looking for

File 2:
X   - A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952)

File 3:
XI  - List of computer-folklore related books


 -------------------------------------------------------------------------


I - Introduction

I.1 - What is folklore ?

According to Webster's:
		Folklore: 1. Traditional customs, tales, or sayings
		preserved orally among a people. 2. A comparative 
		science that investigates the life and spirit  of
		a people as revealed in their folklore [recursive
		definition?] 3. A widely held unsupported specious
		notion or body of notions

In this newsgroup, all of the definitions above seem to be supported.
One can say that discussions in this group approach discussion about
history of computing, but that is not quite right.  Ultimately, the
difference between history and folklore is that history deals with
great and important facts and folklore deals with minor, day-to-day
facts.  We obviously discuss facts that fit in "History", too, but
that is a side-effect of the overall discussion.


II - Generic questions

II.1 - What is the origin of the term XXX ?  What does XXX mean ?

Answer to questions like this can be found in a big (I mean it!) file
called The Jargon File.  This file contains, among other things, the
meaning of thousands of words used by computers people.  If you ever
heard of a computer-related word, it is probably in this file.  Be 
aware, however, that this file is not a lexicon of technical terms.
It mostly contains words that you _don't_ find in computer dictionaries.
You can get it by anonymous ftp, in prep.ai.mit.edu (18.71.0.38), in
directory pub/gnu, as the file named jargon300.ascii.gz.  It uncompresses
to a file with more than 1 megabyte.  It is also a published book, _The New
Hacker's Dictionary_ (see below, question II.3).

In this file, you can find answers to questions as "Does UNIX means anything ?"
or "What does PDP means ?", and "Why the h**l are hard disks called
winchesters ?", and a LOT more.  The Jargon File is also a repository for
other history, poems, and anecdotes.  A little grepping will probably find 
what you're looking for, and it will probably also be faster and more 
accurate than posting to a.f.c.


II.2 - Is {famous person} on the net?

There is also a file with information on it.  It was posted to a.f.c
in Feb. 26th, 1993.  I managed to contact the mantainer of this file,
and the last thing I heard was that he was updating it.  I was told,
however, that he is no longer in the net.  More news when I have something.
(Meanwhile, I have a copy of that file, and if somebody wants it, let me
know.  It is a little out of date, though.)


II.3 - What are some good books on computer folklore?

Look at the third file of this FAQ.  It contains a large list of such books.


II.4 - Where can I find {interesting file} ?

Try archie.  But, sometimes it is really difficult to know the name of
the file, even if you know the title of the article.  I include a small
list below:

- 'Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language', by Brian Kernighan :
it was posted to a.f.c. as ASCII.  It is also available as a PostScript file
in research.att.com:netlib/research/cstr/100.Z

- 'Real Programmers don't use Pascal', by Ed Post: it was posted to a.f.c, too.
It is available via FTP from leif.thep.lu.se (130.235.92.55) as 
pub/Misc/realprog; also in ftp.uni-kl.de:/pub/humor/realp.tex.Z

- 'The Tao of Programming': it is copyrighted material, so it cannot be
distributed via FTP.  Anyway, it was posted to a.f.c in Feb. 1993.

- This FAQ: vaxa.crc.mssm.edu.  Let's see if the guys at rtfm.mit.edu will
begin archiving it...

- humorous file: sunsite.unc.edu has a large collection of such files, under
the directory /pub/docs/humor

II.4.1. How does one try archie ?

Archie is a way to find files in the net.  Usually, all you need to do
is type "archie" at the OS prompt, and you'll have a good explanation.
If not, type "telnet archie.sura.net" and log in as archie.  There is
a good on-line help.



III - General folklore

III.1 - I heard that one of the NASA space probes went off course and
	had to be destroyed because of a typo in a FORTRAN DO loop.
	Is there any truth to this rumor?

As revealed by past discussion in comp.risks (Risks Digest) as well as
alt.folklore.computers and occasionally other newsgroups, this turns
out to be a confusion of two separate events.

The space probe that the DO-loop story has been wrongly attached to is
Mariner I (or 1), which was intended for Venus (not Mars).  Several
incorrect or partially correct versions of what really happened were
posted in comp.risks; the best of these cited a NASA publication called
"Far Travelers" by Oran W. Nicks, but still did not have the whole story.

Then in issue 8.75 we found out what really happened...

|  Date: Sat, 27 May 1989 15:34:33 PDT
|  From: Peter Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
|  Subject: Mariner I -- no holds BARred
|  
|  Paul Ceruzzi has written a truly outstanding book for the new show
|  that opened two weeks ago at the Smithsonian National Air and Space
|  Museum.  The exhibit and the book are both entitled "Beyond the Limits
|  -- Flight Enters the Computer Age".  Both are superb.  Go for it (them).
|  
|  Paul has dug into several cases treated previously in RISKS and in
|  issues of the ACM Software Engineering Notes, and has been able to
|  resolve several mysteries.  In particular he considers the case of
|  Mariner I, about which various inaccurate stories have been told.
|  Intended to be the first US spacecraft to visit another planet, it was
|  destroyed by a range officer on 22 July 1962 when it behaved
|  erratically four minutes after launch.  The alleged missing `hyphen'
|  was really a missing `bar'.  I quote from Paul's book, pp. 202-203:
|  
| #  During the launch the Atlas booster rocket was guided with the help
| #  of two radar systems.  One, the Rate System, measured the velocity of
| #  the rocket as it ascended through the atmosphere.  The other, the
| #  Track System, measured its distance and angle from a tracking
| #  antenna near the launch site.  At the Cape a guidance computer
| #  processed these signals and sent control signals back to the
| #  tracking system, which in turn sent signals to the rocket.  Its
| #  primary function was to ensure a proper separation from the Atlas
| #  booster and ignition of the Agena upper stage, which was to carry
| #  the Mariner Spacecraft to Venus.
| #  
| #  Timing for the two radar systems was separated by a difference of
| #  forty-three milliseconds.  To compensate, the computer was instructed
| #  to add forty-three milliseconds to the data from the Rate System
| #  during the launch.  This action, which set both systems to the same
| #  sampling time base, required smoothed, or averaged, track data,
| #  obtained by an earlier computation, not the raw velocity data
| #  relayed directly from the track radar.  The symbol for this smoothed
| #  data was ... `R dot bar n' [R overstruck `.' and `_' and subscript n],
| #  where R stands for the radius, the dot for the first derivative
| #  (i.e., the velocity), the bar for smoothed data, and n for the
| #  increment.
| #  
| #  The bar was left out of the hand-written guidance equations.  [A
| #  footnote cites interviews with John Norton and General Jack Albert.]
| #  Then during launch the on-board Rate System hardware failed.  That in
| #  itself should not have jeopardized the mission, as the Track System
| #  radar was working and could have handled the ascent.  But because of
| #  the missing bar in the guidance equations, the computer was
| #  processing the track data incorrectly.  [Paul's EndNote amplifies:
| #  The Mariner I failure was thus a {\it combination} of a hardware
| #  failure and the software bug.  The same flawed program had been used
| #  in several earlier Ranger launches with no ill effects.]  The result
| #  was erroneous information that velocity was fluctuating in an
| #  erratic and unpredictable manner, for which the computer tried to
| #  compensate by sending correction signals back to the rocket.  In fact
| #  the rocket was ascending smoothly and needed no such correction.  The
| #  result was {\it genuine} instead of phantom erratic behavior, which
| #  led the range safety officer to destroy the missile, and with it the
| #  Mariner spacecraft.  Mariner I, its systems functioning normally,
| #  plunged into the Atlantic.

The DO-loop incident did happen at NASA, and at about the same time.
As told by Fred Webb in alt.folklore.computers in 1990:

|  I worked at Nasa during the summer of 1963.  The group I was working
|  in was doing preliminary work on the Mission Control Center computer
|  systems and programs.  My office mate had the job of testing out an
|  orbit computation program which had been used during the Mercury
|  flights.  Running some test data with known answers through it, he was
|  getting answers that were close, but not accurate enough.  So, he
|  started looking for numerical problems in the algorithm, checking to
|  make sure his tests data was really correct, etc.
|
|  After a couple of weeks with no results, he came across a DO
|  statement, in the form:
|       DO 10 I=1.10
|  This statement was interpreted by the compiler (correctly) as:
|       DO10I = 1.10
|  The programmer had clearly intended:
|       DO 10 I = 1, 10
|
|  After changing the `.' to a `,' the program results were correct to
|  the desired accuracy.  Apparently, the program's answers had been
|  "good enough" for the sub-orbital Mercury flights, so no one suspected
|  a bug until they tried to get greater accuracy, in anticipation of
|  later orbital and moon flights.  As far as I know, this particular bug
|  was never blamed for any actual failure of a space flight, but the
|  other details here seem close enough that I'm sure this incident is the
|  source of the DO story.

Project Mercury's sub-orbital flights were in 1961, and its orbital
flights began in 1962.  I forwarded the above to comp.risks, slightly
abridged, and it appeared there in issue 9.54.

The erroneous claim that the DO-loop bug was the bug that killed Mariner I
apparently originated with, and certainly was propagated by, the book
"Software Reliability: Principles and Practices" by G(lenford) J. Myers
(John Wiley & Sons, 1976).  I haven't read it myself; I've seen the page
numbers 7 and 275 attributed to the assertion.  I expect both are right.
This book also describes the bug as a "billion-dollar error", which is
too large by a factor of about 50.

In some earlier postings it was suggested that Myers be located and
asked about his sources (the book gives none), but nobody successfully
did this; his employer at the time of publication didn't have his
current address.  My guess is that he simply made an error or more
likely accepted someone else's wrong recollection, and didn't feel
it necessary to go to original sources to verify what was only an
illustrative point anyway.

