[00:00.000 --> 00:00.640]  ...computer history.
[00:01.200 --> 00:08.400]  And Bill and Evan are here to talk to us about a lot of the technical aspects around that history and a lot of the history itself.
[00:08.840 --> 00:09.200]  Gentlemen.
[00:13.880 --> 00:14.400]  Hello.
[00:14.400 --> 00:15.140]  How you doing?
[00:17.600 --> 00:18.660]  I'm Bill Degnan.
[00:18.800 --> 00:20.060]  This is Evan Koblentz.
[00:20.100 --> 00:22.620]  And we're from the Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists.
[00:23.020 --> 00:27.780]  We're a group of people who believe in conserving the history of computing.
[00:27.780 --> 00:31.100]  And our focus is in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
[00:36.250 --> 00:36.810]  Okay.
[00:36.810 --> 00:38.230]  We're going to start with ENIAC.
[00:39.470 --> 00:42.330]  There are many myths about ENIAC.
[00:42.550 --> 00:45.270]  For example, that it's the first computer.
[00:45.490 --> 00:46.570]  Not even close to true.
[00:47.210 --> 00:51.810]  It's the first fully electronic programmable digital story programming computer.
[00:52.010 --> 00:54.210]  And at first, it wasn't even a story programming computer.
[00:55.670 --> 01:00.850]  However, the ones that were before it weren't declassified until decades later, like Colossus.
[01:00.870 --> 01:01.210]  In Britain.
[01:02.950 --> 01:04.770]  Another myth is that it was unreliable.
[01:05.310 --> 01:07.310]  ENIAC had 19,000 vacuum tubes.
[01:07.670 --> 01:13.470]  And there's a myth that people were on roller skates, running around the room, constantly changing vacuum tubes that were blowing out.
[01:14.510 --> 01:16.190]  True, but not for the reason you think.
[01:16.750 --> 01:18.530]  It's not that the tubes are unreliable.
[01:18.650 --> 01:20.690]  These guys had access to the best tubes money can buy.
[01:21.050 --> 01:24.870]  When you have 19,000 of anything, there's going to be some break in it at any given time.
[01:24.870 --> 01:27.910]  So it was a problem of quantity, not of quality.
[01:29.530 --> 01:36.630]  But my favorite myth about ENIAC is that it was designed to compute trajectories and motor rounds of World War II.
[01:37.290 --> 01:40.710]  Every history book about ENIAC says that as gospel.
[01:40.950 --> 01:42.130]  And it's just not true.
[01:43.470 --> 01:44.650]  Here's what actually happened.
[01:45.670 --> 01:53.070]  John Malkley, the brains behind ENIAC, was a physics professor at Ursinus College in 41, outside Philadelphia.
[01:53.750 --> 01:55.310]  He needed a better paying job.
[01:55.690 --> 01:57.230]  So he applied to two places.
[01:57.370 --> 02:01.450]  He applied to the Signal Corps Radar Lab at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
[02:01.750 --> 02:03.610]  He got an offer but didn't pay a lot.
[02:03.810 --> 02:04.930]  And he applied to Penn.
[02:05.310 --> 02:11.130]  He took the Penn job, also didn't pay a lot, but he made extra money doing side contracts to the Army.
[02:12.090 --> 02:16.790]  One of his contracts was for the Signal Corps Radar Lab that he declined the job at.
[02:17.810 --> 02:21.530]  And the idea for a digital computer had been in the air since the late 30s.
[02:21.650 --> 02:23.110]  It's not like they were the only ones working on it.
[02:23.170 --> 02:24.170]  There was a race to build one.
[02:25.530 --> 02:28.070]  Because they already had differential analyzers and things like that.
[02:29.730 --> 02:32.530]  Anyway, he started teaching physics at Penn in 41.
[02:33.570 --> 02:35.030]  And he had a side contract.
[02:35.090 --> 02:40.090]  And the contract was to do the math for parabolic radar antennas for Fort Monmouth.
[02:41.410 --> 02:44.230]  And he went all around the University of Pennsylvania.
[02:44.390 --> 02:45.770]  He went to Warden the Business School there.
[02:45.910 --> 02:47.830]  Gathered all the mechanical anti-machines you could find.
[02:48.150 --> 02:49.670]  And it wasn't enough math power.
[02:50.410 --> 02:55.910]  So he went to his boss, the physics department head, and said, Hey boss, you know those newfangled digital computers?
[02:56.050 --> 02:57.190]  Now I've got a reason to build one.
[02:57.270 --> 02:59.530]  To get these crazy radar guys in the Army off my back.
[03:00.250 --> 03:01.730]  And the boss said, Good idea.
[03:01.910 --> 03:03.270]  But the Army will never go for it.
[03:03.330 --> 03:03.830]  It's too obscure.
[03:03.950 --> 03:04.750]  Come up with something else.
[03:05.490 --> 03:07.850]  So he said, Well, what other math problems does the Army have?
[03:08.270 --> 03:11.830]  And he realized the whole thing about the human computers, trajectories, and motor rounds.
[03:12.210 --> 03:18.330]  So on the funding proposal, he wrote down, Give me the money to build this, Mr. Army, so I can compute trajectories.
[03:19.090 --> 03:20.130]  But there are two problems.
[03:20.310 --> 03:24.430]  One is that that's just what he wrote to get the money, not what he actually wanted to build a computer for.
[03:24.870 --> 03:27.490]  And second, the war ended before the computer was ever finished.
[03:29.570 --> 03:34.210]  So that is the hidden story of why ENIAC was actually built.
[03:38.980 --> 03:41.640]  And I don't know if you guys can see the screen, some technical details.
[03:42.360 --> 03:45.520]  ENIAC was finished by 45, introduced to the public in 46.
[03:47.340 --> 03:50.940]  The idea of the program was just patch cords basically.
[03:52.200 --> 03:54.580]  Not unlike an old telephone operator station.
[03:56.260 --> 03:59.420]  And, you know, I don't want to give you PowerPoint karaoke, but...
[04:00.080 --> 04:04.460]  One of the biggest problems with it was that it was very slow to program.
[04:04.740 --> 04:06.580]  Not hard to program, but too slow to program.
[04:06.820 --> 04:08.380]  So that was a big drawback of it.
[04:08.540 --> 04:11.460]  It was actually used for the Census Bureau in nuclear research.
[04:13.920 --> 04:14.800]  And that's a picture.
[04:14.960 --> 04:16.580]  It was in a room 30 by 60.
[04:17.940 --> 04:19.380]  The men were technicians.
[04:19.680 --> 04:20.580]  The women were programmers.
[04:20.920 --> 04:22.020]  Programming was women's work.
[04:22.920 --> 04:24.000]  Not how I feel.
[04:25.500 --> 04:29.220]  And all the programmers were the smartest female math majors at Penn.
[04:29.820 --> 04:36.080]  If you pick up a dictionary back then, computer with an OR meant the human who operated the machine, not computer, the machine itself.
[04:38.700 --> 04:43.180]  The Vacuum Tube Development Committee met at the Empire State Building in the 40s.
[04:44.140 --> 04:45.440]  I think it was mid to late 40s.
[04:45.900 --> 04:59.400]  And it was a committee of all the nation's top engineers and technical managers to figure out better ways to push commercialization and practical uses of vacuum tubes so that the military could have them for lower cost.
[05:01.700 --> 05:09.500]  Electronic Associates was the leading analog computer company of its time, well into the 1970s.
[05:09.920 --> 05:16.200]  and it was a spin-out of the aforementioned Signal Corp. Radar Lab, which is now our museum in Wall, New Jersey.
[05:20.820 --> 05:21.820]  That's an analog computer.
[05:23.780 --> 05:24.940]  Oh, go back a second, Bill.
[05:25.580 --> 05:29.220]  So that's what I meant, even though ENIAC was a digital computer, that's what I meant by the patch cords.
[05:29.420 --> 05:32.000]  You know, where they plugged in, that was the program.
[05:36.200 --> 05:37.000]  This is fun.
[05:38.020 --> 05:47.400]  When Bell Labs perfected, not invented, the transistor, Bell Labs' internal staff and all the nation's top scientists said, we have to keep this secret.
[05:47.580 --> 05:48.960]  Only America can have this.
[05:50.120 --> 05:57.080]  And a man named Harold Zoll, who was the technical director of the Army Base, that's now our museum, he fought to make it public.
[05:57.100 --> 05:59.140]  And he said, no, it's too important, the role needs it.
[05:59.140 --> 06:05.000]  And he won, thereby setting transistors and practical applications forward a good 10 to 15 years.
[06:07.780 --> 06:09.820]  That's the first practical transistor?
[06:10.920 --> 06:11.320]  Yes.
[06:12.940 --> 06:14.580]  Thank you for the color commentary, Bill.
