History of technology

From nswccWiki

Software Design and Development Course Resource

You may have briefly read ABOUT some of this in textbooks!

For those with an interest in the REAL history of computing, that is the original documents and original specifications of original equipment, and not the filtered versions, relating to software and hardware specifications look up | Bit Savers .

This site is composed of scanned images of the original documents in .pdf format. Nothing has been done to "pretty up" the documents, and consequently they are large. Some documents run into the 10 MB to 100 MB range. Many are typed (using a typewriter), and with hand written corrigenda.

There is nothing like getting the original information on the people and hardware that shaped the current industry. It is sorted in directories of manufacturers, and big institutions from about 1946! to 1985 or so. It is being actively maintained.

You can get a .pdf scanned copy of the Harvard Mark I operations manual (all 50MB of it) if you are interested.

John McCarthy ... soothsayer

Here is John McCarthy's | predictions from 1970 wrapped up in a paper presented then. But what is novel about this one is that he has revisited it 30 years later and annotated it. Makes for very interesting reading!

The Mother of all Demos

Doug Engelbart’s famous “mother of all demo’s” occurred on 9th December 1968. You’ve never heard of it? It has gone down in history as the most famous 1h:30min of all time demonstration with a resounding applause at the end- I consider it to be the technological equal to some of Newton’s work. Just about everything you see in the film (it was recorded on film) of the event would have been considered magic to the person in the street, even to the point of irrelevance. 10 years later the personal computer revolution was about to happen and this event provided the bright pointer to what was going to be done.

This was slightly more than 6 months before the first person in history stepped foot on another celestial body (Man on the moon). At the very end of his demonstration he gets a bit emotional and almost casually links computing and surfaces. When you reconsider what he demonstrated for the first time you cannot be but amazed! It’s almost ALL there. And I mean ALL except voice interaction with a machine. Interestingly, possibly also a first, Engelbart “talks you through the demo”. He has a headset on and works as though he’s in a modern office setting- at this point he was one of a handful who worked in a “modern office”. But reading about the event tells you that he was wired to hear what was going on behind the scenes- what the support engineers were up to. He looks very ‘edgey’ as he moves through the session- you get the impression that it could have fallen apart at any moment. During the demonstration he unveils for the FIRST time to an audience anywhere (of over 1000 computer professionals):

• how a person would use a computer in an office of the future- it would be on all the time and be yours to work with. The personal keyboard! would be separate from the personal video monitor!, and both moveable! He demonstrates his point by doing. In other places while this was happening the only people to get within 100 m of a computer wore white coats and had security clearances.

• what we now call a data projector (the equivalent of.. on loan from NASA cos it was kinda expensive). He looked larger than life.
• A mouse. Englebart even provides a quick tutorial. Look at the screen, not the mouse. He prefers to call it something else- “mouse” to he and his co-workers was a pejorative term.

• Something that predates Powerpoint by about 20 years! You can only appreciate this in hindsight. Engelbart even uses staged revels of his slides. He also has electronic diagrams. He uses the same kind of gestures, and “slide etiquette” we use today!

• Engelbart did his presentation on line! He communicates with other co-workers remotely located about 50 km away, discussing what they are doing. We call this video conferencing. They interactively share the screen with each having a visible mouse on the same screen! I remember less than desirable efforts to do this on-line in the mid 1990's. Granted the technology was different but the idea was not new!

• a chordic keyboard, a “normal” keyboard, and a mouse arrayed in front of him. He makes use of the touch sensitive chordic keyboard more than the “normal” keyboard. He briefly describes how it works! We now call this a video tutorial.

• e-mail, or what was to become e-mail. You can see and hear the genesis in the descriptions from the leader of the team that invented e-mail!

• Picture in Picture - video conferencing. Say no more!

This system he tells us, was going to be very soon the second computer system connected to ARPA-NET. I guess you need at least two to make a net! We now call it the World Wide Web.


• part the way through the presentation he describes the programming involved - including the rudiments of a code editing technique called “code folding”. He describes briefly and interactively demonstrates how the system could search for key words and patterns in filenames, AND the contents of files by clicking on the word! Hypertext is demonstrated about 20 years after Vannever Bush's printed article describing hypertext and about 20 years before Tim Berners-Lee demonstrates his version.

• He and his co-presenters describe how they had to invent new computer languages to do the things they wanted to do.
 One of these was able to interpret patterns of text. We now call this regular expression pattern matching, used extensively in search engine technology.

• A lot of what was seen was done with multiple TV cameras and custom built electronic switching devices-"Smoke and Mirrors". They struggled to provide audio links and video links and 1200 B (not 56,000 B on modern dial-up) data links. Engelbart was actually sitting at a remote terminal- We now call this set up a "thin client".

Taking absolutely nothing away from the moment of the event, it is only now an average person could understand most of what was going on- because it is now so commonplace. This is a MUST SEE video. I give it a rating of 10 out of 5 stars! I saw the live broadcast of the landing on the moon. I was in year 7 high school. I would have preferred to see this event .... It must have been absolutely inspirational to those present. Some of the team went on to work at Xerox PARC, and then to Apple.

It has been documented and edited to smaller chunks. Information can be obtained at: [ http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html ] Also check out [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos ] for more on the event.