What Google would have looked like in the 1960s | Hacker News Reader

What Google would have looked like in the 1960s

masswerk.at

100 pointslanbird24 comments

Punch cards

Wow!

This is actually very classy and reminds me of my dad's office back in the day. I remember going to his desk on Sundays and listening to dot-matrix printers nearby. Now I know those were ordinary MIS/TPS reports that we've come to hate so much. But I used to play with that line-feed paper, ripping its edges where it connected to the printer sprockets.

There was also a huge drum printer in that office, with a giant spool of paper resting on the false floor. The room was air-conditioned, shoes left outside, very cozy and well lit. Sure it looked very cool to me then. Thank you for bringing back those pleasant memories!

I get pangs of nostalgia watching this thing. I'm old enough to have worked with punch cards, teletypes, mag tapes, line printers, front panel switches, and such -- in the '70s anyway. (... now where the hell are my cigarettes ...)

This 60s Google app is very cool, and I can see how it might inspire nostalgia.

But whenever I think about how prevalent cigarette smoking used to be in those days, I feel sad that so many people smoked without fully understanding the health risks. Both of my grandfathers lived and worked in that era, and both died of lung cancer.

The risks were pretty much fully understood in the '70s

Indeed. My father quit smoking from one day to the next in the mid-60s, when a surgeon friend showed him photos of a smoker's lung. The info was available.

I'm glad to hear that your father successfully quit his first time. According to the American Cancer Society, he belongs to a 7-percent minority. Please see my response above for more statistics and qualitative data about what information was - and is - available.

Your responses raises two questions:

1) Understood by whom? 2) How deep was the "understanding?" In other words, what did it signify for people's health and well being?

If your argument is that medical professionals understood the health risks associated with smoking by the late '70s, I agree. But everyday people, those most affected by smoking-related illnesses, continue to underestimate the danger.

Here are three of the many studies illustrating this point: [1] http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/239800.php [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1381045/ [3] http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/14/1/55.full.pdf

Some excerpts:

"Smokers underestimated their relative risk compared to non-smokers and, contrary to previous interview surveys, believed they have a lower risk of developing lung cancer than the average smoker."

"These findings suggest that at least heavy smokers significantly underestimate their risk of premature mortality."

So, this leads to the second question: how does smokers' understanding of risks — or lack thereof — have practical implications for their behavior?

Among current U.S. smokers, the odds of wanting to quit, trying to quit and successfully quitting are still quite poor. About 30 percent of smokers do not want to quit. Sixty percent reported that they will not try to quit this year. And only seven percent reported successfully quitting their first time.

[4] American Cancer Society: http://www.statisticbrain.com/quitting-smoking-statistics/

This makes me a little sad that I wasn't born early enough to experience the rise of that sort of technology. On the other hand, I'm also a little sad that I was born too early to not live through the era of hyperdrive and mass consumer space travel.

I guess I'm a little greedy.

It takes so long to use, but the "printout" feels a lot more permanent and awesome than the modern digital list of search results.

I used to have a box of crummy line-feed paper that I used in a dot matrix printer hooked up to my Apple IIe. I liked the endlessness of the accordion-fold paper. Also I felt like it was very cool (and a bit surreal) to take data that is inside the computer and print it out and leave it in piles on the desk. I wasn't tied to a tiny screen anymore...

I just re-watched Colossus: The Forbin Project and I thought it was funny how you could tell that the paper was much higher-quality than the stuff I had in my box. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vn0... <- should skip to 36 seconds in

I just spent my morning watching that movie, and now I'll probably spend the rest of the day reading the book. Awesome movie, thanks for posting it.

I got really distracted about totally inaccurate audio and tape functions. Haven't you ever used those devices? Timing, sounds, tape reel operation, highly in-accurate. Sorry to complain, idea is nice. But execution is really non authentic. You should have written authentic simulation code for audio and tape reels. Now it's just ehh, artistic stuff, just like in movies, which usually means bad. Also tape storage usually used faster seeks, slower reads and some pauses in between.

I also deeply hated Brother electronic typewriters, because I could always write faster than those typewriters were able to extract data from buffer. There was always an risk that you filled the buffer up and then had a overflow. Then you had to wait until the buffer was clear so you were able to see what was lost before continuing. Really enraging. IBM Selectic typewriters were much better and a lot faster. Anyway, main point is that print timing differs between letters based on what's being printed.

Of course you were able to connect both of these to computer and use as a printer.

Good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter Bad: http://electricinnards.blogspot.fi/2013/04/brother-ax-250-el...

This should be interesting at least to tech hackers. Old but good stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Selectric.ogv

The sounds are actually extracted from footage showing this kind of equipment at work. The tape drive operations are controlled by random (based on what assumptions on the index and block locations should we do this?), but should usually feature some pauses and stops. The action of the tape tensioners is highly exaggerated in order to provide a substitute for the vacuum columns that can't be shown in this layout (providing a bit of a visual explanation for the asynchronous action of the reels).

Please understand that this is not meant to be a full emulation (like, say, Hercules compiled via Emscripten). Otherwise you would have to re-implement Google on top of zOS ... ;-)

Nice. They capture the 360-era console style well. Should use a fast vac-column tape drive, though — it only reads a few contiguous blocks, so I'm not able to suspend disbelief that there is no actual search depicted.

The same author has done PDP-1 Spacewar <http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/> with a pretty good re-creation of the original display — see Notes on the CRT-Emulation down the page.

I have been wondering why it took me so long to become a better, faster programmer. I accomplish as much in a week now as I did in a year back then.

Was I that stupid back then? Have a become a much better learner? Was is the "10,000" hours that made the difference?

No. It was just that fucking hard to make much progress back then. And it's changed so gradually that it's hard to notice.

I've have always known this, but I didn't feel it to this extent until I did this demo.

Great job. Brought back wonderful memories. And new understanding.

Now burn it.

This is fantastic. I'm 54 and thus old enough to remember writing my programs one card at a time on an 026 or 029 keypunch. A DECwriter with TSO was like heaven.

Great simulation and highly evocative of that earlier time. Kudos to the creators!

Not very realistic, though... where were the ads?

Seriously, though, totally impressive!

No ads, but it features some basic Doodles: Dec 23, 24-26, 31, Jan 1.

I love that. I got my first access via a teletype console in 1962, and a few years later in high school I took a programming extension class at a local university: punched cards! After college, we would run our own data general minicomputers, VAXes, etc. I remember backing up my tapes because it would have been catastrophic to loose programs and data.

Gosh, I thought my childhood computers were slow...

(my first computer was an Acorn BBC, with 32K and tape recorders to save your programs on, zzzzz...)

Happy days!

This really helps you appreciate how fast modern technology really is.

Props to whoever came up with the idea.

Props to whoever executed the idea.

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