7 ms·

I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the tra

by a1371 1y ago

I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: https://youtu.be/6orsmFndx_o https://youtu.be/6orsmFndx_o Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with movies like Electric Dreams (1984). Videos like this make me think that our predictions of AI super intelligence are probably pretty accurate. But just like this machine, in actuality it may look different.

smokel 1y ago
One might also take on the more cynical perspective and be disappointed that we are still stuck with these early achievements. FCOL most of us are now happy to have our AI overlords type out software on 80 column displays in plain ASCII because that is what we standardized on with Fortran.
- kens 1y ago
  That's my "unpopular opinion" too. As I look at computer history, it amazes me how many things from the 1970s we still use. We are stuck at a local maximum due to the historical trajectory. Languages, terminal windows, editors, instruction sets, operating systems, CLIs, ...
- zahlman 1y ago
  (I've never seen "FCOL" before and had to look it up. For onlookers: "for crying out loud", apparently.) We aren't stuck with the terminal and CLIs. We stick with them, because they actually do have value. 80 columns is a reasonable compromise length, once you've accepted monospace text, that works with human perception, visual scanning of text etc. But many programmers nowadays don't feel beholden to this; they use any number of different IDEs, and they have their linters set varying maximum line lengths according to their taste, and make code windows whatever number of pixels wide makes sense for their monitor (or other configuration details), and set whatever comfortable font size with the corresponding implication for width in columns. (If anything, I'd guess programmers who actually get a significant amount of things done in terminal windows — like myself — are below average on AI-assisted-programming adoption.) Meanwhile, the IDE could trivially display the code in any font installed on the system, but programmers choose monospace fonts given the option. As for "plain ASCII", there just isn't a use for other characters in the code most of the time. English is dominant in the programming world for a variety of historical reasons, both internal and external. Really, all of the choices you're talking about flow naturally from the choice to describe computer programs in plain text. And we haven't even confined ourselves to that; it just turns out that trying to do it in other ways is less efficient for people who already understand how to program.
  - smokel 1y ago
    Perhaps I should've made myself more clear. Monitors, keyboards, programming in textual representations, all seem quite unnatural. They were all the result of incremental technical progress, not the result of an ideal thought process. Just look at the QWERTY layout, and the limited number of people actually able to do programming. If one reads science fiction novels from the 1970s, this is typically not the way people envisioned the 21st century. I agree that the solutions have value, but I'm certain that we are stuck in a local optimum, and things could have been wildly different.
undebuggable 1y ago
That's one of the reasons why touchscreen smartphones dominated the market in less than one decade. They made the dream of "real-time videotelephony from a rectangle" come true, a dream which had been present in literature and culture for around hundred of years.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  And yet, while 90's (and earlier) TV was talking breathlessly about video communication, it feels like it just "snuck in" to our daily lives when webcams and e.g. Skype became mainstream, and it never felt magical. Of course, the demos were tightly scripted and stifled.
  - undebuggable 1y ago
    Skype made the the first major milestone. The software and network parts were "simply working" but the hardware part, CRT displays, headsets, and webcams, were still plasticky and tacky.
  - extraisland 1y ago
    I saw a BBC archive video about AMSTRAD. AMSTRAD owned a PC manufacturer called Viglen. In the archive the CEO of Viglen was having a video call to someone offsite presumably on what looked like Windows 3.11. This was 1995. https://youtu.be/XX53VbgcpQ4?t=793 https://youtu.be/XX53VbgcpQ4?t=793 In the same video the salesman was selling a Pentium 75MHZ machine. So it must have run on a PC of similar specification. People had seen the tech working in some form on TV for some time. It just wasn't mainstream.
  - MomsAVoxell 1y ago
    When I first got our labs two SGI Indy's webcams pointed at each others relevant coffeepots over ISDN, with 30km's space between them, there was definite magic. The same when I sat in the hills of Griffith Park with a Ricochet modem and a tiBook, wondering how much ssh'ing and CUSeeMe I'd be able to do until the batteries ran out. Once these kinds of activities became integrated into a laptop, the magic of all of the pasts' future predictions definitely became atmospheric.
JdeBP 1y ago
