Subject: The Analytical Engine (CHAC newsletter!)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1993 17:50:00 GMT

>From article <[email-masked]>,
by [email-masked] (Strong datatypes for weak minds.):
> 
> Thank you for posting the Computer History Association of California
> information.  Would you post the rest of the newsletter, please ?

Here it is:

--------------------------------------------------------------------
    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                         Page 1

                        The ANALYTICAL ENGINE
      Newsletter of the Computer History Association of California
                             ISSN pending
                    Volume 1, Number 1, July 1993

    Kip Crosby, Managing Editor
    Jude Thilman, Telecommunications Editor
    -------------------------------------------------
    EDITORIAL

    Welcome to the Analytical Engine, volume one, number one.

    This document has three purposes:  To present a small sample of
    computer history.  To convince you that computer history is 
    worth exploring and preserving.  To persuade you that a modest 
    commitment of your time or money, or both, will help build an 
    institution and protect some of the most important scientific 
    information in the world today.

    Let me give you one concise example.  Remember the Pong machine?
    It wasn't much to look at; a black-and-white CRT in a squat, 
    screaming-yellow plywood box, with a couple of black knobs.  But 
    in the early Seventies it introduced thousands of people -- and, 
    beyond them, the world -- to the interactive video game.  It was 
    one of the first computer-driven devices to become a memorable 
    part of our culture.

    Of the perhaps 15,000 Pong machines that Atari built, _there are
    fewer than a dozen left_ and they are substantially priceless.  
    Collectors compete to buy them.  What happened to the others?  
    They were displaced, replaced, thrown away.  Junked.

    Ever since the days of ENIAC, the rallying cry of computing has
    been _Let's chuck the old stuff to make room for the new 
    stuff!!_ and hardware is scrapped, with the hardware goes the 
    documentation, goes the information, leaving only the thin 
    thread of memory which snaps too.  Leaving aside dubious 
    precursors, electronic computing is fifty-five years old, 
    microcomputing is less than twenty years old, and we're shedding 
    the pertinent history by the dumpsterful.  The history of 
    digital computing -- one of the newest core sciences in the 
    world -- is being destroyed as fast as it's being made.  

    Nor can we depend on the voices of the pioneers to fill gaps. 
    Many of the originators of electronic computing, like Alan 
    Turing, Atanasoff and Berry, John Mauchly, Wallace Eckert, 
    Admiral Hopper, and even Bob Noyce and William Shockley, can no 
    longer be interviewed.  The British journalist Chris Evans, who 
    wanted to be _the_ popular historian of the microcomputer, died
    with one of his books half-finished.  Computer science has 
    become a freestanding discipline comparable in stature to almost 
    any other physical science, and yet its public record lags far 
    behind the evolving fact.  Worthy exceptions like the BBC Press 

    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                         Page 2

    book The Dream Machine (reviewed next issue) only underscore the 
    scale of the general flow into oblivion.  A handful of concerned 
    organizations, like the Association for Computing Machinery, and 
    individual historians -- Ted Nelson, Jon Palfreman, James 
    Cortada, for example -- are trying to preserve an irreplaceable 
    historical record, and frankly fighting a losing battle.

    On April 19, 1993, a few people decided to take a stand by
    founding the Computer History Association of California, an 
    organization that exists to do these things:

    *     Create awareness of the history of computing as a real,
          evolving and valuable phenomenon.

    *     Prevent the destruction of historically significant
          hardware, software and documentation.

    *     Strengthen the cooperation among existing institutions
          that safeguard the history of computing.

    *     Begin discussions among developers and computer-related
          manufacturers about setting up an overall archive -- or at 
          least agreeing on archiving conventions.

    *     Ultimately, to help build a coalition that can build and
          endow a library and museum for the history of computing in 
          California.

    A tall order!  But the people who attended the first meeting
    left, thought it over, and told friends.  The idea went out in 
    CompuServe mail and Internet mail and voice.  And within days we 
    had -- 

    Projects.

    Urgent messages about hardware slated to be scrapped, software
    in filing cabinets in storerooms, manuals on pallets waiting to 
    be recycled.

    Right now, today, we have almost no space, almost no money, a 
    few members, a lot of work to do and a lot of enthusiasm.  The 
    Computer History Association of California could take off and do 
    its part for the history of science.  Or it could end up as a 
    good idea in a filing cabinet in a storeroom.  The difference is 
    up to me, to us, and to you.

