ETL. It employed 130 [July 1], who worked for IBM at transistors, 1,800 germanium the time. diodes, and its 128-word July This was not IBM's first foray memory unit employed into religious indexing, which ultrasonic delay elements that had begun in 1949 due to the used glass as a medium. Short Code efforts of the Jesuit priest, Proposed Roberto Busa [Nov 28].

July 1949 IBM and the Short Code was the first Summa Theologica Spreadsheet relatively high-level computer language in the sense that its July 1957 Programming statements were mathematic The Summa Theologica is July 1961 expressions rather than machine considered the greatest work of instructions. It also supported Richard Mattessich published medieval philosophy. It was branching and calls to library the article "Budgeting Models written by St. Thomas Aquinas functions. and System Simulation" in the between 1265 and 1272, and July 1961 issue of The The language was first proposed spans some sixty volumes. Accounting Review in which he by John Mauchly [August 30] at In 1957, IBM was asked by the discussed (in very general the end of July 1949, originally Pontifical faculty of Philosophy terms) how conventional as "Brief Code", and the first accounting spreadsheets might prototype, by William Schmitt, be modeled in FORTRAN IV. The was running later that year on software would calculate the the BINAC [April 4] . He ported it results of formulae expressed as to the UNIVAC [March 31] in the addition or subtraction of 1950, and it also popped up on subscripted input data. There the UNIVAC II in 1952, was no notion of an interactive implemented by A. B. Tonik and GUI as typified by VisiCalc [May J. R Logan. Its programs ran 11]. almost 50 times slower than the equivalent machine code, which This was followed by several 'proved' to many people that programming languages which high-level languages were never made it easier to write the going to be a viable coding tool. formulae, including BCL (Business Computer Language) The BINAC was also home to the by R. Brian Walsh in 1962, C-10 machine code by Mauchly AutoPlan/AutoTab by A. Leroy and Betty Holberton [March 7], Ellison, Harry N. Cantrell, and developed in 1947, the first Russell E. Edwards in 1968, and language to use mnemonic LANPAR (LANguage for names for operations (e.g. “a” for Programming Arrays at add and “b” for bring). Random) by Rene K. Pardo and Remy Landau in 1969. APL's [Dec 17] core use of A page from Thomas Aquinas' ETL Mark III multidimensional arrays made it Summa theologiae, 1482. July 1956 a good choice for building spreadsheet languages, resulting in Milan to create an index and When the Mark III came into in the IBM Financial Planning concordance of the Summa, and operation at Japan’s and Control System by Brian Pope John XXIII was so delighted Electrotechnical Laboratory Ingham, and APLDOT designed with the results that he (ETL) in July, it became the first by the US Railway association, conferred the Knights Grand stored-program transistor both in 1976. Cross of the Order of computer, and was amazingly St. Sylvester upon Thomas None of these offered an also only the second electronic Watson, Jr. [Jan 14], and his interactive grid-based user computer completed in Japan, brother Arthur. Other notable interface like that of VisiCalc. after the vacuum tube-based members of the Order include FUJIC [Nov 16]. Bob Hope and Oscar Schindler. The Mark III's development was In adition, the experience gained conducted by Takahashi Shigeru, during the project contributed Nishino Hiroji, Matsuzaki towards the development of the Isokazu and Kondo Kaoru of the KWIC Index by Hans Peter Luhn Electronics Research Division at