This answer by Mark Brader <msb@sq.com>.  Quoted items in it have been
reformatted but not abridged.


III.2 - I heard that Gary Kildall missed the chance to make CP/M the
	IBM PC operating system because he decided to go flying on
	the day the IBM reps had an appointment.  Is this true?

This answer comes from the book "Hard Drive"; it says there are two
versions of this story.

One is from Jack Sams, the guy from IBM who went to DR to meet
Kildall.  He says that Kildall was out, flying on his plane, and
Kildall's wife and a DR's lawyer met with him (Sams).  They did not
want to sign a non-disclosure agreement with IBM, so IBM went away
without even talking with Kildall.  (That agreement said that DR could
not tell IBM confidential information, but if DR did so, IBM could not
be sued for using it; and DR would be sued if it used any confidential
information that IBM gave them.)  That night, they went to Seattle and
made the deal with Microsoft.

But Kildall tells a different history: he says he really was out on his
plane, but he was on a business trip at San Francisco, and he was back
to DR in time to meet with the IBM guys.  He signed the agreement, had
the meeting, and apparently thought that they and a deal.  That night,
he and his wife went to Miami with the IBM guys (in the same plane; the
IBM guys were coming back to Boca Raton, and the Kildalls were going to
Caribe), and Kildall was told to contact them when he returned.  When
he eventually returned to the US, he was unable to find Sams, and later
heard they had a deal with Microsoft (this is strange, since IBM kept
that project as a secret, and nobody knew about Microsoft being on
it).

Kildall says that the plane story was first told by Gates, in an
interview to the London Times.  This is Microsoft's version, he says,
but History always tells the winners' version, not the losers'.



III.3 - Is there really a Coke machine attached to the Internet?

They say so.  Actually, it's address is coke.elab.cs.cmu.edu
(128.2.209.43).  It cannot be fingered every time (sometimes it refuses
connection, and sometimes it answers an empty line).  And, in RFC1288
(The Finger User Information Protocol), the use of vending machines on
the net is supported :

#2.5.5.  Vending machines
#
#   Vending machines SHOULD respond to a {C} request with a list of all
#   items currently available for purchase and possible consumption.
#   Vending machines SHOULD respond to a {U}{C} request with a detailed
#   count or list of the particular product or product slot.  Vending
#   machines should NEVER NEVER EVER eat money.
#



III.4 - I heard there was a POKE command on the {your computer here}
	that would physically damage the hardware.  Is this true?

For those not used to it, a POKE command puts some value in some position in
memory.  Thus, POKE 16510,0 changes the number of the first line of a BASIC
program in a Sinclair ZX81 to 0 by overwriting the real number in that
position.

About physical damage: apparently, you could make the monitor of a PET
computer catch fire with a POKE.  The poke controlled the size of the
screen for the electron beam (which was under computer control).  The idea 
was that you could change the screen size if you wanted to get around
variations on the screen.  Anyway, setting to zero meant the computer would 
try to paint the entire screen in the center of the screen, thus burning
out the phosphor on the monitor.

Also, in some IBM PC hardware you could burn the flyback transformer inside
the monitor with an OUT, reprogramming the MGA video card.



III.5 - What should I do to an old CD ?

Microwave it.  Put in in the microwave oven, above a cup turned upside
down (the cup, not the disk), set the power to HIGH, the timer to 5 seconds,
turn off all the lights, and make sure you watch.  You will never use this
CD again.  The microwave oven is left apparently intact.



III.6 - Is it true that there is a cat printed on the motherboard of 
	Sun SPARCStations IPX ?  Why ?

Yes, it is true (don't believe me ? open yours !).  It is supposed to
be the comic strip caracter "Hobbes" (from Calvin and Hobbes).  The Sun
internal name for the IPX is "Hobbes" (the SparcStation 2 is Calvin).



III.7 - Why did IBM choose the 8088 rather than the 68000 as the processor for
	their first PC?

The IBM PC was supposed to be a low-end model machine that would compete
with CP/M machines and the Apple II, but not with IBM's planned larger
"PC's" (which never left the ground). For that reason, it needed a 16-bit
CPU, but not too much memory.

With its 8-bit data bus, the 8088 would lead to cheaper hardware
than a 68000-based machine. The limited address space (1MB, further
reduced by IBM's designers to 640 KB) wasn't perceived as a problem
since nobody could imagine anyone needing so much RAM in a PC 
anyway.
   
Also, the 8088 has the advantage of allowing easy porting of 8080/Z80 
code. This meant that lots of software could be produced very quickly
by porting existing CP/M programs (such as Microsoft Basic and the
WordStar word processor).



III.8 - Is the 8088 processor really code compatible with the 8080?

No, not on the binary level; the opcodes are different. However,
the instruction sets are so similar that assembly language programs
can be machine translated from 8080 assembler to 8088 assembler.   



III.9 -  What does VAX mean? Why did early VAXen have model numbers starting
	 with "11",like 11/780, 11/750, and so on?

Rumour has it that the 11/780 was originally intended as the PDP 11/78 with
"Virtual Address eXtension" (i.e. virtual memory), but Digital choose
to present their new 32-bit line of computers under the name "VAX" 
rather than "PDP".

The 11/xxx series of VAX machines all had a special "compatibility mode"
in which they can run PDP-11 code. 



III.10-  Why is 'i' typically chosen as a loop counter, in constructs such as
	 for(i=0; i<10; i++); ?

There are several possible answers to this, and most of them seem to support
the idea of 'computer centrism' from the guys who work with computers (I mean
'all of us').  For example,

  - FORTRAN (on which many people learned to program) used the initial
    letter of variables to determine their data type. A variable would
    be assumed integer if the initial letter was in the range I-N (some
    have commented that these are the first two letters of INteger). So
    if you wanted a quick int variable as a loop counter, you would start
    with i, proceed to j, and so on.

  - This is all very well, say the math oriented, but we're using 'i'
    in equations as a sample variable like this :
	___
	\  
	/__  X
	i=0   i

    and FORTRAN obviously stole the idea from us.

As to which one is actually true? Well, no one is quite sure. Programmers
probably picked up the practice from FORTRAN, which in turn probably took
it from the mathematicians. All I know is that every programming book around
uses 'i' as the first loop counter.

Of course, there are many programmers who use 'F' or 'N' as loop variables, as
a consequence of using Sinclair computers in their first days of programming.
These computers had the BASIC keywords assigned to keys, and you could get
FOR by typing F, and NEXT with N.  So, it was easy to type 'FOR F=...' and
'NEXT N'.  By the way, the word 'TO' was also on the F key; '=' was on
the L, with LET.



III.11- Is there any truth to the rumor that the people at Cray design
	their supercomputers with Apple computers, and that Apple designers
	use Cray's?

The comment was made when Apple bought its Cray to design the next Macs.
Dr. Cray wrote them a note saying that he found that quite ironic, since
he was designing the next Cray on a Mac...  Keep in mind that each one uses
the other's machines to do quite different things, probably.  Apple uses
a Cray to do heavy calculations, and Cray probably uses Macs in CAD, or
something like this.



III.12- Did Bill Gates write MS-DOS ?

No, no and no.  Microsoft bought MS-DOS from a Seattle company, and it was
called QDOS then (Quick and Dirty Operating System).  Some say it is not
quick anymore, but the rest stays the same.  True, Microsoft made some
modifications to it, and probably Bill Gates helped in it, but he did not
write the OS in the true sense of these words.  By that time, MS was in
dire need of an OS to use with IBM PC, because IBM could make business with
Digital Research (see above, III.2), and QDOS was their salvation.



III.13 - Is '2' the lowest possible numeric base ?

No.  There's a lot more in the matter of bases than most people can
dream.  Although one usually only encounters number systems with positive
integer bases (binary, decimal, hexadecimal, octal), it is also possible
to use non-integral, negative, irrational, or even complex bases. For a
comprehensive discussion, see Knuth's 'Art of Computer Programming'.

Although it is not a positional system, one sometimes talks about a
system with base one (the unary system) where the integer N is
represented as a string of N ones. This number system is especially
popular among theoretical computer scientists when discussing Turing
machines.

The discussion about bases seems to surface in a.f.c about once every
semester, and it seems to hold endless fascination for CS students (like
me, for example).



III.14 - What about that story about viruses in printers during Gulf War?

The latest information I have is that all of this is an April-Fool
joke, which was published by a US magazine.  Several months after that,
some news service found the article and fell for it.  It was repeated
all over the world several times since then, by a number of reputable
news services.


III.14.1 - Would it be possible, anyway ?

This is a folklore newsgroup, not a technical one.  But there are some
chances for it to be possible (fumbling with a PostScript printer is
one).



III.15 - Why does MS-DOS use '\' as the path separator, while Unix uses
	 '/'?

Version 1 of MS-DOS didn't have subdirectories or paths, and wasn't
much like Unix at all. The '/' character was used to denote command
options (like '-' in Unix); this was rather common in CP/M, and is the
standard in many DEC operating systems.  In version 2.0 of MS-DOS, many
new Unix-like features were added, including subdirectories. Since '/'
was used for command options by many programs, that character couldn't
be used in paths. Apparently Microsoft thought '\' was the second best
alternative.  It's interesting to say that is the shell who requires
'\' as the path separator; the real DOS is quite happy with '/', and
when you program in C (for exemple), you can write a path as
"c:\\foo\\bar\\..." or "c:/foo/bar/...", and both work.  Also, there
was an undocumented feature of DOS which allowed the user to change the
switch char, and freed '/' to be used as a path separator in the
command line.  This no longer exists in DOS 5.0, and probably is absent
in DOS 6.0, as well (I couldn't test this).


III.16 - Is it ok to discuss about soft drinks in a computer folklore
	 newsgroup ?

