Geeks of the '70s unite...

[John K Jordan]

Let's remember John Conway, mathematician, who passed away from COVID-19 at age 82. John came up with the cellular automata algorithm behind the "Game of Life".

Does anyone else remember the Scientific American article that introduced this to the world? I still have that issue, October 1970. I know I spent countless hours exploring patterns, seeding random patterns, copying what others discovered, and experimenting with combinations, at first on paper then on a home-built 6800 computer. The basic algorithm is simple: if a live cell (dot) on an infinite grid has two or three live neighbors, it stays alive; a dead cell comes alive if it has exactly three live neighbors. Anything else kills the cell or keeps it dead.

The complexity of the patterns can be mind boggling. YouTube and the web have more about this than you might imagine. Just look at this one video, it gets more and more complex.

(Skip to 1:10 if you want to skip the text and go straight to the action)

https://youtu.be/C2vgICfQawE


https://youtu.be/C2vgICfQawE

RIP, John Conway.

JKJ

[Jamie Buxton]

Okay, keeping a fifty-year-old copy of Scientific American sure qualifies you as a geek!

...But I must admit to remembering an article by Piet Hein in a mid-sixties Scientific American about super-ellipses. I've even built dining tables with a super-elliptical top -- a merge of geek with furniture design.

[Michael Weber]

The older I get the more I realize how stupid I am. :( If I'm understanding this at all it's that it reflects my philosophy about most everything. IDK. I did enjoy learning about the architecture of and programming the Motorola 6800 line of microprocessors. Thanks for that Heathkit:)

[John K Jordan]

Does anyone remember the hexahexaflexagon? I first read of it in one of Martin Gardner's articles in SciAm described it in the 50s. Martin's Mathematical Games column was the first thing I opened to - I think his column ran for over 20 years!

There are different classes of flexagons but the hexahexa is made of triangles assembled with flexible hinges to make a 6-sided construction which can be folded to invert the thing in multiple ways. Each inversion displays a different hidden surface.

I made a number of them from poster-board cardboard and still have one:

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On this one I glued six pictures on the pieces, unfolding in different ways reveals different pictures. Unfolded the wrong way the pictures are scrambled. One of the pictures is particularly difficult to find! Good fun!

JKJ

[John K Jordan]

...I did enjoy learning about the architecture of and programming the Motorola 6800 line of microprocessors. ...

Ah, you got your geek card too!

The 6800 was where I got my start. I'd read about the Imsai and such but then SWTPC came out with a kit of parts: a 6800 running on less than 1 mHz (they used a cheap clock crystal to save money), a full 2 k of ram, a case, and a printout of a hex code program for tic-tac-toe that had a bug. That's was about it. Before I retired it I was running a 6809 at a screaming 2mHz clock speed, had 56k of static ram on a stack of 8k cards (1434 solder connections on each $250 8k board kit), bubble memory storage, duel 8" floppy disk drives, a refurbished teletype for keyboard/printer/tape reader, a 4-color plotter that used 4" wide paper, and a home-built b/w monitor and display card. I learned to design and etch digital circuit boards and made a real time clock, a/d and d/a converters with joystick input and music output, a 256x256 graphics card, and a homebuilt modem running at a screaming 110 baud. It took a 20 amp DC power supply to run the thing. I learned to program in assembler and coded a type of flight simulator and a stereo music player. In the early 70s, you couldn't play hard unless you did most of it yourself!

This was my clock/calendar board - wired into the chip of a digital watch. The circuitry was too complex for me to draw and etch traces so I went with wire-wrap wire for the data connections. Software read the time and date by triggering and cycling through the time/date-set feature of the watch then sensed and decoded the 7-segment display digits. It looks sloppy but it worked! This board kept me from having to type in the time and date every time the computer was powered on. Good fun!

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Then the world changed when the first IBM PC was released and everyone with money could play. And here we are today.

JKJ

[Rod Sheridan]

SWTPC???

South West Technical Products??

Wow, if that's the company I haven't thought about them in decades...........Probably the eighties would be the most recent........Rod.

[Michael Weber]

I've forgotten how much memory the Heathkit 6800 trainer had but it was very little. It was clocked at 1/2 megahertz lol. Never the less even at that speed, after writing a simple program and knowing all the internal steps involved using registers, stacks and memory stores and fetches and so forth, it boggled my mind how fast it accomplished those things. Hundreds of instructions and it was complete supposedly instantly. I did buy a radio shack color computer because it had the 6809 and I was familiar. Managed a few assembly language programs of no consequence except for interest and enjoyment.

[John K Jordan]

SWTPC???
South West Technical Products??
Wow, if that's the company I haven't thought about them in decades...........Probably the eighties would be the most recent........Rod.

When I got interested in all this I heard about a guy opening a computer store in Oak Ridge TN. I drove down there and found he was a long ways from opening, still working on the interior of the store, so I beat on the door and asked him to order some SWTPC kits for me.