It definitely is survivorship bias. Go and watch videos from the retrocomputing enthusiasts. There are loads of branches in computing history that are off-trajectory in retrospect, inasmuch as there can be said to be a trajectory at all. Microdrives. The Jupiter Ace. Spindle controllers. The TMS9900 processor. Bubble memory. The Transputer. The LS-120. Mattel's Aquarius. … And while we remember that we had flip-'phones because of communicators in 1960s Star Trek we forget that we do not have the mad user interfaces of Iron Man and that bloke in Minority Report, that the nipple-slapping communicators from later Star Trek did not catch on (quelle surprise!), that dining tables with 3-D displays are not an everyday thing, … … and that no-one, despite it being easily achievable, has given us the commlock from Space 1999. (-: * https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114590229374309238 https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114590229374309238
- pcblues 1y ago
  The Jupiter Ace was unreal, but only from a computer science perspective. You had to know a lot to know how to program Forth which was the fundamental language of that white but Spectrum-looking dish of a PC, in spite of a manual that read like HGTTG. Critically, it didn't reward you from the start of your programming journey like Logo or Basic did, and didn't have the games of the ZX Spectrum. I knew a person who tried to import and sell them in Australia. When I was young, he gave me one for free as the business had failed. RIP IM, and thanks for the unit! https://80sheaven.com/jupiter-ace-computer/ https://80sheaven.com/jupiter-ace-computer/ Second Edition Manual: https://jupiter-ace.co.uk/downloads/JA-Manual-Second-Edition-[Updated-12-2011].zip https://jupiter-ace.co.uk/downloads/JA-Manual-Second-Edition...
- adrian_b 1y ago
  The Transputer as an implementation has failed, but all modern server/workstation CPUs have followed the Transputer model of organizing the CPU interfaces, starting with some later models of the DEC Alpha, followed by AMD Athlon and then by all others. Unlike the contemporaneous CPUs and many later CPUs (which used buses), the Transputer had 3 main interfaces: a memory interface connecting memory to the internal memory controller, a peripheral interface and a communication interface for other CPUs. The same is true for the modern server/workstation CPUs, which have a DRAM memory interface, PCIe for peripherals and a proprietary communication interface for the inter-socket links. By inheriting designers from DEC Alpha, AMD has adopted this interface organization early (initially using variants of HyperTransport for peripherals and for inter-CPU communication), while Intel, like always, has been the last in adopting it, but they were forced to do this eventually (in Nehalem, i.e. a decade after AMD), because their obsolete server CPU interfaces reduced too much the performance.
kristopolous 1y ago
That's Ivan Sutherland though. He's one of the living legends of computing. His doctor advisor was Claude Shannon and some of his students include the founder of Adobe, The founder of SGI and the creators of both Phong and Gouraud shading. He also ran the pioneering firm Evans & Sutherland, a graphics research company starting in the 1960s. They produced things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Drawing_System-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Drawing_System-1 He was a key person during the Utah school of computing's most influential years - when the Newell's famous Teapot came out for instance. Saying his predictions are right on is kinda like saying Jony Ives predictions about what smartphones would look like was accurate
- pixelpoet 1y ago
  I always fund it amusing that Phong was actually the guy's given name, but Vietnamese family name ordering isn't the same as in the US so everyone thought it was his surname and just rolled with it.
  - dreamcompiler 1y ago
    I've used Phong interpolation for decades and never knew this. I also didn't know he died of cancer two years after getting his PhD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bui_Tuong_Phong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bui_Tuong_Phong
    - kristopolous 1y ago
      Yes! He is greatly missed among his colleagues. I went to an event in Utah in 2013 and multiple people spoke quite fondly of him, including Blinn and Jim Clark. When they were showing old photos of Ivans VW Bug they were taking measurements of, there was an obvious grief pause whenever he was in one. There's videos of these on YouTube. I sat next to Sutherland in the room btw That is 2nd to when I had a buffet breakfast showing up early to an event when it was just me and woz in the room and I talked to him for an hour not realizing who he was. Actually my bullshit flags went up thinking "this guy sure likes to tell fantastic exaggerated stories!" Kinda like talking to, say Harrison Schmitt, not knowing him, and saying "you? Landed on the moon? Sure old man. Stepped foot on the moon... then you were a senator? alright."
NoSalt 1y ago
Man, I LOVE Electric Dreams. It is one of my "guilty pleasure" movies. X-D

by a1371 1y ago

smokel 1y ago

One might also take on the more cynical perspective and be disappointed that we are still stuck with these early achievements. FCOL most of us are now happy to have our AI overlords type out software on 80 column displays in plain ASCII because that is what we standardized on with Fortran.

