Thursday, October 14, 1965: Programma 101

Desktop computer or programmable calculator? To this day it's a point of contention about Olivetti's Programma 101 (list price $3,200), introduced at the New York World's Fair. The New York Times split the difference in its reporting the next day: 

Two new entries have gone to the post in the race for the desk-calculator dollar. ... The new Olivetti machine, the Programma 101, is closer in nature to a computer than the new Victor device. Like a computer it can automatically run programs calling for a series of arithmetic operations. It can also store or remember these programs internally as well as externally, and through these programs can make simple logical decisions. ... The Olivetti device displays its calculations on a paper printout. Its numerous functions allow it to be used for both business and scientific purposes.

* "The incredible story of the first PC, from 1965" (www.pingdom.com): @

* Entry from www.curtamania.com: @

* Entry from www.silab.it: @
* Entry from The Old Calculator Web Museum: @

* "The invention of the personal computer: a fascinating story ever told" (website of Pier Giorgio Perotto, Olivetti engineer and architect of the Programma 101; use Google translate): @ 
* Operating manual (ClassicCmp): @
* Advertisement (video from Archivio Nazionale del Cinema d'Impresa): @
* 101 Project: @

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1965: Operation Match

In the Old World, the marriage broker learned the personality traits and financial status of all eligible men and women and did a fairly successful job of matching compatible types.

     Today, like almost any other project in the United States, the match can be programmed by the use of IBM Computer 7090.

     The computer is part of the program called Operation Match originated by two Harvard University students who now use the system on 500 college campuses in the U.S., England and Canada.

     The marriage broker had his fee, so does the computer -- $3 apiece. But the computer also wants answers to 105 questions such as religion, musical preferences, sports and personality tests. Then it will find a person ranging in age from 17 to 27 who seems compatible with the first set of responses.

     -- "IBM Computer Pairing Off Students on 500 Campuses" (United Press International, November 1965): @

* " 'Match' Eliminates Much Hit-Or-Miss; May Make Some UNC Misses Into Mrs." (The Daily Tar Heel, September 23, 1965): @

* "IBM Mating Hits Penn" (The Daily Pennsylvanian, October 14): @

* "$3 Will Get A Date With 'Computer Gal' " (The Pittsburgh Press, October 24): @

* "Operation Match" (The Harvard Crimson, November 3): @

* " 'Operation Match' Dates On Way" (The Daily Illini, December 1): @

* "boy ... girl ... computer" (Look magazine, February 22, 1966): @

* "Matching Them Up" (Harvard magazine, 2003): @
* "Looking for Someone" (The New Yorker, 2011): @
* "Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating" (Dan Slater, 2013): @
* "This 50-year-old app foretold the future of dating and socializing online" (Fusion, 2015): @
* "What Online Dating Was Like In The 1960s" (video, FiveThirtyEight, 2015): @ 

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Monday, April 19, 1965: Moore's Law

Electronics magazine publishes Gordon Moore's paper, "Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits." His observation -- "the amount of computing power available for a given cost has increased and continues to increase by a factor of two every 18 months to 2 years" -- came to be known as Moore's Law.

-- Quoted material from "The Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security" (2011): @

-- Image (cost vs. time sketch from Moore's 1964 notebook) from Computer History Museum: @

* PDF of Electronics article: @
* "Moore's Law at 50: Its past and its future" (Extreme Tech): @

* "Moore's Law Hits Middle Age" (EE Times, April 2015): @

* "The Multiple Lives of Moore's Law" (IEEE Spectrum, March 2015): @
* "10 images that explain the incredible power of Moore's Law" (Washington Post, April 2015): @

* "Understanding Moore's Law: Four Decades of Innovation" (Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2006): @ 

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Friday, May 1, 1964: BASIC programming language

At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, Dartmouth professor John Kenemy and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born.
     -- From "BASIC Begins at Dartmouth" (link: @)

BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was invented at Dartmouth College in 1964 by John Kenemy and Thomas Kurtz to allow students to write simple programs. The students used BASIC on a time-sharing system, which allowed them to reach the computer using terminals in their dorms. The computers of that era were expensive and hard to use and there were only a few computer languages to choose from, Fortran and Algol being two of the most common. BASIC came into being partly because these other languages seemed too hard for most students to learn.
     -- From "Concise Encyclopedia of Computer Science" (2004; link: @)

     -- Image from first BASIC instruction manual (Dartmouth, May 1964; link: @)

* BASIC instruction manual, October 1964 (from bitsavers.org): @
* BASIC instruction manual, January 1968 (from bitsavers.org): @
* Entry on John Kenemy (CIS Graduate School, Dartmouth): @
* Entry on Thomas E. Kurtz (IEEE Computer Society): @
* "50 Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal" (Time magazine): @
* "50 years of BASIC" (Network World): @

* Excerpt from "Encyclopedia of Microcomputers" (1988): @ 

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1963-1964: Computer mouse

     Late 1963: Douglas Engelbart, founder and director of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at Stanford Research Institute, conceives of a device to more easily move a cursor around a computer screen. (Source: "Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing," Thierry Bardini, 2000; link: @)

     1964: Bill English, a computer engineer working with Engelbart, builds a "mouse" prototype.