[06:16.240 --> 06:17.340]  Bill, why don't you take this one?
[06:18.100 --> 06:18.680]  Oh, come on.
[06:19.620 --> 06:21.340]  You know more about this than that.
[06:21.420 --> 06:33.600]  Well, down the hall from where Bell Labs is doing the transistor in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Claude Shannon wrote his paper, and that was basically the preeminent paper on information theory, done in central Jersey.
[06:34.660 --> 06:35.160]  Good stuff.
[06:35.350 --> 06:36.280]  Are you starting to see the theme?
[06:36.880 --> 06:37.180]  Yes.
[06:37.680 --> 06:39.660]  This is one of my favorite things of all.
[06:39.920 --> 06:40.700]  Moby Dick.
[06:42.860 --> 06:45.520]  Mobile digital computer, of course, Moby Dick, big as a whale.
[06:45.900 --> 06:48.960]  It is the world's second portable computer.
[06:50.480 --> 06:52.050]  The first one was called DICIAC.
[06:52.600 --> 06:54.180]  It was two 40-foot trailers.
[06:55.320 --> 06:57.960]  It was the Raul's first computer to use printed circuits.
[06:58.380 --> 07:02.080]  And it was designed by the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C.
[07:02.760 --> 07:06.400]  And the customer was the White Sand Missile Base, the signal core out there.
[07:06.980 --> 07:12.320]  But it was so primitive, the circuit boards, that they shipped it out there and the White Sand got in the circuits and never worked.
[07:13.160 --> 07:18.000]  Anyway, three years later, they shrunk it down to three-eighths the size, one 30-foot trailer.
[07:19.020 --> 07:28.980]  Laugh if you want, I understand the humor here, but this was, in fact, the first computer in the Raul that went to where the problem was instead of the problem going to where it was.
[07:29.220 --> 07:31.960]  Now we have iPhones, but portable computing had to start somewhere.
[07:32.760 --> 07:37.960]  In addition to all that, it was the third or fourth computer in the Raul to use transistors.
[07:38.660 --> 07:45.380]  And it was the first computer in the Raul to talk to other computers, different makes and models, in a common format called field data.
[07:46.060 --> 07:50.340]  Before this, certain models of IBM computer could talk to each other, but only the same model.
[07:51.220 --> 07:55.140]  They had four or five different companies all made field data compatible computers.
[07:55.860 --> 07:58.200]  And at the first time, different computers could talk to each other.
[07:58.920 --> 08:02.920]  Now there was no wire, it was passing punch cards, but it was a common format for the first time ever.
[08:03.100 --> 08:04.580]  The first sneaker net, you could say.
[08:05.180 --> 08:08.120]  And field data became something you've all heard of called ASCII.
[08:09.380 --> 08:16.200]  But my favorite, favorite thing about this computer is a story we heard from the man who invented it, that they wanted to send it to Europe.
[08:16.200 --> 08:17.200]  They built about six cities.
[08:17.640 --> 08:20.980]  And the army said, well, yes, it's a computer, but it's also an army truck.
[08:21.200 --> 08:24.780]  And all army trucks have to be tested at the Aberdeen Proving Ground first for ruggedness.
[08:25.460 --> 08:28.620]  So they drove the computer, if you will, from New Jersey to Aberdeen, Maryland.
[08:29.260 --> 08:33.780]  And the computer came through the test track with flying colors, but the army truck broke down.
[08:36.500 --> 08:48.900]  The other story with Dick was that the reason it was portable in the first place was the guys at this Camp Evans lab wanted an IBM 704.
[08:49.550 --> 08:51.480]  And the government said, no money for it.
[08:51.920 --> 08:53.310]  So they said, well, we'll build our own.
[08:53.400 --> 08:54.050]  How hard could it be?
[08:54.500 --> 08:56.190]  And that was a pretty common thing back then.
[08:56.380 --> 08:59.810]  And the army said, okay, we'll give you money for a computer, but it's for field technology.
[09:00.330 --> 09:03.600]  So the engineers said, well, we'll put wheels on it.
[09:03.880 --> 09:04.960]  When it gets here, we'll take the wheels off.
[09:05.050 --> 09:05.540]  We'll have our own computer.
[09:06.550 --> 09:07.500]  That's how it became portable.
[09:11.630 --> 09:21.990]  This is just a cover of a magazine to illustrate the beginning of the industrial age of computing, the era when computers went commercial.
[09:22.210 --> 09:27.810]  Of course, they were large, and they were only owned by large corporations in the military, but that's what this is all about.
[09:29.890 --> 09:33.370]  At the same time, there were people beginning to hack computers.
[09:33.910 --> 09:43.690]  And one of the first things a budding computerist would purchase would be to get an analog computer, such as this one.
[09:43.990 --> 09:45.470]  This one's called the Geniac.
[09:46.010 --> 09:49.610]  And you would buy this out of a catalog in New York City.
[09:50.610 --> 09:55.270]  And you would take it home, and you'd be able to do a series of experiments, adding and subtracting and whatnot.
[09:59.340 --> 09:59.700]  Okay.
[10:00.560 --> 10:01.620]  Okay, the resistors.
[10:02.660 --> 10:04.240]  I'm not going to remember what it stands for.
[10:05.420 --> 10:06.820]  Radically Emphatic Students.
[10:07.380 --> 10:08.380]  Do you remember the rest bill?
[10:08.800 --> 10:09.160]  Interested.
[10:09.560 --> 10:09.920]  Interested.
[10:10.100 --> 10:10.560]  I don't know what it is.
[10:11.300 --> 10:11.620]  I forget.
[10:12.140 --> 10:13.200]  It's on Wikipedia.
[10:13.900 --> 10:14.040]  Yeah.
[10:14.740 --> 10:22.960]  It was a high school computer club formed by Claude Kagan, who was a Western Electric employee in Hopewell, New Jersey, which is just outside Princeton.
[10:24.280 --> 10:28.480]  I don't know if it was the Rawlsfurs High School Computer Club or not, but it was certainly one of the earliest.
[10:30.140 --> 10:36.020]  In Claude's barn, he had a Burroughs Electrodata slash Burroughs 205 mainframe.
[10:37.360 --> 10:38.300]  Heck of a computer.
[10:38.680 --> 10:42.240]  He also had a DEC PDP Straight 8, the original model of the PDP-8.
[10:43.060 --> 10:46.080]  And that was given to him by DEC when it was new in 1965.
[10:48.760 --> 10:49.960]  What's the rest of the slide say?
[10:50.060 --> 10:50.880]  It's cut off on our netbook.
[10:51.240 --> 10:51.920]  I don't know what the rest of the slide is.
[10:52.060 --> 11:07.260]  Project Might, he, in addition to computing, also sought out underprivileged children and kids and high school students and brought them in as well so that he helped bring computing to people, not just people that went to MIT and whatnot.
[11:07.260 --> 11:16.020]  He was actually trying to find students that were in underprivileged schools to illustrate the fact that anybody could learn computing.
[11:16.240 --> 11:19.960]  And that's one of the themes that he followed throughout the organization.
[11:20.180 --> 11:20.380]  Right.
[11:20.540 --> 11:26.140]  Now, Claude, his students in 1970 brought that PDP-8 to a computer conference.
[11:26.140 --> 11:27.120]  I think it was in France.
[11:27.720 --> 11:30.240]  And they were shunned by everybody, all scientists.
[11:30.800 --> 11:35.940]  Some of the scientists approached Claude, basically told them off and said, what are you wasting a computer on children for?
[11:36.320 --> 11:37.300]  Are you crazy?
[11:38.100 --> 11:40.180]  And obviously, he was right and they were wrong.
[11:40.720 --> 11:48.120]  In our museum today, we have that actual PDP-8, including the original software on paper tape.
[11:48.800 --> 11:52.740]  And Claude wrote a language called SAM 76, almost like basic of its time.
[11:53.880 --> 11:57.220]  And eventually, the club disbanded by the early 70s.
[11:57.380 --> 11:59.020]  They sat around most of the day and smoked pot.
[12:00.880 --> 12:03.200]  Unfortunately, the barn burned down last year.
[12:03.200 --> 12:06.020]  The Burroughs 205 was destroyed before we have a chance to save it.
[12:06.200 --> 12:07.480]  But we did save the PDP-8.
[12:08.520 --> 12:18.020]  And Claude also wrote a paper about the Home Reckoner in the late 60s, early 70s, which he described all the components of a modern PC.
[12:18.580 --> 12:22.340]  Now, that was already been done by, you know, Xerox PARC in the West Coast.
[12:22.660 --> 12:25.620]  But it was kind of new to the East Coast at the time.
[12:25.640 --> 12:26.940]  And he thought of it independently.
[12:29.920 --> 12:32.800]  InterData was a spin-out of Electronic Associates, I mentioned earlier.
