Firsts

classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu Subj: Re: Firsts Allison J Parent wrote: Then there is the "first solid state electronic calc" which I think goes to the Busicom from Japan that employed the first production run of the intel 4000 chip set: the 4001 (2048 bit ROM), 4002 (320 bit RAM), 4003 (10 bit shift register), and the 4004 (4 bit CPU). That chip set was shipped to Busicom in March 1971 according to Michael S. Malone's "The Microprocessor: A Biography" ISBN 0-387-94342-0 (which is not a great book: much content was apparently largely dictated by the PR departments of a few Silicon Valley companies and thrown together much as a newspaper article would be. It nontheless contains some interesting photos and bibliographic references and I think was the result of a rushed editorial deadline (why would a publisher rush a history book?)). There are references to the operation of the IBM/Harvard Mark I (programming loops were constructed by literally looping the input tape back on itself e.g.) It could be argued that such an early machine was not a stored program computer hence could not even support an OS. If however one does not limit oneself to only software notions of OS then the "Start" button could be considered to be an OS - implemented in hardware. I personally don't know much about the early Sperry Rand or Manchester->Ferranti computers (first commercial computers) since so much of the widely available literary records are dominated by IBM's history, but certainly by the time of the IBM 705 (mid 50's) there were OSes. Few of the early ones were time-sharing and many were not even "full-duplex". Peter Prymmer