Reflections on 30 years of the PC

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release announcement for the IBM PC. At the time, this was a key breakthrough in standardization of software for individuals and companies, as the platform allowed clones with the same Intel 8080 processor to have the same functionality at much lower cost.

Making the computer into a commodity changed the world, although it almost stifled innovation because money could be made on software without any vision at all. We are incredibly lucky that Apple survived the Lisa to produce the Mac with a mouse and a full GUI interface or we might still be waiting for devices like the iPad.

A long flashback digression. Although I had been programming and using computers for more than a decade at that time (my first access had been to a Honeywell system while in HS, where a teacher ran decks for us when it wasn't being used by the school system), they weren't suitable for writing. Good word processing systems that could handle special characters and equations were extremely expensive and limited to the business world. Our department got a home built using 8" floppy disks running the CP/M system with WordStar. WordStar could handle bold, italics, and greek letters along with superscripts and subscripts, which was like a dream come true when Word was still a dream and WordPerfect was not yet on the market. It still amazes me how many features of WordStar exist in HTML and the hot keys that somehow also appear in Word. (Learning basic HTML was trivial to someone who had used WordStar, since it was essentially a markup language for documents.) Later we bought a PC clone for home use, but the real revolution was when our department got a Mac and Adobe Illustrator as well as Photoshop. This was so far beyond the PC world as to boggle the mind. It is often forgotten how important the Apple consumer world was to the adoption of Adobe products like Pagemaker when PC users were still taping pictures into empty rectangles on a printout. Since our work machines ran one of the flavors of UNIX windows systems and I could use a Mac for fancier graphics, I was never as beholden to the M$ version as some. Now that I have an iPad it irritates me no end that I can't click on a link by touching the screen of a PC or laptop. For me, the iPad's only limitation is that I haven't adapted to either the glass keyboard or the nice portable keyboard for rapid touch typing. Hence the remark below. End of unnecessary digression.

As I commented over at Dean Dad's today, hand-held devices are changing the way we look at computers and what they do for us and how they hold us back.

IMHO, the most important choice today is your keyboard.

For example, M$ bloatware means even really fast hardware takes forever to boot compared to a MacBook, not to mention an iPad. This is a big deal in a classroom, where just booting up the computer can take a substantial part of the between-class time if you find it locked or off. [All of our classroom machines go into a single-user locked mode if left unattended, for security reasons. The only way out is a power-button reboot that takes several minutes.] It is truly remarkable how slow the Vista operating system is, almost as remarkable as how M$ has never admitted it was an utter failure. (I love that if you go to a Windows Vista page, it says you should buy Windows 7.)

A big change from the early days, mostly because of the internet and World Wide Web standardized interfaces, many computers are used only to "consume" information. Examples are the web sites Dean Dad was asking about, or e-mail, or various enterprise systems like our CMS, internal grading or advising systems, and college databases. Most of these involve minimal typing so they work great with a tablet like the iPad. I definitely see this as the future.

But sometimes you need a portable keyboard as nice as the one I am typing on now.

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Reaction Time

"Watson" didn't have to push a button, a huge advantage when everyone knows the answer well before the question ends on "Jeopardy".

You could see it in real time, but I'd like to see data equivalent to what was used to determine the lock-out time for a false start in track when they shifted to electronic timing. I'd guess that "Watson" rung in at the same instant every time as it didn't have to worry about moving a finger or the delay as flesh meets button. After all, it could devote a processor to that task without any distractions from the main task at hand.

Indeed, this raises two questions about how "Jeopardy" determines when the board is open to ring in with an answer.

1) Does a human press a button, or is the end determined by an electronic sensor listening to the host's microphone? If the latter, a machine with a non-mechanical reaction time can learn to anticipate when the lights will come on.

2) Does the system lock out for a reasonable reaction time after the lights come on, the way they do for false starts in track? In track, extensive tests with world class sprinters showed that none had a reaction time less than 0.1 s, with the best around 0.12 s. Since visual responses are, reportedly, slower, does Jeopardy have a 0.2 s lockout for a valid response?

