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Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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Good point. You got that too. I didn't think it was worth commenting on
before but I'm glad you made the connection. Actually in the 50s I was a
guest in my uncle's lab at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in MD where he was
a DOD physicist who incidentally invented the fastest camera in the world
at that time and he showed me the second generation computer (I believe
Aberdeen Labs was the first to receive and use computer systems - even as
crude as they were at that time) and I was excited. I was a ham operator
since 1955 and this was a few years later to give you an idea how long ago
it was.
I had a serious interest since then and turned my Commodore computer
(old keyboard and about 32Mg microprocessor) into a radio-teletype
computer system to be used with Army MARS. Very few were using computers
then and only a handful had converted them into telex/teletype machines.
Pre-Commodore I had built a Heath kit bread board computer. My next
computer was an IBM XT and it just kept getting better but I recall when
hard drives were novel I purchased one to use on my Commodore computer for
$1,700 and that was early 60s.
At the White House we did not use computers in the late 50s and even
cryptology was still using mechanical wheels to change code. At the War
Room in the 60s I did work on computers, but they all used vacumn tubes
with diode multipliers and some transisters. ARPA was not yet started to
establish a communications system but we were using pulse mod and packet
communications. Later on when I was at Durham Tech we did connect to the
Internet which was very new and I became a student member of ACM
(Association of Computing Machinery) and studied programming, mostly COBOL
but also rpg, lisp, basic, and mostly assembly languages WITH punch cards
over Main Frame IBMs. Yes, those were the days.
Hank
On Mon, 10 Apr 2006, LLT wrote:
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> / o o \
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> http://pnews.org/
> Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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>
>
> ---
>
> Dear Hank,
>
> Please don't be so rude with such a very old man and be =
> understanding : at least fifty-five years living with computers may be a =
> strong mental health hazard....
>
>
> (reminder : the first commercial computer was build by the British =
> Ferranti, the "Mark 1" and sold - if I remember correctly - to some =
> general store chain; it was in 1951; a few months earlier, the British =
> prof. Maurice Wilkes, from the Cambridge's applied maths Lab, had =
> published the first manual for programming; so, our friend has to have =
> been, in the early '50, a British analyst-programmer from thez Cambridge =
> team - since I cannot question he was the first etc..., see under)
>
>
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