Chip Letter Links No. 2: Arpanet, The First Byte, Nodes, ENIAC.
Great links, reading and images for 21 September 2022
This is the second edition of a regular series of posts with links, images and articles of interest, inspired by Adam Tooze’s excellent Chartbook.
Each edition starts with a beautiful die image. This week we have an image of the Nvidia NV40 courtesy of Martijn Broers.
Quiz Question
We talked about Charles Babbage in a recent post. What hobby did Babbage and Richard Feynman have in common? Answers in the comments please!
Arpanet in 1977
The ‘logical map’ of Arpanet in 1977 captures a moment in time and has so many interesting dimensions.
The computers attached to the Arpanet: no microcomputers - not yet powerful enough. So many PDP-10 and PDP-11 minicomputers. So few IBM’s though, with just a few S/360 and S/370 mainframes.
Some of the locations: NORSAR (bottom right) to detect earthquakes and nuclear explosions . The London connection was to University College London, with its ICL and GEC machines alongside those from IBM and Control Data.
Byte First Edition
Byte was, during the late 1970s and early 1980s a must-read for anyone interested in microcomputers.
The first edition (via Internet Archive) is especially interesting. It’s not yet the multi-hundred page door-stopper that Byte would become and its focus is more on building your own hardware than was the case with later editions. It’s also clear that the editorial staff (along with everyone else) were still trying to work out what microcomputers would be used for. The aspiration for computers to be more personal is clear though.
The article ‘Which Microprocessor for You?’. Highlights just how early in the development of the microprocessor market this was. Just three options were said to be viable: the 8008 and 8080 from Intel and the IMP-16, a long-forgotten multi-chip offering from National Semiconductor.
Look out for a special post on the history of Byte and some of the most interesting issues of the 1970s.
The Node is Nonsense
For an interesting read on issues with the naming of technology ‘nodes’ used to mark the progression of Moore’s Law try The Node is Nonsense. Aside from the commentary on future naming, it has some great historical charts showing the progression of various semiconductor feature sizes.
ENIAC And Web3
In vintage computing meets crypto, (a physical copy of) the ENIAC ‘General Purpose Computing’ patent has been acquired by Arkive the ‘Web3 decentralised museum’.
Thought For The Day
I find it inspiring to see how a interpreter that outlives me has such passionate and skilled contributors keeping it alive or rather, rejuvenating it with new life.
From Hacker News comment on post on Emacs development.
I’m starting to post more links on my twitter account. For example, you might enjoy this link to Faraday’s first electric motor from 1821. Please head on over and say hello.
Thanks again for reading!
Image Credit
ENIAC Patent
Jeremy Norman Collection of Images
https://www.historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=5454
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International(CC BY-SA 4.0)