If it doesn't, "Watson" had a huge advantage.

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Data Storage Media

An important reminder from Unbalanced Reaction about data backup brought the following question to mind:

How many different types of storage media do you have at home? (I don't care if you have the hardware to read them or not.)

Although I suspect I am missing something, here is my list of the 9 (possibly 11) different types of media that are in my house:

• Internal magnetic disk and external half-terabyte drive (I think it is also magnetic)
  
  
• Flash drives
  
  
• CD ROM
  
  
• DVD
  
  
• Zip disks! (that part of Zoolander is so out of date now)
  
  
• 3.5" floppies
  
  
• [uncertain] 5" floppies (I might have tossed those)
  
  
• [uncertain] 8" floppies (ditto, written under CP/M)
  
  
• Magnetic cassette tapes for an auto-loader backup system
  
  
• 9 track tapes (plural)
  
  
• punched cards
  

Time to do some more summer house cleaning ....

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Cool Old Instrument

Interesting article via the BBC feed today about reconstructing a Roman-era trumpet that was used in European music through the early 1700s. Apparently, one piece of music by Bach, a motet (BWV 118 based on the title given in the BBC story and what I found on Wiki) was scored for this instrument; a new recording of that piece of music can be heard via a link in the BBC story.

The instrument was reconstructed by using a computer model for trumpet-like instruments to design something that had the tonal range and other properties described in old descriptions of its use. That is one heck of an application of the numerical solution of partial differential equations!

The rapid response team that exists on Wikipedia answered my question before it could even be asked. I had wondered (based on the picture in the article) if the Lituus was in any way related to the curved war trumpets used by Roman armies in Hollywood movies, or the straight ones (looks like it was called a tuba because it was basically a tube) you see used to herald the arrival of Caesar or to coordinate troops in battle. The answer seems to be "yes".

The music produced by mixing voice with this instrument is really haunting. Not exactly as upbeat as one would expect from a modern song with a title like "Jesus, the Light of my Life", but beautiful in its own way. I wonder how it would sound with the additional presence resulting from being played in a church with stone walls.

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News from Apple!

This 'news' story was all the rage among the Mac users at work today:

Check out the new MacBook Wheel!

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

It is definitely revolutionary (pun intended).

And definitely LOL funny.

Pay close attention to the captions and the other stories in the crawl.

Now if you want a real laugh, follow this link to a Youtube version and read the comments. There are a lot of gullible people out there ...

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Early Computer Music

An article from the BBC reports on the oldest recording of computer music, played by a commercial version of the Manchester Mark I computer (read a more technical article here, which includes links to articles about the 50th anniversary and construction of a working replica).

The vintage BBC video of the original "baby" machine in 1948 is priceless!

I love that the program to check if 2¹²⁷ - 1 (a Mersenne number) is a prime number (it is, as first proved in 1876) took 25 minutes to run.

I also like the image of a computer program written in machine language. That brings back some memories! And a question: Does The Thomas still have a MISTIC simulator? If so, I have a program for it ... somewhere.

UPDATE:
There is another anniversary story from the BBC, on 20 June, that has some additional information and another photo of the computer. I had forgotten that it had 128 bytes of memory. (That is not a misprint: 128 bytes, not 128 kilobytes like the earliest PC had. That factor of 1000, actually 1024 if you want to be picky, really limits what you can do when writing a program.)

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Practical Nobel Prize

It is about time (said even though I am a theorist)!

This is the time during the semester that we get to magnetism and the physics of important practical phenomena such as the Hall Effect (which is used to measure magnetic field strength, characterize the properties of semi-conductors, and, in its quantum version, establish a standard voltage). I always point out to my class that the mundane physics of such things as magnetic disk drives, like the mundane chemistry and physics of batteries, is as crucial to modern technology as the silicon chip ... and much more important to the functioning of our economy (or military) than electro-weak unification and other cool subjects of high energy particle theory that got all the press back when this work was published.

