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How would you describe a modern computer to a person 50 years ago?

'Georgy Papantoniou'

Experienced Member
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Nov 25, 2012
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Location
Nicosia, Cyprus, Cyprus
Imagine you were to travel half a century back, to the early 1960s, and meet your father - or even your self if you are that old! How would you describe a modern computer and internet to them, so that they can visualise how this machine looks and operates in the future? (e.g It is like a typewriter with a TV in front... etc)
 
I can't imagine it would be that hard. granted even my father would be a small child at the time, but if my understanding of history is correct, most people had some concept of a computer. Dick Tracy, had a wrist sized 2-way radio in the mid 40's. Basically you could go up to anyone, and tell them that every science fiction toy was invented. Save for the hover-car and space travel.
 
I agree with the previous poster that it shouldn't be that hard. There are even several members of this forum who operated big iron computers in the early sixties (not me because I'm slightly too young). And even long before 1960 the concept of information processing was well understood. When I was very young I read a novel that was far from new, it was written by a science fiction author but the theme wasn't science fiction per se - it was describing all kinds of information processing. Until I read that novel I hadn't understood how information could be handled that way, and something clicked into the right gears in my brain and I suddenly understood what I would do in life. And I'm still at it. :)

What would be difficult to get the 1960 person to believe would probably be the effect of Moore's law.. even the cyberpunk sci-fi writers of the 1990s (Gibson, Stephenson) failed to imagine the amount of RAM in a computer or the size of disk storage. I'm sure they thought they exaggerated a lot, but when you find a description of a personal computer (say, the protagonist's laptop in Stephenson's Snow Crash) it isn't particularly impressing as a computer of the future (except maybe for the eye-tracking laser.. and even that isn't sci-fi anymore). So in that sense it would be an enormous shock for my colleagues of 1990 if I now went back there with my (several years old!) Nokia N-900 phone, or my laptop.. after all I'm running my home-written minicomputer emulator on that phone, and it runs faster than the mini I was working on back then. And with 32GB internal storage.. we had 1.2GB disks back then, actually we used the 630MB ones instead because they were faster. And it had 6MB of RAM. The bigger 32-bit one had 14MB of RAM, and my phone would run circles around it when processing the same data (I have an emuator for that one too, but I'm not running it on my phone. I can run the 32-bit mini software though because it's in C and Pascal and Fortran and all of that I can do on a Linux phone.)

-Tor
 
I was introduced to computers in the late 50's with a tour of the innards of an operating IBM 704 at an air force base. My Dad was a DP manager in those days, and left me (a starry-eyed pre-teen) in the care of one of the resident IBM field engineers for a couple hours. This guy gave me quite a tour of the surreal vacuum-tube flip-flop chassis, punch card sorters (awesome machines), a magnetic drum memory disassembled for service, and much more, then taught me how a vacuum tube works.

A few years later in High School I got to go to a class sponsored by CDC learning to program a CDC 160A. Then in the mid-60's off to the navy and NTDS, and when I got discharged in the early 70's a job with CDC doing 3rd party maintenance on many different systems from different manufacturers. After CDC in the early 80's our small startup company built DEC-based systems for a customer, and later helped them port over to a PC platform.

So my description of modern computers 50 years ago would be "The more things change, the more things stay the same", but they are sure a whole lot smaller and faster :D

Conceptually the operation of the NTDS computer designed in the 50's is pretty much the same as modern cpu's, just slower and much less horsepower. Computers still execute stored programs in sequence unless told to branch. Magnetic storage is the same, just a lot smaller and faster. We had vector graphic terminals with track balls in the 60's, so the whole Apple/Windows gui is just a refinement of stuff that was around 10 years earlier.

Optical storage and flash memory are a couple things that would be hard to imagine before they were invented.
 
Optical storage and flash memory are a couple things that would be hard to imagine before they were invented.
Flash memory is actually something I was imagining about for years during my career, well, not the NAND/NOR flash technology, but I always found all the mechanical storage systems like tapes and floppies severely lacking. I was always wishing there would be some kind of solid state storage, in my mind I could see a small cube-shaped or rather 'rectangular solid' (as I think the term is), maybe a cm or two wide.. could be carried in a small pocket and would of course be non-volatile. Should store large amounts of data. Of course we have that now, for example in the shape of USB sticks. And I always carry a bunch of them in a pocket. Most of them are 16GB in size, in other words they're not even new.
The funny thing is that the whole flash memory thingy kind of sneaked up on us.. they were so small in the beginning, and then they gradually became larger, so I didn't really realize that they are what I imagined. The future is here and I didn't notice. Maybe it also has something to do with 16GB not being very much these days.. maybe I need something with 160TB before I (today) would feel as what I imagined maybe just 15-20 years ago.
 
One problem with modern computers is that their quality is declining rapidly. You get a thin plastic keyboard made in china, an awful mercury-bulb LCD, and the computer itself with cheap circuitry. And laptops (yuck!)... seems like everyone buys a $300 acer. That's not a computer as far as I'm concerned.

Not to be negative, but modern computers definitely pale in comparison to a lot of the vintage ones I own (along with other vintage electronics).
 
A computer that can fit in a room, on a desk, on a lap, in your hands, or even in your pocket.

They are mostly used in the early 21st century to access a great bank of information stored on a network of networks called the Internet. All of human knowledge is available at any time, and most people use the internet for looking at pictures of cats.

The room computers we call 'servers', and, much like the radio/television stations of the 1950s, these are where the information and media is stored. These are mostly boxes, from 2 foot high to 6 foot high, which can be accessed from a different location.

Desk computers are called 'Personal Computers'. These were used mostly in the 80s and 90s. Consists of a box, usually a couple of foot tall, and a screen like a television, though later these became flat. Input is mostly through a keyboard, with keys arranged like a typewriter, and a movable puck with a couple of buttons called a 'mouse'. This moves an arrow on the screen, to perform operations.