Yes, it is.  Soft drinks, specially colas (and specially Jolt Cola(TM))
have a lot to do with computer folklore, and there is a claim that, if
you don't know why, you shouldn't be discussing computer folklore to
begin with.


III.17 - Why do bytes have 8 bits ?

They weren't like this ever.  Older computers used to have "strange" (by
today's standards) word/byte sizes, usually multiples of 6.  The 8-bit
byte (and probably even the word "byte") didn't appear until the advent
of IBM's System/360.  From the early 1970's on, most computers used 8-bit
bytes and multiple-of-8-bit words, and the non-standard became a de-facto
standard.

Now, why did the System/360 have 8-bit bytes ?  Probably, because of the use
of BCD data (or "packed decimal"); you need 4 bits to represent one digit (0-9),
so one 8-bit byte can represent two digits.  The System/360 had instructions
that allowed one easily to handle BCD data, and that made much easier the
lifes of people writing accounting systems.  It would be hard to use 6-bit
bytes to represent BCD, so 8 bits was the obvious solution.



IV - Origins

IV.1 - What are the origins of Usenet ?

Read the FAQs :-).  Actually, it is posted to news.answers, with
the subject "USENET software: History and Sources".


IV.2 - ... C ?

Quoted from _The_Secret_Guide_To_Computers (a GREAT book, by the way),
(c) 1991 by Russ Walter (15th edition):

   In 1963 at England's Cambridge University and the University of
   London, researchers developed a ``practical'' version of ALGOL and
called it the Combined Programming Language (CPL). In 1967 at Cambridge
University, Martin Richards invented a simpler, stripped-down version
of CPL and called it Basic CPL (BCPL). In 1970 at Bell Labs, Ken
Thompson developed a version that was even more stripped-down and
simpler; since it included just the most critical part of BCPL, he
called it B.
   Ken had stripped down the language _too_ much. It no longer
   contained enough commands to do practical programming. In 1972, his
colleague Dennis Ritchie added a few commands to B, to form a more
extensive language. Since that language came after B, it was called C.
   So C is a souped-up version of B, which is a stripped-down version
   of BCPL, which is a stripped-down version of CPL, which is a
``practical'' version of ALGOL.


IV.3 - ... Unix ?

There are several versions of this story.  Some say that it was
designed as a system "by programmers and for programmers", others say
that it was mainly a word-processing system, and others say that
Thompson's primary goal was playing Space War.

This is a quote from Ritchie and Thompson themselves, in "The Unix
Time-Sharing system", published in "The Unix Time-Sharing System",
thematic issue of Bell System Tech. J. vol 57, no 6 part 2 (1978):

"There have been four versions of the UNIX time-sharing system. The
earliest (ca 1969-70) ran on the Digital Equipment Corporation DPD-7
and -9 computers. The second version ran on the unprotected PDP-11/20
computer. The third incorporated multiprogramming and ran on the
PDP-11/34, /40, /45, /60 and /70 computers 

[...]

Since PDP-11 UNIX became operational in February, 1971, over 600
installations have been put into service. Most of them are engaged in
applications such as computer science education, the preparation and
formatting of documents and other textual material, the collection and
processing of trouble data from various switching machines within the
Bell System, and recording and checking telephone service orders. Our
own installation is used mainly for research in operating systems,
languages, computer networks, and other topics in computer science,
and also for document preparation.

[...]

The first version was written when one of us (Thompson), dissatisfied
with the available computer facilities, discovered a little-used PDP-7
and set out to create a more hospitable environment. This (essentially
personal) effort was sufficiently successful to gain the interests of
the other author and several colleagues, and later to justify the
acquisition of the PDP-11/20, specifically to support a text editing
and formatting system.

[...]

...because we are programmers, we naturally designed the sustem to
make it easy to write, test and run programs."

While it doesn't mention Space War (which I suppose isn't serious
enough for a research journal), this makes very clear that *both*
stories are correct: Unix was initially developed by programmers, for
programmers, but word processing became an important application very
early.  By the way, in "AT&T Bell Labs. Tech. Journal", Oct. 1984, they
say that when they found the first PDP to put Unix in it, they were
trying to find a machine to run a gamed named Space Travel (not War).

Thompson and Ritchie seemed pretty proud about the 600 installed
systems in 1978; I wonder what they'd have said if somebody had told
them back then that there'd be millions of Unix systems within 15
years... 


IV.4 - ... structured programming ?

The 1st reference to it seems to be the following article:
E. W. Dijkstra, ``Structured programming,'' in Software engineering
techniques, J. N. Buxton and B. Randell [Eds.], NATO Scientific Affairs
Division (Brussels, 1970), 84-88.



V - Firsts

V.1 - When/what/where/who/... was the first {something} ?

- Computer:  look at the third file of this FAQ.  It contains a little
history of computers.

- Computer programmer: Lady Ada Lovelace was one of Lord Byron's
daughters, and a friend of Charles Babbage.  She wrote numerous
programs for the Analytical Engine, and so qualifies as the world's
first computer programmer.

- Stored program to run: The Manchester Mark-I-Prototype ran the first
stored program in the world (a program to find greatest common factors)
on 21st June 1948.

- E-mail message: probably internal messages were around for as long as
there was systems providing it.  It can be probably by 1963 or 1964.

- Computer game:  people have been programming games for as long as
there have been computers.  There was research in getting computers to
play Tic-Tac-Toe, chess and checkers going on already in the early
1950's.  Also, the following quotation sheds some light in the issue:

	"...The Mark I's random number generator ... supplied some fun
	and games.  F.C. Williams ... wrote a little gambling program
	that counted the number of times a given digit, from 0 to 9, was
	produced by a run of the generator.  But Williams adjusted the
	generator to lean toward his favorite number, and he enjoyed
	betting against unsuspecting visitors.  The beginnings of
	computer crime!"

		-Bit by Bit, Stan Augarten p. 212, ISBN 0-89919-302-1

- "Adventure" game: ADVENT, also known as Colossal Cave, by Crowther
and Woods (see the rec.{games,art}.int-fiction FAQ's for more info).
There was an earlier precursor, though: "Hunt the Wumpus", which is not
an adventure game as we know it, but it is the first game with a stored
map.  See the Jargon File under "Wumpus".

- Graphics computer game: SpaceWar, originally played on oscilloscopes

- Use of microprogramming:  Maurice Wilkes on the EDSAC.

- Use of virtual memory: Atlas at Manchester University.

- High level language : Fortran, designed at IBM in 195?.



VI - Jokes 
 
There are a lot of parodies and generally "computer-related" jokes
around.  It's really easy to find them in posts, and in FTP sites.
Particularly, you can find a great numbers of them in sunsite.unc.edu,
directory /pub/docs/humor.

 
VII - Net resources 
 
VII.1 - Who do I call if I have a problem with <something> ? 
 
I was told that the FAQ files of alt.uu.announce and alt.uu.comp.misc
have a list of "volunteers".  Try them.  Anyway, to questions relating
a.f.c ONLY, you can try peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva), he seems to
know almost everything.



VIII - Acknowledgements

Contributions were received from (if your name is here, and you want it
out, just tell me; or, if it's not but it should, also, just tell me):

"T.G.A." Rushton <T.G.A.Rushton@durham.ac.uk>
Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra@pvv.unit.no>
Bernie Jones <Bernie.Jones@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Dave (whitten@fwva.saic.com)
Dik.Winter@cwi.nl
Eric Grosse <ehg@research.att.com>
Geoff@equinox.gen.nz (Geoff Mccaughan)
MJ STODDARD <STODDARD@ARIZVMS.BITNET>
Magnus Olsson <magnus@thep.lu.se>
Malcolm Shute <mshute@computer-science.manchester.ac.uk>
Mark Harrison <snow@dcs.warwick.ac.uk>
Murray_Moffatt@kcbbs.gen.nz (Murray Moffatt)
Nik Clayton <cs92njc@brunel.ac.uk>
Peter Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
S.R. Atkins <90sra@eng.cam.ac.uk>
Stig Venaas (venaas@nvg.unit.no)
Thayne Forbes <thayne@unislc.slc.unisys.com>
Tony.Duell@lambada.oit.unc.edu
alien@acheron.amigans.gen.nz (Ross Smith)
bryan o'connor <bryan@fegmania.wustl.edu>
dcd@houston.geoquest.slb.com (dan day)
del+@CMU.EDU (Daniel Edward Lovinger)
eeyimkn@unicorn.nott.ac.uk (M. Knell)
faught@zeppelin.convex.com (Danny R. Faught)
forbes@cbnewsf.cb.att.com (Scott Forbes)
gmw1@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Gabe M Wiener)
ig25@fg70.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (Thomas Koenig)
jelson@circle.cs.jhu.edu (Jeremy Elson)
klaus@diku.dk
koen@stack.urc.tue.nl (Koen Holtman)
msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader)
mshield@ukelele.GCR.COM (Michael Shields)
nelson@eagle.natinst.com (Nelson Bishop)
payson@cs.wisc.edu ( Payson)
silveira@inf.ufrgs.br (Fernando da Silveira Montenegro)
simutis@ingres.com (John Simutis)
stuckey@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (Anthony J. Stuckey)
tcorcora@sunlab.cit.cornell.edu (Travis Corcoran)
thompsn@ccu.UManitoba.CA (Adam Thompson)
vieth@convex.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de (Ulrik Vieth)
weisberg@ee.rochester.edu (Jeff Weisberg)


IX - Things I am looking for:

- has anybody already took a SPARCstation 2 open to look for a Calvin printed
  on it ?  Did you find it ? (yes, nobody answered yet; I am sure somebody
  at Sun should now it)

- the books section need newer entries; I am sure there are a lot of books
  which qualify, and I intend to go to a bookstore someday this month and
  get a list; if you have any ideas, just tell me

-- 
--
Wilson Roberto Afonso              Nutec Corporation
+1 415 988-9781                    2685 Marine Way Suite 1319
FAX: +1 415 988-9782               Mountain View, CA 94043


Article: 33561 of alt.folklore.computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Path: tridom!emory!swrinde!sgiblab!barrnet.net!infoserv!nutec!wilson
From: wilson@nutec.com (Wilson Roberto Afonso)
Subject: alt.folklore.computers FAQ - Part 2/3
Organization: Nutec Corporation
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 22:39:19 GMT
Message-ID: <CnypLJ.FDB@nutec.com>
Keywords: faq, folklore
Lines: 856



Archive-name: afc-faq-2
Last-modified: 05-Apr-1993

This is the alt.folklore.computers list of Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ).  It is maintained by Wilson Afonso (wilson@nutec.com).  All
contributions and corrections are welcome, but I'm ultimately
responsible for what appears here.  Contributors are acknowledged, if
possible.

