Archive for the ‘Computer History’ Category:

2024-03-15 Ferranti Argus “Hearing Aid” Computer

In the “Original Series” chapter this very interesting Wikipedia article talks about the “hearing aid computer” that used the OC-71 germanium transistors which were used in hearing aids and could go only up to 25kHz clock rate. That was quite slow – tube computers could clock at 500kHz.  Later models used faster transistors and could

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2024-02-05 1960s IT Guy Predicts The Future

He got almost all of it right.  But at that time  no one knew how portable they would become.  No one knew how many more things they would be and do – telephone, camera, audio and video recorders, run hundreds of applications such as the browsers that access the Worldwide Web.   Email, messaging, clock, calendar

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2023-09-23 Mainframe Tape Drives

During my mainframe computer days, someone made a foot or so long rod with a metal base.  We would grab a handful of write rings and have a write ring tossing contest.  During the daytime the day shift would run dozens of batch jobs on the computer, and they would queue up in the printer

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2022-06-27 The Complete History of the Home Microprocessor

A min YouTube video.

2020-12-23 Harald Bluetooth And Our Cellphones

Tom Scott tells us the story of the Danish king who united the Scandinavians. How the ‘personal area network’ ln our cellphones got the name Bluetooth. He shows us the ancient runestones, one by Harald Bluetooth. https://youtu.be/VdmQp9M9jUo

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2017-06-01 How To Disable 5V Regulator?

I’ve been getting PC boards that have all the chips operating at 5 volts, but the input voltage has to be between 7 and 12 volts.  The board has a 5 volt regulator on the board, and often it is a surface mount chip.  But I have dozens of 5 VDC, 1/2 amp AC adapters,

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2015-11-24 AT&T or at&t Article

The day after tomorrow is turkey day, and I have been trying to read some online things but I keep getting distracted. One article I found on Investopedia is about at&t, as its logo is now spelled, but was known as AT&T for more than a century.  The article gives a bit of at&t’s history

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2015-06-19 U of Cambridge Computer

The University of Cambridge computer circa 1949. Back then the computer took up the whole room. It’s difficult to imagine that nowadays we have thousands of times more computing power in our pocket.

2014-10-04 MS Win 8 Dying Away

An article appeared in The Register about the percentages of Windows OSes out there being used.  I was surprised at how low the percentage of Win 8 & 8.1 were.  It looks as if Win 8/8.1 are going to be this decade’s Vista: treated as a hornets’ nest and completely avoided, even though the prospective

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2013-04-11 A Complete history of Mainframe Computing

I found this link to a slide show called A Complete history of Mainframe Computing by R. Arzoomanian.  The pictures are fantastic. I thought this tidbit was very remarkable: “In fact, by the time it was retired in 1955, it was estimated that the ENIAC by itself did more calculations than all of humankind did up

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