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burgeoning hacker culture in the Laboratories Record" (BLR) First Computer lab during the 1960s and 1970s. magazine printed an article The ITS 1.5 Reference Manual, about the system and its Graphics Cover by Donald Eastlake, was issued teaching materials during this July 1965 some time during this month. month. The July 1965 issue of Fortune In keeping with the hacker The computer operated by sported the first magazine cover ethos, there were no passwords, means of pencil and sliding tabs, drawn using computer graphics. every file was editable, and it with any arithmetic out-sourced was easy to watch and kill any to the user. The machine It illustrated a story entitled user processes. Notable supported a generous 100 "The 500 Biggest Industrials", software written on the ITS memory cells which could hold and so featured a large "500" in included Emacs [Oct 2], MacLisp integers from 0 to ±999. A rich the foreground, colored red, [Dec 25], Macsyma [previous ten operation instruction set white, and blue, surrounded by entry], and SHRDLU [Feb 24]. allowed the CARDIAC to add, numerous red and blue arrows subtract, test, shift, input, The ITS name was chosen by pointing optimistically upwards. output, and jump. Tom Knight as a humorous The image had been generated callback to the earliest time- in black and white on a PDP-1 sharing OS from MIT, the [Nov 00] borrowed from Bolt, Compatible Time-Sharing Beranek & Newman [Oct 15], System (CTSS [May 3]). and the colors added later by applying filters to different ITS's host PDP-10 is also photographs taken of the image remembered for its "More displayed on the PDP-1's screen. Magic" switch, a little home- made switch glued to the frame of one of its cabinet. The switch had two positions, labeled Macsyma Begins ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. Close examination by curious hackers July 1968 revealed that the switch had Macsyma (Project MAC’s only one wire running to it, and SYmbolic MAnipulator) became the other end, though connected one of the first computer algebra to the wiring, was ultimately systems, and inspired many connected to a ground pin. later systems, such as Maple, Clearly the switch was useless: The front of the CARDIAC. (c) and Mathematica [June 23]. It not only was it electrically non- Bell Telephone Labs 1968. was developed at MIT’s Project operative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect MAC [July 1] by Carl Engelman, Programs were run by moving William A. Martin, and Joel anything anyway. So one of the hacker flipped the switch. three tabs (in the shapes of Moses, and coded in Maclisp, beetles) so that the number in making it the largest LISP The PDP-10 promptly crashed. the instruction register equaled program of the time. Its This time Richard Greenblatt the number in the memory cell. development also helped When a beetle moved to the next improved LISP's support for was called upon. He inspected it, concluded it was indeed useless, memory cell, the user was numerical computing and directed by an arrow to what efficient compilation. and utilized some diagonal cutters to remove it. The PDP-10 operation to perform next. In 1982, Macsyma was licensed was rebooted, and ran without The manual and kit can be found to Symbolics [March 15]. any problems. online at https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls 96/museum/cardiac.html ITS Described CARDIAC: Very The CARDIAC wasn't the first paper-based digital computer; July 1969 Arresting that was probably the PAPAC-00 The Incompatible Timesharing July 1969 a two-register, one-bit device, System (ITS) was an influential created by Rollin P. Mayer, and OS developed mainly by Richard The CARDIAC (CARDboard printed in the Communications Greenblatt [Dec 25] and Stewart Illustrative Aid to Computation) of the ACM [Sept 15], Sept. 1959. Nelson in the MIT AI lab, initially was a learning aid for teaching For more educational computer as a deliberate move away from high school students how kits, see [Feb 22], [April 30], the complexity of Project MAC’s computers worked. It was [Sept 30]. Multics project [Nov 30], but it developed by David Hagelbarger eventually became better known and Saul Fingerman at Bell Labs as one of the catalysts for the in 1968, but the "Bell

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road department. They had been When PLATO IV became The NRI 832 inspired by observing another operational at the University of July/August 1971 group of students at Lakeside Illinois during the summer of School who were currently 1972, it offered several major The National Radio Institute doing this job manually. innovations: Bitzer’s orange (NRI) Journal (Vol. 28, No. 4) Incidentally, Traf-O-Data wasn't plasma screen with bitmapped announced its new home-study the pair's first business venture graphics, a microfiche selector computer electronics course, – see [Nov 18]. that permitted colored images to which included (probably) the be projected on the back of the The project required special very first computer kit, the NRI screen under program control, hardware to read the tapes, but 832. and a 16×16 grid infrared touch neither Gates nor Allen had any panel [Nov 27]. The 832 used around 50 TTL hardware design experience. So chips, a 16-byte diode switch they headed over to the matrix memory, and an University of Washington’s additional 16 bytes of TTL (UW) Physics building (now SRAM. Its operator’s panel held known as Mary Gates Hall) 128 switches, and offered light where they eventually found bulb outputs. Paul Gilbert, an EE student, worked in the high-energy The kit was designed by Lou tracking lab. He became a Frenzel, a long-time electronic partner in the business, and in hobbyist/maker, who later return built a became Vice President of Heath using the newly released Intel Company, where he started 8008 [April 00] while Gates and ’s [July 00] personal Allen wrote its software. computer and education/publishing To test their code while the businesses. microcomputer was being built, Allen wrote an 8008 emulator The NRI course was based that ran on UWs IBM 360. around 100 experiments that (Although Allen wasn't a student A PLATO V Terminal from 1981. demonstrated various electrical there, his father was a UW Photo by Mtnman79. CC BY 3.0. principles, computer operation, librarian.) and programming. Frenzel Several novel peripherals were remarked, “We are just tickled to Unfortunately, the Traf-O-Data designed for PLATO, including death about our computer project came to nothing when the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind course and we think that our Washington state began offering (named after inventor Sherwin students will be, too.” It sold for free traffic processing services Gooch) which offered four voice just over $500, and became very to its cities, ending the need for music synthesis., and the Votrax popular. private contractors. speech synthesizer [Dec 4] The NRI 832 wasn't the first But Traf-O-Data didn't die; which led to a “say” instruction computer kit to appear in an indeed it was formally created in being added to PLATO’s Tutor advert. That honor belongs to an Jan 1975, with Gates, Allen, and programming language. ad by Dave Digby which Paul Gilbert as partners. This PLATO IV included shared- appeared in the October 1967 allowed Gates and Allen to use memory that allowed programs issue of CQ magazine (a Traf-O-Data’s 8008 emulator to to send data between its users. publication aimed at amateur develop their BASIC for the This was used to build chat-type radio operators). The $1000 kit Altair [Dec 19]. programs and multiplayer used RTL logic, four registers, Allen later said: “Traf-O-Data networked games, such as and a 512- to 1024- byte delay remains my favorite mistake spasim (a 3D space game [March line memory. However, there’s because it confirmed to me that 1]), Empire (a shooter [May some debate over whether any every failure contains the seeds 00]), and Dungeon [Dec 22]. of those kits were actually of your next success.” manufactured. By 1976, PLATO had sprouted a variety of novel tools for online