This is a four-part file.  The first part contains only administrative
comments.  The second contains mostly generic questions. The third is a
small history of computers, and the fourth is a list of books which are more
or less related to computer folklore.  The third part (file 2) is mantained
by Mark Brader (msb@sq.sq.com), and contributions related to it should go
to him.

File 0:
0   - Administrivia

File 1:
I   - Introduction
II  - Generic questions
III - General folklore
IV  - Origins
V   - Firsts
VI  - Jokes
VII - Net Resources
VIII- Acknowledgements
IX  - Things I am looking for

File 2 (this file):
X   - A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952)

File 3:
XI  - List of computer-folklore related books


 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

What was the first computer and who built it?

It turns out that this is more a question of definition than a
question of fact.  The computer, as we now understand the word,
was very much an evolutionary development rather than a simple
invention.  This article traces the sequence of the most important
steps in that development, and in the earlier development of
digital calculators without programmability.  It may help you
to decide for yourself whether you think the first computer was
the ABC, the V3 (aka Z3), the ENIAC, the SSEC, the Manchester
Mark I, the EDSAC, or perhaps yet another machine -- and how to
apportion the honor of invention among John Atanasoff, Charles
Babbage, Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Alan Turing, John von
Neumann, Konrad Zuse, and others.

     ----------------------------------------------------

This article has evolved from an original version that I drafted
in 1988, and has been posted to various Usenet groups several times.
It has been prepared primarily from two sources:

	Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers
	by Stan Augarten
	1984, Ticknor and Fields, New York
	ISBN 0-89919-268-8, 0-89919-302-1 paperback

	A History of Computing Technology
	by Michael R. Williams
	1985, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
	ISBN 0-13-389917-9

Either of these books is well worth a trip to the library to read.
(Unfortunately, finding either one in a bookstore today would be an
unlikely proposition.)  Augarten is a journalist; he writes very
readably, but occasionally does not say exactly what he means.
Williams is a computer science professor; his book is superior in
technical depth, and covers additional subject areas including
analog computing and computing in ancient times.

For some material in the last part of the chronology I also
consulted:

	Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering, 2nd ed.
	editor Anthony Ralston, associate Editor Edwin D. Reilly Jr.
	1983, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York
	ISBN 0-442-24496-7

	Portraits in Silicon
	by Robert Slater
	1987, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
	ISBN 0-262-69131-0

	The Computer Comes of Age / Ainsi naquit l'informatique
	by R. Moreau, English translation by J. Howlett
	1981, translated 1984, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
	ISBN 0-262-36103-2

The August 1988 issue of Scientific American contained a article
about the Atanasoff-Berry machines.  There is also a book by Clark
Mollenhoff about them, some information from which was forwarded to
me by email.  The February 1993 issue of Scientific American
contained an article about Babbage's difference engines and the
modern-day completion of one of them.  

     ----------------------------------------------------

I've tried to mention in this chronology each machine within the
relevant time period that meets the following criteria.  First,
it must do arithmetic digitally; this eliminates, for instance,
the slide rule.  Second, it must actually do the arithmetic rather
than just assisting the user's memory; I consider this to eliminate
the abacus as well as, say, Napier's Bones.  Third, it must do
essentially the whole computation, with little or no assistance
from the user; you could subtract 16 on a 6-digit Pascaline by
adding 999984, but this doesn't mean we should say that a Pascaline
could subtract.

And finally, the machine must have either been technologically
innovative, or else well known and influential.  For certain concepts
of special importance, I have also listed the first time they were
*described*, although they were not implemented at that time.

Where I do not describe the size of a machine, it is generally
suitable for desktop use if it has no memory and is unprogrammable
or if it is a small prototype, but would fill a small room if it has
memory or significant programmability.

The term "full-scale" is used, in contrast to "prototype", to refer
to a machine with sufficient capacity to do regular useful work.
For the sorts of machines described toward the end of the chronology,
I generally consider them "completed" when they first run a program,
even though they may be subject to further modifications and debugging.

The names Tuebingen, Wuerttemberg, and Mueller should have an
umlauted "u" in place of the "ue" used in this ASCII text.

     ----------------------------------------------------
     A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952)
     ----------------------------------------------------

1623.   Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635), of Tuebingen, Wuerttemberg
	(now in Germany), makes his "Calculating Clock".  This is a
6-digit machine that can add and subtract, and indicates overflow
by ringing a bell.  Mounted on the machine is a set of Napier's Rods
(or Bones), a memory aid facilitating multiplications.  The machine
and plans are lost and forgotten in the war that is going on.

The plans are finally rediscovered in 1935, only to be lost in war
again, and then re-rediscovered in 1956 by the same man!  The machine
is reconstructed in 1960, and found to be workable.

(Schickard is a friend of the astronomer Kepler.)

1644-5. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), of Paris, makes his "Pascaline".
	This 5-digit machine uses a different carry mechanism from
Schickard's, with rising and falling weights instead of a direct
gear drive; it can be extended better to support more digits, but
it cannot subtract, and probably is less reliable than Schickard's
simpler method.

Where Schickard's machine is forgotten -- and indeed Pascal is
apparently unaware it ever existed -- Pascal's becomes well known
and establishes the computing machine concept in the intellectual
community.  He makes more machines and sells about 10-15 of them,
some supporting as many as 8 digits.  (Several survive to the
present day.)  Patents being a thing of the future, others also
sell copies of Pascal's machine.

(Pascal is also the inventor of the bus.)

c.1668. Sir Samuel Morland (1625-1695), of England, produces a
	non-decimal adding machine, suitable for use with English
money.  Instead of a carry mechanism, it registers carries on
auxiliary dials, from which the user must reenter them as addends.

1674.   Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), of Leipzig,
	designs his "Stepped Reckoner", which is constructed by a
man named Olivier, of Paris.  It uses a movable carriage so that it
can multiply, with operands of up to 5 and 12 digits and a product
of up to 16.  The user has to turn a crank once for each unit in
each digit in the multiplier; a fluted drum translates the turns
into additions.  But the carry mechanism requires user intervention,
and doesn't really work in all cases anyway.

Leibniz's machine doesn't get forgotten, but it does get misplaced
in an attic within a few years -- and stays there until 1879 when
it is noticed by a man working on the leaky roof!

(Leibniz, or Leibnitz, is also the co-inventor of calculus.)

1775.   Charles, the third Earl Stanhope, of England, makes a
	successful multiplying calculator similar to Leibniz's.

1770-6. Mathieus Hahn, somewhere in what is now Germany, also makes
	a successful multiplying calculator.

1786.   J. H. Mueller, of the Hessian army, conceives the idea of
	what came to be called a "difference engine".  That's a
special-purpose calculator for tabulating values of a polynomial,
given the differences between certain values so that the polynomial
is uniquely specified; it's useful for any function that can be
approximated by a polynomial over suitable intervals.  Mueller's
attempt to raise funds fails and the project is forgotten.

1820.   Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar (1785-1870), of France,
	makes his "Arithmometer", the first mass-produced calculator.
It does multiplication using the same general approach as Leibniz's
calculator; with assistance from the user it can also do division.
Machines of this general design, large enough to occupy most of a
desktop, continue to be sold for about 90 years.

1822.   Charles Babbage (1792-1871), of London, having reinvented
	the difference engine, begins his (government-funded)
project to build one by constructing a 6-digit calculator using
gear technology similar to that planned for the difference engine.

1832.   Babbage and Joseph Clement produce a prototype segment of
	his difference engine, which operates on 6-digit numbers
and 2nd-order differences (i.e. can tabulate quadratic polynomials).

The complete engine, which would be room-sized, is planned to be
able to operate both on 6th-order differences with numbers of about
20 digits, and on 3rd-order differences with numbers of 30 digits.
Each addition would be done in two phases, the second one taking
care of any carries generated in the first.  The output digits
would be punched into a soft metal plate, from which a plate for a
printing press could be made.

But there are various difficulties, and no more than this prototype
piece is ever assembled.

1834.   George Scheutz, of Stockholm, produces a small difference
	engine in wood, after reading a brief description of
Babbage's project.

1834.   Babbage conceives, and begins to design, his "Analytical
	Engine".  Whether or not this machine, if built, would
have constituted a computer depends on exactly how "computer" is
being defined.  One essential feature of present-day computers
is absent from the design: the "stored-program" concept, which is
necessary for implementing a compiler.  The program would have
been in read-only memory, specifically in the form of punch cards.
(In this chronology, such machines will be called "programmable
calculators".)

Babbage continues to work on the design for years, though after
about 1840 the changes are minor.  The machine would operate on
40-digit numbers; the "mill" (CPU) would have 2 main accumulators
and some auxiliary ones for specific purposes, while the "store"
(memory) would hold perhaps 100 more numbers.  There would be
several punch card readers, for both programs and data; the cards
would be chained and the motion of each chain could be reversed.
The machine would be able to perform conditional jumps.  There
would also be a form of microcoding: the meaning of instructions
would depend on the positioning of metal studs in a slotted
barrel, called the "control barrel".

