LINC

Wesley Clark and Charles Molnar, then at Lincoln Labs, built the LINC, or Laboratory INstrumentation Computer, as a personal laboratory computer, finishing the first in March 1962. The machine was developed in response to the needs of Mary Brazier, a neurophysiologist at MIT who needed better laboratory tools, and it was a followup to the Average Response Computer, an 18 bit special purpose machine built in 1958 for the same purpose. When Lincoln Labs decided that the LINC did not fit their mission, in January 1963, the project moved to MIT, and then in 1964, to Washington University in St Louis. The National Institute of Health funded the project as an experiment to see if coumputers would be a productive tool in the life sciences. By the end of 1963, 20 LINCs had been built and debugged, many by their eventual users.

Alltogether over 24 LINC systems were built by and for customers before late 1964 when DEC began selling a commercial version. By the time DEC introduced the LINC-8, 43 LINC systems had been installed (see Computers and Automation, Mar. 1966, page 34). In total, 50 LINC systems were built, 21 by DEC, 29 by customers.

The self-build LINC kind of was the first open HW ever. The commercial LINC system manufactured by DEC included a sophisticated tape software system and a powerful CRT-based console. Priced at $43,000, the LINC-8 was the first practical, somehow reasonably priced and somehow personal computer on the market.

http://history.nih.gov/exhibits/linc/2.html http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8/section-7.html http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-dec-linc-8.html

How Americans do it

A quote from The Long Strange Trip to Java (see below, thx Chris):

"The next few months were very hectic as James (Gosling) and Mike (Sheridan) and I (Patrick Naughton) worked through just what this project would be. We worked long hours on weekends writing up notes about how we could create something that was truly new in such a crowded market? We looked at how other products failed and succeeded. We looked hard at the mess we all made with X11 and NeWS. What about Beta versus VHS? Why had video games boomed, then busted, then boomed again? What role does art and design play in products? We looked at branding and consumer loyalty. We wondered if there would ever be a software equivalent of a vanity purchase? Something akin to a Rolex or a Mercedes, a product that is considered to be so superior that it is worth a substantial premium to consumers. We got a significant amount of Sun founder, Andy Bechtolsheim's time to discuss what a hardware platform might look like in the mid nineties. We discussed portables and PDA's. We bought strange portable devices like the prototype Go Lombard and the Sony Data Discman which only displayed in Kanji. We also shopped for real estate."

History of the PANC 27

New inputs, halftrue as ever. Das mit den Mythen in Tüten hört - glaub ich - nie auf Chris LNGR hatte einen Link: Patrick Naughton: The Long Strange Trip to Java Ich hab böse kommentiert ....nicht gegen Chris natürlich, gegen den Autor des Artikels dort. Die richtige Begründung für die coolness und den Erfolg von Java steht hier. Thx Hannes.

CT hatte im Heft wieder einmal eine Microsoft-Analyse der sonderverlogenen Klasse. Alle erfundenen Antimicrosoft-Mythen versammelt.

2 questions to the matter:

Warum wählte Mitch Kapor eine Kombination aus Scheißprozessor (Intel) mit einem Scheißbios (IBM) und einem Scheißbetriebssystem (MS), um Dan Bricklin zu zeigen, wo der Programmierbartel den Appliaktionsmost holt, spreadsheetmäßig?

Warum wollten die Leute überwiegend dieses Zeug lieber als die geilen Kombinationen von Motorola, Mostek und Zilog Prozessoren, total überlegenen Betriebssystemen wie SunOS, AppleDOS, CP/M, SCO, MacOS mit Apps von echt coolen Programmierern, die im Gegensatz zu den Deppen in Seattle ja was konnten, v.a. diverse Assembler, C(++) und Objective u.a. m.?

Es kann sich nur um Drogen und Bestechung handeln. Aber was soll man machen gegen das Verbrechersyndikat aus Washington State? Pate ist Pate und Consigliere bleibt Consigliere. Eh nix.

What a PANC is

A PANC is an electric computing device that is

• Personal & Programmable
• Affordable & Accessible
• Networkable & Nonfictional

Examples: - Xerox Alto: not accessible and not affordable - Apple II: networkability not that good, all else ok - Commodore PET: networkability not that good, all else ok - Commodore 64: networkability not that good, affordability very good - XEROX Star: bad affordability - IBM PC: networkability not good but coming, affordability in US - Apple Lisa: medium networkability and bad affordability - SUN I: pretty bad affordability - Apple McIntosh: pretty bad networkability and affordability

The second half of the 80ies solved all affordability and local networkability problems through ethernet and productivity gains in the cloning industry. Wide area networkability for the masses was available through different networks and the telephone but stayed rather bad for some while. The second half of the nineties brought real mobility and widespread affordable decent connectivity through the Internet, the mobile processor and new forms of signal modulation on twisted pairs and coax cable.

Only just the software seems to stagflate in many ways, not in all though.

Retrocomputing

As people who know me might guess I like retrocomputing. You can get pretty crazy about this like people who put a VAX in their bathroom and heat up their flat with it. I always thought of getting my C64s up or my last left CP/M computer (TA) but then I didn't do it and actually it makes little sense to me. Now taking a 386 and running BW Smalltalk/V is retro computing enough for me. That and my first lessons in KR C are about how far back my programming memory goes really. All things before I cannot and really do not want to remember in detail.

I've been pretty sick for a week now, I didn't even surf, so no interesting links to commit. Only after reading the logs, i normally read, today, I'll link the best story on Gary Kildall and CP/M I know on the web. Hope to comment on this soon.