Retro Technology

Today, we take office software suites for granted. But in the 1970s, you were lucky to have a typewriter and access to a photocopier. But in the early 1980s, IBM rolled out PROFS — the Professional Office System — to try to revolutionize the office. It was an offshoot of an earlier internal system. The system would hardly qualify as an office suite today, but for the time it was very advanced.

The key component was an editor you could use to input notes and e-mail messages. PROFS also kept your calendar and could provide databases like phonebooks. There were several key features of PROFS that would make it hard to recognize as productivity software today. For one thing, IBM terminals were screen-oriented. The central computer would load a form into your terminal, which you could fill out. Then you’d press send to transmit it back to the mainframe. That makes text editing, for example, a very different proposition since you work on a screen of data at any one time. In addition, while you could coordinate calendars and send e-mail, you could only do that with certain people.

In general, PROFS connected everyone using your mainframe or, perhaps, a group of mainframes. In some cases, there might be gateways to other systems, but it wasn’t universal. However, it did have most of the major functions you’d expect from an e-mail system that was text-only, as you can see in the screenshot from a 1986 manual. PF keys, by the way, are what we would now call function keys.

The calendar was good, too. You could grant different users different access to your calendar. It was possible to just let people see when you were busy or mark events as confidential or personal.

You could actually operate PROFS using a command-line interface, and the PF keys were simply shorthand. That was a good thing, too. If you wanted to erase a file named Hackaday, for example, you had to type: ERASE Hackaday AUT$PROF.

Styles

PROFS messages were short and were essentially ephemeral chat messages. Of course, because of the block-mode terminals, you could only get messages after you sent something to the mainframe, or you were idle in a menu. A note was different. Notes were what we could call e-mail. They went into your inbox, and you could file them in “logs”, which were similar to folders.

If you wanted something with more gravitas, you could create documents. Documents could have templates and be merged with profiles to get information for a particular author. For example, a secretary might prepare a letter to print and mail using different profiles for different senders that had unique addresses, titles, and phone numbers.

Documents could be marked draft or final. You had your own personal data storage area, and there was also a shared storage. Draft documents could be automatically versioned. Documents also received unique ID numbers and were encoded with their creation date. Of course, you could also restrict certain documents to certain users or make them read-only for particular users.

More Features

PROFS could remind you of things or calendar appointments. It could also let you look up things like phone numbers or work with other databases. The calendar could help you find times when all participants were available. PROFS could tie into DisplayWrite (at least, by version 2) so it could spell check using custom or stock dictionaries. It also looked for problematic words such as effect vs. affect and wordy phrases or clichés.

The real game changer, though, was the ability to find documents without searching through a physical filing cabinet. The amount of time spent maintaining and searching files in a typical pre-automation business was staggering.

You could ask PROFS to suggest rewrites for a certain grade level or access a thesaurus. This all sounds ordinary now, but it was a big innovation in the 1980s.

Of course, in those days, documents were likely to be printed on a computer-controlled typewriter or, perhaps, an ordinary line printer. But how could you format using text? This all hinged on IBM’s DisplayWriter word processor.

Markup

Today we use HTML or Markdown to give hints about rendering our text. PROFS and DisplayWriter wasn’t much different, although it had its own language. The :p. tag started a paragraph. You could set off a quotation between :q. and :eq. Unnumbered lists would start with :ul., continue with :li., and end with :eul. Sounds almost familiar, right? Of course, programs like roff and WordStar had similar kinds of commands, and, truthfully, the markup is almost like strange HTML.

The Whole Office

IBM wanted to show people that this wasn’t just wordprocessing for the secretarial pool. Advanced users could customize templates and profiles. Administrators could tailor menus and add features. There were applications you could add to provide a spreadsheet capability, access different databases, and gateway to other systems like TWX or Telex.

History and Future

Supposedly, the original system was built in the late 1970s in conjunction with Amoco Research. However, we’re a little suspicious of that claim. We know of at least three other companies that were very proud of “helping IBM design PROFS.” As far as we could ever tell, that was a line IBM sales fed people when they helped them design a sign-in screen with their company name on it, and that was about it.

The system would go through several releases until it morphed into OfficeVision. As PCs started to take over, OfficeVision/2 and OS/2 were the IBM answer that few wanted. Eventually, IBM would suggest using Lotus Notes or Domino and would eventually buy Lotus in 1995 to own the products.

Scandal

One place that PROFS got a lot of public attention was during the Iran-Contra affair. Oliver North and others exchanged PROFS notes about their activities and deleted them. However, deleting a note in PROFS isn’t always a true deletion. If you send a note to several people, they all have to delete it before the system may delete it. If you send a document, deleting the message only deletes the notification that the document is ready, not the document.

