I sometimes look at the book of the BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) TV^▸ (Thames Valley, or TeleVision, depending on context) series The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. I am sure it is on the web somewhere. Interesting to compare the then state of the art computing.

I have up in the attic one of the modems which you drop the telephone handset into. No plastic, wonderful wooden box! Lots of historic computing hardware in the memory.

Warning I think this thread could be a major diversion.

I have also seen an old photograph (late 1960s ?) of a 2MB hard drive being loaded into the rear cargo door of a DC3 geophysics aircraft. It was loaded using a forklift truck and it only just fitted through the door.

It was huge! I reckon with 4MB of storage, the plane would have been unable to take off.

You could be right there.

I do remember one of those 4000 series terminals - and waiting for it to redraw. But it's an indistinct memory (like the output from those thermal printers). It must have been when I was a postgrad at Cambridge, though what pictures it was bought to draw I cannot recall. As this was in the speech group it may have been for drawing bits of the vocal tract, as modelled for synthesis. But if was me getting it to draw pictures it may have been the engineer's usual reaction to any new bit of kit -  what fun things can I get that to do?

You also mention (in the blog) Perkin Elmer, who took over Interdata to use their computers in big complex instruments like mass spectrometers, and renamed it. But I was using an Interdata M70 which we got about 1974, and a bit later we got an M80 and an M85. These were all microcoded machines, and the M85 gave users access to the micro-machine and a microcode memory. So, needing a real-time vector display someone built one, interfaced as part of this machine. That was definitely fun to program - I did the basics of a billiard table simulator: lines for the table and cue, circles for the balls, and model the physics of the ball/cue and ball/ball contacts!

In 1977 I joined a company with "microwave" in its name, so the Tek instruments I used were mostly spectrum analysers, oscilloscopes etc. The computer side was mostly from DEC or HP (Tektronix's big competitor). Having looked at what old stuff I can easily find, that's mainly DEC manuals and the like, but I do have some old Tek 4000 thermal printout out of a program! A bit dark, but it's not been in the light so it's still quite readable - as much as it ever was.

Your blog also mentions Tek offering APL keyboards; that I never came across. But I do remember an IBM luggable (the 5100, it seems) that was built to run APL, so it could have a built-in screen (which only had to be small). That was down to someone I knew who had a consultancy in London doing business computing in APL. It takes all kinds ...

One more oddity I had to use was the HP 9100A, called both a personal computer and a programmable scientific calculator. This was big (similar to the IBM 5100), and interfaced to peripherals like printers and plotters, and custom devices. So it was used for controlling laboratory equipment, i.e. as a computer. HP have a history page on it, which notes that buying a computer often needed senior management approval, while a calculator didn't. That was why we had one in a University department - it was easier to get grant funding for.

On a similar tack. Here's an image of Norwich City Council having a computer delivered in 1957. Thirteen (at least) men needed to get it into the building. The image above, from over 60 years later, is someone holding a device with more computing power than the 1950s behemoth.

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The other side of that coin being the software that does what it does with impeccable precision and ease, while the present day equivalent drags its sorry way across people's lives and work. I'm immediately thinking of Office 365 vs Windows 'Write' - I can't recall the date that 'Write' was retired though.

Another issue with the stuff is the software that cuts a valley in a similar way to a river - aeons later and we all wonder why, say, the Avon gorge exists. I can't quite see where I'm going with this metaphor, mind...

Mark

My first meeting with computers was at school cutting bits of perspex to make a water powered computer. All I can remember was that if your feet got wet the answer was going to be wrong!

In the army I used mechanical predictors. Analogue was well suited to artillery/ballistic calculations. Remember an anti-aircraft predictor, weighing about a ton, which sat inside a radar (rainbow code name Yellow Fever). In the process of changing one the pivot on the lifting gear sheared, that was a call for new underwear.

In 1982 I obtained executive committee approval to buy the first 12 IBM PCs for a major accounting firm, we already has some Apple IIs^▸ (IndustryInsider - a respected member of this forum).  When the XT came out there was a special program on the diagnostics diskette to park the hard disk head before moving the machine.
I had an early Compaq Portable in the boot of my car for a week to see if the disk really could survive general use.

I remember that the New York office received a call from IBM marketing.  They said that sales were far, far higher than expectations and they wanted to know what they were being used for.