Last weekend I had the chance to talk about the LGP-30 and my emulation project at VCF West in Mountain View, CA. The showrunners will be posting a full video later, but that takes a while to go live. In the meantime, here's the audio I siphoned off the sound board and my slide deck. View my slides here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E9-B3EzxudFWX0yJMevbbIkD2qRbBKWi/view?usp=sharing View the emulator at: https://lgp30.org
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Episode 163 - Ever Heard of the PDP-11?
The DEC PDP-11 is one of the most influential minicomputers of all time. Some would even call it the most influential computer of all time. But where exactly did it come from? How was it designed? This episode is the start of a 3 part series that will look at how the PDP-11 was created, adapted to changes, and the strange places it ended up.
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Episode 162 - CSIRAC, Australia's First Computer
In 1949 CSIRAC sprung to life in a lab in Sydney, Australia. It was a very early stored program computer. All machines of the era were unique. But CSIRAC, well, it was very unique indeed. Selected Sources: https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/csirac/music/reconstruction - The Music of CSIRAC https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/MAHC.1984.10014 - Pearcy and Beard on CSIRAC
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Episode 161 - The IAS Machine
The first batch of digital computers emerge directly following WWII. The hallmark of this generation is uniqueness: no two computers are the same. However, there is a machine that bucks that trend. The IAS Machine, built in Princeton in the late 1940s, served as the inspiration for at least a dozen later computers. But how similar were these Princeton-class computers? What exactly was so special about the IAS Machine? And how does good 'ol Johnny von Neumann get tied up in all of this? The Eastern Boarder map fundraiser Selected Sources: Bigelow Oral History - https://www.si.edu/media/NMAH/NMAH-AC0196_bige710120.pdf Prelin IAS Machine Report - https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/library/Prelim_Disc_Logical_Design.pdf
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Episode 160 - What can Lunar Lander tell us about FOCAL?
Lunar Lander is one of the best loves video games of all time. The game was created in 1969 as an homage to the recent Apollo 11. From there it would only spread. Just about anything that can print text has it's own version of Lunar Lander. The early history of this game is mixed up with something weird: two nearly identical programming languages. Today we will be using the history of Lunar Lander as a good excuse to look at an obscure tongue called FOCAL. This language is so close to BASIC that direct line-by-line translation is possible. But are the two connected?
Welcome to Advent of Computing, the show that talks about the shocking, intriguing, and all too often relevant history of computing. A lot of little things we take for granted today have rich stories behind their creation, in each episode we will learn how older tech has lead to our modern world.
Brasil