Re: Apple and the Holy War

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <391C11E9.BEFE9862@inetnebr.com>,
Roy and/or Janet Miller  <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:
 
> Paul Schlyter wrote:
> 
>>> Back in the olden days of computing, the task most people used the
>>> computer for was word processing.
>>
>> I positively DON'T think so!!!  Back in the days of the Mark I and
>> II, the ENIAC, the IBM 701 (which was made famous because it was the
>> first computer with a compiler for a high-level language available:
>> FORTRAN I, bakc in 1957), the UNIVAC, and others, CPU cycles were
>> considered far too expensive to waste on word processing.
> 
> You two gentlemen keep talking past one another. Paul sees the "olden days"
> of computing as when the first "mainframes" were created. Supertimer is
> talking about the early days of "microcomputers/desktop computers/pcs" And
> you are both right, from your own timeline perspective, and wrong from the
> other's. But Paul, one of the early programs written on the DEC PDP -1 at
> MIT was a program called "Expensive Typewriter" the first known word
> processor. In the late 1950s.
 
Interesting.... but I guess it never got any particularly wide useage....
 
BTW I believed at that time the very first computer games were also
created.  Of course they were run only by dedicated hackers, who
willingly stayed at the computer center at nights and weekends when
noone else used the computers.  Timesharing hardly existed then:
either you did or did not have the computer....
 
> We still use the terms "mainframe" and "minicomputer" but pc has become
> identified with IBM, and microcomputer has been lost (does it apply when the
> Apple ][ was about as powerful as the PDP -1?) Today, when most people say
> "computer" they are referring to personal computers, so, for the sake of
> this thread, and that usage be adopted??
 
I believe the terms "mainframe", "mini" and "micro" referred to
physical size rather than performace: a "mainframe" required its own
big room, a "mini" would fit in a closet, and a "micro" would fit on
your desk.  By that definition the ENIAC was definitely a
"mainframe", even though its performance was clearly inferior to some
of the better pocket calculators today!
 
And then we have the term "supercomputer", which was coined when the
first computers, primarily intended for number crunching and with a
performance clearly superior to earlier computers, appeared.  I
believed the first "supercomputer" was the CDC 6600: it appeared in
the late 1960'ies, and had a performance comparable to an 80386 or an
68030, with accompanying FPU.
 
The CDC 6600 had a quite odd archtecture: it was word-addressed and
had 60-bit words.  Addresses were 18-bits, which means it could
address 256 Kwords (which approximately corresponds to some 2
MBytes).  It had no hardware stack, which made recursive functions
quite hard to implement.  The standard approach was to reserve the
first word of each function for the return address: the caller would
then store its return address there and then start executing code at
the next word - when returning, an indirect jump was made to that
first word.  This of course made reentrancy impossible and recursion
quite hard.  The very first implementation of Pascal was made ny
Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 -- my tribute to him for succeeding in
implementing recursion on that architecture!
 
Back in 1980 when I bought a language card + the Apple Pascal
system, the documentation included Wirths "Pascal: User Manual and
Report", a boook which towards the end included instructions on how
to run Pascal -- on the CDC 6600 !!!!!  I guess a number of Apple
users found that part quite irrelevant.  To me it was at least
interesting, since I had some experience with the CDC 6600 and
actually had access to one, so I could try these things out (I played
with Pascal on the CDC a few times, that's all).
 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at saaf dot se   or    paul.schlyter at ausys dot se
WWW:     http://hotel04.ausys.se/pausch    http://welcome.to/pausch