Lap computers are called 'Laptops', 'Notebooks', 'Netbooks' or 'Ultrabooks'. Similar to the desk computers, except it folds and opens like a book, with a flat screen. The mouse is dispensed with, a small pad through which you move the arrow with your finger is used instead.

Hand computers are called 'Tablets', like a flat screen, you use your fingers to touch items directly on the screen to perform operations.

Pocket computers, called 'smartphones' which evolved from mobile versions of the telephone. Can make phone calls, but can also browse the Internet. Similar to tablets, with the flat touchable screen to perform operations.

The desk PC, laptops, tablets, smartphones can browse the Internet, listening to music, watching videos, connecting to networks without the use of wires - similar to radio reception but on a local level.
 
Flash memory is just a slower/cheaper form of battery backed RAM, which has existed for as long as RAM has existed. We haven't even taken the next obvious step of combining memory and storage into one single non-volatile system. No more loading of programs, just execute them in place, as if from ROM. No more saving of programs, if it's in memory it's safe. Once flash memory gets good enough to make this change, I think computing will be very different.
 
Remember that 50 years ago, core was the dominant technology for main storage. And it keeps its magnetization after power is removed. I daresay core will withstand many more write cycles than modern flash will--after all, every time that core is read, it must be rewritten. I suppose MRAM or FRAM would be a comparable technology.

I recall showing a co-worker my newly assembled Altair 8800. Her reaction? "That's not a computer, it's a toy!" That was pretty harsh--and she was a programmer. Well, that was almost 40 years ago, so use your imagination. That said, I don't think that wrapping one's head around the notion of today's PCs and other digital devices would have been terribly difficult, particularly if you were a layperson.

Far easier for the young, anyway. I remember the 1969 Apollo moon landing. It was being televised and my grandmother was watching. You could not convince her that it was really occurring--she insisted that it was all a science fiction movie. Of course, we have young people today who deny that the Apollo missions were real... :)
 
Flash memory is just a slower/cheaper form of battery backed RAM, which has existed for as long as RAM has existed.
I can't really agree with that, it's a huge difference between battery-backed RAM and flash. I still have a couple of Palm Tungsten PDAs, and their storage is battery-backed RAM. It's a pain to have to bring them if I'm to travel for more than a week or so, I need to bring them to charge them or they'll run out of charge and all the installed software and data will disappear (and I can't leave them at home in the docks because multiconnectors are unreliable after a short while, the LED will be on but there's no charging and the device will run out. And some software won't reinstall properly from backup due to licenses etc.)

Switch to my other gadgets (phones, Nokia internet tablet, other gadgets) which have proper Flash storage. Never a problem, leave them for a year and they're still fine. Two years, three years. No worries. And the last Palm PDAs, the Lifebook for example, had switched from battery-backed RAM to flash, just for that reason. Core memory, as was mentioned above, was true non-volatile of course.

We haven't even taken the next obvious step of combining memory and storage into one single non-volatile system. No more loading of programs, just execute them in place, as if from ROM. No more saving of programs, if it's in memory it's safe. Once flash memory gets good enough to make this change, I think computing will be very different.
Getting back to the Palm PDA again.. PalmOS always had execute-in-place, from battery-backed RAM (storage and memory was just the same, quite unlike the Windows Mobile/PPC-based PDAs which diviced the RAM into storage and memory). Even the non-volatile Palm Lifebook had this unified memory/storage model.

It would be faster to use FRAM (as one of those newer types of memory that has actually been on the market for quite a while) as unified RAM/storage. Unfortunately I just read that the main outlet for that type of memory has just doubled or tripled the price of FRAM apparently in order to force customers over to less-interesting alternatives (for profit. Or something. I just read that in passing the other day on another forum).
 
FRAM (Ramtron-style) has its place, but lacks the density of traditional CMOS RAM. TI offers the MSP430 with FRAM integrated. MRAM (Everspin) looks to have a brighter future than FRAM, however, with several third-party manufacturers looking to get on board, but fab densities will always be a problem. You'll still probably encounter the stuff mostly in niche applications.

PCRAM (phase change RAM) is another one that might give flash a run for its money.
 
50 years ago, an iPhone or Laptop was called a Tricorder or Communicator, capt. kirk~
 
If a person from the 1940s appeared suddenly in 2013, what machines would be the most difficult to explain and for him to comprehend?

I'm curious about what it is you're getting at here. A person from the 1940's isn't all that old, and one would expect them to still have all their marbles. Do you think that there is something different about being older, other than having more knowledge and experience? Those aren't things that would normally get in the way of "understanding" things. :)

PS: "Suddenly appeared" ??? Perhaps we're living on different planets, or we have different ways of doing the math. :) :)
 
I think he meant to move a person living around 1940 through time to the year 2013.

The tech that absolutely did not exist in 1940 would be satellites.. so, GPS satnav? Earth resource monitoring satellites? Geostationary satellites? Arthur C. Clarke didn't come up with his Wireless World article until 1945. The idea of satellites weren't common back then I think, and certainly not what they would be good for (outside the military, perhaps)

To a 1940 person mobile phones would be a mystery I guess.. obviously the size of it would be troublesome to fathom, but maybe also why you would need one. That was something people were asking as late as 1990.

Hm, to a person living in the WW2 period "Made in Japan" stamped on a tiny transistor radio would be utterly incomprehensible.. as depicted in Terry Pratchett's book 'Johnny and the Bomb'.

-Tor
 
I wonder, once they've gotten a grasp of the accomplishments/new inventions that have happened, what questions would they ask starting with "Why haven't you...?", like why haven't we been back to the moon?
 
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