At that time the personal computer community was quite limited and closely knit. I remember talking on a bulletin board to a young guy named Bill Gates who was working out of his garage at the time. I also wrote a number of articles for a computer magazine. I can't even remember the publication name, maybe it was Micro Journal or Dr Dobbs. If anyone is interested, I have the set of Byte magazines including the somewhat rare first issue, somewhere in the bottom of a big box. Kilobaud was also a favorite, especially as Byte started dropping the hard core and fluffing up the content to make the advertisers look good. (Sort of like some woodworking magazines today.)

It was all good fun and incredibly exciting but I also accidentally learned a bit about software. My hobby transitioned to a job then to a stable career with good retirement benefits - now I can play with wood and llamas and incubators and dirt-moving equipment all day!

As for computer speed, it's amazing what even a glacially slow (compared to today's speed) microprocessor can do with a very small amount of hand optimized code. The problem today is nothing is written that way or it would be too expensive to write and debug. Software gets more and more inefficient and needs increasingly higher processor speeds as programmers now build operating systems and application software by pasting bloated black box libraries together.

JKJ

[Lee DeRaud]

Does anyone remember the hexahexaflexagon? I first read of it in one of Martin Gardner's articles in SciAm described it in the 50s. Martin's Mathematical Games column was the first thing I opened to - I think his column ran for over 20 years!

There are different classes of flexagons but the hexahexa is made of triangles assembled with flexible hinges to make a 6-sided construction which can be folded to invert the thing in multiple ways. Each inversion displays a different hidden surface.Bonus points if you recall their appearance in the 1977 SF/horror film "Demon Seed".

[Lee DeRaud]

I learned to program assembly and Fortran on an IBM 1401.

(And I will happily genuflect to anyone working with earlier hardware than that.)

[Lee DeRaud]

And in case anyone needs some "math geek" humor to finish off the day, I give you this:
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[John K Jordan]

Bonus points if you recall their appearance in the 1977 SF/horror film "Demon Seed".

No points for me. I don't think I've ever watched a horror film.

[John K Jordan]

I learned to program assembly and Fortran on an IBM 1401.

(And I will happily genuflect to anyone working with earlier hardware than that.)

I never used that, but I suspect it used core memory. I keep this in my little computer "museum", from a more modern computer!

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I have paper tape, a variety of boards and disks. The thing I wish I saved was a stack of punched cards. I can't tell you how many thousands I punched myself or had punched by the girls from coding sheets. Always girls, for some reason. I wish I'd saved a bag of the punchings too.

JKJ

[Ron Selzer]

My uncle made a few Heath kit items don't really remember what they were.. Remember after he retired he got an IBM Jr? spent a lot of days programing it to print a train on one line at the top of a page, he was a train nut also a systems analyst. Two of my brothers messed around with the Radio Shack computers when they come out. i learned later on Concurrent DOS on a 8086 or 8088 whichever was older. Then learned how to write in pascal in my 30's. still do some HVAC programing. Remember wiring a computer room for 20 ton Liebert with 200 amp UPS system. Disk drives with 3 phase 5hp motors, the computers were built to look like a desk with 8" floppy drives(16 of them), etc. Changed it all over to tape drives and new computers 1 1/2 later, they said the electric savings paid for all the computer upgrades in less than a year. The 2 stage Liebert barely loaded up one stage after the changeover, before the change it ran 1 stage hard and loaded the 2 cd stage fair. UPS ran hard before the changeover then loafed after. Took a lot of energy to run those old systems
Ron

[Thomas Wilson]

I learned to program assembly and Fortran on an IBM 1401.

(And I will happily genuflect to anyone working with earlier hardware than that.)
Algol on a Burroughs 6800? It was an old computer in 1970. I learned assembler on a PDP 8. My first job involved programming and running a Data General Nova. I became the “resident expert” on that computer which led to me getting an assignment running and programming a system consisting of three analog and one ancient digital computer. I did transient simulations of a complete nuclear power plant before it was cool.

I still program like I am working on an 8 bit computer with limited amount of core memory.

[David Powell]

Wow, this thread really takes me back. I recall taking a computer course in 1968 as a required engineering course. The language used was Fortran IV. I recall having to punch the cards after writing the program, then submitting the cards to be run. The next day I would get the results back; many times I had miss-punched a card (or cards) and having to correct those and resubmit to run. And, the computer center was on the other side of the campus which was a struggle to walk there and back during the winter.

[Lee DeRaud]

Algol on a Burroughs 6800? It was an old computer in 1970.B6800 didn't come out until '77 or so, more likely a B5500/6500. (I learned Algol on a new one of those at DU in 1968/69.) The IBM1401 was quite a bit older, dating back to 1959. The one I worked on was 2nd or 3rd hand, leased by the Fairfax County (Virginia) school system to do payroll and such in 1967.

And yes, I also did DG Nova assembly language at Rockwell in 1974-75. :)

[Bruce Volden]

Who are you guys and where did you come from?

Bruce

[Aaron Rosenthal]

You folks with FORTRAN experience need to migrant to New Jersey.
I was reading the other day that their computer systems are still running FORTRAN and they can’t find programmers, since their health care computers are old, and doing the Covid-19 modelling requires new instruction sets.

