PC of the future (as predicted in 1954)

Ganssle group ^ | 12-07-04 | Ganssle

[R. Scott]

16k - reminds me of my old Commodore.

[DaveTesla]

If memory serves me that was actually a PDP-8.
Just kidding about the ferrite memory.

[beezdotcom]

That's how we know this photo is a forgery - an interface designed by true PhD Human Factors Engineers would have forced the user to look in a rear-view mirror at the monitor....

[RadioAstronomer]

Ferrite cores?

Indeed. :-)

Our IBM 360/75J mainframes used ferrite core memory as well.

(I'm getting old. Sigh.)

[DaveTesla]

No your not.

ROTFLMAO

[RadioAstronomer]

16k - reminds me of my old Commodore.

Wish I have one of the original Pet computers. Big time collectible.

[RadioAstronomer]

If memory serves me that was actually a PDP-8.

PDP-8 and PDP-11 computers were still used up to only a few years ago. :-)

There are PDP collector clubs and web sites.

[cuz_it_aint_their_money]

I wonder what the big wheel does?

Silly, that's the pointing device.
You have to turn it left or right at the same time either pushing it in or out to get the cursor to move around the monitor.
They didn't dare call it a mouse way back then cuz the "little lady" of the house wouldn't want it in her home.

[OXENinFLA]

You just don't get those pressure gauges in PCs any more!

Or steering wheels! LOL!!

[walford]

Actually had 20M hard drives. Each one was as big as a washing machine. The disk packs looked like 8 layer cakes under big covered cake dishes. We would load them in the top of the drive and unlock and remove the covers and pray the heads didn't crash when they spun up.

Yes I remember them well. The programmers told us that if you blew a puff of smoke into a disk pack while it was running it would crash the head. Once the 2nd generation system came out in the mid '80s, things got better.

One thing that I miss from those old CAD stations was the 2-screen master/slave system, where you had the whole drawing on one screen and the detail on the other. Very helpful. [Yes I know you can do split screens and multiple windows on a singular tube -- it's just not the same.]

If I was still doing electo-mechanical drafting, I'd probably be trying to figure out a way to have 2 screens come out of the same CPU. Should be doable somehow.

[DaveTesla]

Now we use Autocad Inventor and three 24" LCD monitors.

[7thson]

What's amazing is how many people fall for this and other stuff found on the net. I went to the H.S. graduation of a friend's son last year. There were three moments when different speakers mentioned something from the internet - a quote by someone - that I knew to be false. These were educators! It is like what Will Rogers said - there is no one more stupid than an educated person if you get them off what they were educated in.

[chilepepper]

sorry -- "Grand Theft Auto" games on Playstation/Xbox/etc...

[RadioAstronomer]

As an example of almost-forgotten progress, we found a dusty old Seagate ST-225 hard drive in the back of an old cabinet.

We use the IBM 2314 Disk Storage Drive on out 360s. :-)
It used a removeable disk pack containing eleven stacked 14 inch platters, 29.9 million character storage and a bandwidth of 155K bytes/sec.

Compare that to the Western Digital WD2500JD for a home PC.
8 MB buffer, 250 GB, and a data transfer rate of 150 MB/sec.

Just a tiny improvement. LOL!!

[RadioAstronomer]

One thing that I miss from those old CAD stations was the 2-screen master/slave system, where you had the whole drawing on one screen and the detail on the other. Very helpful.

I have dual monitors on this computer. That is becoming pretty common now.

[DaveTesla]

Matrox
Have A LOOK!

[far sider]

LOL! I wonder what the big wheel does?

Man, these guys were good! They even anticipated the video game!!

[backhoe]

Ferrite cores? Indeed. :-) Our IBM 360/75J mainframes used ferrite core memory as well. (I'm getting old. Sigh.)

Double sigh- I have a Seeburg "Regency" jukebox in the shop- it uses a ferrite core memory to recall record locations ( the old ones used a mechanical "memory" ) and it was near state-of-the-art... in 1974.

[RadioAstronomer]

I am using dual ViewSonic VX900 LCDs on this computer. :-)

[USCG SimTech]

The big wheels are the throttles for the reactor output.