    If we can make a good case for ourselves, we won't be alone. 
    Companies and managers who share our wish to preserve this 
    history  -- their history -- will lend a hand to a serious 
    effort.  The wider public will contribute through annual dues or 
    subscriptions to this newsletter.  

    Our potential membership is large, and growing.  Computing --
    personally and institutionally -- is moving from a 

    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                         Page 3

    devil-may-care adolescence to a maturity that embraces social 
    responsibility.  Recycling, waste control, power consumption and 
    other "green" issues are developing broad constituencies.  These 
    people are the same ones who will recognize, in and through our 
    Association, steps that can be taken now to prevent a lot of 
    regret in the next century.  The sooner we can alert them to the 
    need for preservation, the more we can accomplish.

    To those of you who want to share in that accomplishment, the
    Computer History Association of California makes five promises:

    *     We will be non-partisan and nonjudgmental.  We will strive
          to be accurate, interesting and innovative.  Our aim must be to 
          enrich the history of science without distorting it.

    *     We will work to preserve hardware, software and
          documentation, as it becomes available to us, from the full 
          spectrum of the history of computing.

    *     We will make the Association's property accessible to all
          interested parties as a professional and educational resource.

    *     We will aggressively pursue funding from the corporations
          that made the computer into a fact of modern life -- inviting 
          them to safeguard the history that they themselves created.

    *     We will have professional counsel on how to build up and 
          broaden this organization; how to make time and money most 
          effective; how to choose and manage exhibits and resources, 
          and protect them for future generations.

    If we succeed in these ambitions, we will do our small part of a
    big -- of a great -- job.  We will help to affirm the history 
    of a core science while we live surrounded by its turbulent 
    origins.  Someday, when our descendants respect the pioneers of 
    computing as they do Galileo, Edison and Goddard, that 
    affirmation will pay off.

    But we are those pioneers.  We know this story as no one else
    ever will.  And we must keep it as our children's heritage -- 
    and as our own.

    -------------------------------------------------

                        PROGRAMMING THE 1401:
                   An Interview with Leo Damarodas

                       by Roger Louis Sinasohn

    [Author's note:  Leo Damarodas has been a programmer since the
    days of room-sized computers filled with vacuum tubes.  We 
    first met in the mid '80s when we both worked for Noesis 
    Computing Company, then known as one of the premier software 

    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                         Page 4

    houses in the Hewlett-Packard marketplace.  

    Today, Leo is an independent consultant, and lives on a sailboat
    south of San Francisco.  I  was recently able to pin him down 
    and convince him to reminisce about his work with one of the 
    earliest commercially available mid-size computers, the IBM 
    1401. ]

    _When and how did you get into computers?_

    Let's see.... My actual first job was in 1965.  I started off
    from high school as an electronic technician in the early 
    '60s,when they were a dime a dozen, and in a period of three 
    years, I was laid off 18 months.  I got a job in one of the 
    local mills, and went to school nights studying computer 
    programming, circuitry and design, figuring that if I got a job 
    in either maintenance or programming, that's where I'd work.  
    And the mill that I was working at knew of my interest in 
    computers and moved me into their office as a programmer, once I 
    graduated.

    _Over the years, what have been the biggest changes in the
    computer industry?_

    (Laughs)  Well, let's see.  Going from vacuum tubes to
    solid-state magnetic core memory -- this is where the 
    expression core memory comes from.  Another big one's 
    interactive programming; getting away from punched cards.  It 
    affected the way I was working, anyway.  

    _What has stayed the same?_

    The need for programmers.  That's never changed.  And I don't
    think it's ever going to.  

    _Why do you say that?_

    Because I've been hearing as long as I've been in this business
    that computers would start programming themselves in the near 
    future.  It hasn't happened yet.  I don't really think it will.

    _You don't think that artificial intelligence will become
    intelligent enough?_

    Not with the way computers are being built currently.  I mean,
    programmers will be put out of business when computers become 
    sentient.  They're going to have to know what they're doing, and 
    machines don't.  It's as if we worried about cars driving 
    themselves around the streets.  Even artificial intelligence 
    requires programming.  

    _When I've been working, I've cursed my computer for not doing
    what I wanted it to..._

    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                         Page 5

    (Laughs)  You want my poem?  Is that what you're asking for? 
    [Quotes:]

    "I really hate this gosh-darned thing, I think I'm gonna sell it.
    It never does just what I want, but only what I tell it."

