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What was your first computer? Pentium AT format PC? Core i5 laptop? Snapdragon on mobile phone? IBM 370/terminal? Prepare for a bit of a snigger...
I have the pleasure of saying that I hand-built my first computer from discrete components, integrated circuits, and a kit circuit board. The kit was produced by Dick Smith electronics Australia and I first saw it in my monthly electronics magazine, Electronics Australia, in early (I think!) 1977. Being near to my birthday, I decided to spend most of my pay packet that month on the kit, which duly arrived and was oooh'ed and aaah'ed over by the other guys at work before I asked permission to spend a few evenings after work to assemble it with our state of the art workshop tools.
That kit was the Mini-Scamp. As you can see it had very little memory, no way to permanently store a program, and as well as that, I needed to learn machine code. I put it in my packing case for travelling back closer to home with my sci-fi monthly magazines - and never saw either again...
But the Sinclair ZX80 came out around that time, and I learned BASIC, then an Amstrad CPC464 with extra software finally let me learn assembly language and machine code.
The link to the computer museum leads to a pretty skinny article with not a lot of info, and a few nice pictures that I can't view the large version of because the website uses Flash or somesuch. But to save you needing to follow through with that article above, here are some of the images from it:
The heaviest thing about it was the relatively large transformer. All the old computers had this problem, they ran on a low voltage, usually 12V, and the only way to get that was with a bulky iron transformer. I can only count myself lucky I suppose, because a later server tower I had, contained a transformer that easily weighed 10-20kg - it was a huge cube of steel laminations and copper wire and I'd heard that people actually made arc welders out of them when these old ITT (I think?) towers went on sale for scrap. I had two of them and they were tall enough that I could lay a solid core wooden door across them and use that setup as my electronics workbench. It took a lot of strength to lift one, I remember that.
The Mini Scamp was based on an SC-MP processor chip and 256bytes - not kilobytes or megabytes, bytes - of memory, front-panel toggle switches and DMA for programming and reading the results, and as you can see from the lower photo above, a lot of "those integrated circuit thingies" (when I started my career in electronics, only a select and expensive few things had them, notably some avionic equipment I got to marvel over, and a few computers that I couldn't. Ever.)
Anyhow - one of the interesting things I remembered about the MiniScamp was that it was possible to write a complete program on a few sheets of paper because the toggle switches that selected the memory and then the content you wanted to write to that location were just binary code - two four-bit words, one the address, the other the code you wanted to put there, and a "deposit" button to make it so, then either "step" or manually enter a new memory location, add the code for that location, "deposit." and you could only do that for a maximum of 256 steps because that was it, that's all she wrote, out of memory. To say it was limited was an understatement - but it was a functioning teaching computer that you could set a program into and run. Had I been able to learn on it, it would have been a great teaching computer that I built, myself.
I wrote in a recent article how supercomputers are a load of crap, and that little computer was part of the reason why. 1977 - 1987 I took several quantum leaps of computer power, 1997 I was on fairly powerful PCs and on the Internet, and look where we are today, the circuit that lets me turn on and off my lounge room lights with the app is a few orders of magnitude more powerful than that SC-MP processor chip was...
The Future?
I've been wondering about that. I've watched the usual beginning-of-new-year videos that make their predictions for the future of - tech / biology / physics / cosmology / etc and trying to work out what I reckoned. I wrote about how to use AI to remove "bottlenecks" in life, and an attempt to see how we could get past most of those (for which a part #2 is coming as well) and due to the magic of scheduled posting the part #2 link may not work until February, but I'll see what I can do.
I think things like mobile phones have about run their course, I have no idea what'll replace them but it'll be a major shift. I have no idea if PCs, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones will still remain as favoured computing / communicating devices but I reckon whatever replaces the mobile phone will shake ALL of these up, and also maybe steal a march on huge content servers leaving only distributed content delivery networks and a lot of cloud computing as our main options. Owning a private server behind a private LAN may well become a red flag for our governments...
Also - our currency was once tied to our country's physical wealth, but almost all of them have now been taken off the Gold Standard and relate to absolutely nothing at all, so the next step that seems inevitable to me is the shutting down of cash money in favour of online currency.
I'm totally against the last of these things but you know that people will always find a way around such restrictions, be it the use of shells or IOU notes or scrip or whatever, I just urge you to be very careful about what you agree to let your government do in the interests of "security."
There are worse things than beatings, prison terms, or execution, and one of them is the complete loss of privacy that those changes will enable. Fight against it.
Okay, we're "down here." What's going on? My wife is facing a life/death medical issue and I'm spending as much time as possible with her, caring, being there.
That does mean that I'm not doing as much writing, which means fewer posts, fewer announcements on social media, fewer people's eyes being directed to the blog suite. You can help me out though - share this article, follow the (newspaper icon) link to the News Stand and share that on your social media too. This should bring a few more readers, and with luck, a snowballing effect.
You can also help immensely by making a donation, either one-off or periodically, as that will allow me to pay online / running costs rather than taking away what little income we have.
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