Project Hub
Here’s a history of the computers I have used.
In the 1960’s I picked up a Tutortext at the Santa Barbara Public Library. It was a bit like Knuth’s with a pseudo machine to illustrate how to program a computer
I remember how I was wowed when I saw an ad for the Magic Brain Calculator in a magazine. It was incredibly cheap. I was a bit let down when I got it and found out it was merely mechanical. It does serve to illustrate my early interest in computing devices, and I suppose, a kind of taste for technological magic.
I think it was the fall of 1965 at Santa Barabara Hight School when I first got to actually run computer programs. The classroom had a funny looking machine againt the right wall. It looked like a typewriter on top but had a metal stand with two protruding legs on the bottom. Its main purpose was to introduce high school students to computers. A typical use was to generate cartesian graphs to illustrate algebra problems the teacher was presenting. The teacher would enter an equation into a program. Then he would insert a transparent sheet and run the program. The typewriter would then print out a simple graph using individual characters on the transparent sheet. When the sheet was placed in an overheader projecter, the class could see a visualization of the problem on the screen.
Several interested students, myself included, were curious how this computer worked. Indeed in my naïtivity, I falsely believed the computer itself was inside the metal box that supported the typewriter. There was a telephone built into the right side of the device. By dialing a particular number, the “teletype” established a connection to a computer in a downtown office. With the appropriate password, one got access to the Dartmouth BASIC system running on a General Electric GE-225.
In 2023 I came across Birth of BASIC on Youtube. Its creators were a bit surprised how easily even high school students learned and used BASIC.
RPG-II
At HP Labs, we used these machines to do distributed system research. They ran HP-UX. We designed a computer room next to our office area for about half a dozen systems including disc drives. For one project, I got a trace of disc activity for a system running a database server. I instrumented the HP-UX kernel and developed a RPC connection between the database server process and a benchmark program running on a separate system. The database server and benchmark program were run on separate systems so that database disc accesses being traced were isolated from those of the benchmark program.