[12:33.720 --> 12:39.060]  It was the only company other than DEC at the time to do a 16-bit mini-computer.
[12:40.600 --> 12:41.080]  Well...
[12:41.080 --> 12:41.460]  Yeah.
[12:41.460 --> 12:45.320]  And the company was called...
[12:45.320 --> 12:50.360]  Then it was acquired by Perkin Elmer, which was acquired by Concurrent Computer Corporation, which is still around today.
[12:51.260 --> 12:54.000]  So it's an important New Jersey connection.
[12:54.520 --> 12:55.160]  Okay.
[12:55.240 --> 12:56.920]  This slide talks about...
[12:56.920 --> 12:58.900]  It's kind of branching the talk out a little bit.
[12:58.960 --> 13:08.380]  We've illustrated some of the important historical events and milestones that tie to the mid-Atlantic region.
[13:09.140 --> 13:34.580]  This next group takes us to the next generation where we began seeing the homebrew hacking era, the pre-market period where employees of companies like Intel and Perkin Elmer and, you know, Electronic Associates, et cetera, would have gone home, taken little bits and parts that fell on the ground or were substandard or whatever,
[13:34.580 --> 13:36.480]  and started building their own little interfaces.
[13:36.900 --> 13:40.240]  They weren't creating computers at that time.
[13:40.420 --> 13:45.600]  What they were doing were automating the processes, perhaps of...
[13:45.600 --> 13:57.660]  They were ham radio enthusiasts and they were finding ways to use computing to automate the process of, you know, checking a lot of channels at night and so on, or just connecting to a television set so they could do typing.
[13:57.660 --> 14:08.920]  In fact, this is a picture from our museum of a TV typewriter, which was put together by a gentleman who lived in New Jersey and donated it to us.
[14:09.720 --> 14:21.000]  But what was happening, there was a growing desire of people who worked in the industry to start building their own computers.
[14:21.120 --> 14:22.780]  They were starting to see the possibilities.
[14:22.780 --> 14:25.780]  They were starting to see that they could do this themselves.
[14:25.780 --> 14:32.440]  And New Jersey, Philadelphia, Delaware was very much involved in that at this time.
[14:32.560 --> 14:36.060]  It wasn't just California or Colorado and Texas.
[14:38.020 --> 14:40.640]  The radio... you can talk about this because you worked for John.
[14:40.880 --> 14:41.160]  Sure.
[14:41.540 --> 14:51.540]  August 74, I believe, but don't quote me on the month, Radio Electronics Magazine had this cover article about a kit computer called the Mark 8 Mini Computer.
[14:51.540 --> 14:52.280]  You built it yourself.
[14:54.440 --> 14:59.980]  And it was pretty powerful, but it was impossible to build for every 10 sold, maybe one ever worked.
[15:00.800 --> 15:02.420]  Very difficult to use as well.
[15:03.020 --> 15:09.760]  And it was designed by a man named John Titus, who made most of his living writing technology articles for magazines, and he still does that today.
[15:10.700 --> 15:18.720]  And it was the predecessor, Popular Electronics Magazine, the following year in 75, said, oh, we have to compete against this.
[15:18.900 --> 15:20.380]  Our rival had this great computer kit.
[15:20.480 --> 15:21.040]  We need our own.
[15:22.820 --> 15:23.700]  Skip ahead, Bill.
[15:23.700 --> 15:26.120]  No, I've got a picture of the one, but...
[15:26.120 --> 15:26.480]  Okay.
[15:29.880 --> 15:30.840]  Is that what you're talking about?
[15:30.980 --> 15:31.200]  No.
[15:31.420 --> 15:31.820]  No, okay.
[15:32.780 --> 15:33.380]  Never mind.
[15:34.040 --> 15:35.140]  Skip ahead to the out there.
[15:36.780 --> 15:37.680]  Not that out there.
[15:37.680 --> 15:37.700]  Not that out there.
[15:38.000 --> 15:39.160]  That's what we got.
[15:39.400 --> 15:39.680]  Oh.
[15:40.060 --> 15:41.460]  Well, that's the second out there.
[15:42.020 --> 15:43.540]  The first out there in 1975.
[15:44.000 --> 15:44.800]  Bill will talk about it.
[15:44.900 --> 15:46.440]  Yeah, let me back up here a little bit.
[15:46.740 --> 15:47.040]  All right.
[15:47.220 --> 15:48.900]  So people were like, finally, okay.
[15:49.080 --> 15:51.720]  They weren't just going to build their own computer.
[15:52.240 --> 15:53.780]  Now they could actually buy a kit.
[15:54.000 --> 15:55.060]  And that was very exciting.
[15:55.220 --> 15:57.700]  This kit came out of generally our region.
[15:57.700 --> 16:04.580]  And so what started to happen was groups started to coalesce.
[16:04.920 --> 16:07.780]  And like-minded people started getting together.
[16:07.960 --> 16:10.080]  So this hackerspace concept isn't new.
[16:10.480 --> 16:17.080]  The real homebrew computing clubs began to form, including the Amateur Computer Group in New Jersey.
[16:17.560 --> 16:18.680]  And Evan can continue.
[16:18.720 --> 16:18.840]  Okay.
[16:19.380 --> 16:23.580]  Anyone who ever read a computer history book knows about the Homebrew Computer Club in Zulcon Valley.
[16:23.940 --> 16:25.700]  That got all the press.
[16:26.460 --> 16:28.400]  But as Bill said, it was one in Central Jersey.
[16:28.840 --> 16:30.400]  It was based in the Scotch Plains.
[16:30.520 --> 16:32.780]  It still is today based in Scotch Plains.
[16:32.960 --> 16:33.440]  It was the...
[16:33.440 --> 16:38.280]  They claimed to be the oldest running, you know, non-interrupted computer club in the world.
[16:38.700 --> 16:40.360]  I don't really know if that's true or not.
[16:40.480 --> 16:41.240]  But I don't see that.
[16:41.340 --> 16:41.960]  It's not true.
[16:41.980 --> 16:42.600]  Put it that way.
[16:44.520 --> 16:49.280]  And originally they were formed, and clubs like them were formed, just to help people build the kits.
[16:49.580 --> 16:50.780]  You didn't get instructions.
[16:50.780 --> 16:51.720]  You got schematics.
[16:52.880 --> 16:56.540]  And you had to really, really be a serious engineer just to even build it.
[16:57.840 --> 17:01.460]  Once people started building the kits, they said, well, what do we do with the computers?
[17:01.980 --> 17:07.080]  In many cases, even the people who made the Altair and made the Mark 8 never saw it do much.
[17:09.260 --> 17:13.340]  So, for example, in California, they figured out by accident how to play music on an Altair.
[17:15.560 --> 17:16.560]  Such as this one.
[17:17.300 --> 17:17.540]  Yes.
[17:17.940 --> 17:21.780]  So this is an example of a computer from that time.
[17:22.040 --> 17:30.680]  It was not invented in the mid-Atlantic region, but certainly this is actually not the first one, but the one I happen to have a picture of.
[17:31.860 --> 17:36.100]  And this is an example of the types of interface that you would use with a computer.
[17:36.200 --> 17:42.480]  You can see, again, people weren't really building a computer to make a word processor, to make games and all this.
[17:42.480 --> 17:45.240]  They were making a computer to do computing of some sort.
[17:45.460 --> 17:48.680]  Interface, analog to digital converters or whatnot.
[17:49.000 --> 17:50.480]  So this computer, you would...
[17:50.480 --> 17:50.880]  Play games.
[17:51.380 --> 17:51.620]  Yeah.
[17:51.960 --> 17:57.180]  You wouldn't really be able to play games with something like this until you wrote the software, which there was none yet.
[17:57.440 --> 18:01.220]  So these groups were getting together to say, hey, now we need software.
[18:01.400 --> 18:03.760]  Now we need to have a terminal.
[18:03.900 --> 18:06.720]  Now we need to figure out how to connect this thing to a teletype and so on.
[18:07.120 --> 18:16.700]  And when you bought an early computer like this, all you really had was a way to change and manipulate data and put instructions into memory and then execute them.
[18:18.140 --> 18:22.540]  And you can see here, this is a 1976 successor to the original.
[18:22.920 --> 18:24.540]  And you can see the specifications.
[18:28.770 --> 18:33.160]  The first computer store on the East Coast was Computer Mart, I think in Long Island.
[18:33.360 --> 18:34.270]  No, here in Manhattan.
[18:34.400 --> 18:35.010]  Right here in Manhattan.
[18:35.820 --> 18:41.270]  But there were two of them in New Jersey within, you know, within months after the New York one opened up.
[18:42.750 --> 18:43.820]  Computer Mart was a chain.
