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Hitting the Books: Did the advent of the first desktop computer lead to murder?
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World's First Desktop Computer
by Meryle SecrestThe world's first desktop computer didn't take shape in a Menlo Park garage or the bowels of a corporate production facility. It was created in a workshop in Northwest Italy owned and operated by the Olivetti family. Already renowned for their mechanical typewriters, the Olivetti pioneered electronic calculation a decade before Apple or IBM, which (as you'll read below) debuted at the New York World's Fair in 1964. The first of its kind, the P101, became an instant smash hit -- everyone from NASA to the US military was clamoring for these highly sought after "super-calculators."
But was the Olivetti family's fortune actually a curse? Shortly after the P101's debut, Adriano Olivetti, the head of the family suffered a mysterious and fatal heart attack at the age of 58, just 18 months before the company's talented engineer, Mario Tchou, died in an equally suspicious car accident. In The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti, author Meryle Secrest reveals the incredible behind-the-scenes story of the first desktop computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:37PM (2 children)
Atari 800, 1982, $800 with standard 16K of RAM and BASIC programming language.
Useless cassette data storage unit $60 extra. When it worked, it transferred data at about 3 characters per second, just a little faster than typing speed. After three failed attempts to load a program from cassette tape, you might as well go to the paper backup and type it in yourself.
Just don't type too fast, the early BASIC text entry system would lock up about once every 4 hours or so of "fast typing use" - if you paced your character entry with at least 100ms between keypresses it never failed, but if two keystrokes came in during the same 1/60th of a second period, there was a slight chance for system lockup that only a complete memory dump reset would cure.
Great machines, for their time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:53AM (1 child)
My boss bought an Atari 800 too and the damn cassette player wasn’t working properly. Turns out that as it began to record it emitted a tone that trashed the start of the recording, rendering it useless.
The trick was to wait a moment (three seconds comes to mind, maybe I’m wrong) and then record. Voilá! Worked like a charm.
Of course, you should have asked me at the time :-)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:54AM
I'm sure they all had their own personalities. Mine tended to "burp" in the middle of big files. You could clean the heads and it would work a little better. You could use brand new high quality cassettes and it would work a little better. But, for anything with 8K+ of code, it was nearly pointless, would always screw up at some point.
After a year+ of screwing around with that, I managed to scrape together $400+ for a floppy disk drive, they were just about stone cold 99% reliable 99% of the time. You had to abuse the 5.25" floppy disks pretty hard to get them to screw up. 88K per disk, and I recall blank disks varied from around $1 to $3 a piece, but the expensive ones really didn't do anything the cheap ones couldn't.
After I got the floppy drive, I never looked back at cassettes.
🌻🌻 [google.com]