Before Apple, before Microsoft...

... nice little piece of history...

You need RealPlayer to view the little movies.

Douglas C. Engelbart's Presentation:

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

No time to watch the videos, but I read the summaries.

It seems to me that there is a lot of technology and innovation that could have been marketed a lot sooner, but for the lack of vision of corporate directors and the like.

Probably the same type of corporate genius that killed STAR TREK.

I remember when we got our first calculator.

My dad built it from a mail order kit.

It sat on the table, humming. It had a big orange LED display, and the thing would actually get HOT as it operated. What a fantastic machine it was. Dad was proud that it could compute a square root!

Later, I bought one of the first Texas Instrument hand held pocket calculators. I didn't have a pocket big enough, and boy that thing could slurp down a 9 volt transistor battery in no time! Our high school mathematics teacher (an old woman who broke code during WWII) stopped teaching the slide rule at about that time. Mine was the first class that didn't learn the slipstick.

It was 1981 before I bought a Radio Shack Color Computer. It had a whopping 4 K of RAM!

Things seem to be moving mighty fast, but somehow not fast enough. When I was the average age of today's ENTMOOTER, I looked ahead to Y2K (and yes! we knew back then that there could be a problem) and thought I'd be able to book a vacation in orbit or even on the Moon.

Actually, the above videos may be used as proof against a lawsuit some British Telecom company is making against Prodigy... the British telecom is sueing (sp?) for the patent of hyperlinks!!!!

... but the video (a film actually) clearly shows that even in 1968 the hyperlink was a known concept (in the video, Engelbart even calls it a "link"...)

And about old technology... I guess people today (young ones that is) wouldn't believe us that one used to save and read data from a plain old cassettes (yes, the ones used for recording/playing music...).

Pascal, Lady Ada and Babbage must be laughing in their graves when today people think the 20th century invented the calculating machines...

That's truely fascinating, Gil. Real Player isn't really working right now for me, so I can't view the movie, but I'll go check out the page.

www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org

that is all.

slide rules -
my parents (an old-fashioned engineer & an old-fashioned science/math teacher) each brought home a slide rule a few months ago - they added them to our collection of small antiques & art pieces. my mom also tried to teach me how to use one, but i've never used in in practice so i probably don't remember.

obsolete comps -
i know simple programming in PASCAL, thanks to an eccentric little animation teacher. does anyone use that language now? i know some older programs that are still around are written in that language, but is it still "alive?"

aryne *

(The programming language, not the mathematician)

After Turbo Pascal 7, Borland went on to make the Delphi line of products, which are based on Object Pascal. They're used heavily in RAD situations.

I learned a little BASIC and FORTRAN. If I had done more back when I was you kids age, I might have been a wealthy tech millionaire by now...

...who just lost his fortune in the market!

Only Babbage doesn't have a language named after him, if i'm not mistaken (Visual Babbage... nah!)


Now I'm looking for a biography of Theodore Lisp...

Babbage does have a software chain named after him!

Well, his descendents must be happy now!

I'm also looking for bio or Gregory Artemius Cobol...