The best small computer in the world (1968) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The best small computer in the world (1968) [pdf]

archive.computerhistory.org

25 pointsmjbellantoni15 comments

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I find it quite amusing that the photo-models are the president and the vice president looking manly.

and smoking!

Nothing like having Don Draper make promo shots for your new computer.

That photo of Herbert J Richman is a pure classic.

This actually does remind me of classic Oglivy work.

Wow... my first exposure to a computer was a Supernova, set up with four ASR-33 Teletypes and running Data General BASIC, for about eight or nine evenings in the spring of 1971. Changed my life--the next year, without a computer to use, I wrote programs in a notebook which I wish I had kept. Thanks, Data General, NSF, and thanks to Dr. Richard V. Andree.

What would be the typical use of a machine like this? I'd assume basic roll-up accounting, with programs written on a custom basis per client.

Anyone with practical experience?

They were marketed for embedded control and data acquisition in laboratories and factories. See the text on page 5, in "The hardware", where it tells how you can send your program on paper tape to DG and they send you back a read-only memory you can plug in - so your program begins running on power-up without help from an operator.

I recall seeing a Nova used in an experimental psychology lab. The first production medical CT scanner included a Nova, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_computed_tomography.

Before "The Soul of a New Machine."

Silently and spastically splaying taut fingers to get you the fuck out of his office and stop interrupting a man who works for a living, the great Tom West past 19 May 2011:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_West

I actually just finish reading that and it's what lead me to this!

Here's a picture of the Eclipse MV/8000 "Eagle", the machine they were building in the book:

http://www.foxdata.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Data-...

"The Soul of a New Machine" is a great book, by the way, even if the technology in it is a bit old at this point. Hackers of hardware and/or software should definitely read it.

Another interesting book about the creation of a large system is "Show-stopper", by G. P. Zachary, which describes the building of Windows NT.

It's not just computer nerds who thought that The Soul of a New Machine was a great book. Tracy Kidder received the Pulitzer Prize for it.

But that Eclipse picture is boring. Here's how a computer should look. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:360-91-panel.jpg

Does anybody know more about FHP (the Fountainhead Project) than what little I can read here:

http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fhp.html

Here's an account of the Fountainhead Project written by Rich Wingerter, who was a programmer working on the project:

http://www.sonic.net/~richw/FHP.html

While searching for this I also found an interesting paper on the Eagle project:

"Flight of the Eagle: The Birthing and Life of a Super-Minicomputer" (1996)

http://www.faughnan.com/papers/eaglecomp.pdf

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