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
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.
NoSalt · 58s ago
Man, I LOVE Electric Dreams. It is one of my "guilty pleasure" movies. X-D
kristopolous · 4h 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 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 · 1h 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.
JdeBP · 6h 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. (-:
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.
pcblues · 5h 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!
>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.
Vectrex. Jaz drives. MiniDisc. 8-track. CB Radio.
The more I notice, the less I feel there is a discussion to be had over this distinction.
The sci-fi predictions all came true - many of them, also came to pass, which is to say that the weight of the accomplishment of speculation to reality becomes immediately irrelevant in the context of the replacing technology.
Star Treks' communicators did catch on - among the content creation segment - but on the other hand, we also got the 'babelfish'-like reality of EarPods ..
I think the never-ending march of technology becomes fantastic at first, but mundane and banal the moment another fantasy is realised.
undebuggable · 6h 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.
zahlman · 19m ago
I read and watched quite a bit of sci-fi (including from the golden age) as a kid in the early 90s and don't recall such a dream. What media exactly did I overlook?
undebuggable · 1m ago
Jetsons cartoon, Back to The Future, Space Odyssey, even more distant predictions [1]? That's from the top of my head without even searching thoroughly.
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.
MomsAVoxell · 3h 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.
dmd · 2h ago
Were you really still using CUSeeMe in 2001+ (when the tibook was released)?
MomsAVoxell · 2h ago
Yes, it was a regular tool for determining if there was still power to various racks around SoCal, and the reason it was still in use was because those racks were in various locations around SoCal and nobody had the budget to switch to something else (plus, CuSeeMe binaries for SGI were a thing...)
dmd · 2h ago
Hah! I thought we were the only ones. I was using it to watch the screen of a machine with no other out-of-band monitoring, in a server room in 2002, mostly because "I've been using it forever and it still works".
MomsAVoxell · 2h ago
Yes indeed, in fact my early productive use of videoconferencing mostly didn't involve humans, but rather - as you say - out-of-band monitoring of devices and systems.
On occasion it was nice to know when some tech was also in the closet, in case I knew their # and could get them to flick a switch or two, on my behalf, in lieu of the 1 or 2 hour bike ride (depending on traffic) I'd have had to endure to use my own fingers...
extraisland · 5h 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.
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.
undebuggable · 6h 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.
smokel · 7h 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.
zahlman · 56s 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.
kens · 50m 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, ...
AlbertoGP · 6h ago
That man, Rex Malik, participated in (among other things) the 1982 BBC series “The Computer Programme” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme), typically in a small section at the end on an episode but also as narrator in other parts and is credited as “Programme Adviser”:
The first person with a home computer in the UK, not just a terminal, was probably computer music experimenter Peter Zinovieff, who bought a DEC PDP-8/S for his studio in the late 1960s, for the insane cost of around £80,000 (inflation adjusted to today.)
And in addition, DEC made its name in the 1960s by selling computers at unprecedented low prices. A complete PDP-8/S system was quoted at $25000 in 1965 [0], equivalent to over a quarter of a million dollars today, for a computer that barely had an instruction set. These days we can buy supercomputers for five of today's dollars.
I used to take home a terminal from work in the mid 70s. Same principle but portable. It had two rubber cups which the two ends of the phone would push into and after dialing up I was ready to go.
I felt space age.
W-Stool · 1h ago
TI Silent 700?
bigtones · 6h ago
Acoustic coupler for the win !
hilbert42 · 8h ago
I wonder what that kid ended up doing for a profession and what he thinks of today's computers.
That BBC news report is interesting as it puts about 60 years of tech/computing progress into perspective.
Now extrapolate 60 years hence—right, today's mind just boggles.
cgsmith · 4h ago
I was also thinking something similar. If it was me as a child it would be quite nostalgic to see a video of myself at 4 years old with my father.
kstenerud · 6h ago
I laughed at the first scene, where he's placed next to his bed a machine with a rather loud fan, that also periodically goes CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA!
It's also interesting to note his lack of adeptness at typing (sign of the times, I suppose).
KevinMS · 6h ago
I wonder why they didn't find somebody with a CRT display if they were doing a story about the future instead of those horrendous teletypes.
lopis · 5h ago
I think in 1967, an affordable computer terminal was not more than 2-way fax machine. Being able to drive a CRT sounds significantly harder than driving a typewriter.
BoxOfRain · 2h ago
I'd quite like to hook up a teletypewriter to a modern Linux box, sounds like a fun little project.
Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: 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.
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
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
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
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.
https://80sheaven.com/jupiter-ace-computer/
Second Edition Manual: https://jupiter-ace.co.uk/downloads/JA-Manual-Second-Edition...
Vectrex. Jaz drives. MiniDisc. 8-track. CB Radio.
The more I notice, the less I feel there is a discussion to be had over this distinction.
The sci-fi predictions all came true - many of them, also came to pass, which is to say that the weight of the accomplishment of speculation to reality becomes immediately irrelevant in the context of the replacing technology.
Star Treks' communicators did catch on - among the content creation segment - but on the other hand, we also got the 'babelfish'-like reality of EarPods ..
I think the never-ending march of technology becomes fantastic at first, but mundane and banal the moment another fantasy is realised.
[1] - https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2021/09/1280px-Franc...
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.
On occasion it was nice to know when some tech was also in the closet, in case I knew their # and could get them to flick a switch or two, on my behalf, in lieu of the 1 or 2 hour bike ride (depending on traffic) I'd have had to endure to use my own fingers...
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.
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.
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.
Episode 1 - “It’s Happening Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc
Episode 4 - “It’s on the Computer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXqb1QT_tI
Episode 5 - “The New Media“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GETqUVMXX3I
Episode 10 - “Things to Come”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLL7HmbcrvQ
By the mid-70s the studio had turned into this:
https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/listen_peter-zinovief...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8
I felt space age.
That BBC news report is interesting as it puts about 60 years of tech/computing progress into perspective.
Now extrapolate 60 years hence—right, today's mind just boggles.
It's also interesting to note his lack of adeptness at typing (sign of the times, I suppose).
The old Teletype in question was a Baudot machine with a 60 mA current loop, rather than ASCII and 20 mA loop for the Model 33.