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October-December 1993 Volume 1,.2 The Analytical Engine NEWSLETTER OF THE COMPUTER HISTORY ASSOCIATION OF CALIFORNIA didn't. We were applauded for our guts and Editorial: Hello, World excoriated for our mistakes. We found inquiries, smiling from our screens, about starting the As I write this, there's a week of tightening and Computer History Association of Iowa; of formatting to be done before ANALYTICAL Colorado; of the Northeast and Northwest. (Keep ENGINE Volume 1, Number 2, gets uploaded to that going! It's great!) the Internet and our growing list of private bulletin So we've learned more and slept less, and now we boards. We know now how much work - and know - begin to know - what's really out there. how much fun - producing the ENGINE really We are not alone, and there is no silence. There will be. are thousands of people in California, in this nation, Luckily, for us, for you, there's joy in our hearts as and in the world, who care about computer history, we do it. What a scramble! What a puzzle! What about keeping it safe, and about making it known. elation! What an education! Above all, what a This is no silence. This is a roar. sense of that good old, great old .... Right Thing. And if that's what came of ENGINE #1 - Some people answered the editorial in the July Thank you, everybody who called, posted, wrote, ENGINE by commenting that it almost sounded grinned, welcomed, barked or bit. Thank you, panicky, as if we thought we were alone. Well.. .. everybody who subscribed or donated. Thank you, not exactly. It was just that, working almost everybody who wrote an article - or even entirely from experience in the East and Midwest, promised one. Thank you, everybody who gave we were afraid that we wouldn't find a comparable advice and ideas and time. level of dedication in California - one of the most interesting and pivotal places in all of computer Welcome to ENGINE #2. It's six times thicker history. We lobbed ENGINE #1 into the dark of than ENGINE #1. And it's all yours! the future, thinking that we had "dropped the rose Hello, world!! petal into the well and waited for the splash," really only scared of silence, of politely spattering INITIATIVE 1999: applause, of nothing. Warnings of Extinction The Internet's fiber backbones glowed. The lights of our modems lit up and stayed lit. The snail-mail If you love old iron - and so many of us do - arrived with rubber bands around it. The first consider this quote from Accidental Empires by phone call came from Toronto; the first twenty-five­ Robert X. Cringely, Addison-Wesley, 1992: dollar check, from Idaho, the second one from Pennsylvania. We heard from the Computer .... you and I can go even further [than Bill Museum in Boston, the Smithsonian Air and Space, Gates]. We can predict the date by which the the Babbage Institute, from DEC and Intel and old IBM - IBM the mainframe computing giant SUN, and the list went on. - will be dead. We can predict the very day that the mainframe computer era will end. Californians especially tended to reply by e-mail, so since the first week in July when the ENGINE hit Mainframe computing will die with the coming the net, we've received almost five hundred pieces of the millennium. On December 31, 1999, of e-mail. That doesn't count global postings on right at midnight, when the big ball drops and USENET, either. We heard from people who people are kissing in .... Times Square, the era of understood what we were doing and people who mainframe computing will be over. Page 2 The Analytical Engine October-December 1993 Mainframe computing will end that night YYMMDD because a lot of people a long time ago made a and, when YY returns as 00, will halt on error. very simple mistake. Beginning in the 1950s, Sure, there may be workarounds. But for lots of they wrote inventory programs and payroll older computers, the programming overhead of programs for mainframe computers, programs dealing with this kink will be the last push over the that process income tax returns and send out cliff. Cringely's right; mainframes will be scrapped welfare checks - programs that today run most wholesale, and the oldest first. From the standpoint of this country. In many ways those programs of function it only makes sense, since the oldest have become our country. And sometime hardware is usually the slowest. But to the during those thirty-odd years of being moved historian and preservationist, the oldest hardware is from one mainframe computer to another, larger often the most significant. mainframe computer, the original program listings ....were just thrown away. We have the If we intend to respond to this crisis, we have object code .... which is enough to move the seven years to make plans and marshal resources; software from one type of computer to another. seven years. to find and equip facilities; seven years But the source code - the .... details of how to nail down funding. And for a project of this these programs actually work - is often long size, seven years is not a long time. Anyone gone, fallen through a paper shredder back in seriously interested in preserving the history of 1967. There is mainframe software in this country computing - which certainly means any reader of that cost at least $50 billion to develop for which this newsletter - is actually advised to figure that no source code exists today. we're in a screaming hurry. This lack of commented source code would be With this issue of the ANALYTICAL ENGINE, no big deal if more of those original the Computer History Association of California programmers had expected their programs to announces INITIATIVE 1999. What this is, and outlive them. But hardly any programmer in what it becomes, will be elaborated in future issues. 1959 expected his payroll application to be still For the moment, just plant two cardinal points in cutting checks in 1999, so nobody thought to your mind: teach many of these computer programs what to 1) On or before January 1, 1999, we would do when the calendar finally says it's the year like to see chapters of this Computer 2000. Any program that prints a date .... and History Association established in every that doesn't have an algorithm for dealing with state of the Union. To that end, we will a change from the twentieth to the twenty-first advise, collaborate with, and give moral century, is going to stop working. I know this support to any responsible groups of doesn't sound like a big problem, but it is. It's historians and preservationists who express a very big problem. serious intention of founding such an Looking for a growth industry in which to Association. invest? Between now and the end of the 2) On or before January 1, 1999, we intend to decade, every large company in America will open a museum large enough to display a have to find a way to update its mainframe significant part of the history of computing software or.... write new software from scratch .... in California, presenting the broadest Either solution is going to cost lots more than available spectrum of appropriate artifacts, it did to write the software in the first place. and using the (then) most contemporary And all this new mainframe software will have technology for instruction by interactive and one thing in commOh; it won't run on a virtual means. To that end, we would mainframe .... which why the old IBM is is appreciate the donation of (for example) a doomed. large disused factory or warehouse, The reasoning behind this is various, but the simple convenient to freeways, and with loading case is that many older mainframes store their dates docks; of pertinent hardware and software; in the format of expert consultation, particularly with October-December 1993 The Analytical Engine Page 3 reference to accession, registration and and for your attention. Please reply by Internet curatorship; and of appropriate amounts of mail, or by paper mail to the CHAC EI Cerrito money. address. We reiterate: Seven years is not a long time. What we're trying to do here can only be done DIGITAL'S HISTORY PROJECT once, or given up for lost. If you're reading this newsletter, you can help, with a $25 donation to Lawrence C. Stewart at the Cambridge Research the ENGINE or with that factory. Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) has sent a memo about an interesting and ambitious Save the mainframes! project to produce comprehensive, documented emulations of historically important computer COMPILATION PROJECT: systems. This is the summary: Getting It All Together "The idea of the Computer History Project is to preserve the history of computing As basic research, fundamental to tracing the systems, and to make that history readily provenance of donated hardware, software, and available to everyone .... to publish a documentation, the Computer History Association CDROM, or perhaps a series of CDROMs, of California is compiling a list of which would contain emulators for historic 1) Computer HARDWARE computing machines and copies of their developers/ manufacturers operating software and documentation. 2) Computer SOFTWARE Modern computers are so much faster than developers/ manufacturers historic machines that it is possible to emulate the instruction set and I/O systems 3) Computer PERIPHERALS of a historic machine at full speed. Thus developers/ manufacturers students will be able to actually sit down now or formerly incorporated or headquartered in and use TENEX running on an emulated the State of California.
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