It is great to see a practical discovery related to magnetic data storage rewarded with a Nobel Prize.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was given to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for discovery of the Giant MagnetoResistance effect. This effect is used to read the tiny changes in magnetic field that signal the difference between a zero and a one when data are stored on a magnetic disk storage device. It has made possible the rapid (to someone as old as I am, spectacular) decrease in size of computer disk drives. For once, the media are not exaggerating when they say that this recent (late 1980s) discovery from basic research made the iPod possible.

One simple example: We own a half terabyte disk drive that is smaller than a Harry Potter novel. That is 500 gigabytes, for those who don't yet know the nomenclature, essential to backup all the data generated by a digital camera. A bit over 20 years ago, just a few years before the GMR discover was made, I used a computer system that had a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of storage mixed between disk and automatic tape drives. That terabyte of storage took up a space larger than our house.

I won't elaborate on the physics, which is way outside of my personal expertise in nuclear physics, because general information on the discovery, as well as links to pdf files suitable for the general reader as well as physicists, can be found in the press release from the Nobel committee.

Addenda:
A comment over at Uncertain Principles included a link to an IBM corp article on R and D that puts GMR to work.

When talking about this to my physics class, I remembered that a computer I used for my thesis research had a 1 megabyte (0.001 gigabyte) disk for key programs (operating system, compiler, device drivers) that was a beautifully polished platter about 2 feet in diameter. A factor of a million in data with a reduction in volume of maybe a factor of 10, not to mention an increase in reliability and a drop in cost by what is probably a factor of a million in current dollars.

I also pointed out in the lab how important it is to have reliable contemporaneous lab notebooks in ink to help document your independent discovery that might lead to a valuable patent if not a Nobel Prize.

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Question for Mac People

My wife has become assimilated. First an iPod, now a Mac.

After decades in the PC world, the question is:
what Mac-specific software is out there (particularly for photo management) that she would not know about?

Feel free to post any other suggestions about tools that work well with the Mac. For example, we have a wireless router for our stuff, but it does not seem to play well with the Mac. AirPort?

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Cray computers

I think I owe Rebecca, whose dream computer is the Cray 1, a photo of its first descendant:



Even built it myself! Of course it actually is just a cardboard model of a Cray X-MP that was also a calendar.

When I saw one of those on a desk, I just had to track down the source and make one myself.

Like Rebecca, I loved Cray's computers. His CDC6500 design was my second computer, and I knew it inside and out. Its RISC design made it easy to program, since I could easily keep the state of the machine in my head. Wrote some cool stuff for it, including a macro package that turned the assembler into a FORTRAN in-line compiler and a multi-tasking operating system that beat M$'s (much later) original DOS by a mile. Although the 6500 was wildly out of date by then, I count it as my first supercomputer.

My first computer was some Honeywell model that the school system let my physics teacher use in the off hours. I slammed some code to do a trivial numerical integral (using a Riemann sum) of the potential energy of a beaded chain. It was really doing a calculator sum, but calculators did not exist until a few years later. Used it to show that the potential energy of a free-hanging curve (a catenary) was less than that of other (distorted) shapes held in place by pins. Looking back, that was so cool for its time that it probably would have won some science fairs if I had bothered to enter it. Little does Mr. P know where that experience took me.

Over the years, I used a CDC7600, a Cray 1 (which was sort of the evolved 8600, sort of not), an X-MP, and a Cray 2 (which was sort of the 9600, the plausible reason I give for HAL being in the 9000 series). The immersion in liquid coolant made the Cray 2 rather unique and particularly photogenic. The ETA-10 (the successor to the CDC Star, the ultimate CISC architecture) was immersed in liquid Nitrogen for cooling, which was extremely cool (literally) but could not be seen.

Rebecca, if you want to design an emulator for the Cray 1, I found a copy of the Hardware Reference Manual on the web. Page 3-25 shows the hack he did on the multiply unit to save money at the cost of some minor computational flaws, some of which are documented at that point in the manual.

Seymour Cray was a genius. We lost a lot when he was killed in an accident on a freeway when his Jeep Grand Cherokee overturned.

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