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



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:

hexahexaflexagon_20200414_131755.jpg

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!

clock_board_front.jpg clock_board_reverse.jpg

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:
duck plot.jpg

[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!

core_memory_s.jpg

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.