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posted by n1 on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the wikipedia-is-news,-kind-of... dept.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the history of computers/hardware

The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers. Before the 20th century, most calculations were done by humans. Early mechanical tools to help humans with digital calculations, such as the abacus, were called "calculating machines", by proprietary names, or even as they are now, calculators. The machine operator was called the computer.

The first aids to computation were purely mechanical devices which required the operator to set up the initial values of an elementary arithmetic operation, then manipulate the device to obtain the result. Later, computers represented numbers in a continuous form, for instance distance along a scale, rotation of a shaft, or a voltage. Numbers could also be represented in the form of digits, automatically manipulated by a mechanical mechanism. Although this approach generally required more complex mechanisms, it greatly increased the precision of results. A series of breakthroughs, such as miniaturized transistor computers, and the integrated circuit, caused digital computers to largely replace analog computers.

I remember my dad talking about punching cards to Program the huge computer at Queens university. In high school, I was filling in the cards with a pencil. My young (at the time) brother-in-law won a vic-20 and was typing his commands.

My first personal computer was an Acorn Atom... I could only dream of the 64k that Bill Gates said was enough for anyone. I could never get the cassette tape to record my carefully typed and debugged programs.


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  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:36PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:36PM (#431314)

    Neat article but it really only covers the early history and sums up 1960's to present day in a few short paragraphs. Somehow Steve Jobs merited a mention in there because of his NeXT machine. If anything the Motorola 68030 should have been talked about and Steve's name absent (a hyperlink to NeXT should be good enough).

    The MC68030 was released in 1987 and could directly address 4 GB memory. It had a built in MMU and (optional) external FPU. Think about that RAM. In 1987 you could address as much ram with a consumer CPU as you could in 2000. Unfortunately the MC68K processor family was killed off by Intel. Intel's 80386 released in 1985 was arguably just as good but engineers at the time considered the 68K architecture to be beautiful and x86 to be a mess. But x86 backward compatibility from 32bit to 16bit meant you didn't have to rewrite or repurchase any old software. Intel also had better manufacturing capability and drowned the competition. If you were going to write software and wanted to target the largest market you went for x86. Less software for MC68K meant less people likely to buy that platform.

    Anyways, i find the 70's-90's computer history to be very interesting. It still boggles my mind the power that processors from the 70's had. Seems like RAM and storage were the real bottlenecks, not the CPU.

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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday November 22 2016, @06:42PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @06:42PM (#431400)

    In 1987 you could address as much ram with a consumer CPU as you could in 2000.

    The point there is that when they designed 32bit computing the idea was to make the address space 'big enough' so you couldn't fill it, so we wouldn't need tricks like EMS. As memory capacity outgrew those assumptions the move to 64bit happened, it just took about ten years longer on the PC because Microsoft had programmed themselves into a corner and it took some considerable effort to drag them into the future. But look when SPARC, PPC and MIPS all had 64bit.

    Less software for MC68K meant less people likely to buy that platform.

    It also didn't help that the MC68K installed base was spread across Next, Sun, Atari, Amiga and Apple hardware, none of which could run the other's software without a major rewrite of most of the code. While they all had Motorola MC68XXX processors, almost everything else varied, both hardware and software. Meanwhile the PC was the PC, didn't much matter what namebadge was on the front.