The machine would do an addition in 3 seconds and a multiplication
or division in 2-4 minutes.

1842.   Babbage's difference engine project is officially canceled.
	(The cost overruns have been considerable, and Babbage is
spending too much time on redesigning the Analytical Engine.)

1843.   Scheutz and his son Edvard Scheutz produce a 3rd-order
	difference engine with printer, and the Swedish government
agrees to fund their next development.

1847-9. Babbage designs an improved, simpler difference engine,
	which will operate on 7th-order differences and 31-digit
numbers, but nobody is interested in paying to have it built.

(In 1989-91, however, a team at London's Science Museum will do
just that.  They will use components of modern construction, but
with tolerances no better than Clement could have provided... and,
after a bit of tinkering and detail-debugging, they will find that
the machine does indeed work.)

1853.   To Babbage's delight, the Scheutzes complete the first
	full-scale difference engine, which they call a Tabul-
ating Machine.  It operates on 15-digit numbers and 4th-order
differences, and produces printed output as Babbage's would have.
A second machine is later built to the same design by the firm
of Brian Donkin of London.

1858.   The first Tabulating Machine is bought by the Dudley
	Observatory in Albany, New York, and the second one by
the British government.  The Albany machine is used to produce
a set of astronomical tables; but the observatory's director is
then fired for this extravagant purchase, and the machine is
never seriously used again, eventually ending up in a museum.
The second machine, however, has a long and useful life.

1871.   Babbage produces a prototype section of the Analytical
	Engine's mill and printer.

1878.   Ramon Verea, living in New York City, invents a calculator
	with an internal multiplication table; this is much faster
than the shifting carriage or other digital methods.  He isn't
interested in putting it into production; he just wants to show that
a Spaniard can invent as well as an American.

1879.   A committee investigates the feasibility of completing the
	Analytical Engine and concludes that it is impossible now
that Babbage is dead.  The project is then largely forgotten and is
unknown to most of the people mentioned in the last part of this
chronology -- though Howard Aiken is an exception.

1885.   A multiplying calculator more compact than the Arithmometer
	enters mass production.  The design is the independent, and
more or less simultaneous, invention of Frank S. Baldwin, of the
United States, and T. Odhner, a Swede living in Russia.  The fluted
drums are replaced by a "variable-toothed gear" design: a disk with
radial pegs that can be made to protrude or retract from it.

1886.   Dorr E. Felt (1862-1930), of Chicago, makes his "Comptometer".
	This is the first calculator where the operands are entered
merely by pressing keys rather than having to be, for example, dialed
in.  It is feasible because of Felt's invention of a carry mechanism
fast enough to act while the keys return from being pressed.

1889.   Felt invents the first printing desk calculator.

1890.   US Census results are tabulated for the first time with sig-
	nificant mechanical aid: the punch card tabulators of Herman
Hollerith (1860-1929) of MIT, Cambridge, Mass.  This is the start of
the punch card industry.  The cost of the census tabulation is 98%
*higher* than the previous one, in part because of the temptation to
use the machines to the fullest and tabulate more data than formerly
possible, but the tabulation is completed in a much shorter time.
Another precedent is that the cards are read electrically.

(Contrary to popular impression and to earlier versions of this
chronology, Hollerith's cards of 1890 are not the same size as
US paper money of the time; they are much smaller.  Other sizes of
punch cards will also appear within a few years.)

1892.   William S. Burroughs (1857-1898), of St. Louis, invents a
	machine similar to Felt's but more robust, and this is the
one that really starts the office calculator industry.

(This machine is still hand powered, but it won't be many years
before electric calculators appear.)

1906.   Henry Babbage, Charles's son, with the help of the firm of
	R. W. Munro, completes the mill of his father's Analytical
Engine, just to show that it would have worked.  It does.  The
complete machine is never produced.

1919.   W. H. Eccles and F. W. Jordan publish the first flip-flop
	circuit design.

1931-2. E. Wynn-Williams, at Cambridge, England, uses thyratron
	tubes to construct a binary digital counter for use in
connection with physics experiments.

1935.   International Business Machines introduces the "IBM 601",
	a punch card machine with an arithmetic unit based on relays
and capable of doing a multiplication in 1 second.  The machine
becomes important both in scientific and commercial computation,
and about 1500 of them are eventually made.

1937.   George Stibitz (c.1910-) of the Bell Telephone Laboratories
	(Bell Labs), New York City, constructs a demonstration 1-bit
binary adder using relays.

1937.   Alan M. Turing (1912-1954), of Cambridge University, England,
	publishes a paper on "computable numbers".  This paper solves
a mathematical problem, but the solution is achieved by reasoning
(as a mathematical device) about the theoretical simplified computer
known today as a Turing machine.

1938.   Claude E. Shannon (1916-) publishes a paper on the
	implementation of symbolic logic using relays.

1938.   Konrad Zuse (1910-) of Berlin, with some assistance from
	Helmut Schreyer, completes a prototype mechanical binary
programmable calculator, originally called the "V1" but retroactively
renamed "Z1" after the war.  It works with floating point numbers
having a 7-bit exponent, 16-bit mantissa, and a sign bit.  The
memory uses sliding metal parts to store 16 such numbers, and works
well; but the arithmetic unit is less successful.

The program is read from punched tape -- not paper tape, but
discarded 35 mm movie film.  Data values can be entered from a
numeric keyboard, and outputs are displayed on electric lamps.

Nov 1939. John V. Atanasoff (1903-) and graduate student Clifford
	Berry (?-1963), of Iowa State College (now the Iowa State
University), Ames, Iowa, complete a prototype 16-bit adder.  This is
the first machine to calculate using vacuum tubes.

1939.   Zuse and Schreyer begin work on the "V2" (later "Z2"),
	which will marry the Z1's existing mechanical memory unit to
a new arithmetic unit using relay logic.  The project is interrupted
for a year when Zuse is drafted.

(Zuse is a friend of Wernher von Braun, who will later develop the
*other* "V2", and after that, play a key role in the US space program.)

1939-40. Schreyer completes a prototype 10-bit adder using vacuum
	tubes, and a prototype memory using neon lamps.

Jan 1940. At Bell Labs, Samuel Williams and Stibitz complete a
	calculator which can operate on complex numbers, and give
it the imaginative name of the "Complex Number Calculator"; it is
later known as the "Model I Relay Calculator".  It uses telephone
switching parts for logic: 450 relays and 10 crossbar switches.
Numbers are represented in "plus 3 BCD"; that is, for each decimal
digit, 0 is represented by binary 0011, 1 by 0100, and so on up to
1100 for 9; this scheme requires fewer relays than straight BCD.

Rather than requiring users to come to the machine to use it, the
calculator is provided with three remote keyboards, at various
places in the building, in the form of teletypes.  Only one can be
used at a time, and the output is automatically displayed on the
same one.  In September 1940, a teletype is set up at a mathematical
conference in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a connection to New York,
and those attending the conference can use the machine remotely.

1940.   Zuse is released from the army and completes the Z2.
	It works better than the Z1, but isn't reliable enough.
(Later he is drafted again, and released again.)

Summer 1941. Atanasoff and Berry complete a special-purpose calcu-
	lator for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations,
later called the "ABC" ("Atanasoff-Berry Computer").  This has 60
50-bit words of memory in the form of capacitors (with refresh
circuits -- the first regenerative memory) mounted on two revolving
drums.  The clock speed is 60 Hz, and an addition takes 1 second.

For secondary memory it uses punch cards, moved around by the user.
The holes are not actually punched in the cards, but burned.  The
punch card system's error rate is never reduced beyond 0.001%, and
this isn't really good enough.

(Atanasoff will leave Iowa State after the US enters the war, and
this will end his work on digital computing machines.)

Dec 1941. Now working with limited backing from the DVL (German Aero-
	nautical Research Institute), Zuse completes the "V3" (later
"Z3"): the first operational programmable calculator.  It works with
floating point numbers having a 7-bit exponent, 14-bit mantissa
(with a "1" bit automatically prefixed unless the number is 0),
and a sign bit.  The memory holds 64 of these words and therefore
requires over 1400 relays; there are 1200 more in the arithmetic
and control units.

The program, input, and output are implemented as described above for
the Z1.  Conditional jumps are not available.  The machine can do 3-4
additions per second, and takes 3-5 seconds for a multiplication.
It is a marginal decision whether to call the Z3 a prototype; with
its small memory it is certainly not very useful on the equation-
solving problems that the DVL was mostly interested in.

Jan 1943. Howard H. Aiken (1900-1973) and his team at Harvard
	University, Cambridge, Mass. (with IBM's backing), complete
the "ASCC Mark I" ("Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator Mark I"),
also called the "Harvard Mark I".  This electromechanical machine is
the first programmable calculator to be widely known:  Aiken is to
Zuse as Pascal to Schickard.

The machine is 51 feet long, weighs 5 tons, and incorporates 750,000
parts.  It includes 72 accumulators, each incorporating its own arith-
metic unit as well as a mechanical register with a capacity of 23
digits plus sign.  (See the ENIAC entry, below, for a more detailed
description of such an architecture.)  The arithmetic is fixed-point,
with a plugboard setting determining the number of decimal places.
I/O facilities include card readers, a card punch, paper tape readers,
and typewriters.  There are 60 sets of rotary switches, each of which
can be used as a constant register -- sort of a mechanical read-only
memory.

The program is read from one paper tape; data can be read from the
other tapes, or the card readers, or from the constant registers.

