The Analytical Engine JOURNAL of the COMPUTER HISTORY ASSOCIATION of CALIFORNIA
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The Analytical Engine JOURNAL OF THE COMPUTER HISTORY ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA mcs ......•••••••••••••••• ..~ *..,~- ~. ~:-:.:-:.:-.:-::-: ~.-...-.-.-.- __ .. _",*_u__ ..-._ !!!!..!~ •••••••• "lllllllllrllll II infellec 8 IntelMCS Hal Layer / IiI Weil Volume 2.2 October-December 1994 October-December 1994 Volume 2.2 The Analytical Engine JOURNAL OF THE COMPUTER HISTORY ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA We could even have it running, for special Editorial: THE X-PROJECT occasions. Receptions. Conferences. Anniver saries. Fundraisers. If we can find a place to My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It put it. was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were When visiting scholars ask to see our Califor not able to understand it, I made another nia hardware we could say "Right this way." drawing: I drew the inside of the boa If we can find a place to put it. constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see Look, friends. We conquer space or it it clearly. conquers us. When CHAC started eighteen - Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince months ago, it needed money, organization, contacts, and credibility. Now it needs money, In eighteen months we've learned a lot about organization, contacts, credibility, and space, pushing the envelope. First the micros began mostly space. to arrive, and, well, micros are easy. (Up to a point!) Then we retrieved the PDS 1020 and The opportunity to secure this XDS 930 is not the HP 3000 on the very same day, and with unlimited; nor is the patience of its current some stretching (oof, grunt) we had space for owners. If we can't find a place to put this the minis too. within reasonable time - probably defined as a couple of months - this agency will write Okay. Playtime is over. Are we ready for a us off as Not Serious, and scrap the computer. mainframe? You can help us save this California classic by A major Federal agency in the Rockies would pointing the way to donated storage for a like to clear out a bootable and working XDS computer about the size of a small car. The 930. This once-potent mainframe from Xerox space has to be long-term, because we don't Data Systems (which began life as Max want to move this again for trivial reasons. A Palevsky's Scientific Data Systems) was built in Silicon Valley location would be nice, but Southern California in the early Seventies. Cer anywhere in Northern California will do. tainly there are many classic California main Your company's tax deduction will be signed, frames, but this one indisputably has a lot of sealed and delivered. And, naturally, undying soul. And while it's not small, it's not gargan gratitude and recognition is part of the tuan, either. Just the size to make rookie CS package. students stand there with their mouths open. 1999 is here. Please help! If we can find a place to put it. Because what we mean by "not gargantuan" is .... ten or twelve racks. Say fifteen feet long, five tall and four deep. About the size of a small five-passenger sedan. On its side. It could be the kingpin of a real, museum quality computer collection. If we can find a place to put it. Page 2 The Analytical Engine October-December 1994 IN IT FOR YOU, Part Two NEW ADDRESSES To our enthusiastically received offer of a We're firmly established in Palo Alto and discount on Doctor Haddock's Collector's eager to receive whatever you might want to Guide to Personal Computers, we now add a . send. (Note: Please don't ship a computer or second spiff - this one exclusively for sub other heavy hardware without querying first, scribers. bye-mail or snail-mail.) Lexikon Services' HISTORY OF Subs, articles, donations and general corre COMPUTING by Mark Greenia will be the spondence are welcome at: ENGINE's reward to you for a two-year sub scription or renewal. Compared to version 2.0, Computer History Association of California which was glowingly reviewed in July's 3375 Alma Street ENGINE, the extensively reworked Version Apt. 263 2.5 offers Palo Alto, CA 94306-3518 • Expanded and improved menus We were hoping to have a new e-mail address by the time this issue of the ENGINE • Over 60 pages of new information appeared, but InterNIC is drowning in requests • Expanded listing of early large digital for domain names and couldn't get back to us computers by October 15th. Look for the updated address on the net and in the January • Expanded listing of early microcomputers ENGINE. • Over 300 different types of computers and devices A BALLOT • Additional profiles of computer pioneers and companies [Ordinarily, ballots for the National Com puting Science Day survey are confidential. But • Expanded bibliography we asked Tim Patterson, career database • Numerous revisions and clarifications in hacker and humorist from Berkeley, for the Dictionary. permission to print his.] This indispensable reference to computer his "Free propeller beanies for every man, woman tory, a US$19.95 value, can be yours when you and child in the United States and all its subscribe to the ANALYTICAL ENGINE for colonies, formal and informal. two years, or extend your current subscription. Requirement that on National Computing Just include the words "History Diskette" on Science Day, all members of Congress speak your sub slip or in your e-mail and we'll send only in machine language. it by first class post. Mandatory 10% raise every year for all clerical (Oh, and - the HISTORY requires a and manufacturing employees in Silicon computer with a 3.5" floppy drive that runs Valley." MS-DOS or MS-Windows.) [Gee, that should be popular. - Ed.] October-December 1994 The Analytical Engine Page 3 "THE SAME TECHNOLOGY RJ: The records were in fixed-size pockets, and when the pocket ran over, there was an STILL HOLDS:" address of where the next pocket would fall. Rey Johnson and Jack Harker talk about JH: SO if you did get duplication then you'd RAMAC, the Low Cost File System and write trailer records. The original recording, as the dawn of the floppy I recall, was a straight conversion. But in later (Part 2) times you got a little more sophisticated than that, in terms of using frequency versus code Interview by Kip Crosby and Max Elbaum length. And you really didn't do much data compression, in the classic sense, for a long, KC' This does lead into something else that we should consider before we get too far along in long time. the hardware technology. There always was the KC: Because even without any kind of question of how you defined the data on the disk compression, you still had data densities on the - once you put it on there, and can we briefly disk files that were more than competitive? treat questions of encoding and data location JH: Yes. We were always very conservative on before we go further? the electronics side of re-writing, because you RJ: Packing random numbers efficiently and really had a problem of reliability as you were getting to them. Punch cards all stack one on updating things in real time, and you didn't top of the other, and the space required is have good backups. determined by the number of numbers you RJ: It's a classic problem - how do you stack have. But here, if the numbers are a thousand random numbers in space that tend to be units apart, stacking them becomes the sequential? problem. I'm not enough of a systems engineer to answer that, but at the time we had Pete JH: When ASD was broken off from the Luhn, a very prolific inventor in mM, who development laboratory [in May 1959] there was responsible for the mathematical system were people in Rey's lab who were trying to whereby doing arithmetic on an account convince us that they could record at ten number, you generated random numbers, so all times prevailing density just by using some account numbers took on the characteristic of data compression and some signal processing random numbering and could then be sorted technology, filtering, pre-comp, post-comp - and stacked very efficiently. And then when things that are all standard now, but they you got back, you'd re-convert that random took a long time. number by the encoding technique to the RJ: The thing that has surprised us is that, original account number. over these forty years, the same technology KC: Did this amount to on-the-jly data still holds. The moving heads over the rotating compression? disks and surface; and to this day - Emil Hoffner, who has been the most active in No. That was to randomize the records so JH: signal processing, claims that he can get at that you could get a uniform distribution of least ten times the density of any system now records, because it didn't have index tracks on in use through new signal processing. And the the first RAMAC. latest, very important change that has taken KC' So all the indexing had to be performed on place in the reading head is that no longer the data itselft does a signal get its energy out of the speed. The signal is subject to variation by the JH: In order to get a uniform distribution of presence of the magnetic bit - it's records across the space, you wanted to magnetostrictive - so that you can really go randomize it. It was a pseudo-random very slowly if necessary and you don't have algorithm that would allow you to reproduce the same servo problems.