Investigators recovered many “deleted” e-mails from PROFS that provided key details about the case. Oddly, around the same time, IBM offered an add-on to PROFS to ensure things you wanted to delete were really gone. Maybe a coincidence. Maybe not.

Note: Summary is from Hack-a-Day since this is long but interesting read about how modern computerized air traffic control evolved.

It is a movie staple to see an overworked air traffic controller sweating over a radar display. Depending on the movie, they might realize they’ve picked the wrong week to stop some bad habit. But how does the system really work? [J. B. Crawford] has a meticulously detailed post about the origins of the computerized air traffic control system (building on an earlier post which is also interesting).

Like many early computer systems, the FAA started out with the Air Force SAGE defense system. It makes sense. SAGE had to identify and track radar targets. The 1959 SATIN (SAGE Air Traffic Integration) program was the result. Meanwhile, different parts of the air traffic system were installing computers piecemeal.

SAGE and its successors had many parents: MIT, MITRE, RAND, and IBM. When it was time to put together a single national air traffic system the FAA went straight to IBM, who glued together a handful of System 360 computers to form the IBM 9020. The computers had a common memory bus and formed redundant sets of computer elements to process the tremendous amount of data fed to the system. The shared memory devices were practically computers in their own right. Each main computing element had a private area of memory but could also allocate in the large shared pool.

The [9020]* ran the skies for quite a while until IBM replaced it with the IBM 3083. The software was mostly the same, as were the display units. But the computer hardware, unsurprisingly, received many updates.

If you’re thinking that there’s no need to read the original post now that you’ve got the highlights from us, we’d urge you to click the link anyway. The post has a tremendous amount of detail and research. We’ve only scratched the surface.

*The original article on HaD had typo'd that to 9200 which I fixed here.

The most surprising thing (covered in the video at the bottom of the article) is that the MSN WebTV 2 has similar specs to the original Xbox. Major differences are lack of GPU as in the Xbox, Windows CE instead of a modified W2K, and twice the RAM (128 MB vs the Xbox's 64).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/58898414

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/58898407

I have posted more info in the Pixelfed post

One of our newer writers, [Tyler August], recently wrote a love letter to plasma TV technology. Sitting between the ubiquitous LCD and the vanishing CRT, the plasma TV had its moment in the sun, but never became quite as popular as either of the other display techs, for all sorts of reasons. By all means, go read his article if you’re interested in the details. I’ll freely admit that it had me thinking that I needed a plasma TV.

I don’t, of course. But why do I, and probably a bunch of you out there, like old and/or odd tech? Take [Tyler]’s plasma fetish, for instance, or many people’s love for VFD or nixie tube displays. At Supercon, a number of people had hit up Apex Electronics, a local surplus store, and came away with some sweet old LED character displays. And I’ll admit to having two handfuls of these displays in my to-hack-on drawer that I bought surplus a decade ago because they’re so cute.

Original YT Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVBJg0J1v1s

The Bomem DA3 is a type of Fourier transform spectrometer used for measuring various spectral data and [Usagi Electric] has one. On his quest to understand it he runs down a number of rabbit holes, including learning about various barcode formats, doing a teardown of the Telxon LS-201 barcode scanner, and exploring how lasers work. That’s right: lasers!

His reason for looking at the Telxon LS-201 barcode scanner is that it has the same type of helium-neon laser as his Bomem DA3 uses. Since he’s learning about barcode scanners he thinks it’s prudent to learn about barcode formats too, and he has a discussion with our very own Adam Fabio about such things, including the UPC-A standard barcodes.

A newspaper clipping from The Tacoma News Tribune, dated April 11, 1953, features an article titled "There'll Be No Escape in Future From Telephones".

The article quotes Mark R. Sullivan, president of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., who speculated on the future of the telephone.

Sullivan's prophecy included the idea that individuals would carry telephones with them, similar to a watch today. He also suggested that future phones might not require a dial and users could see each other while talking.

A final speculation was that the device might even be able to translate between languages.

On November 21, 1969, the first ARPANET link went live between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute, demonstrating packet-switched communication and laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the modern Internet.

The pursuit of retro has entered the WEB ...

Anything with a laser has undeniable hacker appeal, even if the laser’s task is as pedestrian as sending data over a fiber optic cable. [Shahriar] from [The Signal Path] must agree, and you can watch as he tears down and investigates a fiber optic link made from old HP equipment in the video below.

He starts with an investigation of the block diagram of the transmitter. In the transmitter, the indium gallium arsenide phosphide laser diode emits light with a 1310-nanometer wavelength. Thermal characteristics in the transmitter are important, so there is thermal control circuitry. He notes that this system only works using amplitude modulation; phase modulation would require more expensive parts. Then it’s time to look at the receiver’s block diagram. Some optics direct the light signal to a PIN diode, which receives the signal and interfaces with biasing and amplifying circuitry.