    _In that connection you've said that you shouldn't want it to start
    guessing what you want.  You want it to do what you tell it._

    Right.

    _Why do you say that?_

    If it starts trying to second-guess me, and it guesses
    wrong....if anything goes wrong with the computer, I'd rather 
    blame myself than the computer, because to me the computer is a 
    tool -- nothing more than a glorified screwdriver.  And when the 
    tools start running themselves, then it's time to worry.  
    Because if computers start doing what they think we want done, 
    the next step is them doing what they think is best for us. It 
    is getting to the point where computers become intelligent, but 
    with present-day circuitry, no matter how many processors you 
    hook up, it still can't think for itself.  It still needs a 
    program to run.

    _You worked on the IBM 1401._

    Yeah.

    _What was that like?_

    Well, at the time, it seemed great, because it was the only
    thing I knew -- the first computer I ever worked on.  It was a 
    hundred per cent vacuum tubes....the logic circuitry, the 
    memory, everything was vacuum tubes.  The addressing structure 
    of the machine only allowed for 16K of memory, and there was no 
    operating system in the modern sense.

    The way into the machine was through reading the machine
    instructions.  Each instruction portion was a letter, a 
    readable character, and they made sense.  Take some examples, M 
    was Move; W was Write a print line; P was Punch a card; R was 
    Read a card.  When you executed these instructions, you didn't 
    need an address, because the card read/punch always worked 
    memory locations 1 through 80.  And the printer always used 
    memory locations 101 through 232 as the I/O buffer.  It was a 
    really simple machine to work with and a lot of fun in a way.

    The only way you could get the machine to do something was put a
    deck of cards in the card reader and hit the start button.  And 
    that would read the card deck, load the program into memory, and 

    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                         Page 6

    start executing it.  It was slow; there was no multi-processing, 
    no nothing.  Just a really simple machine.

    _So it was basically one thing at a time, and mostly written in
    machine language._

    Basically, yeah, but we had ways around that.  There was a COBOL
    compiler on the program, but we tried to avoid using it, 
    because to compile a 16K program and get a program deck out 
    would take something like an hour.  But because we could read 
    the machine instructions, if we had an error, we didn't really 
    have to go through the compilation.  You could take the program 
    deck and modify the actual machine code, load the program and 
    run it again.  It saved a lot of time.

    We also had a language called Autocoder which was a kind of
    assembler.  It expanded the machine instructions out to more 
    readable mnemonics, and allowed you to use labels for addresses 
    and stuff -- use real names.  It made the programming a lot 
    easier.  The thing that was really interesting was the COBOL 
    compiler, which was the only other language, that I knew about 
    -- I think there was a FORTRAN available too, but I coded 
    business applications, so FORTRAN wasn't used that much.  One of 
    the features of the COBOL was an ENTER instruction, so that 
    while you were writing your COBOL code, you could say ENTER 
    AUTOCODER and start writing Autocoder code right in your COBOL 
    source, then say ENTER COBOL and start writing COBOL code again. 
    This was possible because the COBOL compiler didn't generate 
    machine language -- it generated Autocoder code, and then called 
    the Autocoder, which converted the COBOL output into machine 
    language.  So it just substituted the Autocoder code in your 
    COBOL source for the output.  

    _What sort of applications were you working on?_

    Payroll, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, General Ledger
    -- straight business applications.  And it was next to 
    impossible to write any major program without going over 16K.  
    So you either broke it down into steps -- 16K steps, or you 
    wrote program overlays.  There were instructions that would 
    allow you to read in the next part of the program.  But the 
    overlays had to be set up in such a way that you performed one 
    step for all the data, loaded the next step and performed it for 
    all the data.  You couldn't go back and forth between overlays 
    because the programs had to run from card decks.  Data resided 
    on disk, but not programs.  All the data would come in initially 
    on cards, be transferred to the disk drives on the system, and 
    the programs could process disk.

    _So, for example, a run to print the payroll, how long would it
    take that program to produce checks?_

    Honestly I don't remember, but a long time, because the only
    time we could use for testing was between midnight and eight in 

    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                         Page 7

    the morning.  The machine was being used the rest of the day to 
    do production work, and about all they were doing was Accounts 
    Receivable, Accounts Payable, General Ledger, payroll and some 
    inventory. Not too much more than that.  

