Science Sunday!
I thought I’d go back to the early days, starting with the 1950s.
From 1953, and the Bell System, “The Transistor”, an early documentary about the transistor and its anticipated impact on society. (Remember, this was six years after the transistor was invented.)
Wrist radios! Portable televisions! Computers that can fit into “a good sized room”! The future!
Bonus video #1: “Genesis of the Transistor”. Also from the Bell System, but from 1965 this time: the origins and development of the device.
Bonus video #2: “The Incredible Machine”. Electronic circuit design, digital drawing with a pen, computer animation, computer music composition, speech synthesis…none of this stuff is extraordinary today. But it was in 1968.
The Bell Labs ‘Graphic 1’ computer system consisted of a Digital Equipment Corporation ‘PDP-5’ computer coupled with input devices such as the ‘Type 370’ light pen and Teletype Corporation ‘Teletype Model 33’ keyboard, married to a Digital Equipment Corporation ‘Type 340’ precision incremental display backed by 36-bit Ampex ‘RVQ’ buffer memory capable of storing 4096 ‘words’. The resolution on the monitor was 1024×1024.
This system was designed to transform the graphics-based input into output to be fed into a IBM ‘7094’ (200 Kflop/s). The entire thing was attached to a microfilm-based recorder – the Stromberg Carlson ‘SC 4020’, which took hours to read and record the data.