12 Jan
1999
12 Jan
'99
2:55 a.m.
In anticipation of such strawman arguments, I focused
on Simon because it
shares almost all of the same traits as the Altair:
* digital
* electronic (or electromechanical, in the case of Simon)
* small
* affordable to build
* well publicized
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
12 Jan
12 Jan
5:45 a.m.
On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, cswiger wrote:
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?
I could ask the same about the Altair when it first came out -- no
software, no real I/O, and only a few bytes of memory.
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.
I beleive the PDP-8 has eight instructions in its instruction set. Simon
has nine :-) I don't know how to program one yet, but I believe there are
control instructions as well as ALU and storage instructions.
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.
Well, you have to remember that Simon was made around 1950, when very few
computers existed on the planet and the very *concept* of computing was
foreign to just about everybody. In spite of, or perhaps because of this,
Radio Electronics did a series of articles about building Simon over about
a year. Who can say how many future computer scientistics Simon
influenced? And, to me, influence is what we're talking about when we
talk about the *first* something.
All I know for certain is that at least one budding computer scientist was
haevily influenced by Simon: Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland went on to
heavily influence interactive computing and the GUI. To me, this makes
Simon the closest thing we have to an "Eve", the first progenitor of the
interactive personal computer.
But we want to know more - was the tape program
storage,
could it make decisions and branch based on comparisons,
scalable, etc.
The paper tape *reader* couldn't be used for storage, but it was used to
read in programs and data. The memo I posted talks about Magdum, the
magnetic drum, being interfaces for external storage. The report does
mention comparison operations, I believe. But don't ask for too much.
This was *1950*, 25 years before the Altair, several years before
transistors, a time when the number of computers on the planet could
probably be counted on fingers and toes.
I find this literally awesome. Bow down before Simon! We are not worthy.
-- Doug
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