    _What happened if you had a deck that's data to be input, and you
    have a deck that's a program -- what happens if you mix them 
    up?  That is, you put the data in as if it were a program?_

    One of the things that would happen, if you tried to load the
    data in without having the program loaded, was that it would 
    choke on the first card.  You've got to remember there was no 
    operating system, and this machine's just sitting there, waiting 
    for a bootstrap program that had to be in the first card.  When 
    you pressed the start button on the console, it read the 
    bootstrap card and branched to location one.  If there wasn't a 
    valid instruction there for it to execute, it wouldn't do a 
    thing.  The bootstrap program read the rest of the cards in, and 
    when it got an end-of-cardfile, it branched to the location 
    where the program was loaded; I forget exactly what part of 
    memory that was.  

    _Punched cards had 80 columns, so you could, in theory, have up
    to eighty instructions per card.  Is that correct?_

    In theory you could, if they were instructions that didn't
    require addresses.  They were single-byte instructions.

    _So a small program might fit on a single card?_

    Yes, in fact the bootstrap program didn't even take a whole
    card.  The bootstrap program was about a dozen characters long. 
    Somewhere I have a framed white poster, about four inches high 
    and ten or twelve inches long, with that program written on it.  
    I got it at an HP user group meeting where I walked by a booth 
    with a sign outside that said "If you know what this is, you're 
    showing your age."  It was the 1401 bootstrap program.  It 
    looked familiar but I couldn't quite remember what it was, and I 
    said "I don't know what it is, but I should."  The guy who was 
    running the booth knew me and my background, and  he said "I 
    know you should."  Maybe three or four weeks after the meeting, 
    the poster showed up in my mailbox.

    _How long did you work with the 1401?_

    Only about a year, and I think the machine I worked on was
    actually a 1410.  1410's were the ones that had disk drives.  I 
    came in just as they were doing a conversion from the 1401
    series to an IBM 360.

    _And 360's are still being used today._

    I would imagine so.  [Editor's note:  Our best information is
    that at least two System/360s are currently used in California, 

    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                         Page 8

    both by private corporations in Greater Los Angeles.]  As for 
    the 1401 series, last I heard, the Department of the Navy was 
    still running an application on a 1410 a good eight or nine 
    years ago...  In the early eighties, anyway.

                   [Concluded next issue]

    -------------------------------------------------

                 I Played the ORIGINAL Video Game!
                 a recollection by Scott Robinson

    I went to work at Bolt Beranek and Newman (no comma, please) in
    the summer of 1966, as an instrumentation engineer.  In those 
    days the company's activities were roughly equally divided 
    between acoustics -- both architectural and underwater -- and 
    computer science.   The computer group's main machine was a 
    PDP-1, which consisted of about six 6 foot racks full of 
    hardware.  It may have had a Remington Rand Fastrand drum 
    memory; I'm not sure.  The company certainly had one of these 
    beasts later on, a drum about five feet long and two feet in 
    diameter with a large number of heads.  All this was housed on 
    the lower floor of the (then) new split-level building, adjacent 
    to the kitchen and the reception area.  

    The control console for this machine was on the end of the row
    of racks; it had a monochrome CRT, about 12 or 14 inch size, 
    and a row of miniature metal-handled toggle switches to enter 
    data and addresses when necessary.  These switches were used as 
    the controls for Spacewar.  This game was not a time-shared 
    activity; I suspect that we used the whole machine!

    When a game was started, the screen would light up with two
    different ship icons against a random background of stars.  
    There could, optionally, be a sun in the middle exerting 
    gravitational influence on matter.  The gravitational constant 
    was also players' choice, I think in two steps, "fast" or 
    "slow."  The screen was topologically connected side-to-side and 
    top-to-bottom; if you exited screen left, you reappeared screen 
    right, and so on.

    Each ship could be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise, fire
    reaction engines that eventually ran out of fuel, and fire 
    missiles of finite range and finite number.  The ship obeyed 
    Newton's laws, accelerating and decelerating under the influence 
    of its engines and of solar gravitation, if any.  Rotation could 
    be either easy to control (when you had a switch on, the ship 
    rotated,) or more difficult and realistic (the switches applied 
    angular acceleration, so that rotation increased or decreased 
    gradually depending on switch settings).  The object, of course, 
    was to blow the other ship up.  

    If you were hit, you were dead meat!  Falling onto the sun was
    comparably ill-advised.  Collision of two ships produced a 

    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                         Page 9

    vivid, graphically depicted explosion on screen, and both 
    players were out, whereupon the game restarted.