kens 1y ago
That's my "unpopular opinion" too. As I look at computer history, it amazes me how many things from the 1970s we still use. We are stuck at a local maximum due to the historical trajectory. Languages, terminal windows, editors, instruction sets, operating systems, CLIs, ...
zahlman 1y ago
(I've never seen "FCOL" before and had to look it up. For onlookers: "for crying out loud", apparently.) We aren't stuck with the terminal and CLIs. We stick with them, because they actually do have value. 80 columns is a reasonable compromise length, once you've accepted monospace text, that works with human perception, visual scanning of text etc. But many programmers nowadays don't feel beholden to this; they use any number of different IDEs, and they have their linters set varying maximum line lengths according to their taste, and make code windows whatever number of pixels wide makes sense for their monitor (or other configuration details), and set whatever comfortable font size with the corresponding implication for width in columns. (If anything, I'd guess programmers who actually get a significant amount of things done in terminal windows — like myself — are below average on AI-assisted-programming adoption.) Meanwhile, the IDE could trivially display the code in any font installed on the system, but programmers choose monospace fonts given the option. As for "plain ASCII", there just isn't a use for other characters in the code most of the time. English is dominant in the programming world for a variety of historical reasons, both internal and external. Really, all of the choices you're talking about flow naturally from the choice to describe computer programs in plain text. And we haven't even confined ourselves to that; it just turns out that trying to do it in other ways is less efficient for people who already understand how to program.
- smokel 1y ago
  Perhaps I should've made myself more clear. Monitors, keyboards, programming in textual representations, all seem quite unnatural. They were all the result of incremental technical progress, not the result of an ideal thought process. Just look at the QWERTY layout, and the limited number of people actually able to do programming. If one reads science fiction novels from the 1970s, this is typically not the way people envisioned the 21st century. I agree that the solutions have value, but I'm certain that we are stuck in a local optimum, and things could have been wildly different.

undebuggable 1y ago

That's one of the reasons why touchscreen smartphones dominated the market in less than one decade. They made the dream of "real-time videotelephony from a rectangle" come true, a dream which had been present in literature and culture for around hundred of years.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
And yet, while 90's (and earlier) TV was talking breathlessly about video communication, it feels like it just "snuck in" to our daily lives when webcams and e.g. Skype became mainstream, and it never felt magical. Of course, the demos were tightly scripted and stifled.
- undebuggable 1y ago
  Skype made the the first major milestone. The software and network parts were "simply working" but the hardware part, CRT displays, headsets, and webcams, were still plasticky and tacky.
- extraisland 1y ago
  I saw a BBC archive video about AMSTRAD. AMSTRAD owned a PC manufacturer called Viglen. In the archive the CEO of Viglen was having a video call to someone offsite presumably on what looked like Windows 3.11. This was 1995. https://youtu.be/XX53VbgcpQ4?t=793 https://youtu.be/XX53VbgcpQ4?t=793 In the same video the salesman was selling a Pentium 75MHZ machine. So it must have run on a PC of similar specification. People had seen the tech working in some form on TV for some time. It just wasn't mainstream.
- MomsAVoxell 1y ago
  When I first got our labs two SGI Indy's webcams pointed at each others relevant coffeepots over ISDN, with 30km's space between them, there was definite magic. The same when I sat in the hills of Griffith Park with a Ricochet modem and a tiBook, wondering how much ssh'ing and CUSeeMe I'd be able to do until the batteries ran out. Once these kinds of activities became integrated into a laptop, the magic of all of the pasts' future predictions definitely became atmospheric.