communication, including Personal Notes (e-mail), Traf-O-Data Begins PLATO IV Talkomatic (chat rooms), Term- Summer 1972 Talk (instant messaging), Summer 1972 monitor mode (remote screen Donald Bitzer [Jan 1] and Daniel Bill Gates [Oct 28] and Paul Allen sharing), and emoticons. Alpert's PLATO (Programmed [Jan 21] set up their Traf-O-Data Logic for Automatic Teaching Early in 1972, Xerox PARC business with the idea of Operations) [Aug 22] was the researchers were given a tour of automating the processing of first general-purpose computer- Illinois' PLATO system, and traffic paper tapes for Seattle's assisted instruction system. many of the technologies found

3 their way back to PARC. For The Apple I went on sale at the vector addition, scalar example, PLATO’s application "sinister" price of $666.66, multiplication, dot products, for drawing pictures influenced chosen because Steve Wozniak linear combinations, and matrix the drawing program on the [Aug 11] “liked repeating digits” multiplication. Xerox Star [April 27]. PLATO's and “the phone number for my BLAS was developed by the Charset Editor for painting new dial-a-joke service was 255- characters became PARC's 6666,” and because it ACM-SIGNUM committee on basic linear algebra Doodle program. represented a one-third markup subprograms between 1973- on the $500 wholesale price. He Some authors have drawn 1977, and quickly became the de had no idea about its satanic similarities between this visit facto standard for low-level meaning as the “Number of the and the much more famous one routines used in linear algebra Beast”. by the Apple team to PARC in libraries, such as LINPACK [Dec [Dec 00] 1979. Unlike other hobbyist 1] and LAPACK. computers of the day which There’s an even earlier The original BLAS focussed on were sold as kits, the Apple I connection between PLATO and densely stored vectors and was beautifully presented as a PARC in the impressive shape of matrices, but extensions were fully assembled circuit board, Alan Kay [May 17] who first added later for sparse matrices containing about 60 chips. visited in the summer of 1968, and the utilization of cache However, to turn it into a and saw a prototype of the memory. working computer, users still plasma display. had to add a case, a power supply, ASCII keyboard, and a display. However, the Apple I's HeathKit H8 The Mark-8 support for keyboard input and TV output was a radical step Announced July 1974 forward – machines of the time, such as the Altair [Dec 19], July 1977 The Mark-8 was a ‘build it relied on the user toggling Heathkit was a long-established yourself’ microcomputer first switches, and looking at flashing player (since 1926) in the described in Radio-Electronics’ bulbs. July 1974 issue. For only $5, a electronics market, offering a budding computer engineer About 200 boards were sold range of DIY kits, some of them could purchase a booklet before Apple announced the scarely complex, such as a color containing circuit board layouts Apple II a year later [June 5]. television and a light airplane. based around an Intel 8008 According to an online registry, Through the 1950s and 1960s it [April 00] and construction there are still 79 around, an also sold a range of splendid details. A couple of thousand impressive survival rate. analogue computers, including were sold, according to the the extremely popular (and On August 26, 2016, an Apple I designer Jonathan Titus, then a cheap) EC-1 [Dec 25]. prototype built by Steve Jobs student at Virginia Tech. [Feb 24] (according to Apple I In 1977 Heathkit decided to The Mark-8 was actually the expert Corey Cohen), was sold enter the microcomputer second microprocessor kit, the for $815,000. It was duly market, under the guidance of first being the Scelbi-8H [March dubbed the ‘Holy Grail’ of electronic hobbyist/maker, Lou 00], but the Mark-8 became computers. Frenzel [two pages ago]. The H8, better known since Radio- an -based Electronics was a widely read microcomputer [April 00], was magazine, and the Mark-8 was announced in July 1977 and pictured on the cover. BLAS Reported started selling in kit form that July 1977 fall at a shockingly reasonable The interest in the Mark-8 price of $379. prompted the editors of Popular C.L. Lawson, R.J. Hanson, Electronics to publish a similar D.R. Kincaid, and F.T. but easier microcomputer Krogh submitted their project, its famous paper, "Basic Linear [Dec 19] article, in January 1975. Algebra Subprograms for had been Fortran Usage" to the offered the Mark-8 piece, but ACM Transactions on had turned it down. Mathematical Software.

