"If the airline industry had progressed as quickly as the computer industry, then the 747 would have been flying in 1917". Now this statement wasn't made a couple of years ago - no, it was being made in the late 1970's. So when you look back at what computers were like and what they were doing, you don't have to go back that many years. In fact, unlike other technologies, there are people still living who saw and used computers at a time when the technology was in its infancy.
One aspect of our lives today is that we all can personally get access to computers - they're no longer hidden within the bowels of some organisation's basement. So have a bit of fun and take away a sense of wonderment when you visit the sites for this week. Just remember when you're looking at photos of the old machines that they stand about 1.8m (6 feet) high but you'll see the progression to smaller and more powerful systems during the 1980's.
The YAPP site in particular has some good hardware details about Digital Equipment's minicomputer range. The 11/70 model was the most powerful for many years and the 11/34 model was extremely popular, being sold worldwide in the thousands.
The term "minicomputer" was applied to machines such as these because they didn't cost millions of dollars nor require the huge resources of power, space and cooling (often water-cooling) of the current mainframes. Thus for the first time, small businesses could set up and run a machine such as an PDP11/34, costing just tens of thousands.
More importantly, the DEC range of time-sharing minis brought a far more significant change to the way computing was carried out: for the first time, for a whole range of computer users, computing became interactive. That is, users themselves ran programs from their terminals, did their word-processing, printed their own documents, entered data into the accounting package, produced reports, even wrote their own programs, ran them and edited them. This was a huge change from the working methods on mainframes such as IBM's where there was no real-time interaction - jobs were given to the computer as a series of commands and users' jobs waited in a queue until they were completed. If the job was unsuccessful, it was was submitted again to the queue and the user waited for its completion.
webWiz has a special affinity for the PDP11/34 so pardon the bias in this week's sites. However, the history of the PDP-11 and the Digital Equipment Corporation makes interesting reading in the context of the history of computing over the past forty years or so.
|