Conditional jumps are not available.  However, in later years the
machine is modified to support multiple paper tape readers for the
program, with the transfer from one to another being conditional,
sort of like a conditional subroutine call.  Another addition allows
the provision of plugboard-wired subroutines callable from the tape.

Apr 1943. Max Newman, Wynn-Williams, and their team at the secret
	Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, Bletchley,
England, complete the "Heath Robinson".  This is a specialized machine
for cipher-breaking, not a general-purpose calculator or computer but
some sort of logic device, using a combination of electronics and relay
logic.  It reads data optically at 2000 characters per second from
2 closed loops of paper tape, each typically about 1000 characters long.

(The secrecy that surrounded this machine and its successors at
Bletchley Park will still be partially in effect at the time of
writing, hence the vague description.  Newman knew Turing from
Cambridge, and had been the first person to see a draft of Turing's
1937 paper.  Heath Robinson is the name of a British cartoonist known
for drawings of comical machines, like the American Rube Goldberg.
Two later machines in the series will be named for London stores
with "Robinson" in their names!)

Sep 1943. Williams and Stibitz complete the "Relay Interpolator",
	later called the "Model II Relay Calculator".  This is a
programmable calculator; again, the program and data are read from
paper tapes.  An innovative feature is that, for greater reliability,
numbers are represented in a biquinary format using 7 relays for
each digit, of which exactly 2 should be "on": 01 00001 for 0,
01 00010 for 1, and so on up to 10 10000 for 9.

(Some of the later machines in this series used the biquinary
notation for the digits of floating-point numbers.)

Dec 1943. H. T. Flowers and his team at Bletchley Park complete the
	the first "Colossus".  This successor to the "Robinson"
series machines is entirely electronic, incorporating 2400 vacuum
tubes for logic.  It has 5 paper tape loop readers, each working
at 5000 characters per second.

(10 Colossi will eventually be built.  Turing also has an important
role at Bletchley Park, but does not work directly on the machines.)

1944-5. Zuse almost completes his first full-scale machine, the "V4"
	(later "Z4"), which resembles his earlier designs.  Its
memory reverts to the Z1's mechanical design, storing 1000 words of
32 bits in less then a cubic meter; the equivalent in relays would
have filled a large room.

As the war begins to go very badly for Germany, Zuse's work is dis-
rupted several times, and then abandoned for the duration.  An air
raid had destroyed the Z3 in 1943, but the incomplete Z4 survives the
war's end in a basement.

1945.   Zuse invents a programming language called Plankalkul.

Jun 1945. John von Neumann (1903-1957) joins the ENIAC team and
	drafts a report describing the future computer eventually
built as the "EDVAC" ("Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic
Computer" (!)); this is the first description of the design of a
stored-program computer, and gives rise to the term "von Neumann
computer".

The first draft of the report fails to credit other team members
such as Eckert and Mauchly; when this version becomes widely
circulated, von Neumann gets somewhat too much credit for the
design.  The final version corrects the oversight, but too late.

(Von Neumann, also noted for his mental calculating ability, is
the only one of the principal computer pioneers in the US familiar
with Turing's 1937 paper.)

Nov 1945. John W. Mauchly (pronounced Mawkly; 1907-80) and J. Presper
	Eckert (1919-) and their team at the Moore School of Electrical
Engineering, of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, complete
a secret project for the US Army's Ballistics Research Lab: a program-
mable calculator called the "ENIAC" ("Electronic Numerator, Integrator,
Analyzer, and Computer").

The ENIAC's architecture resembles that of the Harvard Mark I, but
its components are entirely electronic, incorporating 17,468 vacuum
tubes.  The machine weighs 30 tons, covers about 1000 square feet
of floor, and consumes 130 or 140 kilowatts of electricity.

The machine incorporates 20 accumulators (the original plan was for 4).
The accumulators and other units are all connected by several data
buses, and a set of "program lines" for synchronization.  Each accum-
ulator stores a 10-digit number, using 10 bits to represent each digit,
and also incorporates circuits to add a number from a bus to the
stored number, and to transmit the stored number or its complement to
a bus.

A separate unit can perform multiplication (in about 3 milliseconds),
while another does division and square roots; the inputs and outputs
for both these units use the buses.  There are constant registers, as
on the Harvard Mark I: 104 12-digit registers forming an array called
the "function table".  100 of these registers are directly addressable
by a 2-digit number from a bus (the others are used for interpolations).
Finally, a card reader is available to input data values, and there
is a card punch for output.

The program is set up on a plugboard -- this is considered reasonable
since the same or similar program would generally be used for weeks
at a time.  For example, connecting certain sockets would cause
accumulator 1 to transmit its contents onto data bus 1 when a pulse
arrived on program line 1; meanwhile several accumulators could be
adding the value from that data bus to their stored value, while
others could be working independently.  The program lines are pulsed
under the control of a master unit, which can perform iterations.

The ENIAC's clock speed is 100 kHz.

Mauchly and Eckert apply for a patent.  The university disputes this
at first, but they settle.  The patent is finally granted in 1964,
but is overturned in 1973, in part because of the previous work by
Atanasoff, with which Mauchly was acquainted.

(The BRL wanted the ENIAC to use on the difficult problem of making
aiming tables for use by artillerymen.  It isn't ready in time for
the war, and overruns its original budget by 225% -- problems that
will face Eckert and Mauchly again on later projects.)

Feb 1946. The ENIAC is revealed to the public.

Jul-Aug 1946. The Moore School gives a course on "Theory and Techniques
	for Design of Electronic Computers"; lectures are given by
Eckert, Mauchly, Stibitz, von Neumann, and Aiken among others.  The
course leads to several projects being started, among them the EDSAC.

Jul 1947. Aiken and his team complete the "Harvard Mark II", a large
	programmable calculator using relays both for its 50 floating-
point registers and for the arithmetic unit, 13,000 of them in all.

Sep 1947. A moth (?-1947) makes the mistake of flying into the Harvard
	Mark II.  A whimsical technician makes the logbook entry "first
actual case of bug being found", and annotates it by taping down the
remains of the moth.

(The term "bug" was of course already in use; that's why it's funny.)

1947.   Frederick Viehe (?-1960), of Los Angeles, applies for a patent
	on an invention which is to use magnetic core memory.

c.1947. The magnetic drum memory is independently invented by several
	people, and the first examples are constructed.

(As noted below, some early machines will use drums as main memory
rather than secondary memory.)

Jan 1948. Wallace Eckert (1902-1971, no relation to Presper Eckert)
	of IBM, with his team, completes the "SSEC" ("Selective
Sequence Electronic Calculator").  This technological hybrid has
8 vacuum tube registers, 150 words of relay memory, and 66 paper
tape loops storing a total of 20,000 words.  The word size is
20 digits, stored in BCD in the registers.

As with the Harvard Mark I in its later form, the machine can be
switched to read instructions from any of the paper tapes.  There
is also some use of plugboards in its programming.  But it can
also cache some instructions in memory and read them from there;
thus, in effect, it can operate either as a stored-program computer
(with a very small program memory) or not.  Because it can do this,
IBM's point of view is that this is the first computer.

Jun 1948. Newman, F. C. Williams, and their team at Manchester Uni-
	versity, Manchester, England, complete a prototype machine,
the "Mark I" (also called the "Manchester Mark I").  This is the
first machine that everyone would call a computer, because it's the
first with a true stored-program capability.

It uses a new type of memory developed by F. C. Williams (possibly
after an original suggestion by Presper Eckert), which uses the
residual charges left on the screen of a CRT after the electron
beam has been fired at it.  (The bits are read by firing another
beam through them and reading the voltage at an electrode beyond
the screen.)  This is a little unreliable but is fast, and also
relatively cheap because it can use existing CRT designs; and it is
much more compact than any other memory then existing.  The Mark I's
main memory of 32 32-bit words occupies a single Williams tube.
(Other CRTs on the machine are less densely used: one contains only
an accumulator.)

The Mark I's programs are initially entered in binary on a keyboard,
and the output is read in binary from another CRT.  Later Turing 
joins the team (see also the "Pilot ACE", below) and devises a primi-
tive form of assembly language, one of several developed at about the
same time in different places.

Sep 1948. The ENIAC is improved, using ideas from Richard F. Clipper of
	the BRL and Nicholas Metropolis of Los Alamos.  Each program line
is permanently wired for a different operation, and a new converter
unit allows them to be addressed by a program, the way the function
table can -- thus implementing, in effect, opcodes.  With this change,
the program can now be entered via the *function table*.

(This conversion will sometimes be described as making the ENIAC into a
stored-program computer, but the program memory is still read-only.
However, setting up a program now takes a matter of hours, rather than
days as before.)

Fall 1948. IBM introduces the "IBM 604", a programmable calculator
	and card punch using vacuum tubes.  It can read a card,
perform up to 60 arithmetic operations in 80 milliseconds, and punch
the results on the same card.  The programming is by plugboard.

All machines first mentioned in the chronology from here on are
stored-program computers.

1949-51. Jay W. Forrester and his team at MIT construct the
	"Whirlwind" for the US Navy's Office of Research and
Inventions.  The vague date is because its advance to full-time
operational status is gradual.  Its original form has 3300 tubes
and 8900 crystal diodes.  It occupies 2500 square feet of floor.
Its 2048 16-bit words of CRT memory use up $32,000 worth of tubes
each month.  There is also a graphical I/O device consisting of a
CRT (only one dot can be displayed at a time) and a light pen.
This allows the machine to be used for air traffic control.

The Whirlwind is the first computer designed for real-time work;
it can do 500,000 additions or 50,000 multiplications per second.

Spring 1949. Forrester conceives the idea of magnetic core memory as
	it is to become commonly used, with a grid of wires used to
address the cores.  The first practical form, in 1952-53, will replace
the Whirlwind's CRT memory and render obsolete all types of main
memory then existing.