[18:44.100 --> 18:47.840]  Anyone from Central Jersey knows the town as Islin, a neighborhood in Werberstownship.
[18:48.600 --> 18:51.230]  And Bob Radcliffe, Hoboken Computer Works.
[18:51.600 --> 18:54.060]  I haven't... I found Larry Stein, interviewed him.
[18:54.290 --> 18:56.600]  I haven't been able to find Mr. Radcliffe yet.
[18:56.800 --> 18:59.990]  But from what I'm told, it was not really a computer store.
[18:59.990 --> 19:02.470]  It was kind of like a little wing of an electronic shop.
[19:03.030 --> 19:03.730]  I don't know.
[19:03.840 --> 19:05.040]  I haven't found him yet.
[19:05.160 --> 19:05.510]  But I'm trying.
[19:05.620 --> 19:06.820]  If anyone knows him, let me know.
[19:07.820 --> 19:18.730]  Speaking of which, if anyone has additional information or brochures or receipts or whatnot from a computer purchase from 1974, 75, 76, we'd be interested.
[19:19.160 --> 19:21.340]  Yeah, we're always looking for the paraphernalia.
[19:21.420 --> 19:22.340]  For our museum.
[19:22.600 --> 19:22.880]  Right.
[19:22.880 --> 19:24.290]  Okay.
[19:24.470 --> 19:32.010]  This is an image of the Southern California Computer Society magazine.
[19:33.040 --> 19:47.450]  And the reason that I put this up is that there was a Delaware Valley chapter which was considered to be the most vibrant and active of the computer societies aside from the one in Southern California.
[19:47.450 --> 19:57.540]  And there's a quote there from Creative Computing by the president, Lou Fields, describing how this Philadelphia area really had a buzz to it, especially.
[19:57.840 --> 20:04.290]  I personally am not familiar with what was going on in the New York area at the same time, but I would assume that there was also something happening.
[20:04.450 --> 20:11.160]  But specifically, in our mid-Atlantic region, Philadelphia was perhaps more active than it is today.
[20:11.420 --> 20:16.290]  And also, just as an aside, the more popular magazine, of course, was Byte.
[20:16.290 --> 20:17.950]  But Creative Computing was actually out first.
[20:18.400 --> 20:20.210]  Byte was published up in New Hampshire, I believe.
[20:20.360 --> 20:23.860]  Creative Computing was published in Marstown, New Jersey, by David All.
[20:24.730 --> 20:30.860]  And after this speech, come down to our booth on a mezzanine level, David All is present, selling back issues of his magazine.
[20:31.140 --> 20:35.060]  He's also selling CDs from the 1978 Computer Music Festival.
[20:36.250 --> 20:37.560]  So you can meet him in person.
[20:38.970 --> 20:46.900]  Speaking of festivals, the very first computer festival in the United States was the New Jersey Computer Festival.
[20:47.040 --> 20:53.580]  And this is an advertisement from Dr. Dobbs Journal in May of...
[20:53.580 --> 20:59.400]  It was for May of 1976, and I think this came out in March of 1976.
[20:59.580 --> 21:01.510]  There was no actual April advertisement.
[21:01.620 --> 21:06.140]  I guess they didn't have enough money to advertise two months in a row, so they just figured, well, if you saw it in March, good enough.
[21:06.380 --> 21:11.840]  But this was the very first advertisement of the very first computer festival in the United States.
[21:11.840 --> 21:17.620]  And again, if you watch Pirates of Silicon Valley or any of those corny movies, you hear all about the West Coast Computer Fair.
[21:17.800 --> 21:19.360]  And again, that was the famous one.
[21:20.540 --> 21:27.360]  But also in New Jersey, within a couple of months, it was another show called PC-76 in Atlantic City, run by John Dilks.
[21:27.510 --> 21:27.750]  That's right here.
[21:28.120 --> 21:39.060]  And that was, again, that was more of a commercial computer show, whereas Trenton's show became more of a user's show over the years.
[21:39.300 --> 21:39.530]  Right.
[21:40.230 --> 21:45.800]  And there were all the heavy hitters who were at the Trenton Computer Festival event.
[21:46.530 --> 21:53.600]  MITS, MSci, Processor Technologies, Ohio Scientific, SWTPC, Crememco, etc.
[21:54.320 --> 22:07.020]  All of the, if you're a computer historian, all of the manufacturers of all the most, the very first generation of homebrew computer enthusiasts who actually said, hey, let's make a company.
[22:07.260 --> 22:10.920]  And that little incubator all went out to Trenton.
[22:11.020 --> 22:17.480]  And it was an opportunity for them to, you know, kind of get together and some of them to meet each other for the first time.
[22:17.480 --> 22:22.760]  Also, an interesting tidbit is that one of their early keynote speakers was John Mockley of ENIAC fame.
[22:23.390 --> 22:24.960]  So there was 1,500 people.
[22:25.160 --> 22:34.820]  And the other first for the Trenton Computer Festival that we know of, at least certainly in the mid-Atlantic region, is the first flea market specific to computing.
[22:36.320 --> 22:39.660]  And this next slide is about the Philadelphia Area Computer Society.
[22:40.300 --> 22:41.580]  Another group is born.
[22:41.960 --> 22:45.560]  June 1976, Dick Moberg was the president.
[22:45.560 --> 22:48.450]  He's still around today, but he's not the president any longer of the group.
[22:49.320 --> 22:57.300]  Again, this is a group of people getting together not to learn how to use Excel or how to, you know, use CPM even.
[22:57.460 --> 23:02.190]  This was, again, a group of special interest group specific to a processor type.
[23:02.360 --> 23:04.880]  And can we build a computer around a processor?
[23:05.100 --> 23:15.000]  There was also computers in education, which was very big at the time, giving students access to time-sharing systems and whatnot.
[23:15.000 --> 23:18.740]  So it wasn't just microcomputers, it was also time-sharing systems in schools.
[23:20.480 --> 23:22.220]  And that's... we talked about that.
[23:22.690 --> 23:23.220]  Okay.
[23:23.840 --> 23:32.620]  The teletype was the hard storage device of the mid-70s to late-70s until cassette finally took over.
[23:32.780 --> 23:40.000]  It was a terminal, it was a printer, it was a storage device, and it was a readout device all in one.
[23:41.650 --> 23:55.100]  So in the days before there was discs and cassettes and hard drives and whatnot, if you had a computer, if you had an Altair, if you had an MSci, you also had a teletype if you were going to save your programs and if you wanted to see it as a screen, essentially.
[23:55.320 --> 23:57.160]  So your screen was your teletype.
[23:58.210 --> 24:01.980]  We don't have a teletype on display here, but we certainly do have one in our museum.
[24:02.750 --> 24:09.160]  And I'm not sure if we have one up and running, but certainly we have a number of members who would have something like this at the Vineyard Computer Festival.
[24:09.840 --> 24:17.340]  So here's an advertisement that I found from Berkeley Heights, New Jersey from 76, 77, just to kind of give you an idea of the expense.
[24:17.600 --> 24:21.600]  So you really had to want to do computing in 1976.
[24:21.780 --> 24:26.780]  The equivalent dollars of $840 back then was a lot more.
[24:26.920 --> 24:41.780]  So you already spent perhaps $800, $900, $1,000 just on the parts, so you'd have the privilege of working for six months to put a computer together so you could then hook up a teletype to it and do it in the garage because it was so loud you couldn't certainly talk on the phone at the same time.
[24:45.140 --> 24:51.600]  Groups began, led by the Philadelphia Area Computer Society and others, to actually start to build their own computer trainers.
[24:51.880 --> 24:56.660]  So this is an early computer built by the PAX group.
[24:56.860 --> 25:01.860]  It's a single board computer and it was actually featured in Byte Magazine.
[25:01.860 --> 25:11.260]  And this would have been an example of the type of computer you would have sent away for as a kit if you read Byte Magazine and you didn't have a ton of money.
[25:11.360 --> 25:13.210]  You could see there's very few chips on the board.
[25:13.340 --> 25:19.300]  But then once you're done, then the fun begins because then you have to figure out, well, how do I hook up things to it?
[25:19.520 --> 25:32.240]  So a lot of the microcontrollers that you see today, a lot of the hacking space type work that's being done today with microcontrollers, that same spirit was associated with these types of single board computers.
[25:35.810 --> 25:36.410]  Okay.
[25:36.710 --> 25:45.270]  Moss Technologies was the 6502 chip maker and they were based in the Philadelphia region.
[25:45.970 --> 25:50.310]  And they made the... Chuck Peddle invented the 6502 processor.
[25:50.590 --> 25:55.430]  This was the processor that was used in the Apple computer, the Ohio Scientific, the Atari.
[25:55.990 --> 26:01.650]  And, of course, it was the computer that was part of the set that built the SID chip that you have your 8-bit music today.