     1965: The term "mouse" would first be used in "Computer-Aided Display Control," a paper by Engelbart, English and Bonnie Huddart.

     December 9, 1968: The mouse is demonstrated publicly for the first time.

     -- Image from MouseSite (linked below)

* "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" (Engelbart, 1962): @

* "Computer-Aided Display Control": @

* "Father of the mouse" (from Doug Engelbart Institute): @

* "History in pictures" (from Doug Engelbart Institute): @

* "1963: Douglas Engelbart Invents the Mouse" (from University of California Berkeley College of Engineering): @

* MouseSite (from Stanford University): @

* Mouse patent (application 1967, approval 1970): @

* "Computer Mouse and Interactive Computing" (from SRI International, formerly Stanford Research Institute): @

* Engelbart entry from Computer History Museum: @

* Mouse entry from Computer History Museum: @

* Video of 1968 demonstration: @

* Engelbart obituary (New York Times, 2013): @ 

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Monday, June 17, 1963: ASCII

Associating numbers with specific characters has proved necessary to allow automated telegraph printers (teleprinters) and then computers to represent text. The most widely used mapping between numbers and letters was that approved on June 17, 1963, by the American Standards Association. It is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII.
-- From "What is ASCII?" (The Economist, 2013). Full story: @
* American Standards Association document (from www.wps.com): @
* "1963: The debut of ASCII" (CNN, 1999): @
* www.asciitable.com: @
* www.ascii-code.com: @

* Entry from www.cryptomuseum.com: @
* Bob Bemer's website (Bemer helped create and standardize ASCII): @

* American National Standards Institute: @ 

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Undated: 'Hypertext'

The term is coined by Ted Nelson as part of his work in computers and information management/access.

The term as defined by PCMag.com:  "A linkage between related information. Hypertext is the foundation of the World Wide Web, enabling users to click on a link to obtain more information on a subsequent page on the same site or from a Web site anywhere in the world. Hypertext is the umbrella term for all links, whether appearing as text (word, phrase or sentence) or as an icon or other graphical element, the latter technically called a 'hypergraphic.' The terms 'hypertext,' 'hyperlink' and 'link' are also used synonymously."

Nelson would further define the term and explain the concept in his 1965 paper "Complex information processing: A file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate." He wrote: "Let me introduce the word 'hypertext' to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not be conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it. Let me suggest that such an object and system, properly designed and administered, could have great potential for education, increasing the student's range of choices, his sense of freedom, his motivation, and his intellectual grasp."

Illustration by Nelson for his 1974 book "Computer Lib / Dream Machines."

* Nelson's website: @ (Project Xanadu: @)
* Nelson entry from "The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia" (2005): @
* Text of Nelson's 1965 paper: @
* "Did Ted Nelson first use the word 'hypertext' at Vassar College?" (Vassar site): @
* Entry from "History of the Web" (Bob Hopgood, Oxford Brookes University, 2001): @
* "Hypertext: Towards a Definition" (from Media-Studies.ca): @
* Vision and Reality of Hypertext and Graphical User Interfaces: @
* "The New Media Reader" (2003): @
* NetLingo (Internet dictionary): @ 

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Friday, December 7, 1962: Atlas supercomputer

Atlas, considered the most powerful computer in the world at the time, begins operating at the University of Manchester.

From the book "Computers: The Life Story of a Technology" (Eric G. Swedin and David L. Ferro, 1997): "The Atlas pioneered two important technologies: virtual memory and some aspects of time sharing. The Atlas was designed to use a memory space of up to a million words, with each word 48 bits long. No one could afford to put that much magnetic core memory in a machine, so the Atlas had actually core memory of only 16,000 words. A drum provided 96,000 more words. The operating system of the Atlas swapped memory from its magnetic core memory to the drum and back as needed in the form of pages, providing the illusion of more memory via this virtual memory scheme. The Atlas also was designed to be a time-sharing computer so that more than one program at a time could be run. To implement this time-sharing, the idea of extracode was developed, which is similar to what are now called system interrupts. These two ideas were adopted in all later operating systems of any sophistication."

