Re: [TCLUG:20145] RE: ancient computers

["Troy A. Johnson" <john1536@tc.umn.edu>]

Holy educational aids, Batman!

Is there anything like this on the market today? It might be nice to be
able to get people to feel more comfortable when they get closer to the
1s and 0s (myself included, though I'm not a stranger to them). How big
was this thing?

Peter Schuman wrote:
> 
> Well, literally, my first digital computer was a plastic contraption I got
> in the 1960s sometime.  It consisted of wires (for strength, not
> conduction) and a lot of levers and plastic slides.  You could rearrange
> the sliders and levers and get the computer to either do addition or
> subtraction or generate random numbers -- all on a 3-bit "display":  three
> of the sliders that represented 1 if pulled out and 0 if pushed in.  No
> Altair, but I certainly got an understanding of the process in adding
> numbers in a digital computer -- and an appreciation for the time and
> rework needed to get even the simplest computer program to work.  Once you
> spent the hours to assemble the thing and worked out how to do the small
> number of things it could do, that was that:  there was nothing more you
> could do with it.  You couldn't even dismantle it so you could store it
> safely (easy-snapping polystyrene, remember?)
> 
> A few computer museums have these, but they were made of soft steel wire
> and polystyrene ("high-impact," of course!), so they have VERY little
> resistance to breaking.
> 
> A bit of experience with a mechanical digital computer goes a long way
> towards breaking down any awe for the magical electronic "brain."  I will
> never think of computers as anything but extremely fast, extremely stupid
> adding machines.  Of course, they are also examples of how much can be done
> with lots and lots of simple-minded processes -- but then, so are ants and
> bees; the tiny, self-replicating robots that some labs have running around
> on lab floors are really just an order of magnitude or so simpler than the
> "brains" controlling insects.
> 
> The Kaypro 2X in the garage is a different animal, of course:  4 MHz Z80
> with 64 K of memory and two 390K floppy drives.  Over 6 years, I wrote
> about 1 1/2 million words on it, all of which were printed on a Juki 6100
> daisy wheel printer.  And Wordstar -- made in hacker's heaven, for hackers.
> 
> "Trainor, Kevin T." wrote:
> 
> > Jeff wrote:
> > > I still have my first computer (Apple II+) and monitor (green
> > > monochrome made by apple) in the basement.
> >         I have an XT clone that my son has "inherited"; bought it
> > for about $2000 worth of grad school student loan money in 1988.
> > I remember being thrilled because it had 10 expansion slots and
> > a CGA monitor.
> >
> > <snip>
> > > Scary, though,
> > > that my TI-89 graphing calculator is many times more powerful than my
> > first
> > > computer, or even my first Mac. (16MHz 68000 vs. 8MHz 68000
> > > vs. 1MHz 6502)
> >         I feel the same way about my Palm Pilot (a Personal, not
> > even a III!) and that 8088. Very scary.
> >
> > Kevin Trainor
> > [Snip!]
> 
> --
> Peter Schuman        paschuman@uswest.net
> 
> Vegetarians eat vegetables:  Beware of humanitarians!
> 
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-- 
Troy Johnson   mailto:john1536@tc.umn.edu   http://umn.edu/~john1536/
You know why there's a Second Amendment?  In case the government fails
to
follow the first one.
         -- Rush Limbaugh, in a moment of unaccustomed profundity 17 Aug
1993