Douglas Engelbart

[jpearman]

We owe this guy so much.

douglas-engelbart-inventor-of-computer-mouse-and-so-much-more-dies-at-88/

[anon50541363]

I actually know a bit about this guy, mostly because I love the story about the history and development of computers which sadly I only caught the tail end of.

I was thinking just yesterday how I wish computers were still as verbose as they used to be. It was so much fun seeing a ton of information displayed during silly tasks like disk defraging as a child. I remember Windows 98 had a visual representation of the blocks of data and I used to imagine that they were being consumed as they flipped from red to blue.

That and watching things count up or down in hex never gets old.

One of these days I want to walk backward and try to build and use a windows 3.1 machine, a Apple 2, etc. for small simple tasks just to see how people used to do things.

I dono, computers are amazing long live everyone who helped make them advance.

[ManicMechanic]

@cody

One of these days I want to walk backward and try to build and use a windows 3.1 machine, a Apple 2, etc. for small simple tasks just to see how people used to do things.

I dono, computers are amazing long live everyone who helped make them advance.

Even more fun than Windows 3.1 was MS DOS. I still remember using 8086 machines, basic BASIC, “Advanced” BASIC and teaching my son how to put together music note by note on a legacy machine. Those old computers lasted forever – our first family computer was our primary computer for 12 years and never formally died – it was retired into obsolescence due to its inability to access the internet (and the futility of upgrading). It could probably be resurrected from the attic, but good luck getting any usable data from it – I believe that its primary data storage device was a 5.5" floppy drive. In those days, “floppy disks” really were floppy and really were disks. Imagine that.

Amazingly, there were certain things about MS DOS that seemed more powerful and flexible than its more modern counterparts. It took 20 years for things to “circle back” to the point where I could rename masses of files with the precision and convenience of the old system, even though there was an 8-character limit on file names.

Working with the old machines was like working on a '57 Chevy – to a large extent you could “see” what was under the hood and map out almost every bit of memory and know what its function was. Nowadays, there’s so much “voodoo” going on that I don’t bother trying to figure it out anymore.

[sbdrobotics]

@ManicMechanic

Even more fun than Windows 3.1 was MS DOS. I still remember using 8086 machines, basic BASIC, “Advanced” BASIC and teaching my son how to put together music note by note on a legacy machine. Those old computers lasted forever – our first family computer was our primary computer for 12 years and never formally died – it was retired into obsolescence due to its inability to access the internet (and the futility of upgrading). It could probably be resurrected from the attic, but good luck getting any usable data from it – I believe that its primary data storage device was a 5.5" floppy drive. In those days, “floppy disks” really were floppy and really were disks. Imagine that.

Amazingly, there were certain things about MS DOS that seemed more powerful and flexible than its more modern counterparts. It took 20 years for things to “circle back” to the point where I could rename masses of files with the precision and convenience of the old system, even though there was an 8-character limit on file names.

Working with the old machines was like working on a '57 Chevy – to a large extent you could “see” what was under the hood and map out almost every bit of memory and know what its function was. Nowadays, there’s so much “voodoo” going on that I don’t bother trying to figure it out anymore.

Here’s my first computer which was a kit. It had 1K of memory that it shared with the video so your monitor (television) went blank whenever it was executing a command. I had a cable that allowed me to save files to a cassette recorder.

This was years before I borrowed $5,000.00 for a PC XT with 512K of ram and dual 360K floppy drives with a monochrome monitor and 9 pin dot matrix printer.

[jpearman]

So it’s established that we are all getting old, to keep the theme running, here is the first ever program I wrote. Fortran on a PDP-10 in 1981.

We had to write out the program by hand and submit to the computer center. One of the techs would then create the punch cards and run the job. Results back next day, slow to debug when there were errors.