Posted on 06/24/2020 3:33:30 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Hadn't thought of that, but you have a point there.
Looked it up to refresh my own memory.
The beast of a system weighed ~ 57,089 pounds.
Took up ~ 3,752 ft2 of floor space, with another 2,450 ft2 room for power, refrigeration, & auxiliary equipment.
It used 21 types of vacuum tubes, but not for memory, after all.
It had [at most] 12,288 words of 36-bit magnetic core memory.
Also [at most] 32,768 words of magnetic drum memory.
Up to 24 tape drives could be connected.
Took an hour to boot up: 15 minutes at quarter voltage, another 15 minutes at half-voltage, etc.
Two trucks arrived every week -- one to haul away the burnt-out tubes; another with new tubes.
We wrote programs in Basic Assembly Language [BAL]. Way before [Dartmouth] BASIC.
12 years later, we [Kemosabe] were booting up 16-bit minicomputers with fanfold paper tape.
The fantastic notion that everyone would one day be walking around with his nose glued to a handheld pocket-size touch-sensitive screen -- with embedded high-res cameras -- sending full-color video clips to strangers around the globe via satellite, and storing terabytes of data in a faraway distributed "cloud" of servers, all at nearly zero customer cost, was outrageous, laughable science fiction.
How far we have come.
The internet & worldwide web [combined] is one of the greatest human achievements in history.
You -- of all FReepers -- certainly appreciate the historical & cultural perspectives.
Hard to believe anyone got any work done without the ubiquitous internet.
Still, much of today's chaos is the result of placing significant computing power in the hands of mere civilians.
——
I learned LISP from John McCarthy himself. He was our Professor in every LISP class offered.
Got the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual [1965] right here on my reference shelf.
John discovered / designed LISP, publishing his paper "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine" in Communications of the ACM, April 1960.
He worked at M.I.T., but was eager to start his own research Lab.
He negotiated a deal with Stanford to move west, and create & run the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), in exchange for agreeing to teach LISP part-time to graduate students.
I was a Research Assistant at SAIL [1970 -- 71], while pursuing a Master's Degree in Computer Science.
My Professors in other CS courses were Don Knuth & Alan Kay.
Alan had a sketchbook, and explained to us his ideas & diagrams for a portable, folding computer that evolved into the MacBook.
We often worked late into the night, programming [a DEC PDP 10] in LISP & Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language [also SAIL]. It had an ALGOL-like structure, with extensions like Pieces of Glass that were essentially translucent windows.
Inventing the future.
John McCarthy, Don Knuth, Alan Kay -- holy ****! Of the Mac, Kay once said, it was the first computer worthy of criticism. :^) I'm not sure what the first computer I used was, I only know that, if I drove to, say, [favorite ugly city, fill it in yourself] and on the way there I saw an old pole building where a fire had taken out about the rear third of it and the wall on that side was a huge piece of faded translucent plastic, I'd be looking at exactly the right facility to put a museum that featured that computer system. And I'm in the ballpark of ten years younger than you (estimate), by contrast, I had it *easy*. :^) One of my sisters studied FORTRAN (I'm still not sure why, although she was a math major, that's probably it) and the only assignment I can recall from that dim past was a Snoopy in profile over a calendar, all done in text characters, line printer, wide paper.
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