* From the University of Manchester: @ and @
* From Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton: @ and @

* Timeline: @

* From BBC: @

* Video: @

* "The world's most powerful computer" (New Scientist, September 6, 1962): @ 

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November 1962: 'Personal computer'

From a November 2 story by The Associated Press:

   WASHINGTON -- Pocket-size computers may eliminate the housewife's weekly shopping list. Electronic communication would tell the store in advance what she needed. She would simply pick up the bundles.
   This was envisioned today by Dr. John W. Mauchly, inventor of some of the original room-size computers, who has developed one the size of a suitcase and is now working on a pocket variety.
   Dr. Mauchly, here to address a meeting of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers, said that in a decade or so everyone would have his own computer. Data pertinent to the individual and his problems would be stored in the computers' wafer-thin memory cells. ...
   The inventor's original computers weighed nearly 30 tons and occupied 15,000 feet of floor space. His latest is a portable 50-pound one of suitcase size.
   The present emphasis on miniaturizing components of missile and spacecraft will inevitably result in developing small, inexpensive computers within the financial reach of almost everyone, Dr. Mauchly said.
   "There is no reason to suppose the average boy or girl cannot be master of a personal computer," he said.
* Mauchly entry from National Inventors Hall of Fame: @

* "John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC computer" (University of Pennsylvania): @

* Mauchly biography (University of St. Andrews, Scotland): @

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February 1962: "Spacewar!"

Created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology starting in 1961, the "Spacewar!" video game was in full working mode by the following February. It quickly proved popular among computer enthusiasts and helped lay the foundation for video game development. In the game, two players steer spaceships and try to destroy the other, all set against a background of stars.

* Play the game: @ and @

* Entry from MIT Museum: @

* Entry from Computer History Museum: @

* Entry from www.1up.com: @

* "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" (Rolling Stone, 1972): @

* "Space War! A Computer Game Today, Reality Tomorrow?" (Saga, 1972): @

* "The Origin of Spacewar" (Creative Computing, 1981): @

* "Seminal video game Spacewar lives again" (CNET.com, 2011): @

* "Spacewar!, the first 2d top-down shooter, turns 50" (Ars Technica, 2011): @

* "The first 'electronic' game ever made?" (from pongmuseum.com): @

* Video of "Spacewar!" in action: @

* Interview with Steve Russell, one of the game's creators: @

* "Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction" (book): @

* "Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution" (book): @

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June 1961: The wearable computer

Claude Shannon and Edward O. Thorp, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, devise the first wearable computer. Its purpose: to predict where a ball will end up on a roulette wheel.

* "The Invention of the First Wearable Computer" (paper by Thorp): @

* Thorp's website: @

* "The Professor Who Breaks the Bank" (Life magazine article about Thorp, March 1964): @

* Short biographies of Claude Shannon: @ and @

* "Father of the Information Age" (video on Shannon): @

* "A brief history of wearable computing": @

* International Symposium on Wearable Computers: @

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Tuesday, April 25, 1961: Integrated circuit

Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. in Mountain View, California, is granted a patent for a "Semiconductor Device-and-Lead Structure" -- a type of integrated circuit that allowed for much smaller and far fewer components in electronic devices.

* Definition of integrated circuit (from businessdictionary.com): @

* Summary from Computer History Museum: @

* Patent: @

* Short biography of Noyce and more links: @

* "Transistorized!" (from pbs.org): @

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Undated: Industrial robot

Unimate, the world's first industrial robot, is put to work at a General Motors plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey. Its job: taking red-hot metal parts (door handles, etc.) from a die-casting machine and placing them in cooling vats.

* Entry in Robot Hall of Fame: @

* 1999 article from The Trentonian newspaper: @

* 1966 footage of the Unimate on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson": @

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Undated: John Whitney's 'Catalog'

A pioneer in computer animation, Whitney had worked with graphic designer Saul Bass to create the title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" in 1958. The short film "Catalog" featured a series of visual effects using a computer that Whitney himself had devised.

* Watch "Catalog": @ (Note: The music accompanying this video is from Tod Machover's "Electric Etudes," composed in 1983. The original film used music by jazz great Ornette Coleman.)

* Watch "Vertigo" sequence: @

* Whitney biography site (created by Syracuse University students): @

* "Digital Harmony" (from Animation World Network): @

* Whitney filmography (from www.iotacenter.org): @

* "Cybernetic Cinema and Computer Films" (from the book "Expanded Cinema" by Gene Youngblood): @

* Computer graphic timeline, 1945-2000 (from www.webbox.org): @

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