[26:01.950 --> 26:05.350]  So this is just an example in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
[26:05.670 --> 26:06.470]  Did I say New Jersey?
[26:07.390 --> 26:07.770]  No, you didn't.
[26:07.870 --> 26:08.270]  Okay.
[26:08.710 --> 26:09.110]  Pennsylvania.
[26:10.670 --> 26:15.730]  That was really an important manufacturer of computing technology.
[26:15.910 --> 26:17.930]  And then Moss was acquired by Commodore.
[26:18.110 --> 26:18.390]  Yes.
[26:18.390 --> 26:18.450]  Yes.
[26:19.210 --> 26:19.490]  Yeah.
[26:19.710 --> 26:23.310]  The early Commodores, the PET and whatnot, were designed in Silicon Valley.
[26:23.450 --> 26:25.070]  But Commodore was a Pennsylvania company.
[26:25.670 --> 26:25.850]  Right.
[26:26.270 --> 26:31.270]  And today you don't really have magazines dedicated to a specific processor.
[26:31.490 --> 26:35.150]  You wouldn't go out and buy, you know, a magazine about the i7 or something.
[26:35.150 --> 26:43.050]  So there was a magazine called Micro dedicated to the 6502 processor.
[26:43.230 --> 26:53.790]  So right away, although it wasn't the first microprocessor available for a computer, it became very popular right away because it was cheap and there was a lot of things you could do with it.
[26:53.910 --> 27:11.790]  It had the ability to do tables and manipulate tables for graphics, for example, in a way that wasn't really as convenient compared to a 6800 processor that was a little bit more, you know, math oriented or a little bit more direct memory access oriented for devices.
[27:12.010 --> 27:21.210]  So your 6502 could be put into a, cheaply could be put into a disk drive so you could tell the disk drive to do something while you continue with your work.
[27:21.330 --> 27:24.250]  In a way it was almost like having parallel processing.
[27:24.250 --> 27:31.690]  I remember in my childhood having a Holyworth kid down the street because he had an, I had an Apple IIe and a Commodore and we didn't know it was the same chip inside.
[27:32.470 --> 27:34.590]  Had we known then it was the same computer, you know.
[27:34.670 --> 27:35.490]  Who knows what could have happened?
[27:35.550 --> 27:35.830]  Who knows?
[27:35.930 --> 27:36.550]  We might have been friends.
[27:36.790 --> 27:47.290]  But Microcomputer is the, is the magazine that would have had tips and tricks and code listings and you wouldn't have, you know, entered something into the DOS prompt.
[27:47.430 --> 27:56.590]  You would have entered things in the memory and it would have told you how to enter things in the memory or how to create a monitor, which back then was the name of the program that you use to access and manipulate memory.
[27:57.590 --> 27:59.410]  And here's a picture of the cover.
[27:59.530 --> 28:02.010]  And you can see the AIM-65, the SuperJolt.
[28:02.450 --> 28:05.570]  The Jolt was the first 6502 computer.
[28:06.210 --> 28:08.070]  Apple II, Chem, PET and so on.
[28:08.170 --> 28:10.310]  So it was very high tech graphic.
[28:12.550 --> 28:12.990]  Okay.
[28:13.810 --> 28:29.270]  This is our slide to describe the fact that, okay, you have your real hardcore home group people that didn't even have microprocessors yet and were just trying to connect computers, not even computers, but just parts to try to get something up on your television screen.
[28:29.530 --> 28:32.570]  Then kits started coming out and you have your Altair.
[28:32.770 --> 28:39.570]  And then you start having computers like IMSAI 8080 and whatnot, where it was actually more or less a finished computer.
[28:39.790 --> 28:45.070]  In 1977, ushered in the era of the appliance computer.
[28:45.230 --> 28:51.650]  And that's when you see your TRS-80 Model 1, your Apple II, and your PET coming out with...
[28:51.650 --> 28:56.970]  In the case of the PET, you have a computer with a screen, with a cassette player all built in.
[28:57.010 --> 28:58.930]  All you have to do is turn it on, it says ready.
[28:59.270 --> 29:03.210]  And to somebody in 1974, that would have been like a miracle.
[29:03.210 --> 29:14.030]  So in a three-year span, you went from essentially parts and components and using computing to solve problems to a full-blown computer.
[29:14.310 --> 29:22.510]  And then groups started developing in these computer clubs to now say, okay, now I want to make a TRS-80 club.
[29:22.710 --> 29:29.370]  It's as if, imagine if in three years you went from a steam-powered horse's carriage to turning a key and just driving.
[29:31.510 --> 29:34.430]  All right, so you have some pictures of some interesting computers.
[29:34.690 --> 29:37.510]  You have your North Star Horizon with the North Star system.
[29:37.970 --> 29:38.570]  Just kidding.
[29:38.910 --> 29:44.770]  It was an early computer with wooden sides to it, which is kind of cool.
[29:44.910 --> 29:49.810]  And it was one of the very first five-and-a-quarter-inch disk drive built-in systems.
[29:49.850 --> 29:50.530]  The chip was a V8.
[29:50.850 --> 29:51.030]  Yeah.
[29:52.490 --> 29:52.890]  Okay.
[29:54.770 --> 29:55.690]  You want to do this one?
[29:55.690 --> 29:56.410]  No, you're on a roll.
[29:56.590 --> 29:57.010]  All righty.
[29:57.010 --> 30:00.810]  In 1978, there's a company called Zaytan.
[30:01.950 --> 30:06.810]  I don't know if anyone's ever seen The Onion, but there's a parody on this company called The Zalaga.
[30:07.230 --> 30:12.090]  This group of two guys who were in a garage.
[30:12.090 --> 30:16.990]  And as their company grew, they had to get a smaller garage because they got worse.
[30:17.330 --> 30:21.170]  Well, Zaytan was a New Jersey-based company.
[30:21.170 --> 30:24.030]  And that was actually the computer name.
[30:25.070 --> 30:30.610]  And this is just an example of the fact that there were a lot of companies starting to pop up all over.
[30:30.770 --> 30:40.830]  And certainly in the New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Delaware area, there were companies as well who were trying to take their stab at making a computer and making it big.
[30:40.830 --> 30:47.790]  And just, again, an aside, a couple of the guys from Zaytan went on to do the U.S. division of Epson in New Jersey as well.
[30:47.790 --> 30:48.310]  Yeah.
[30:48.850 --> 30:50.870]  So things were starting to happen.
[30:51.010 --> 30:53.150]  There was a first music show.
[30:53.350 --> 30:58.030]  And I also have some statistics here about the size of the market of computing by 1978.
[31:00.070 --> 31:03.650]  180,000 to 250,000 computers had now been sold.
[31:03.670 --> 31:08.330]  So from zero to 1978 having that many, a quarter of a million.
[31:09.890 --> 31:13.510]  Apple claims to have a large portion of that.
[31:13.630 --> 31:25.110]  But you can see that up to 100,000 computers sold in 1978 were by companies, small companies and companies that were basically putting parts together and then selling them locally.
[31:25.490 --> 31:28.250]  So it still wasn't a consolidated corporate thing.
[31:28.390 --> 31:30.510]  But you could see the changes coming.
[31:31.070 --> 31:34.010]  And you can also see there's a picture of an Apple II with disk drives.
[31:34.250 --> 31:37.710]  The disk drive first became available with the Apple in 1978.
[31:41.290 --> 31:41.950]  All right.
[31:42.110 --> 31:50.110]  So in 1979 the appliance computer was now so predominant that it outnumbered the homebrew hacker type computers.
[31:50.570 --> 31:59.490]  And the groups, the computer groups reflected this to the point that those original hackers were kind of starting to drop out and not even attend the meetings anymore.
[31:59.910 --> 32:05.830]  You can also see in this slide there's a picture of a code listing.
[32:06.470 --> 32:16.150]  Back then when you would buy a magazine with your computer, you would actually very often open right up to the centerfold, which was the code that you could actually type into your computer.
[32:16.510 --> 32:17.830]  Money was tight back then.
[32:17.830 --> 32:20.190]  You'd already spent an awful lot of money on a computer.
[32:20.550 --> 32:34.790]  And to get a free computer program, even though you had to sit there and type it in for five hours and you had to save it onto a cassette that would take 25, 20 minutes to save, and then realize that it was bad and you made one typo and the whole thing would blow up.
[32:35.610 --> 32:47.210]  And then you'd have to rewind your cassette or put another cassette in because you were afraid that that cassette would have the old code in it because you hacked the cassette program standard to you weren't quite sure if it was working.
[32:47.210 --> 32:49.330]  So you were kind of writing all the stuff at the same time.
[32:49.630 --> 33:01.350]  You could see why you would have special interest groups of people just getting together in frustration just to share tapes or share paper tapes because not everybody had the ability to enter in programs into memory.
