What I (and I dare say most people) didn't know was why ARPA gave a damn. It was SAGE:
The closing lines of this video are prescient: SAGE created essentially all the technologies that we associate with the Internet:
The SAGE system had many firsts: it was the first nation wide networked computer system. While it used special leased telephone lines and some of the first modems (at a blistering 1300 baud), it was effectively the internet, long before the internet. It was the first to use CRT screens. The first to use a “touch screen interface” via the use of light pens on the CRT. It was the first to use magnetic core memory. It was the first real time, high availability computer system. It was the first computer system to use time sharing. Many people attribute the genesis of computer programming as a profession to the SAGE system. Modern air traffic control, and computer booking systems of course, descend from the SAGE system.And it could control fighter jets responding to bomber attack, from guiding them to the target, setting fire control, launching weapons, and returning to base. And it was built using vacuum tubes and magnetic core memory, and went online a few months before I was born. I was born in August 1958.
While I never had a job replacing vacuum tubes in computer systems, my older brother (the genius) had friends who did. They got paid to play cards in the computer enter - at least until the main CPU bucket started having problems. Then they would hot-swap vacuum tube modules in the guts of the beast, and then all set down for the tedium of removing each tube for individual testing. Eventually they'd find the bad tube(s), replace them, and go back to playing cards.
That was in the 1970s, and the technology was pioneered by SAGE.
If you read early science fiction - say, Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories - you get a flavor of the expected size of computers. That was based on SAGE, too.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, who created the modern world with vacuum tubes, new-fangled modems, and iron core memory. Wow.
6 comments:
Their achievements are impressive.
Colossus!! :-)
I've been amused over the last few decades by how the great SF masters, like Heinlein and Asimov, totally missed the revolutionary nature (even the possibility) of personal computers. (Since the paper that hypothesized Moore's Law was written in 1965, they can be excused, since their early works were all written before that. But until the "doubling" really started to take off, few SF authors took that into account even then.)
I've been amused over the last few decades by how the great SF masters, like Heinlein and Asimov, totally missed the revolutionary nature (even the possibility) of personal computers. (Since the paper that hypothesized Moore's Law was written in 1965, they can be excused, since their early works were all written before that. But until the "doubling" really started to take off, few SF authors took that into account even then.)
Borepatch as always the stuff you come up with to post is really amazing. I wish I was that good.
Chris:
Not all of the great SF masters missed that. See "A Logic Named Joe", by Murray Leinster for a pretty remarkable example.
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