This paper described the BLAS package (Basic Linear The Heathkit H-8. Photo by Apple I Released Algebra Subprograms) Arthur G Korwin Piotrowski. CC July 1976 consisting of 38 FORTRAN- BY-SA 4.0. callable subprograms for basic It came with a pre-built CPU Prev: [April 1] Next: [Jan 3] numerical linear algebra, such as board, and a front panel with a

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9-digit 7-segment octal display One of the best kept secrets of and a 16-key octal keypad. A Real Programmers the Sun marketing team was speaker provided audio that SPARC spelt backwards was feedback on whether an Don’t Use Pascal CRAPS. Team members had to operation had finished correctly July 1983 swear they would never utter (short bleep) or not (long bleep). that word to anyone. “Real Programmers Don’t Use On the downside, for it to be a Pascal” (a title rifting upon the useful programming tool, you 1982 bestseller “Real Men Don’t really needed to purchase a few Eat Quiche”) was published by Intel Inside is Out extras – RAM and a cassette Ed Post as a letter in the July drive were considered de edition of Datamation [Oct 00]. July 1991 rigueur. Real Programmers only use In the late 1980s, Intel’s market After Zenith Corp. bought punch cards and write programs share was being eroded by HeathKit’s computer division, it in FORTRAN [Dec 00] or upstart, sprightly competitors released a pre-assembled assembly language, while such as AMD [May 1] and Zilog version called the Zenith Data “quiche eaters” delude [March 9]. An innovative Systems Z-100 which became themselves with languages such advertising strategy was needed more popular. Jerry Pournelle as Pascal [Nov 20] which urgently, and one was born in [Aug 7] praised its keyboard, support superfluous structured 1989, when Intel’s Dennis Carter and wrote that it “had the best syntax and impose irritating visited MicroAge’s headquarters color graphics I’ve seen on a restrictions to prevent bugs (i.e. to meet with its VP of Marketing, small machine”. limit our god-given freedoms). Ron Mion.

Seymour Cray [Sept 28] was Mion felt that the public didn’t lionized as an icon of Real really need to fully understand "The Soul of a Programming. It was said that why Intel chips were better, they he input the first OS for the CDC just needed to feel that they New Machine" 7600 [Dec 3] by toggling were better, and to prove this switches on its front panel by assertion he proposed a market Published hand (and without needing to test. Intel would pay for a refer to notes). MicroAge billboard saying, “If July 1981 you’re buying a personal

The Soul of a New Machine by computer, make sure it has Intel Tracy Kidder recounts the inside.” In turn, MicroAge would development of a new Data The Sun SPARC put “Intel Inside” stickers on the General [April 15] workstation, cases of their Intel-based with the engineering team July 1987 computers. forced to work at a blistering The Scalable Processor Mion decided to do the test in pace under tremendous Architecture (SPARC) was a Boulder, Colorado, where pressure. The book won the reduced instruction set MicroAge had a single store. 1982 National Book Award for computing (RISC [May 30]) chip Virtually overnight, the sales of Nonfiction and a Pulitzer Prize developed by Sun Microsystems Intel-based PCs shot up. Intel for General Non-Fiction. [Feb 24]. SPARC’s commercial soon after adopted “Intel Inside” The machine was launched on success finally overcame the worldwide. industry's dyed-in-the-wool April 29, 1980 as the Data The five-note D♭ D♭ G♭ D♭ A♭ General Eclipse MV/8000. It was skepticism about RISC (i.e. they xylophone/xylomarimba jingle the first in a family of 32-bit finally decided to take a few used in TV adverts was risks). introduced in 1994. It was Tom West was assigned the The original 32-bit SPARC written by Walter Werzowa, responsibility of building it, a (SPARC V7) was used in the Sun- once a member of the Austrian task that usually took about 4 workstation, which replaced 1980s sampling band, Edelweiss. the Sun-3 built around the three years, but he was given a year, a seemingly impossible Motorola 68000 [Sept 26]. task. He assembled a team of Sun cannily made SPARC an about thirty engineers. The open architecture, available for hardware designers came to be licensing by any manufacturer. known as the Hardy Boys, and The combination of just a license the microcode developers were to copy the SPARC processor, the Microkids. plus Berkeley UNIX [March 9], made it almost as easy to enter the workstation market as it was to make an IBM compatible PC.

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