[33:01.630 --> 33:09.550]  So when basic, when computers got powerful enough and had 4K and even 8K on them, you could actually type in a basic listing.
[33:09.550 --> 33:10.730]  And now we're talking.
[33:10.990 --> 33:28.430]  So this is an example of a basic listing of ELISA, which is a computer program that was like a psychiatrist's emulator that I actually worked on myself and typed it in myself and went through the experience, which I encourage everyone to do.
[33:30.470 --> 33:33.250]  And the evolution, computers were evolving.
[33:33.370 --> 33:39.710]  Now you could actually have a computer with basic and actually, you know, not have to know everything about the insides of the computer.
[33:39.870 --> 33:45.350]  So the circle of types of people that were actually using computers was growing.
[33:45.510 --> 33:57.310]  So you have your engineers and your technologists, you know, technology people into your programmers who, you know, were so dedicated that they were willing to learn how to do this stuff on their own.
[33:57.390 --> 34:04.590]  And now we're seeing things appear in department stores where you actually could just buy a computer and plug it in, turn it on and use it.
[34:07.210 --> 34:14.910]  Further, the first electronic bulletin board was called CBBS, Ward Christensen.
[34:15.070 --> 34:15.850]  This was out of Chicago.
[34:16.130 --> 34:18.550]  But believe me, there was also bulletin boards in our area.
[34:18.950 --> 34:20.790]  And you can see there's other milestones.
[34:21.030 --> 34:23.950]  CPM becomes the dominant operating system for small business.
[34:24.910 --> 34:26.610]  VisiCalc is introduced for the Apple II.
[34:26.890 --> 34:32.030]  And then Texas Instruments, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, and now other manufacturers offer more computers.
[34:32.230 --> 34:33.610]  And so they sell them in department stores.
[34:33.790 --> 34:35.870]  As I said before, there's some pictures of some of those computers.
[34:36.110 --> 34:40.290]  You can see these are computers that were not intended to be open.
[34:40.710 --> 34:42.030]  They're not intended to be hacked.
[34:42.210 --> 34:44.010]  They were not intended to be messed with.
[34:44.230 --> 34:45.570]  These were computers with a keyboard.
[34:46.050 --> 34:50.450]  And people were more interested in playing games with them, really, or using business applications.
[34:50.710 --> 34:52.190]  And they just wanted them to work.
[34:52.190 --> 35:05.650]  And CPM was the first operating system that was reliable, that would enable you to take a disk, and in theory, or at least transport by modem, in theory, program from one place to another, and it'd still be readable.
[35:06.070 --> 35:14.630]  And that's where Ward Christensen's BBS became popular, was this ability to use and copy CPM programs.
[35:14.930 --> 35:15.910]  So there's always this.
[35:16.030 --> 35:18.850]  This invented, open that door, open that door, open that door.
[35:18.970 --> 35:26.290]  And CPM is a very important step in the evolution of computing, not just in the mid-Atlantic, but everywhere, because of that ability to share files.
[35:26.370 --> 35:27.470]  Now we're talking diskettes.
[35:27.630 --> 35:33.790]  Now we're talking about the ability to save and access data in a lot different and faster ways.
[35:35.150 --> 35:47.090]  Here's a listing from FidoNet that I extracted from our basic area to show you all of the bulletin boards that were available at the time, before the World Wide Web was available.
[35:47.290 --> 35:55.430]  You would find the number that was in your area, and you would call it with your your modem, and you would access whatever files happened to be there.
[35:55.850 --> 36:01.970]  I'm not going to talk necessarily about FidoNet in detail, but FidoNet is one component of the bulletin board system.
[36:02.270 --> 36:05.310]  Many of these bulletin boards, especially in the beginning, was a one-off.
[36:05.670 --> 36:16.510]  You had a computer club, and if you didn't make the meeting that week, you could dial into that club's bulletin board and download the meeting minutes, text files, and whatnot.
[36:16.790 --> 36:18.250]  We're talking 300 baud.
[36:18.250 --> 36:20.850]  We're talking about, you know, very slow computers.
[36:21.070 --> 36:26.750]  But at least you could actually magically transfer files from one place to another.
[36:26.890 --> 36:35.410]  And I personally remember the thrill of just getting my computer to work, getting it to actually dial, connect to somebody else's computer.
[36:35.490 --> 36:39.470]  And I know that they were on the other end just watching the modem lights and everything flashing.
[36:39.630 --> 36:40.290]  It was just so exciting.
[36:40.690 --> 36:42.290]  That was almost the game of it.
[36:42.330 --> 36:43.770]  It wasn't actually the file.
[36:43.970 --> 36:45.190]  It was the process.
[36:45.190 --> 36:45.550]  No, no.
[36:45.670 --> 36:46.590]  Bill's a little older than me.
[36:46.650 --> 36:47.450]  He remembers a thrill.
[36:48.030 --> 36:50.450]  I remember the agony of my mom getting the phone bill.
[36:52.930 --> 36:54.290]  What are you doing on the phone all night?
[36:54.290 --> 37:01.950]  And that's when a lot of people my age began to do real hacking, because now we're like, okay, how are we going to get to the California bulletin board without paying for it?
[37:02.070 --> 37:03.230]  And that really...
[37:03.990 --> 37:06.770]  And that's part of why we get into history is to illustrate that.
[37:06.830 --> 37:20.350]  It wasn't just like you woke up one morning and a computer was sitting on your desk and you just started wanting to communicate with somebody in California to get the cool files that somebody at the Atari company was putting out or whatever.
[37:20.610 --> 37:24.710]  It was that whole concept of you couldn't afford it, but you really wanted to do it.
[37:24.970 --> 37:29.270]  And once you get that first phone bill, then you knew that it was time to figure something out.
[37:30.830 --> 37:31.330]  All right.
[37:31.370 --> 37:36.410]  I'm putting in a pitch for Delaware, which is my home, which doesn't really do much.
[37:36.410 --> 37:39.730]  I actually teach at the university... I teach computer history at the University of Delaware.
[37:40.090 --> 37:44.110]  But there was actually a lot of things going on at the time, somewhat.
[37:45.330 --> 37:48.710]  There was a computer company called... actually, I'm making... this is an excuse.
[37:48.870 --> 37:49.690]  There wasn't anything going on.
[37:50.310 --> 37:55.650]  There was a company called the Computer Data Systems, which was the only computer company I could find from the 1970s.
[37:56.330 --> 38:06.390]  There was Project Delta, which was an organization for the University of Delaware, which is pretty much the only academic group pushing computing that I know of at the time.
[38:06.390 --> 38:09.950]  at the time, where they would actually put computers in schools for students and whatnot.
[38:10.270 --> 38:12.750]  The Play-Doh system was heavily used in Delaware.
[38:12.810 --> 38:15.450]  It wasn't invented in Delaware, but it was heavily used in Delaware in the 70s.
[38:15.550 --> 38:23.570]  But really, the most important component of the Delaware area to computing wasn't the homebrew, wasn't really anything.
[38:23.670 --> 38:32.050]  It was the fact that DuPont and IBM were so rich and so large that they bought every computer that came out and gave it to every...
[38:32.050 --> 38:38.070]  That was the company where people first were getting... everybody was getting a computer on their desk.
[38:38.590 --> 38:49.530]  I used to work at IBM and I remember the tractor trailer would pull up and they would open it up and they'd start unloading computers and the guy would say, what do you have today?
[38:49.850 --> 38:51.150]  So it was something like that.
[38:51.410 --> 38:56.010]  Now, DuPont is really interesting because IBM speaks for itself, right?
[38:57.690 --> 39:01.730]  DuPont goes back really far in computer history and very few people know this.
[39:02.570 --> 39:12.130]  In the mid to late 50s, engineers were starting to come up with scheduling, PERT and CPM, not the operating system.
[39:12.350 --> 39:13.650]  Cost per minute, things like that.
[39:14.630 --> 39:20.930]  And John Moeckley, again of ENIAC fame, had a couple of start-ups, mostly unsuccessful, after ENIAC.
[39:21.370 --> 39:26.850]  And he had one called Moeckley Associates, which was a software consulting company in the late 50s, early 60s.
[39:26.850 --> 39:31.790]  And he was trying to do basically business, you know, scheduling software consulting.
[39:32.150 --> 39:34.910]  And many of his engineers came out of DuPont.
[39:35.850 --> 39:45.970]  And they actually built a portable suitcase size analog computer, pretty much the same size as an Osborne, 17 years before the Osborne.
[39:46.350 --> 39:50.610]  And that was done by Moeckley and by a lot of DuPont engineers in the Philadelphia area.
[39:51.550 --> 39:53.330]  I know we don't have a lot of time, so we're going to keep going.
