I suppose this makes a good point for me to jump in with my 20
milli-dollarsworth. To establish context, I'm in the middle to upper part of
the age rangeat 62. My first contact with a computer was my cousin's Altair
around '76or '77. The first exposure to information about computing were a
PDP-8manual and a FORTRAN manual centered on the 1620 in the attic growingup.
I'm not sure where it came from, but even as early as my freshman year
ofcollege, I had some interest in the history of the field. Several of us
misseda few days of class to attend NCC '81 in Chicago. That year they
werecelebrating the 35th anniversary of the UNIVAC I. One of the days
wasdesignated "founders' day" and they had a session where several
earlypioneers spoke. My memory is a little foggy, but I'm pretty sure the
listincluded Hopper, Backus, Eckert, Kay Mauchly (John had already passed),and
I think maybe even Zuse. To this day, I've never been able to finda definitive
list of who was there, much less a recording or transcript ofwhat they said.
But it definitely made an impression on me. That eventwas also coupled with an
accidental brush with history during my undergraddays. One day I was wandering
through the stacks at the library when abook caught my eye. The spine simply
had the title "Manual of Operation."Of course, I had to take the volume down
and see what it was the manualof operation for. It was an original copy of the
manual for the Harvard Mark I!Needless to say, I checked it out.
On Sunday, May 19, 2024 at 05:00:04 PM UTC, Tarek Hoteit via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> But, Bill, maybe you did influence at least one student or more when you
> showed them> the PDP or VAX. Perhaps we don't know who, but we have to keep
> believing that we are> influencing someone somewhere.
That brings us to the present where I'm also on the faculty of a universityand
am doing but a tiny amount to try to keep the history alive. On Tueday,I'll be
doing what I've come to call my CS professor endurance test wherefor six
lectures in a row, I'll be presenting what has become a traditionallecture for
our freshmen. In it, I trace a line of influence from the Whirlwind,through
the LINC, to a PDP-8/M that I demonstrate for the class, to the8-bit computers
that I grew up with. I've generally heard good thingsabout the experience, so
there are at least some who are getting somevery brief exposure.
The other comment I'll make has to do with the natural evolution ofthe
hobby/study of history. The older things get, the more studyingthem becomes
something specialized. The number of people whoare enthusiasts of the '70s and
'80s 8-bit micros here is certainly verystrong, and quite a number of us are
also into minis from the likes ofDEC, DG, and HP. But the interest in the
vacuum tube machines ismuch more specialized. It's natural to gravitate to
what was availableand aspirational when we were first exposed to computing, but
therewill always be some of us who go deep into older stuff. I, myself,
amseveral years down the rabbit hole of the ENIAC, the most recent bitbeing a
direct demonstration of its Turing completeness:
http://cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/eniac/turing/
So I feel confident that the interest will always be there, but it will
alwaysbe confined to a relatively small subset of those in the field. As much
asI think we'd all argue that it's important for anyone to know about the
historyof their field, it's not likely to become pervasive unless the big-name
employerssitting on advisory boards for CS departments start saying "you really
needto have a required computer history class." When every CS major hasthe
experience of writing some PDP-8 assembly code and toggling itin on a front
panel, when they all have the experience of realizing a differentialequation on
an analog computer, when they have all written a simulatorfor an old machine,
then I'll be able to die happy. At this rate, I'll live forever.
BLS