JdeBP 1y ago

It definitely is survivorship bias. Go and watch videos from the retrocomputing enthusiasts. There are loads of branches in computing history that are off-trajectory in retrospect, inasmuch as there can be said to be a trajectory at all. Microdrives. The Jupiter Ace. Spindle controllers. The TMS9900 processor. Bubble memory. The Transputer. The LS-120. Mattel's Aquarius. … And while we remember that we had flip-'phones because of communicators in 1960s Star Trek we forget that we do not have the mad user interfaces of Iron Man and that bloke in Minority Report, that the nipple-slapping communicators from later Star Trek did not catch on (quelle surprise!), that dining tables with 3-D displays are not an everyday thing, … … and that no-one, despite it being easily achievable, has given us the commlock from Space 1999. (-: * https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114590229374309238 https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114590229374309238

pcblues 1y ago
The Jupiter Ace was unreal, but only from a computer science perspective. You had to know a lot to know how to program Forth which was the fundamental language of that white but Spectrum-looking dish of a PC, in spite of a manual that read like HGTTG. Critically, it didn't reward you from the start of your programming journey like Logo or Basic did, and didn't have the games of the ZX Spectrum. I knew a person who tried to import and sell them in Australia. When I was young, he gave me one for free as the business had failed. RIP IM, and thanks for the unit! https://80sheaven.com/jupiter-ace-computer/ https://80sheaven.com/jupiter-ace-computer/ Second Edition Manual: https://jupiter-ace.co.uk/downloads/JA-Manual-Second-Edition-[Updated-12-2011].zip https://jupiter-ace.co.uk/downloads/JA-Manual-Second-Edition...
adrian_b 1y ago
The Transputer as an implementation has failed, but all modern server/workstation CPUs have followed the Transputer model of organizing the CPU interfaces, starting with some later models of the DEC Alpha, followed by AMD Athlon and then by all others. Unlike the contemporaneous CPUs and many later CPUs (which used buses), the Transputer had 3 main interfaces: a memory interface connecting memory to the internal memory controller, a peripheral interface and a communication interface for other CPUs. The same is true for the modern server/workstation CPUs, which have a DRAM memory interface, PCIe for peripherals and a proprietary communication interface for the inter-socket links. By inheriting designers from DEC Alpha, AMD has adopted this interface organization early (initially using variants of HyperTransport for peripherals and for inter-CPU communication), while Intel, like always, has been the last in adopting it, but they were forced to do this eventually (in Nehalem, i.e. a decade after AMD), because their obsolete server CPU interfaces reduced too much the performance.

kristopolous 1y ago

That's Ivan Sutherland though. He's one of the living legends of computing. His doctor advisor was Claude Shannon and some of his students include the founder of Adobe, The founder of SGI and the creators of both Phong and Gouraud shading. He also ran the pioneering firm Evans & Sutherland, a graphics research company starting in the 1960s. They produced things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Drawing_System-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Drawing_System-1 He was a key person during the Utah school of computing's most influential years - when the Newell's famous Teapot came out for instance. Saying his predictions are right on is kinda like saying Jony Ives predictions about what smartphones would look like was accurate

pixelpoet 1y ago
I always fund it amusing that Phong was actually the guy's given name, but Vietnamese family name ordering isn't the same as in the US so everyone thought it was his surname and just rolled with it.
- dreamcompiler 1y ago
  I've used Phong interpolation for decades and never knew this. I also didn't know he died of cancer two years after getting his PhD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bui_Tuong_Phong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bui_Tuong_Phong
  - kristopolous 1y ago
    Yes! He is greatly missed among his colleagues. I went to an event in Utah in 2013 and multiple people spoke quite fondly of him, including Blinn and Jim Clark. When they were showing old photos of Ivans VW Bug they were taking measurements of, there was an obvious grief pause whenever he was in one. There's videos of these on YouTube. I sat next to Sutherland in the room btw That is 2nd to when I had a buffet breakfast showing up early to an event when it was just me and woz in the room and I talked to him for an hour not realizing who he was. Actually my bullshit flags went up thinking "this guy sure likes to tell fantastic exaggerated stories!" Kinda like talking to, say Harrison Schmitt, not knowing him, and saying "you? Landed on the moon? Sure old man. Stepped foot on the moon... then you were a senator? alright."

NoSalt 1y ago

Man, I LOVE Electric Dreams. It is one of my "guilty pleasure" movies. X-D