Volunteer Information Exchange Sharing what we know with those we know Volume 5 Number 8 September 11, 2015 Contribute To The VIE Links You Might Enjoy Long before the Neiman-Marcus “Kitchen Computer” and before any recipes on your PC, there was ECHO • Creation of Evans and Sutherland IV, a one-off home computer. Dave Cortesi writes a • 10 Pictures of PCs in schools in the 80's wonderful article describing this one-of-a-kind artifact. • Computer Art in 1969 Bill Worthington writes of his opportunity to visit the University of Manchester and the reconstructed • In Memoriam: Karl Taub, who started the Computer “Baby.” And he took some excellent pictures for us. Science departments at Carnagie Mellon and Columbia Universities in the 70's. Thanks once more to Chris Garcia for telling us about three recent acquisitions. • Ed Thelen sends along this link about the Librascope LGP-30. As always, send us your stories, anecdotes and adventures in computing. • Kate McGregor sent this link about the several Jim Strickland [email protected] archiving activities at Cisco iwhich the CHM is leading. • Happy 17 th birthday, Google—Sept 4 CHM Blog Ken Shirriff has written several excellent and detailed Recent CHM Blog Entries articles recently about the innards of the 1401. Kirsten Tashev keeps us up-to-date on new CHM blog • 1402 Operations entries. • Details on 1401 Qui-Binary arithmetic • Guest blogger, Adam Spring writes on Amiga • 1403 Print mechanism – explanation and animation Computing. The Amiga computer celebrated its 30th birthday at CHM this July. • 1401 Core Memory Operation Peter Hart will speak on “Making Shakey, the World's Docent Training: Women In Computing First Intelligent Robot on September 14. Click for Kate McGregor Aug 8 details. This fall we will be “gearing” up for festivities celebrating the life, work and creativity of Ada Lovelace, and I am excited to announce a new training Contents program open to all qualified CHM docents! Contribute To The VIE 1 Exact dates and details will follow, but please let us know now if you would like to join our Women in CHM Blog 1 Computing tour team by signing up using the online Docent Training: Women in Computing 1 form below: Links You Might Enjoy 1 Interest in Women in Computing Tour Training - Fall 2015 Peter Hart Speaks on Shakey 1 Training: Women in Computing Tour First Home Computer 2 Eligibility: CHM Qualified Docents Only Visit to the Manchester Baby 4 Time Frame: October/November 2015 Training Format: 3 classroom sessions and a Recent Acquisitions 5 qualification process Computer in French 5 Location: CHM We know our visitors will be excited to learn more “Ugliest Man on Campus” 6 about Ada and other incredible women of the Coming Events 6 computing era! Please contact Kate directly with any questions. 1 The First Home Computer “Simple keyboard entry and printer output routines DAVE CORTESI were the first ECHO programs the Sutherlands wrote. These were followed by the paper tape Like many dedicated engineers, Jim Sutherland couldn't input and … punching routines... Jim is now resist the urge to take his work home with him. But devoting his time to writing such programs as Sutherland wasn't just any engineer: he worked for multiply, divide, multiple precision add, subtract, Westinghouse designing computers and nuclear power and message writer routines.” plant control systems, and over the course of a 38-year career won 25 patents. So when in the mid-1960s he This shows that in 1968, Sutherland was still writing very decided to take some work home, the result was a full- basic system control functions, and the ECHO IV was a scale computer in the family basement, and very likely long way from being able to order groceries. the first-ever home computer. The ECHO IV did eventually become integrated into the In 1959, Sutherland Westinghouse built household. When a computer called Sutherland the PRODAC IV, a described the machine for which system to a Sutherland meeting of the designed the ALU Pittsburgh section (Arithmetic and of the IEEE in Logic Unit). In 1994[3], he said 1965, Westing- that besides the house bought in a keyboard, teletype Univac design for a and paper tape process-control unit next to the computer to sell as machine, there the PRODAC 50. was an IBM The PRODAC IV Selectric was decom- typewriter in the missioned and its kitchen that could parts were made be used as a surplus. word-processor, Jim Sutherland, in his basement, checks the status lights on the and a numeric Sutherland, who ECHO IV console. keypad in the knew the PRODAC living room that IV technology was used to instruct the ECHO to rotate the TV antenna intimately, asked permission to take home the boards to best receive a particular channel. (Hands up if you and memory to experiment with a home computer, and