[Doug Weiner]

I was working at a firm with a disk based database and it was reaching the 4GB capacity. We called in IBM for adding more disk space and they proposed an additional 4GB. It involved 3 towers that were 3 Feet square by 9 feet high and a 4th tower that held the air conditioner for the 3 towers. Today you can hand a 256GB Drive on a keychain.
You folks with FORTRAN experience need to migrant to New Jersey.
I was reading the other day that their computer systems are still running FORTRAN and they can’t find programmers, since their health care computers are old, and doing the Covid-19 modelling requires new instruction sets.

[Lee DeRaud]

You folks with FORTRAN experience need to migrant to New Jersey.Gawd. Move to New Jersey and program in Fortran.

That's a solid "no thanks" on both counts.

[Kev Williams]

My fondness of old computers wasn't because I was a 'geek', it was because in late 1969 computers got our engraving business rolling. An old work buddy of my dad's (forget his name) was working for Beehive Medical Electronics, which were building computers for hospitals. The computers resembled the TRS-80's, with the display, keyboard and computer incorporated into a 'box'. Back then they were afraid of 'naked' CRT screens being too bright and/or prone to breaking, so they wanted a full-face cover for the screen. Dad was asked if he could make them, no problem. And they needed their logo engraved and painted. These went on for about 5 years. Sometime in 1975 (I think it was) another work buddy of my dad's who worked for Sperry Univac called him one day, wanted to show him something. I went with dad that day, and his friend had me hold out his hand, which he filled with about a dozen of Sperry's blank keyboard buttons... "Can you engrave and paint these?" From that day on everyone in town building computers found out they didn't have to pay exorbitant setup fees to have new keycaps made with new wording, and all hell broke loose around here. Dad bought an old 1940's Gorton 3-U pantograph and a crapload of brass to make masters out of, and four New Hermes IRX-IV 'table top' pantographs.

This pic is circa 1977-? Before floppy disks to be sure :D
- this was System Concepts 'flagship' character generator.
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--this was before all the new and improved models. They sent us this photo as a 'thank you', it's still hanging on the wall to my left ;)

In late '81 we bought our first computer engraver, a New Hermes Concept 2000. It was so much more efficient we bought another one a year later. My BIL still uses it daily. I learned 'basic' on the Apple IIe that drove the machine, I remember it took like 8 seconds to draw a circle. Had 64k ram. I did successfully write a program that would roll dice and play 3 sets of craps at one time, using my betting strategies. It worked too, until it ran out of memory, which was about 20 minutes after starting. To this day I never learned how to fix that problem :)

[Roger Feeley]

Michael,
the bagpipe joke made me think of a bit of grisly band history. At one time they marched with bassoons until some missed an about face and ran the bocal through the back of the mouth right into the brain. The story goes that the bassoonist dropped dead on the spot. Then for a while you could buy a single reed mouthpiece for a bassoon. By the time I came up you were expected to have a saxophone or something.

I can’t imagine taking a $10K instrument out in the cold anyway. I was lucky. My high school had a pre-war Heckel bassoon in pretty bad shape. I rebuilt it (nothing drastic. Just new corks, pads and adjustments ) and played for a couple of years. I was told at the time that it was quite valuable. I fixed up the English Horn too. It was also a Heckel. I think I enjoyed working on the instruments more than playing them.

[Norman Pirollo]

I was a total microcomputer and minicomputer geek in the 70's. Worked for a string of computer companies from 1976 on including Data General, Digital Equip., Hewlett-Packard, etc. Lived and breathed computers. Built a IMSAI 8080 in the late 70's and (yes) still have it today and it runs CP/M on 64kb memory fine! Sports DD 8 in. floppies and currently runs Turbo Pascal V1.0. Has an upgraded Jade Floppy controller with its own Z-80 on board. Otherwise it is fairly stock. Put me through my early years of Comp. Sci with Pascal as the language. Fun and exciting times!

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[John K Jordan]

[QUOTE=Norman Pirollo;3012334]Built a IMSAI 8080 in the late 70's and (yes) still have it today and it runs CP/M on 64kb memory fine!

And unlike the SWTPC, The IMSAI has all those great blinky lights! :D
I eventually traded my 6809 system for a boat and motor and trailer. The guy wanted it to burn eproms.

I once saw both an IMSAI and SWTPC computer in a display at the Smithsonian.

JKJ

[John K Jordan]

I just saw this.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/rip_john_conway_2x.gif

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JKJ

[Michael Weber]

I just saw this.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/rip_john_conway_2x.gif
J
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JKJjust what I need to see :eek:

[Osvaldo Cristo]

Oh, I did not know Mr. Conway was passed away. RIP.

Anyway I was in my early teens on 1970. I was geek´ed only by the end of 1970s and very beginning of 1980 when I was a PDP-11/70 and B6700/7700 programmer at the university.

I felt in love for Motorola 6809 (and afterwards 68000) as they were architecturally very close to PDP-11/70 and Intel iAPX432 (really an advanced architecture for that time and reminded me the Burroughs mainframes). I designed and constructed computers using most of popular microprocessors at their times: Intel 8080, Zilog Z80, Motorola 6800, 6809, 68000, 68030 - just a few it is fresh in my memory. Great times!

Thanks to bring me back those times!

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