George Dyson's continued downplaying of British computing efforts is tiresome
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
My "favorite" example is the hyped up reverence for Apple's role in the early days of the home computer, and the "cult of Woz", when they weren't first by a long shot, and largely priced themselves out of the race for many years, with sales a distant third after Radio Shack and Commodore.
Meanwhile a bunch of early guys at Commodore who directly influenced a lot more people are pretty much ignored, not least Chuck Peddle (the father of the 6502 at MOS Technology without which most of the 70's and 80's home computers would've looked very different, and of the KIM and Commodore PET computers, the latter which outsold Apple in the beginning, until replaced by the VIC 20)
To an extent it is down to who writes history - in this case Apple is the only survivor of the home computer wars, combined with being the only one of the larger players who were a predominantly Silicon Valley company (Commodore had offices there, but moved East, and never did as well in the US as elsewhere).
But as an old Commodore / Amiga user who's very aware of how short-changed Commodore has been by modern day mythmaking around the home computers, I wonder how much else of early computing history is twisted or forgotten that shouldn't have been...
To play Devil's Advocate: Apple has been extraordinarily successful at inventing or popularizing multiple industries within the technology space. They're still around and doing very well financially and in the eyes of the consuming public.
Commodore/Amiga were neat in ways, but never could produce the "whole package" experience and business model they needed to last for the long haul. Surely they deserve some footnotes for their efforts, but their relative popularity/myth within the computer industry is just about where it should be.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121598.htm
Yet, at the time, nobody really cared about Apple. The two big sellers where the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET. Apple was a distant third who most people thought was too expensive. It was relevant only because it was the only third place contender.
TRS-80 and PET were both pre-ordered in higher volumes than what Apple sold per year in the first couple of years.
But they get the vast majority of the article, including a lot of attention for the (for the purpose of that article) irrelevant Apple I (it was sold as a kit, sold in the low hundreds, and had plenty of competition which the article ignores).
The worst outright error in the article is to claim the 6502 was designed by Rockwell - of course it was designed by Chuck Peddle, Bill Mensch and a few others at MOS Technologies (Bill Mensch incidentally still produce new models of it). Peddle was the person who personally got the 6502 off the ground and was responsible for the low price point - without Peddle, the Apple computers would've looked a whole lot different...
And the PET entry gets an incorrect NOTE about Commodore's start of the PET project which really only serves to diminish it's role (in reality, Commodore had bought MOS long before, and it was Chuck Peddle who had the responsibility to do a new computer and wanted to talk to Apple as an option before they decided whether to go ahead and do their own machine - the note doesn't match what either Chuck Peddle or Woz says about it, though Peddle and Woz have very different accounts of the discussions). It also makes it seem like Commodore had nothing, but Peddle had designed numerous boards around the 6502, including the KIM computer.
If you're going to insert notes like that, why's there no note about how Commodore bid for a deal with Radio Shack to be their computer supplier, but Roach at Radio Shack opted to have his team develop his own instead? It's a similar story, yet somehow it's important only when it involves Apple.
This is pretty par for the course for coverage of the start of the home computer era. There are few outright errors in that article, but it's biased in a way that contributes to making Apple seem far more important.
If you want to get a better idea of the mythmaking around Apple, I suggest Brian Bagnalls "Commodore: A company on the edge", which contrasts a lot of the coverage about Apple with contemporary sources and eyewitness accounts.
To give a concrete example: Movies such as Pirates of Silicon Valley which presented the first West Coast Computer Fayre as some sort of triumph for Apple where people where flocking to their stand, when contemporary accounts, including press accounts, makes it clear that the big attention was around Commodore at the time, and attention for Apple was lackluster at best.
That Apple deserved credit for making it big later is not in dispute, but we're talking about history here.
And they receive far too much credit for their purported impact in the early years, when they were selling an over-priced (for the market at the time) product in tiny quantities while other people and other companies were laying the groundwork for the home computer market.
Elphaba, Where I Come From, We Believe All Sorts Of Things
That Aren't True. We Call It History.
A Man's Called A Traitor
Or Liberator. A Rich Man's A Thief
Or Philanthropist. Is One A Crusader
or ruthless invader? It's all in which label
is able to persist.
There Are Precious Few At Ease
With Moral Ambiguities, So We Act As Though They Don't Exist.I do agree with the opinion expressed in the article, though, that the British contribution tends to be downplayed. But as a brit myself we're used to that...
The Manchester Baby is in the science museum here in Manchester and its worth a look if you somehow find yourself in Manchester. The long-now talk is interesting, but you might want to fast-fwd past the stuff about canoes and tree houses.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jan/09/theres-plenty-of-ro...
EDIT: typo
Second, it was the first machine to feature any kind of an index register, a facility that was quite widely copied. You can trace the influence from the spread of the Manchester name for the facility: they called it the "B-tube", a reference to the internal structure of their own machine. (Already having an "A-tube" for the accumulator, and a "C-tube" for control registers, they used the first free letter.) And if you read through the computing literature of the '50s, you'll find frequent references to index registers using terms like "B-boxes", which are otherwise inexplicable.
I tend to find that is the case. Us brits tend to be less brash and more modest than our US counterparts.
On the flip side, we tend to be called unfriendly because of it!
Too often is the inventor the Faustian idealist who tries to change the world but fails due to the harsh reality. If he wants to implement his idea, he has to get involved with powers, whose sense for reality is sharper and more pronounced than his. Today such powers are, without expressing a value judgment, military and management. [...] In my experience, chances are slim to defend oneself against such pacts.
It also links to an Amazon review championing Mauchly and Eckert; but there was a recent bio of Atanasoff (whose title I'm blanking on) saying basically that Mauchly ripped off Atanasoff, and von Neumann had plenty of contact with both sides, had a better grasp of Atanasoff's ideas, and probably worked behind the scenes to promote them and make sure they weren't patent-encumbered. (IIRC Atanasoff had a universal computer in mind but didn't try to make one as his first project because he wasn't going to get stuck Babbage-style taking on too much at once.)
Not to say this review may not have a point. I haven't finished Dyson's book yet.
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I looked up the book on Atanasoff -- it's by Jane Smiley, and I should add that she clearly didn't understand computers (most egregiously, she seemed to think 'digital' meant 'electronic'). Still, not taking her judgments for granted, I thought there was some interesting history there I hadn't heard about, and Atanasoff really seemed to have gotten a lot right earlier than most, and Mauchly to have only subtracted value from what he'd learned from him. (Eckert on the other hand came off as a great engineer.) I have no independent knowledge of this stuff, however.
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