History of Computer Hardware

Note that while CP/M-86 for the IBM Personal Computer Version 1.0 says Copyright 1982 on it, CP/M-86 was already shipping for other machines prior to then, as documented by the article CP/M-86 Captures Leading Share in 16-Bit World Market in a 1981 issue of Digital Research News:

IBM recently announced its 16-bit personal computer, which will use CP/M-86 as its alternate operating system. With this long-awaited move, IBM joins Piiceon, Artelonics and Sirius Systems, which have all introduced 16-bit computers with CP/M-86 in the last six months.

Can CP/M-86 achieve the same widespread acceptance in the 16-bit world as CP/M has in the 8-bit world? More than 400 different computer manufacturers use CP/M, prompting Business Week to hail it as the de-facto standard of 8-bit operating systems. As yet, only a few computer manufacturers use CP/M-86. But behind the raw number is a more revealing statistic. "There are only a few hundred 16-bit machines on the market today," said John Katsaros, director of marketing. "We estimate that about 25 percent of the 16-bit installations use CP/M-86. That makes it the most widely used 16-bit microcomputer operating system."

Other browser-based CP/M emulation includes:

• 8-bit 64K CP/M Version 2.2 (on a Z80)
• Eagle Computer's OEM version of CP/M-86 Ver 1.1B (1983)

If you follow electronics history, few names were as ubiquitous as RCA, the Radio Corporation of America. Yet in modern times, the company is virtually forgotten for making large computers. [Computer History Archive Project] has a rare film from the 1970s (embedded below) explaining how RCA planned to become the number two supplier of business computers, presumably behind behemoth IBM. They had produced other large computers in the 1950s and 1960s, like the BIZMAC, the RCA 510, and the Spectra. But these new machines were their bid to eat away at IBM’s dominance in the field.

RCA had innovative ideas and arguably one of the first demand paging, virtual memory operating systems for mainframes. You can hope they were better at designing computers than they were at making commercials.

The HTPC or Home Theater Personal Computer was an idea before its time. Something only well-heeled and tech-savvy tinkering media geeks could even achieve, and then, more often than not, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Yet, we have the HTPC to thank for our myriad modern media options. So let's look back at the HTPC and give it the respect it deserves.

The HTPC was ahead of its time

At its core, an HTPC is the combination of a PC and a TV, or at least some sort of AV (Audio-Visual) technology. This goes back further than you might think. The Amiga's Video Toaster—an expansion card with multiple video source inputs—is responsible for much of the titling and special effects we saw on TV in the 90s.

By the late 90s, video capture cards were commonplace and relatively easy to get for your computer. In the early 2000s, I had a used Pentium II computer equipped with an ATI All-in-Wonder, which combined a 3D accelerator with a capture card, so that you could record TV, digitize VHS tapes, and then watch it on your computer or play it back on a real TV.

[Codeolences] tells us about the FORBIDDEN Soviet Computer That Defied Binary Logic. The Setun, the world’s first ternary computer, was developed at Moscow State University in 1958. Its troubled and short-lived history is covered in the video. The machine itself uses “trits” (ternary digits) instead of “bits” (binary digits).

When your digits have three discrete values there are a multiplicity of ways of assigning meaning to each state, and the Setun uses a system known as balanced ternary where each digit can be either -1, 0, or 1 and otherwise uses a place-value system in the normal way.

An interesting factoid that comes up in the video is that base-3 (also known as radix-3) is the maximally efficient way to represent numbers because three is the closest integer to the natural growth constant, the base of the natural logarithm, e, which is approximately 2.718 ≈ 3.

Using computers that feature a high-resolution, full-color graphical interface is commonplace today, but it took a lot of effort and ingenuity to get to this point. This long history is the topic of [Dr. Jon Peddie]’s article series called The Graphics Chip Chronicles. In the first of eight volumes, the early days of the NEC µPD7220 and the burgeoning IBM PC.

https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9309_September_1993

after reading Macworld's review of Apple's first PDA, be sure to read Guy Kawasaki's dissenting view near the back of the magazine (page 366 in the archive.org reader):

Late one evening, UCLA graduate student Charley Kline sat in front of a refrigerator-sized computer and sent the message "lo" to a rack of computers operated by systems engineer Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), hundreds of miles away.

The computer, which weighs 2.5 metric tons (2.8 short tons), was built and used at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Berkshire. Construction started in 1949, and the machine became operational in April 1951. It was handed over to the computing group in May 1952 and remained in use until 1957.

It used 828 dekatrons for volatile memory, similar to RAM in a modern computer, and paper tape for input and program storage. A total of 480 relays were used for sequence control and 199 valves (electronic vacuum tube) for calculations. The computer stands 2 meters high, 6 meters wide, and 1 meter deep with a power consumption of 1.5 kW. Output was to either a Creed teleprinter or to a paper tape punch. The machine was decimal and initially had twenty eight-digit dekatron registers for internal storage, which was increased to 40 which appeared to be enough for nearly all calculations. It was assembled from components more commonly found in a British telephone exchange.

This talk is a polemic that distills the pessimistic side of my feelings about systems research these days. I won’t talk much about the optimistic side, since lots of others can do that for me; everyone’s excited about the computer industry. I may therefore present a picture somewhat darker than reality. However, I think the situation is genuinely bad and requires action.

• See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike for context