April 1949. The Manchester Mark I, its main memory now upgraded to
	128 40-bit words (on two CRTs), acquires a secondary memory
in the form of a magnetic drum holding a further 1024 words.  Also
at about this time, two index registers are added to the machine.

May 1949.  Maurice Wilkes (1913-) and his team at Cambridge Uni-
	versity complete the "EDSAC" ("Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic Computer"), which is closely based on the EDVAC design
report from von Neumann's group -- Wilkes had attended the 1946
Moore School course.  The project is supported both financially
and with technical personnel from J. Lyons & Co. Ltd., a large
British firm in the food and restaurant business.

This is the first full-scale operational stored-program computer,
and is therefore the final candidate for the title of "the first
computer".

Its main memory is of a type that had existed for some years, but
had not been used for a computing machine: the "ultrasonic delay
line" memory.  It had been invented originally by William Shockley
of Bell Labs (also one of the co-inventors of the transistor, in
1948), and Eckert had made an improved version in connection with
radar systems.  It works by repeatedly converting from the usual
electrical data pulses to ultrasonic pulses directed along, typic-
ally, the length of a tank of mercury; on arrival at the other end,
the pulses are converted back to electrical form.  The memory must
be maintained at a particular temperature, and only the few bits
currently in electrical form are accessible.  In the EDSAC, 16 tanks
of mercury give a total of 256 35-bit words (or 512 17-bit words).

The clock speed of the EDSAC is 500 kHz; most instructions take
about 1500 ms to execute.  Its I/O is by paper tape, and a set of
constant registers is provided for booting.

The software eventually supports the concept of relocatable proce-
dures with addresses bound at load time.

Aug 1949. Eckert and Mauchly, having formed their own company,
	complete the "BINAC" ("Binary Automatic Computer") for the
US Air Force.  Designed as a first step to in-flight computers, this
has dual (redundant) processors each with 700 tubes and 512 31-bit
words of memory.  Each processor occupies only 4 square feet of floor
space and can do 3500 additions or 1000 multiplications per second.

The designers are thinking mostly of their forthcoming "UNIVAC"
("Universal Automatic Computer") and don't spend much time making
the BINAC as reliable as it should be, but the tandem processors
compensate somewhat.

Sep 1949. Aiken's team completes the "Harvard Mark III".  This
	computer has separate magnetic drum memories for data and
instructions.  Only some of the data drums can be addressed by
the CPU; the others serve as secondary memory.  The total memory
capacity is 4000 instructions, 350 16-bit words in the main data
drums, and 4000 words more in the secondary memory.  The machine
contains over 5000 vacuum tubes and 2000 relays.

May 1950. A group at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington,
	England, complete the "Pilot ACE" (pilot project for an
"Automatic Computing Engine").  This had been largely designed by
Turing when he was there in 1945-47; he had left and gone to Manches-
ter because the designs were not being implemented.  The main memory
of this computer is in the form of 200 separate ultrasonic delay
lines, thus allowing better addressability than other ultrasonic-
based machines.  An additional group of short delay lines serve as
registers, each of which performs a particular operation automatic-
ally on a number directed to it.  Most operations then consist simply
of routing a number, or a counted stream of numbers, from one delay
line to another.  Punch cards are used for input and output; a drum
will be added later for secondary memory.

(A successor to this machine will be named "DEUCE".)

1950.   Zuse's Z4 is finally completed and goes into service at
	ETH (Federal Polytechical Institute) in Zurich, Switzerland.
The design is modified so that it can do conditional jumps.  The
machine also implements a form of intstruction pipelining, with the
program tape being read 2 instructions ahead and various optimiz-
ations performed automatically.

The Z4 remains in use for 5 years at ETH and 5 more in France, and
Zuse soon begins making his machines commercially.  He eventually
sells some 300 machines before being bought out by Siemens.

1950.   Douglas Hartree (the leading expert in the country on the
	specialized computing machines called differential analyzers)
gives his professional opinion to Ferranti Ltd., of Manchester:
as the 3 existing computer projects will suffice to handle all the
calculations that will ever be needed in Britain, Ferranti would be
well advised to drop the idea of making computers for commercial sale.

Feb 1951. A rather more optimistic Ferranti Ltd. completes the first
	commercial computer.  This is yet another "Mark I", but is
also known as the "Manchester Mark II", "MUDC", "MUEDC", and "MADAM"!
It has 256 40-bit words of main memory and 16K words of drum, and
includes 8 index registers.  An eventual total of 8 of these machines
are sold.

(The index register's contents are added, not to the address taken
from an instruction, but to the entire instruction, thus potentially
changing the opcode!  Calling Mel...)

Mar 1951.  Presper Eckert and Mauchly, having sold their company to
	Remington Rand, complete the first "UNIVAC", which is the
first US commercial computer.  (The US census department is the first
customer.)  It has 1000 12-digit words of ultrasonic delay line memory
and can do 8333 additions or 555 multiplications per second; it con-
tains 5000 tubes and covers 200 square feet of floor.  For secondary
memory it uses magnetic tapes of nickel-coated bronze; these are 1/2
inch wide, and store 128 characters per inch.  

Fall 1951.  The Lyons company receives its reward for supporting the
	EDSAC, as T. R. Thompson and his team complete the "LEO I"
("Lyons Electronic Office I"), which is modeled closely after the
EDSAC.  Its ultrasonic memory is 4 times as large, and avoids the
usual temperature dependency by using one delay line as a master
and synchronizing the others to it instead of to a clock.

The Lyons company wants the LEO I for its own use -- payroll, inven-
tory, and so on; it is the first computer used for commercial calcul-
ations.  But other companies now turn out to be interested in the LEO,
and Lyons will soon find itself in the computer manufacturing business
as well.

1951.   Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), of Remington Rand, invents
	the modern concept of the compiler.

1952.   The EDVAC is finally completed.  It has 4000 tubes, 10,000
	crystal diodes, and 1024 44-bit words of ultrasonic memory.
Its clock speed is 1 MHz.

1952.   The IBM "Defense Calculator", later renamed the "701", the
	first IBM computer unless you count the SSEC, enters
production at Poughkeepsie, New York.  (The first one is delivered
in March 1953; 19 are sold altogether.  The machine is available
with 2048 or 4096 36-bit words of CRT memory; it does 2200 multi-
plications per second.)

1952.   Grace Murray Hopper implements the first compiler, the "A-0".
	(But as with "first computer", this is a somewhat arbitrary
designation.)

     ----------------------------------------------------

A few things have happened since then, too, but this margin is too
narrow...

-- 
--
Wilson Roberto Afonso              Nutec Corporation
+1 415 988-9781                    2685 Marine Way Suite 1319
FAX: +1 415 988-9782               Mountain View, CA 94043


Article: 33562 of alt.folklore.computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Path: tridom!emory!swrinde!sgiblab!barrnet.net!infoserv!nutec!wilson
From: wilson@nutec.com (Wilson Roberto Afonso)
Subject: alt.folklore.computers FAQ - Part 3/3
Organization: Nutec Corporation
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 22:40:16 GMT
Message-ID: <Cnypn5.FF2@nutec.com>
Keywords: faq, folklore
Lines: 498



Archive-name: afc-faq-3
Last-modified: 05-Apr-1994

This is the alt.folklore.computers list of Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ).  It is maintained by Wilson Afonso (wilson@nutec.com).  All
contributions and corrections are welcome, but I'm ultimately
responsible for what appears here.  Contributors are acknowledged, if
possible.

This is a four-part file.  The first part contains only administrative
comments.  The second contains mostly generic questions. The third is a
small history of computers, and the fourth is a list of books which are more
or less related to computer folklore.  The third part (file 2) is mantained
by Mark Brader (msb@sq.sq.com), and contributions related to it should go
to him.

File 0:
0   - Administrivia

File 1:
I   - Introduction
II  - Generic questions
III - General folklore
IV  - Origins
V   - Firsts
VI  - Jokes
VII - Net Resources
VIII- Acknowledgements
IX  - Things I am looking for

File 2:
X   - A Chronology of Digital Computing Machines (to 1952)

File 3 (this file):
XI  - List of computer-folklore related books

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------


XI  - List of computer-folklore related books


-----------------8<-----------------8<---------------8<-------------8<--------
 A good source for the following books is supposedly the Boston Computer
 Museum Catalog.  Call them at (617)426-2800 (USA) and ask for one.