    For those in desperate circumstance, faced perhaps with a
    barrage of missiles incoming and too close to dodge, there was 
    an escape...hyperspace!  By rotating in both directions 
    simultaneously, the ship could be made to vanish and reappear 
    with unpredictable position and velocity.  Your situation might 
    be improved...but with a catch.  The ship might explode upon 
    re-entry into normal space, and the likelihood increased each 
    time hyperspace was invoked.   I don't think I ever saw anyone 
    use hyperspace four times in one game without blowing up.

    The display was a vector-type CRT and the quality of the
    graphics exceptional. The motion was perfectly smooth, with no 
    aliasing artifacts noticeable.  

    Although I and others spent many enjoyable evenings playing
    Space War, the test word toggle switches used as controls 
    enjoyed the game much less than we did, and failed with some 
    regularity.  Ultimately the computer folks got tired of 
    replacing the switches and threw us off the machine.  
    Nonetheless I take a certain satisfaction in having played one of
     the first computer games, an innovative and engaging game with 
    rigorous simulation of physics in action.  As for the hyperspace 
    feature, haven't you ever felt that you were about to go off 
    into hyperspace when you tried to rotate both directions at 
    once?

    -------------------------------------------------

    NEXT ISSUE  *  NEXT ISSUE  *  NEXT ISSUE  *  NEXT ISSUE

    INITIATIVE 1999:  Why a lot of hardware will be scrapped at the
    turn of the century.  Why six years is barely long enough to 
    prepare for the consequences.   Plus:  Programming the 1401, 
    part 2.  Smalltalk Then and Now.  Palfreman and Swade's Dream 
    Machine.  More....

    Downloadable October first -- don't miss it!

    -------------------------------------------------

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    Analytical Engine V1#1, July 1993                        Page 10

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---

From: [email-masked] (Martin Minow)
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1993 19:38:55 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
wrote:
> ...
...
>     operating system in the modern sense.

Pardon me, but I also programmed the 1401 and ours was a transistorized
machine with ferrite core memory. It was the "minicomputer" of its day.
In addition to Autocoder (assember), ours could be programmed in RPG
(which might be seen as an emulator for a 407 accounting machine).
As an accounting machine, it was quite fast (1000 cards/minute, 1200
line/minute printer). It was never intended as a number cruncher.
However, as it had no defined numeric word length (words were addressed
at one end and had an "end of record" mark at the other end), you could
do "infinite-precision" calculation with some effort.

A 1401 emulator was available for the PDP-11 (under RSTS/E) for many years.
It probably still works.

Sorry, there were video games in the 1950's on Illiac (I played one in
1962). And I was told there was a quite interesting game on SAGE (Air
Defense Computers) that involved an image of a dancing woman and a
light pen. Someone else will have to explain that one further.

Martin Minow
[email-masked]

---

From: jones@pyrite (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879)
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1993 21:58:37 GMT

There were indeed more than a few errors in that newsletter!

1) The IBM 1401 was not a vacuum tube machine!  It was transistorized.

2) Pong was not a computer game!  It was a video game implemented with
   TTL logic, with no computer.

3) Spacewar wasn't a video game!  Video encoding of data was not used to
   paint the image on the face of the CRT.  Instead, the software drove
   a pair of ADC's to handle deflection in the X and Y directions, and
   the software painted each dot on the screen.  The resolution was far
   better than standard video, but the number of dots that could be
   painted without causing flicker was limited.

(By the way, I have played spacewar myself on a DDP 224 computer at the
University of Michigan -- that machine was a nice 24 bit minicomputer,
and their version of spacewar used two joysticks on the graphics display.)

In any case, the folks at CHAC clearly have their hearts in the right
place, and the kinds of errors they made in their newsletter only serve
to prove the point of their opening editorial!  History is indeed being
lost and forgotten at an impressive rate!

				Doug Jones
				[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (William Tyler)
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1993 23:19:34 GMT

>Here it is:
.........

>                   An Interview with Leo Damarodas

.........

>    operating system in the modern sense.

This is incorrect. The 1401 used discrete transistors. (I also worked
on one, and know whereof I speak.)

.........

>    came in just as they were doing a conversion from the 1401

Disk drives were actually also available on the 1401. Mine had two.

Bill Tyler
-- 
Bill Tyler      [email-masked]