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Datapoint: the Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution by Lamont Wood Book

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Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution by Lamont Wood book Ebook Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution currently available for review only, if you need complete ebook Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution please fill out registration form to access in our databases Download here >> Paperback:::: 330 pages+++Publisher:::: Hugo House Publishers (August 30, 2012)+++Language:::: English+++ISBN-10:::: 1936449366+++ISBN-13:::: 978-1936449361+++Product Dimensions::::6.1 x 0.7 x 9.2 inches++++++ ISBN10 1936449366 ISBN13 978-1936449 Download here >> Description: Forget Apple and IBM. For that matter forget Silicon Valley. The first personal computer, a self-contained unit with its own programmable processor, display, keyboard, internal memory, telephone interface, and mass storage of data was born in San Antonio TX. US Patent number 224,415 was filed November 27, 1970 for a machine that is the direct lineal ancestor to the PC as we know it today. The story begins in 1968, when two Texans, Phil Ray and Gus Roche, founded a firm called Computer Terminal Corporation. As the name implies their first product was a Datapoint 3300 computer terminal replacement for a mechanical Teletype. However, they knew all the while that the 3300 was only a way to get started, and it was cover for what their real intentions were - to create a programmable mass-produced desktop computer. They brought in Jack Frassanito, Vic Poor, Jonathan Schmidt, Harry Pyle and a team of designers, engineers and programmers to create the Datapoint 2200. In an attempt to reduce the size and power requirement of the computer it became apparent that the 2200 processor could be printed on a silicon chip. Datapoint approached Intel who rejected the concept as a dumb idea but were willing to try for a development contract. Intel belatedly came back with their chip but by then the Datapoint 2200 was already in production. Intel added the chip to its catalog designating it the 8008. A later upgrade, the 8080 formed the heart of the Altair and IMSI in the mid-seventies. With further development it was used in the first IBM PC-the PC revolutions chip dynasty. If youre using a PC, youre using a modernized Datapoint 2000. Its wonderful to finally see somebody publicly recognize the revolution in the computer industry that was created by Datapoint Corporation (nee Computer Terminal Corporation) in San Antonio, Texas. Before the 2200, computers came in a chassis or rack, had all kinds of lights and sense switch toggles on their front panel, and had to be connected (usually with all kinds of complex cabling) to external storage, and a separate terminal (often an ASR 33 Teletype machine in those days). You had to plug interface cards into the backplane, and then run separate cables from each of those interface cards to their supported external devices. They were tended by tech types, were nothing like easily movable, and certainly werent anything any serious business person would put on a secretary or receptionists desktop.I first became aware of the Datapoint 2200 when I was a student majoring in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, when one day in 1972 my academic advisor (and Department Head), one Dr. H. George Friedman, handed me a looseleaf ring binder for the Datapoint 2200, labelled as a Programmers Manual. I still have that manual!The manual contains a general specification of the machine, processor architecture, instruction set, typewriter-style keyboard, built-in 12-row x 80- column CRT display, dual magnetic cassette-tape drives (which under program control could be read (including bidirectionally), written, slewed (faster) in both forward and reverse directions, rewound and more), switching regulator power supply (which was revolutionary at the time), a description of the command line commands and internal routines (callable by user programs) within the Cassette Tape Operating System (CTOS) (which supported multi-file tapes with a directory etc etc), General Editor program, Assembler, and even a complete assembler source listing of the CTOS (dated 2/5/1971 !).Separate manuals provided details of the various versions of Cassette DATABUS (a business-oriented programming language) which were offered. (There were five or six versions of Cassette Databus, depending upon how the programmer wanted to trade off available features versus how much memory the system software would use and how much was needed for the users application). There were also a text-formatting document printing program called Scribe, an interactive debugging tool, and much more. There were a whole variety of external communications adapters and other external interfaces which could be daisy-chained on the 50-pin processor I/O bus (which was the only plug socket