How Computers Work -- Circa 1979

Guinnessy writes "In a younger, more innocent time, Ladybird Books came out with a series of children's books called "How things work." Someone has put the 1971 and 1979 versions of How Computers Work onto the web. It's a fascinating glance at how much computers have advanced since the silicon chip was introduced. State-of-the-art in 1971 consisted of fitting thirty components into a 1 cm3 volume."

First Prime Factorization Post

[2*2*3*75011]

1971 = 3*3*3*73
1979 is prime

The times, they are a-changin'

[cagle_.25]

Interesting that tape and disk were competing media back in the day. Now they each have specialized uses (backup and storage, resp.).

My first 5.25" was a Commodore external drive. It cost me about $300, IIRC. I was so psyched! Until I went to college and saw the 30MB HDDs for Macs. :-)

Illustrations

[bobcat7677]

A quick glance at the pictures also gives one a sense of how styles have changed since the 1970s as well. Gotta love the hair on the picture of the chic carrying a tape reel in the datacenter:P

So glad we don't use stacks of punch cards anymore. I mean can you imagine how many truckloads of punch cards you would need to install windows XP? :P

Are people still interested

[Zane Hopkins]

It seems nowdays with computers being so commonplace that most folk are just not interested in 'how computers work' anymore. Thats certainly what I see when I get called round to fix peoples machines. They just want them to work.

Perhaps we /.'s are evolving out of existance?

when this was first issued ......

[Anonymous Coward]

the British Ministry of Defence ordered a print run of about 20,000 in plain covers to issue to soldiers as an explanation of how computers worked.
It was a pretty succinct explanation for neophytes

I had a similar experience

[B11]

When I was sorting through my junk in the garage, I found a volume of a 1986 world book encyclopedia, which had the computer article in it. Old school all the way, describing "expensive color graphics" and "costly, permanent, hard disk drives." It was amazing to see see how much progess was made in the span of 2 decades. The encyclopedia was describing memory in terms of kb, although I forgot how much memory it listed as being ideal or "fast." The tips it had on purchasing a computer still mostly apply today though.

Chindren's book

[brunes69]

The funny (sad?) part is that this "children's book" is more advanced in many ways than some of my CS intro classes were 7 years ago (and some people still failed out!)

People getting dumber? Nah.. can't be!

The Starfleet History

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of a book my mom bought me maybe 10 years ago: 20th Century Computers and How They Worked: The Official Starfleet History of Computers [amazon.com].

It was a very interesting way to learn about technology at my age (what was I, like 12?) especially as a Trekkie, since the author compares "old" 20th-Century technology to "Current" Starfleet technology. It was very well done, I recommend picking up a copy (no, there are no affiliate links in there).

Re:Illustrations

[Monte]

I mean can you imagine how many truckloads of punch cards you would need to install windows XP?

Let's assume we need all of a 650Meg ISO image to instal Windows XP. That's 650x1024^2 or 681,574,400 byes. A standard Hollerith punch card can hold 80 bytes, so we need 8,519,680 cards.

Big assumption here, if someone has better data please chime in - but I'm going to assume 75 Hollerith cards stack to one inch, so we're talking 113,596 or so inches worth of cards, 9,466 feet.

Assuming a semi trailer is 28 feet long, that's 338 stacks. Which is as far as I'm going to take it, but it's not a full truckload.

However one should never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckload of tapes.

Sad

[Random BedHead Ed]

I just looked up this article because I recognized it as a dupe, and found that it goes back to November of 2004 [slashdot.org]. There were only 20ish comments about the article, so I thought I'd be the first person who noticed. I was wrong. At least five people had already posted their dupe spottings, and the number is probably rising.

So I thought, what are the odds of my recognizing a dupe from eight months ago? Or of anyone else recognizing it? And then I realized - they're pretty high. I just discovered that I don't tend to miss Slashdot stories, ever, because if I'm away from the site for an extended period I usually scan backwards and browse the recent days, at least to get the basic ideas of the articles if not to go in-depth. In short, I've missed nothing here. Not in a long time. And I'm starting to wonder what that says about my life.