[39:53.470 --> 40:03.250]  This is a picture of the diagnostic panel in the early NSFnet that was developed in the University of Delaware.
[40:03.390 --> 40:04.270]  This was the...
[40:04.270 --> 40:08.970]  The University of Delaware got the contract to make the Fuzzball, which was the first router that was used in the NSFnet.
[40:11.190 --> 40:13.850]  And we're running out of time, so I'll just go through this quickly.
[40:14.090 --> 40:16.950]  NSFnet was the second generation of the Internet.
[40:17.210 --> 40:17.990]  So you have ARPANET.
[40:18.150 --> 40:25.010]  And then when MILNET broke off of ARPANET, NSFnet was the thing that formed around it.
[40:25.230 --> 40:31.690]  And the connection in the mid-Atlantic area was Princeton.
[40:33.610 --> 40:35.590]  56K modems run on PDP-11s.
[40:37.170 --> 40:43.250]  And this was kind of an exciting thing for people I know at the University of Delaware, but also, obviously, at Princeton.
[40:44.690 --> 40:48.410]  Okay, like I said, we've got 15 minutes, and I think we're going to try to answer some questions.
[40:48.790 --> 40:52.690]  Yeah, we're just going to go rapid-fire and just show you guys some other computers that are in the area.
[40:53.170 --> 40:55.290]  Some of them are more historically significant than others.
[40:55.450 --> 40:57.750]  Some of them were just kind of there, but they're all cool.
[40:57.930 --> 40:59.290]  So we're just going to show you a bunch.
[40:59.290 --> 41:06.930]  I've gotten a number of inquiries about the AT&T 6300 because of the AT&T 3B1 that we've got on display downstairs.
[41:07.010 --> 41:08.710]  And there's a picture of it from my basement.
[41:09.790 --> 41:12.490]  This is the RCA Cosmac Micro-Kit 1.
[41:12.830 --> 41:14.630]  This is a really cool computer.
[41:14.950 --> 41:20.070]  This was before the Altair, and it was a microcomputer before the Altair.
[41:20.290 --> 41:27.450]  And it ran on the version of the chip that eventually became the Cosmac ELF.
[41:27.450 --> 41:27.870]  Right.
[41:27.870 --> 41:29.830]  So this was a pre-version of that.
[41:29.870 --> 41:33.210]  And then RCA Computing was done in Somerville, New Jersey, and Camden, New Jersey.
[41:34.810 --> 41:35.490]  Franklin Ace.
[41:35.630 --> 41:37.010]  This is a clone of the Apple II.
[41:37.210 --> 41:38.490]  This was done in...
[41:38.490 --> 41:39.010]  Medford?
[41:39.810 --> 41:40.510]  Yeah, Medford.
[41:40.830 --> 41:41.750]  Somewhere in...
[41:42.190 --> 41:42.590]  Pensauken?
[41:42.950 --> 41:44.270]  Way, way south Jersey.
[41:44.490 --> 41:45.410]  South Jersey by Cherry Hill.
[41:45.550 --> 41:48.830]  By the way, the two engineers who designed this computer are members of our club today.
[41:48.830 --> 41:50.910]  Not this actual one, but...
[41:50.910 --> 41:51.510]  That model.
[41:52.110 --> 41:59.670]  All right, Commodore 64, obviously, Norristown, Pennsylvania, and Westchester, Pennsylvania, which is about 20 miles from my house.
[42:00.030 --> 42:06.450]  And you can see here between 10 to 17 million of these were sold right out of the mid-Atlantic region.
[42:06.650 --> 42:12.370]  And the Commodore 64 was the best-selling... actually is the best-selling individual model computer of all time, still today.
[42:12.370 --> 42:12.670]  Yeah.
[42:13.070 --> 42:13.910]  Not counting clones.
[42:16.650 --> 42:17.170]  Okay.
[42:17.270 --> 42:17.490]  Let's give us one.
[42:18.050 --> 42:19.610]  Are there just some statistics about PCUs?
[42:20.430 --> 42:22.990]  This is a business computer, the PET 8032.
[42:24.670 --> 42:32.750]  The portable computing has some origins in the mid-Atlantic region, including the Epson HX20, which was developed in New Jersey.
[42:32.890 --> 42:33.830]  Yeah, there was also...
[42:33.830 --> 42:34.190]  There were...
[42:34.190 --> 42:38.670]  In 82, half a dozen companies kind of spontaneously invented laptops.
[42:39.070 --> 42:41.490]  Another one in the local area was called Teleram.
[42:41.490 --> 42:43.730]  Up in Westchester County, New York.
[42:44.470 --> 42:44.770]  Okay.
[42:44.770 --> 42:47.650]  So this is a very early... what a laptop looked like in 1981.
[42:48.590 --> 42:49.090]  82.
[42:50.350 --> 42:50.850]  81?
[42:51.410 --> 42:52.090]  That's wrong.
[42:52.910 --> 42:53.290]  Okay.
[42:55.590 --> 42:56.510]  We'll talk later.
[42:57.010 --> 42:57.330]  Okay.
[42:58.330 --> 42:59.330]  Here's Casio.
[42:59.610 --> 43:01.870]  This is another company based in New Jersey again.
[43:02.210 --> 43:02.390]  Yep.
[43:02.610 --> 43:03.210]  North Jersey.
[43:03.450 --> 43:07.650]  And, you know, these were developed in Japan at this point, but they were all marked...
[43:07.650 --> 43:08.870]  You know, these were New Jersey companies.
[43:09.270 --> 43:11.470]  How many computer companies are now based in New Jersey?
[43:13.090 --> 43:13.950]  I don't know.
[43:14.570 --> 43:15.270]  There you go.
[43:16.330 --> 43:19.790]  Vintage computing today, there's some resources for you.
[43:21.230 --> 43:24.370]  You can write those down or look at them and memorize.
[43:24.970 --> 43:32.710]  This is an example of the Vintage Computer Festival that we held a few years ago in Wall, New Jersey, which is where InfoAge is located.
[43:32.710 --> 43:37.050]  And this is like our kind of our home base for our Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyist Club.
[43:37.210 --> 43:37.350]  Yeah.
[43:37.450 --> 43:39.490]  But a real, real short commercial plug.
[43:40.050 --> 43:41.150]  The next Vintage...
[43:41.150 --> 43:42.670]  The VCF was founded on the West Coast.
[43:42.850 --> 43:44.250]  The one we do is VCF East.
[43:44.450 --> 43:49.510]  And the next one will be May 14 and 15 next year at our museum in Wall, New Jersey.
[43:49.730 --> 43:52.150]  Vintage Computer Festival East 7.0.
[43:54.170 --> 43:54.690]  Okay.
[43:54.830 --> 43:56.610]  Our club formed in 2005.
[43:56.730 --> 43:59.810]  There's the website address, midatlanticretro.org.
[44:00.110 --> 44:04.710]  That's the picture of the PDP-8 that we spoke about earlier with the resistors.
[44:06.410 --> 44:09.750]  And I also wanted to put a plug in for the Delaware hackerspace.
[44:10.850 --> 44:15.070]  On August 26th, we're having a PDP-8 and PDP-11 hacking weekend.
[44:15.190 --> 44:23.310]  And if you're in the Delaware area and you're interested in working on Vintage Computing hardware stuff, you know, actually working on them, that's going to be the loose topic.
[44:23.470 --> 44:27.850]  Although I certainly would welcome any Vintage Computing if you're interested.
[44:28.230 --> 44:31.930]  Just see me afterwards or go to vintagecomputer.net.
[44:31.930 --> 44:32.830]  All right.
[44:32.830 --> 44:35.910]  So we hope we have time for three or four questions before they kick us off the stage.
[44:38.310 --> 44:41.010]  I can't see anything, so I don't know how we're going to do this.
[44:41.690 --> 44:42.270]  Just yell out.
[44:42.490 --> 44:42.790]  Yell.
[44:45.450 --> 44:46.330]  I got a question.
[44:47.610 --> 44:50.990]  How old would you consider vintage unit workstations before they're vintage?
[44:51.190 --> 44:54.430]  Like, would you consider the original Sparks vintage still?
[44:54.650 --> 44:55.050]  Okay.
[44:55.110 --> 44:57.390]  The definition of vintage is of an era.
[44:58.710 --> 44:59.790]  So there you go.
[45:00.010 --> 45:00.210]  Okay.
[45:00.510 --> 45:00.950]  Cool.
[45:01.930 --> 45:03.270]  I'm going to add that as a...
[45:03.270 --> 45:05.690]  We used to say the 10-year rule.
[45:06.070 --> 45:08.790]  We stopped saying that because that could mean Windows 98.
[45:10.730 --> 45:11.250]  Right?
[45:12.190 --> 45:18.790]  As a real general rule of thumb, our hobby pretty much cuts off at 186.
