This is Beagle-Ears -> Lars -> Professional -> Computer History

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Computer History

• Computers that I have worked with
• Early Computing in Denmark
• Timelines of Computing
• Famous Machines
• Museums and Collections
• Keeping Dinosaurs Alive by Simulation
• Important People in Computer History
• Famous Programs
• alt.folklore.computers is the USEnet newsgroup for this stuff.
• Computer Pictures Database - Collected from many sources, both online and paper brochures.
• History of the Internet

Timelines of Computing

• computerhistory.org
• Events in the History of Computing
• Yahoo! Computers and Internet:History
• "Triumph of the Nerds" (PBS)
• History of Encryption
• Timeline of major events relating to System/360.
• Timeline of IBM Advanced Computing Systems Project
• IBM History Highlights includes a multimedia gallery with video clips from IBM's history.
• Computers in Spaceflight - The NASA Experience

Famous Machines and other Milestones

In the Beginning

• Mechanical Calculators
  • Planimeters - Mechanical computation of Integrals.
  • The Adding machine Fraternity of St Louis, Creating a Center of Invention, 1880-1920, by Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, published in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, spring 2000.
• Hollerith's Punched Cards were the origin of IBM.
  • Picture of an IBM 026 keypunch

1937-1942: Atanasoff-Berry

Iowa State University was the home of the first electronic digital computer. Main storage was a rotating drum with each bit stored in a capacitor with dynamic refresh, backing storage was cards, into which holes were burned by a spark gap!

1944-1946: ENIAC

The Ballistic Research Lab of the US Army sponsored the construction of the first American vacuum-tube computer. Mike Muus's History of Computing Information has lots of wonderful material.

1959-1961: Rice Computer

• Rice Institute Computer (R1) was the first machine with a segmented memory architecture. It was a one-off design; 54 bits x 8K words of electrostatic memory, later replaced with 32 KW of magnetic core memory.

  The article has impressive pictures of a CPU large enough for a technician to walk around inside it (with a scope cart).

Early 1960's: IBM 1401 Data Processing System

• David Nichols' 1401 Page
• Paul White's 1401 Memorial Exhibit

1961: IBM 7030 Stretch

Project Stretch created the second-generation mainframe computer.

http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/stretch/.

1963: IBM 7094 and CTSS

MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System was written to run on a (somewhat modified) IBM 7094.

http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html

1964: IBM System/360

IBM's grand leap from 36 bits to 32 bits.

This website's comprehensive article about S/360.

1965: Multics

• Multicians.Org - Official home of Multics history
• http://www.multicians.org/thvv/papers.html - Tom Van Vleck's index of Multics papers. Most of them written before the fact.

1966: PDP-8

While the large systems became multi-user, Digital Equipment Corp. was trying to build a computer so inexpensive that it did not have to be shared.

• Doug Jones' PDP-8 FAQ is a great overview of the accomplishments of the PDP-8 family.
• pdp8.net is a live PDP-8/E connected to the Internet.
• PDP8.COM is a private fan site. (Last I checked, the content was gone, however).

Late 1960's: PDP-10 Family

Digital Equipment did their own successor to the IBM-709 series: The PDP-10 was a full-blown 36-bit mainframe with a time-sharing operating system called TOPS-10. Along the way, Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN - the ARPAnet people) designed a virtual memory extension and an operating system called TENEX. Eventually, Digital bought it and integrated it with their own system, producing TOPS-20.

• 36 Bits Forever - a comprehensive PDP-10 nostalgia site. Includes this article by Mark Crispin about some of the differences between the different PDP-10 CPUs.
• 36bit.org - another comprehensive site, covering not only PDP-10, but also some IBM, Honeywell and Univac systems with 36 bits. The PDP-10 section includes some DEC manuals.
• USENET newsgroup alt.sys.pdp10
• PDP-10 Software Archive from Tim Shoppa's Trailing Edge Company.
• The Soul of an Old Machine - the day University of Texas shut down their PDP-10 (in 1984)

1970: PDP-11

Digital followed the success of the PDP-8 family up with the 16-bit PDP-11 family. The first PDP-11/20 was shipped in 1970, and 30 years later, new PDP-11s are still being built and sold.

1978: VAX

The VAX filled the gap in Digital's product line between the PDP-11 and the PDP-10 families. Eventually, it was replaced by the Alpha series of servers and workstations.

The major survivors

• IBM 360 Family
• Unix (and Linux) history

Museums and Collections of Old Computers

• The Computer Museum History Center at Moffett Field, California (Sunnyvale)
• Smithsonian Computer History from Perspectives of the Smithsonian.
• Museum of Dead, Gone and Obsolete Computers
  Features pictures and specifications for many small office systems and early PCs. Remember Amstrad? BBC Micro? Coleco?
• Mike Umbricht's Vintage Computer Collection
  Mike has a fair number of systems from Digital Equipment Corporation in the early 1980's, including a VAX-11/750 and a PDP-11/44. He also has a Honeywell 316 and some H-P gear.
• National Air and Space Museum: Space History Artifacts
  Includes a section on Guidance, navigation and control, which is all about computers.
• National Cryptologic Museum at National Security Agency (Ft Meade, MD)

Virtual Collections

• Al's Computer Orphanage
• The Retrocomputing Museum
• Mind Machine Web Museum
• Marvellous Machines
• Hungarian site with uncommented pictures of misc VAX parts.

Keeping Dinosaurs Alive by Simulation

• Forest Edge Software and eVAX
• emulation.net: Emulators for the Mac OS
• D Bit: the Ersatz-11
  Emulate any PDP-11 model on your Pentium, and attach Qbus or Unibus peripherals via bus adapter that plugs into PCI. An emulated PDP-11/93 makes a very nice home for RSX-11M-PLUS.
• PDP-11 Freeware CD's
• Fundamental Software, Inc.
  IBM has the P/390: An S/390 CPU chipset on a PCIbus card that lets software developers run a fairly slow VM/390 on an OS/2 based server. Fundamental Software has FLEX-ES, a production load capable plug-compatible mainframe running on a Unix-based Pentium-class machine. Recognized by IBM's software licensing administration as a plug-compatible mainframe. A 400MHz Pentium-II could be an 8-MIPS 3080. Fundamental Software will configure the system to run at the speed of your old mainframe, so you don't have to upgrade your software license when you downsize the CPU box!
• Hercules-390 is a freeware emulator that runs on a Linux Pentium.

Important People in Computer History

• Konrad Zuse
• Seymour Cray
  • A Seymour Cray Perspective (slides from a talk by Gordon Bell)
  • Interview with Seymour Cray (1994) at the Smithsonian computer history collection.
• Gordon Bell's Home Page
• Dennis Ritchie Home Page with Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix

Famous Programs

• Index of /admin/AI_ATTIC/Programs/Classic
• Eliza test.
• The Colossal Cave Adventure page
• Tom Wu's Adventure Web Site

Unsorted Links

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