remember TV antenna rotators!) his employers agreed. The parts were signed out on indefinite loan, and Sutherland began to build the The ECHO also had connections to four “BCD clocks” Electronic Computing Home Operator, or ECHO IV (the around the house. These BCD (binary-coded decimal) “IV” was a tribute to his old work project). clocks are mentioned in two articles, but alas, no pictures were published. They seem to have been an earlier As built, the ECHO IV occupied four bays approximately Sutherland project, and apparently read out the time as 2x2x6 feet each[1], and generated enough heat that binary, four small lights per digit. Sutherland's son Sutherland had to install an exhaust fan to cool the recalled that “after Dad explained that three lights in a basement (the machine drew 3.5KW). By the summer of row meant seven, I could easily tell when it was 7:00 or 1968, the ECHO IV was working well enough that the 7:07...” The clocks apparently updated the minutes value Westinghouse PR department publicized it to local independently. However, when the BCD clock on the media. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did a story featuring Sutherland's bedroom ceiling approached the hour (one a delightful photograph of the Sutherland family gathered supposes, reading out “○●○●, ●○○●”), it triggered the around the computer (see the picture gallery[0]), which ECHO IV in the basement to power up, run a self-test, was fancifully supposed to be able to order groceries and then update the hour value of all four clocks before predict the weather. powering-off again. Popular Mechanics did a feature story[2] that explored at What was the ECHO IV's technology? It was the same length the useful things a home computer might do when as the PRODAC IV from which all its parts came, but that properly programmed. However, this story contains a computer seems to have evaporated from history, or at paragraph that tells volumes to any programmer about least, from the internet. CHM has some items related to the state of ECHO IV programming: 2 the PRODAC 50, the Univac-designed machine that sent The dominant theme here is functional blocks with 5 the PRODAC IV out to pasture and made its parts groups of 3. There are four such blocks headed TR, ZR, available to Sutherland, but nothing earlier. AD and XR. Without access to the documentation[5] we The ECHO can only guess that the “R” in these names means plug-in “Register”. We still can't know the memory word size, but modules, with it almost surely was not a multiple of 4 bits. Very likely it their was some multiple of 3 bits (one octal digit), possibly 15 distinctive bits or 5 octal digits. gold-toned All sources say the machine had a repertoire of “18 extraction instructions”. However, the lower right of the display handles and panel has lights and names for sixteen instructions, not brown circuit eighteen. (The names shown are AND, EOR, ADD, STA, boards JAZ, JAN, INP, OUT, ENA, ENB, SIP, DCS, COM, JOV, populated JMP and HLT.) Anyone who has done assembly- with little green boxes, are familiar to CCARP volunteers language programming can probably intuit what most of who have cataloged over 100 of them, apart from the those mean. Conspicuously absent is any opcode that hundreds more still resident in the ECHO IV cabinets sounds like “load accumulator,” so there may well be now housed in Milpitas. But what is hiding in the green- more instructions than listed. In any case, there's no covered sub-modules? Some have speculated that they indication that Sutherland ever implemented a symbolic were potted reed-relays. assembler, let alone any higher-level language. So the However, ECHO would always have been programmed by entering on some the octal digits of its machine language, and debugged of the by single-stepping the program while reading out the boards the lights (see the INST STEP position under MODE). green Despite its rudimentary technology, the ECHO IV caps have ultimately did function as a household computer, at least fallen off to the extent of being some fashion of a word processor, or been a TV antenna aimer, and a clock manager. It kept the removed Sutherland basement comfortably warm from 1965 until and we can see the contents of the sub-modules. Each is 1975, when it was donated to the Boston Computer a plastic frame that holds one transistor and a cluster of Museum, and eventually made its way to CHM and the resistors and capacitors in a vertical “cordwood” Milpitas warehouse where it can be examined today. arrangement. (Control Data used “cordwood” stacked Notes and Links components in the CDC6600 line; there are a number of those modules in the collection.) [0] A gallery of ECHO IV pictures: https://cortesi.smugmug.com/Other/ECHO-IV-article So the ECHO IV was a discrete-transistor machine.