Berkeley Enterprises 1956 Report

Ok, well, one of the criteria of the Patent office for registered 'firsts' is that it must have utility! What makes it fun, promising, useful as opposed to an academic intellectual curiosity? We read about early logic devices with interest, but the Simon seems to lack a certain critical mass to generate widespread enthusiasm, it's basically an ALU unit. That's like claiming a horizontal output unit, affordable to a home user, was the 'first TV', even tho a sophisticated hobbyist could buy it and use it as a part of a larger project that could actually do something useful. There's nothing really there that would cause thousands of hobbyists to get excited over the possibilities enough to rush out and plop down four grand and swamp the manufacturer with so many orders they couldn't keep up. But we want to know more - was the tape program storage, could it make decisions and branch based on comparisons, scalable, etc. Chuck cswiger(a)widomaker.com