=============================================================================
Accidental Empires
 How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millons, battle foreign 
 competition, and still can't get a date.
 Robert X. Cringely
 324p
 Reading MA, Addison-Wesley, c1992
 0-201-57032-7

Accidental Millionaire
 The rise and fall of Steve Jobs at Apple Computer
 Lee Butcher
 224p, ill
 New York, Paragon House, c1988
 0-913729-79-5

Ainsi naquit l'informatique (The Computer Comes of Age)
 The people, the hardware, and the software
 [This book has a strong IBM bias]
 Rene Moreau, Translated by J. Howlett
 227p, ill
 Cambridge MA, MIT Press, c1984
 0-262-13194-3

Approaching Zero
 Data Crime and the Computer Underworld
 Bryan Clough and Paul Mungo
 242 p
 Faber and Faber, 1992
 0-571-16546-X

Artificial Life
 The quest for a new creation
 Steven Levy
 390 p
 New York, Pantheon Books, c1992
 ???? ISBN

Big Blue
 IBM's use and abuse of Power
 Richard Thomas DeLamarter
 393p
 New York, Dodd Mead, c1986
 0-396-08515-6
 Paperback: Pan Books, London, 1988
 0-330-30923-0

Bit by Bit
 An Illustrated History of Computers
 Stan Augarten
 324p, ill
 New York, Ticknor & Fields, 1984
 0-89919-268-8 (hard)
 0-89919-302-1 (soft)

Blue Magic
 The people, power, and politics behind the IBM personal computer
 James Chposky and Ted Leonsis
 228p
 New York, Facts on File, c1988
 0-8160-1391-8

Breakthrough to the Computer Age
 [???]
 Harry Wulforst
 185p, ill
 New York, Scribner, c1982
 0-684-17499-5

A Business and its Beliefs
 The ideas that helped build IBM
 Thomas J. Watson
 ??? p
 New York, McGraw-Hill, 1963
 ???? ISBN

Computer Engineering
 A DEC view of hardware systems design
 Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, John E. McNamara
 585 p
 Bedford, Digital Press, c1978
 0-932376-00-2

The Computer Entrepeneurs
 Who's making it big and how in America's upstart industry
 Robert Levering, Michael Katz, Milton Moskowitz
 481p, ill
 New York, New American Library, c1984
 0-453-00477-6

The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann
 Herman H. Goldstine
 378p, ill
 Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1972
 0-691-08104-2

Computer Lib; Dream Machines
 [texts bound together back-to-back and inverted]
 Ted Nelson
 178p 153p, ill
 Redmond, WA, Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987
 0-914845-49-7

A Computer Perspective
 Background to the computer age
 by the office of Charles & Ray Eames
 174p, ill
 Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1990
 0-674-15626-9

The Computer Pioneers
 The making of the modern computer
 David Ritchie
 238p, ill
 New York, Simon&Schuster, c1986
 0-671-52397-X

Der Computer - Mein Lebenswerk
 [in German Language - Translations in other languages ???]
 Konrad Zuse
 Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, ..., 1984
 ISBN 3-540-13814-5
 ISBN 0-387-13814-5

The Conquest of the Microchip
 Hans J. Queisser
 200 p
 Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988
 ???? ISBN

The Cuckoo's Egg
 Tracking a spy through the maze of computer espionage
 Clifford Stoll
 326p
 New York, Doubleday, c1989
 0-385-24946-2

Cyberpunk
 Outlaws and hackers on the computer frontier
 Katie Hafner and John Markoff
 368p
 New York, Simon&Schuster, c1991
 0-671-68322-5

The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer
 A view of the future of the software industry
 Edward Yourdon
 352p, ill
 Englewood Cliffs NJ, Yourdon Press, c1992
 0-13-203670-3

The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age
 Tales of the computer age 
 Karla Jennings
 237p, ill
 New York, W.W.Norton, c1990
 0-393-02897-6

Digital Equipment Corporation
 The first twentyt-five years
 Kenneth H. Olsen
 ??? p
 New York, Newcomwn Society in north America, 1983
 ???? ISBN

Digital at Work
 Snapshots from the first thirty-five years
 edited by Jamie Parker-Pearson
 Digital Press, Burlington, MA, c1992, Softbound
 ISBN 0-13-213489-6 / Prentice-Hall
 ISBN 1-55558-092-0 / Digital Press
 Digital Order Number EY-J826E-DP

Early British Computers
 The story of vintage computers and the people who built them
 Simon Lavington
 139p, ill
 Manchester University Press, 1980
 0-7190-0803-4 [hard cover]
 0-7190-0810-7 [paperback]
 Bedford MA, Digital Press, c1980
 0-932376-08-8

Electronic Computers
 A Historical Survey
 Saul Rosen
 Computing Surveys v1#1, March 1969

Father, Son & Co.
 My life at IBM and beyond
 Thomas J. Watson
 468 p
 New York, Bantam Books, c1990
 0-553-07011-8

Fire in the Valley
 The making of the personal computer
 Paul Freiberger
 288p, ill
 Berkeley CA, Osborne/McGraw-Hill, c1984
 0-88134-121-5

>From Dits to Bits
 A personal history of the electronic computer
 Herman Lukoff
 219p, ill
 Portland OR, Robotic Press, c1979
 0-89661-002-0

>From ENIAC to UNIVAC
 an Apraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers
 Nancy Stern
 ca. 290 p. / Hardbound
 Digital Press, Bedford, Mass., 1981
 0-932376-14-2, Digital Order No. EY-AX013-DP

Fumbling the Future
 How Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer
 Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander
 274 p
 New York, Quill, 1990
 0-688-09511-9

Hackers
 Heroes of the computer revolution
 Steven Levy
 458p
 Garden City NY, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984
 0-385-19195-2

Hard Drive
 Bill Gates and the making of Microsoft empire
 James Wallace and Jim Erickson
 426p, ill
 New York, Wiley, c1992
 0-471-56886-4

Hermann Hollerith
 Forgotten Giant of Information Processing
 Geoffrey D. Austrian
 Columbia University Press, New York, 1982
 0-231-05146-8

A History of Computing Technology
 From the earliest written numbers to the IBM 360
 Michael R. Williams
 430p
 Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, c1985
 0-13-389917-9

A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century
 Edited by N. Metropolis, J. Howlett
 and Gian-Carlo Rota
 Academic Press Inc., New York, London, ..., c1980
 0-12-491650-3

Hypergrowth
 The rise and fall of Osborne Computer Corporation
 Adam Osborne
 ??? p
 New York, Avon, c1985
 ???? ISBN

The Little Kingdom
 The private story of Apple Computer
 Michael Moritz
 ??? p.
 New York, Paragon House, c1988
 ???? ISBN

The Making of Microsoft
 How Bill Gates and his team created the world's most successful software
  company
 Daniel Ichbiah & Susan L. Knepper
 304 p
 Rocklin, Prima Pub., c1991
 1-55958-071-2

The Media Lab
 Inventing the Future at MIT
 Stewert Brand
 285p, ill
 New York, Penguin Books, 1988
 0-14-009701-5

Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer
 Maurice Vincent Wilkes
 The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1985
 ISBN 0-262-23122-0

The Micro Millenium
 [???]
 Christopher Evans
 255p
 New York, Viking Press, 1980
 0-670-47400-2

Microchip
 The story of a revolution and the man who made it
 [Originally published as The Chip]
 T. R. Reid
 240 p
 Pan, Collins, London, c1984
 ???? ISBN

The Mighty Micro
 The impact of the computer revolution
 Christopher Evans
 255p
 London, Gollancz, 1982
 ??? ISBN

The New Alchemists
 Silicon Valley and the microelectronics revolution
 Dirk Hanson
 364p
 Boston, Little Brown, c1982
 0-316-34342-0

The New Hacker's Dictionary
 Jargon file in print
 Eric Raymond.
 433 p
 The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, USA.  1991
 0-262-68069
 
Odyssey
 Pepsi to Apple - A journey of adventure, ideas, and the future
 John Sculley with John A. Byrne
 450p, ill
 New York, Harper&Row, c1987
 0-06-015780-1

Once Upon A Time In Computerland
 The Amazing Billion-Dollar Tale of Bill Millard's Computerland Empire
 Jonathan Littman
 413p
 Simon and Schuster / Touchstone, 1990
 0-671-70218-1
 0-671-69392-1 Pbk

The Origins of Digital Computers
 Selected Papers/3rd Edition
 Brian Randell, ed.
 580p, ill
 New York, Springer-Verlag, 1982
 0-387-11319-3

Portraits in Silicon
 [Interviews with 30+ influential hardware and software inventors]
 Robert Slater
 374p, ill
 Cambridge MA, MIT Press, c1987
 0-262-19262-4

Programmers at Work
 Interviews with 19 programmers that shaped the computer industry
 Susan M. Lammers
 391p, ill
 Redmond WA, Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1989
 1-55615-211-6

Project Whirlwind
 History of a Pioneer Computer
 Kent C. Redmond & Thomas M. Smith
 296 p. / Softbound
 Digital Press, History of Computing Series, Bedford, c1980
 ISBN 0-932376-09-6, Digital Order No. EY-8351E-DP

Reckoners
 The Prehistory of the Digital Computer ...
 Paul  E. Ceruzzi
 Greenwodd Press, Westport, Connecticut - London, England
 0-313-23382-9

The Soul of a New Machine
 [data general]
 Tracy Kidder
 293p
 Boston, Little Brown, c1981
 0-316-49170-5

Steve Jobs: the journey is the reward
 [???]
 Jeffrey S. Young
 ??? p.
 Glenville, Scott, Foresman, c1988
 ???? ISBN

The Sun Never Sets on IBM
 [???]
 Nancy Foy
 ??? p
 Cambridge, MIT Press, c1981
 ???? ISBN

Sunburst
 The Ascent of Sun Microsystems
 Mark Hall and John Barry
 297p
 Chicago, Contemporary Books, c1990
 0-8092-4368-7

The Tao of Programming
 Compuarcheological guide to the mysterious past of programming
 Geoffrey James
 ??? p
 Info Books, Santa Monica, Calif., USA.  1987
 0-931137-07-1

Think
 A biography of the Watsons and I.B.M.
 William Rodgers
 ??? p
 London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970
 ???? ISBN
 
The Ultimate Entrepreneur
 The story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation
 Glenn Rifkin
 ??? p
 Chicago, Contemporary Books, 1988
 ???? ISBN

West of Eden
 The end of innocence at Apple Computer
 Frank Rose
 356p
 New York, Penguin Books, c1989
 0-14-009372-9

Zap !
 The rise and fall of Atari
 Scott Cohen
 177 p.
 New York, McGraw-Hill, c1984
 ???? ISBN

The Zen of Programming
 Koans, haiku, folktales and other stories of programming
 Geoffrey James.
 ??? p
 Info Books, Santa Monica, Calif., USA.  1988
 0-931137-09-8
 
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Wilson Roberto Afonso              Nutec Corporation
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FAX: +1 415 988-9782               Mountain View, CA 94043