How long do we spend on this site? How much of our lives is lost to this pursuit? What would happen if I didn't come to this site tomorrow, and on Wednesday I ignore the Yesterday articles? Am I capable of this? A Tuesday without Slashdot? Would I suffer from any withdrawal symptoms? Because I'm scared, but I think it's important enough to try.

Computer legitimacy and toys

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I ever read this book (born in 1970), but flipping through the pages, it makes me realize what computers still mean to my folks; batch cards, mag tapes, green-n-white printouts.

Therein lies the rub; to my folks, any computer that can be fit in a single box and doesn't live in a raised-floor room, is a toy. It's actually very black and white for them..."yes it's all very nice what those toys can do for the movies, but it takes a *computer* to process GE's payroll."

It also reminds me of when a friend of mine brought his dad in to work to show him what he did. His dad was a serious old school programmer for custom chips for Navy jets. He looked it too...checkered shirt, crew cut, pocket protector (first time I'd ever seen one). My friend shows him the *cough* Powerbuilder app we'd be working on, with its buttons and datawindows, etc., and his dad just went *pft* and waved his hand.

The fact that I can run emulators of any of those systems and they run 10x faster has never made a dent in my folks opinion. As far as they can see, and as far as my friend's dad can see, we're just playing with toys.

Anyone else had that happen?

Wow! I had that book as a kid.

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

It's amazing how some of those images are burnt into my brain. But that was a fine book. It's audience was young kids (all Ladybird books where) and yet it discusses binary and CPU architecture. Of course the people who wrote that book were probably old men who were unaware of the revolution taking place around them. In bookshops we had old serious looking books full of Fortran and pictures of magnetic core memory and yet we we were already using machines with solid state RAM at home. It was as if serious computer professionals were in denial that those 'toys' were ever going to amount to anything.

OK so maybe it's a dupe

[Trouble1313]

...But this is cool stuff. Look at the minidress the 'punchcard operator' is wearing. Holy Uhura Batman! Now that deserves an ESRB rating of 18+. As someone who hit 12 years old with 8 bit computers and remembers his parent bringing home one of the new WANG "laptops" (really, not bigger than todays laptops!) with like a 4 line LCD screen and built in 1200 baud acoustic coupler (1200 baud!!!! circa 1983) This brings back happy memories of the 8" floppy. With the movie Wargames out, this was the golden time to be a geek. Now I wasn't one of the uber l33t Altair types but I can still remember going to the local big box retailer of the area (Lechmere's around these parts...more than just a T station!) and seeing people queing up to try out the consumer grade computers. It just doesn't work that way anymore and I for one am a tad bummed about this. Call it nostalgia, call it what you will, but the mystique is gone and likely won't be back. -Trouble

Interesting Social changes

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it interesting how the first sentence changes between the versions.

1971: There is something about computers that is both fascinating and alarming.
1979: There is something about computers that is both fascinating and intimidating.

It's an interesting social change if you think about it.

Re:So what's changed?

[lotusdriver]

Magnetic core memory was still being used as the sole memory medium in the mid 90's for a centralised process control system I worked on. It was a legacy ICL (UK) mainframe system from the early 70's adapted for realtime data acquisition and control but was kept going - it was actually quite reliable, until two more generations of equipment had been rolled out in the rest of the company and a rationalisation of regional control locations had been made. Due to a few problems in the new systems development and some logistical problems it remained in service around 10 years after it should have been replaced. In total it had a few (single digit) kilobytes spread over about 10 boards around 12 inches square. The power requirement was huge though - in the order of a few kW. It was very crude even by the standards of the first computer I ever worked on - a SWTP (South West Technical Products) 6800 in late 1979.

Re:Repost!

[StonedRat]

Notice the original post was from the "doomed-to-repeat-ourselves" dept.