the story over there, nice documentation, from 1959 - 63, with letters from ken olsen and clients as mit.

4k memory 120.000$

pdp-1 in use at the parachuta club, 1962

computer museum has a pdp-1 restauration project up and running | brouhaha

1955 ibm wasn't entered a bid but wasn't able to deliver the desired machine, so proposed a more powerful one. nice turn, but it didn't help. the people from the university of california radiation laboratory didn't swallow it. two years later the supercomputer project became known as stretch aka ibm 7030; memos circulate since november 1955.

Although Stretch was indeed the world's most powerful supercomputer when it was finally introduced, and retained that position until 1964, it fell short of the projected performance. IBM cut the price of the system, originally $13.5 million, nearly in half. | brouhaha

famous and ahead of its time was - regarding to an article in the honeywell computer journal, 1972 - also another machine which listened to the name gamma 60, publicly described in the us in 1958 and was brought to the world by compagnie des machines bull.

it's nice to start the day by reading a true humanized story | thanks to short notes!

the hook at short notes is that schoonschip

.. is possibly the first software ever that helped its author (Martinus J.G. Veltman) win the Nobel Prize.

i don't know, but as other get the turing price and not the nobel one i guess that can be right. you need to be a physicist or maybe biologist dealing with big databases to be counted in there.

reading veltman's autobiography is a nice read and mayeb a hint for al those who are to scared to talk humanly.

i acquired my knowledge of electronics from the local plumber ... My only measuring instrument was my right index finger. If I touched a sensitive connection the radio would produce a hum. If a connection had the correct high voltage (about 200 V) I would get a shock. Commercially I was a failure, as I would usually not dare to ask money for my services ...

I then asked him if he could give me some advice, to which he answered: "don't make mistakes". I thought this funny, and started to laugh, but that was not appreciated by Lee, who took some moments to teach me the seriousness of this enterprise. Well, even if in the making of computer programs the not making of errors is usually the main problem, I still feel that I did not really need that advice! ...

In the meantime, just prior to going to the US, our son Hugo was born. He now runs a restaurant called Solstice in Los Angeles. If I want a really good dinner that is where I go. I hope the reader gets the hint. | martinus j.g. veltman, the nobel prize in physics 1999, autobiography

finally finished the loan from mr tiny as the next "night-reading" has already arrived.

after all i know more about severo ornstein - at least about his role at parc - from the book "dealers of lightning"; which made me curious to read more. for sure his intention was to tell about linc, and the battle over timesharing concept versus "inteRactive real time use" which meant back then personal academic use of a machine. a lot of names in there and some nice recalls.

ibm 1620( CADET=can't add doesn't even try; after that the name was dropped)

ornstein started at bbn to work together with seymour papert to implement logo - but didn't share the conviction of his colleagues, that computer can revolutionize education. (p160)

together with bob kahn he worked on the hardware of imp.

the book is one of the rare sources where bbn doesn't get all the blame for what was wrong/slow with arpanet. for ornstein they tried their best but were fighting with what honeywell supplied. wondering who has written the honeywell ddp 516 story ...

in regard to ibm and their recently all-over-quoted birthday story:

as happened on so many previous occasions, they were practically the last to "get in". personal computers were fundamentally anathema to ibm thinking, so it is hardly surprising that ibm climbed onto the personal computing bandwagen late in the game. the initial success of pc's was due not to any significant conceptual contribution, but rather to ibm's giant size which swamped everyone else once they entered the marked ... it's been suggested that ibm was rescued from the dustbin of history only by the millions of dollars government money that poured into their coffers from air force contracts associated with sage in the 1950s. sic transit, and all that. | severo m. ornstein, computing in the middle ages. a view from the trenches 1955 - 1983

one of the important developments of those days also was the idea to store the bits that represent an image in the computer's memory. nowadays some hope that principle will boost speech recognicion forward, one of the first applications computer scientists dreamed of, back then in the middle ages.