available on the back of the 2200, besides the AC power cord). The revolutionary thing about the 2200 was that here was a machine, of about the size, weight, and form factor of an IBM Selectric typewriter which could readily be user-programmed to perform a wide variety of general-purpose functions (including business applications) using nothing but the components inside the desktop package.Intrigued, I wrote an emulator for the Universitys IBM 360/75 that used mainframe 9-track tape drives to emulate the 2200s cassettes, and which was actually able to run CTOS, assembler, and other Datapoint 2200 software (although obviously limited by the lack of interactive terminals on the mainframe).I had driven to the Datapoint sales office in Chicago to run a program I had written to copy various Datapoint cassettes (CTOS, editor, compilers, etc) to a 9-track tape drive, which allowed me to access and run the 2200 software on my mainframe-based 2200 emulator.I actually proposed a system (based on the Datapoint 2200) intended to support ID card readers (for the University Residence Hall cafeterias) to check students entering the cafeterias and provide easy ways to bill their University student accounts for guests (family and friends) who wished to eat in the cafeteria with the student. Clearly this went well beyond what one could do with a desktop calculator, or other just smart terminal.The 2200s internal 8-bit registers were A, B, C, D, E, H, and L. H and L were the high and low order parts of the memory address register, which allowed the programmer to specify which bytes of the main memory could be loaded to or saved from the registers. People now familiar with programming on the 8008 (which was almost identical to the Datapoint 2200 CPU... the main difference was the addition of an increment and decrement instruction which the 2200 did not have.) And the 2200s register names are (very) familiar also to PC assembler-language programmers to this day.When Datapoints Disk Operating System was released shortly thereafter (to support a Diablo Series 30 removable 2.5 Mb cartridge disk drive, comparable to what was used on the IBM 1130, and there called a 2315 IIRC).Datapoint also added support for programming with RPG II, BASIC, COBOL, and a multi-user version of Disk Databus (called Datashare) which on a 16K 2200 supported up to 8 external video terminals (and which could run independent programs on each terminal).As for pricing, the original serial-processor Type 1 2200 could be bought with up to 4 2K byte shift-register-based memory boards, and the Type 2 2200 (with the 8-bit serial processor and regular RAM memory) could be bought with 1 to 4 4K byte memory cards. The 16K type 2 2200, as I recall, cost $14,110 dollars at the time. A desk-mounted controller and 2.5 Mb Diablo cartridge disk drive cost $9800.One of the truly curious things (and you still see this, for example, if you go to the Computer History Museum out in the Bay Area) is the failure to understand the distinction between a Personal Computer versus a Hobbyist Computer. The early hobbyist computers (Altair and such), which actually used the Intel 8008 version of the Datapoint 2200 CPU, were a totally different beast than the 2200 was,,. they were essentially a cheap hobbyist microprocessor-based version of a classical minicomputer (complete with sense switches, I/O lights, and all the rest, just like the PDP-8 and other such machines were) and like the PDP-8 didnt have a built-in (alpha, anyhow) keyboard, or display, or internal storage. Those (like the minicomputers of the time) had to all be added as external, independently cabled. devices.The Datapoint 2200 on the other hand was a single unit, needing nothing but a power cord, offering an operating system (complete with console commands), a full typewriter-style keyboard, CRT, magnetic dual-drive cassette tape storage, and providing editors (for text and programs), assembler, all sorts of utilities (including diagnostics, terminal emulators and other comm packages) and a variety of compilers.And all of this, in any case, was several years BEFORE the Jobs/Wozniak Apple II, or Bill Gates, or the Altair or its various sister microcomputers, which people who OUGHT to know better (like the Computer History Museum) confuse with the radically better, more complete, and earlier Datapoint 2200... which TRULY was the worlds first real general-purpose desktop personal computer.(As for me, I left the University of Illinois in April 1974 and moved to Datapoint Corporation in San Antonio, where I took a position in Software Development and soon thereafter was given the lead programmer role for the development of the more powerful DOS-dot disk operating systems, many new utilities, the Partition Supervisor multi-OS VM-type facility, and perhaps most significantly was the person there who proposed and wrote the system software for what became the worlds first commercially available local area network system (LAN).
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