[45:19.150 --> 45:22.750]  With some exceptions, Amiga, Next, Newton, et cetera.
[45:23.010 --> 45:30.030]  But rule of thumb, if it's a 286 or newer, if it runs any version of DOS newer than about 4.x, it's a used computer.
[45:30.550 --> 45:30.870]  Not a...
[45:31.210 --> 45:33.210]  It's like an antique car versus a used car.
[45:33.410 --> 45:34.950]  75 Chevy versus a 57 Chevy.
[45:35.230 --> 45:35.490]  Yeah.
[45:35.490 --> 45:36.290]  We know it when we see it.
[45:36.450 --> 45:36.670]  You know.
[45:36.750 --> 45:38.730]  If you have a 77 Velari, not too cool.
[45:38.830 --> 45:41.050]  If you have a 77 Thunderbird, more cool.
[45:41.270 --> 45:41.770]  Could be vintage.
[45:41.910 --> 45:42.230]  You know what I mean?
[45:42.230 --> 45:43.650]  So it depends on the...
[45:44.530 --> 45:46.170]  Is this historically significant?
[45:46.530 --> 45:48.670]  Is this probably going to be historically significant?
[45:49.010 --> 45:52.730]  So if you have the first Spark station, then yeah.
[45:52.970 --> 45:55.010]  If you have the fourth version, no.
[45:55.550 --> 45:57.250]  And frankly, I don't really care.
[45:57.270 --> 45:58.190]  I like all computers.
[45:58.650 --> 45:59.270]  So if you're not...
[45:59.270 --> 46:00.730]  Personally, I don't really care.
[46:00.850 --> 46:04.230]  But I mean, traditionally, the hobby is starting to coalesce around 70...
[46:05.130 --> 46:07.290]  87, 88 seems to be the cutoff date.
[46:07.330 --> 46:10.130]  None of us are saying that vintage computers are better than new ones.
[46:10.130 --> 46:11.090]  But they had character.
[46:11.310 --> 46:12.870]  Remember when cars had fins?
[46:13.270 --> 46:14.770]  I mean, they didn't do anything.
[46:14.970 --> 46:16.170]  But they had character.
[46:16.290 --> 46:21.230]  And today, I can't fathom that in 30 years, anyone's going to collect an 87 Ford Taurus.
[46:21.650 --> 46:24.730]  But they might collect, you know, a 1996 Viper.
[46:25.030 --> 46:25.510]  Right?
[46:25.750 --> 46:27.910]  Things with character might still be interesting to us.
[46:28.010 --> 46:28.150]  Okay.
[46:28.170 --> 46:28.670]  Next question.
[46:29.250 --> 46:30.850]  Just a quick observation.
[46:31.150 --> 46:37.730]  That downloading a file, text, whatever, at 300 baud, you would get 16K in about 10 minutes.
[46:39.350 --> 46:39.910]  Yeah.
[46:40.950 --> 46:47.630]  I was going to say that I remember typing into my Commodore VIC-20 for hours to create Hangman.
[46:47.890 --> 46:50.130]  And then another few hours.
[46:50.410 --> 46:55.550]  My question though, or thought, was I had this hooked up to a black and white TV.
[46:56.070 --> 47:00.910]  And I've always wondered for years now, why did we have to create monitors?
[47:01.550 --> 47:05.210]  You know, what was wrong when hooking it up to a TV set?
[47:05.350 --> 47:09.990]  And now it seems to be finally going in the other direction where you can now, you know, connect with your plasma.
[47:10.730 --> 47:10.990]  Yeah.
[47:11.230 --> 47:12.730]  Well, it's a refresh rate and all that.
[47:13.290 --> 47:14.390]  I mean, it has to do with that.
[47:14.590 --> 47:14.890]  Yeah.
[47:15.350 --> 47:16.370]  And the resolution.
[47:18.470 --> 47:18.790]  Yeah.
[47:18.890 --> 47:19.130]  Yeah.
[47:19.130 --> 47:25.810]  Speaking of those programs really quick, we, downstairs, we have Adventure set up on the, on the UNIX PC if anyone wants to play one of those old text games.
[47:25.990 --> 47:26.690]  And a couple of others too.
[47:26.830 --> 47:26.990]  Go ahead.
[47:26.990 --> 47:27.530]  Yeah.
[47:27.690 --> 47:28.190]  A couple of things.
[47:28.450 --> 47:34.690]  Number one, a lot of people don't know this, but the world's first 32-bit microprocessor originated here in New Jersey.
[47:34.950 --> 47:37.030]  The Bell Mac, the WB32000.
[47:38.250 --> 47:39.050]  Well, thank you very much.
[47:39.210 --> 47:39.530]  Talk to us after.
[47:39.710 --> 47:39.850]  Yeah.
[47:39.950 --> 47:40.690]  I'd like to know more about that.
[47:40.710 --> 47:42.270]  Another tidbit for you.
[47:42.370 --> 47:47.010]  When you refer to CBBS, it's affectionately referred to as Ward and Randy's.
[47:47.230 --> 47:47.490]  Yeah.
[47:48.330 --> 47:49.290]  Ward did the software.
[47:49.450 --> 47:50.930]  Randy Zeus did the hardware.
[47:51.210 --> 47:52.850]  By the way, I was one of the co-ops of that board.
[47:52.950 --> 47:53.450]  Oh, okay.
[47:53.450 --> 47:54.190]  Years back.
[47:55.250 --> 47:59.750]  And the 6300 you posted and all that is not really AT&T.
[47:59.870 --> 48:01.050]  It was built by Olivetti.
[48:01.310 --> 48:03.530]  It was an M20 and rebranded by AT&T.
[48:04.410 --> 48:06.050]  If you've got any other questions, we'll talk about.
[48:06.370 --> 48:07.330]  Actually, you are right.
[48:08.950 --> 48:11.050]  We will remember that the next time we do this presentation.
[48:11.410 --> 48:11.770]  No, really.
[48:11.790 --> 48:12.830]  That's a very good point.
[48:12.870 --> 48:13.950]  I didn't think about that.
[48:14.050 --> 48:18.070]  We're just kind of focusing on AT&T and not the fact that you are absolutely right.
[48:18.090 --> 48:18.570]  That is true.
[48:18.750 --> 48:20.150]  Also, I used to work with Teletech.
[48:20.150 --> 48:20.770]  Yeah.
[48:21.290 --> 48:22.530]  Well, we also know the keynote.
[48:23.390 --> 48:24.310]  I dropped the Teletech.
[48:24.310 --> 48:26.370]  The Winky Beast keynote is coming up soon.
[48:26.750 --> 48:27.150]  So...
[48:27.150 --> 48:27.490]  Okay, yeah.
[48:27.630 --> 48:27.810]  Okay.
[48:27.950 --> 48:29.430]  So, how much more time do we have left?
[48:29.610 --> 48:30.310]  I think...
[48:30.310 --> 48:31.130]  Six minutes?
[48:31.330 --> 48:31.530]  Okay.
[48:33.050 --> 48:39.850]  I just very briefly, I noticed most of the computers you mentioned are also listed a lot in the book Computer Lib by Ted Nelson.
[48:40.110 --> 48:42.430]  That's a really good resource and I really love reading it.
[48:42.430 --> 48:43.630]  Who's from New Jersey, by the way?
[48:44.310 --> 48:45.770]  He seems like he's from everywhere.
[48:46.130 --> 48:47.190]  He's moved around a lot.
[48:47.770 --> 48:49.850]  And his mother is the actress Celeste Holm.
[48:53.450 --> 48:54.530]  Just a really good...
[48:54.530 --> 48:57.150]  They reprinted it in 87 and I've got a copy of the reprint.
[48:57.310 --> 48:58.190]  It's a lot of fun to read.
[48:58.310 --> 48:58.970]  Yeah, I love that too.
[48:59.090 --> 49:00.470]  I definitely like that.
[49:02.690 --> 49:07.090]  I noticed on the BBS forums listed that one was called Dumps R Us.
[49:09.190 --> 49:11.470]  Was that like the first carding forum or something?
[49:13.870 --> 49:14.770]  Dumps R Us?
[49:15.010 --> 49:15.890]  Yeah, if you notice.
[49:15.890 --> 49:20.950]  Well, I have to admit, I haven't been to every single BBS on Earth, but...
[49:20.950 --> 49:22.870]  Yeah, that one, like...
[49:22.870 --> 49:23.970]  Which one is it?
[49:24.030 --> 49:24.390]  What number?
[49:25.050 --> 49:27.610]  The 201-885-7404.
[49:27.730 --> 49:28.350]  Oh yeah, there it is.
[49:28.890 --> 49:29.750]  Gee Wong's?
[49:30.010 --> 49:32.110]  Yeah, that's really, you know, Dumps R Us.
[49:32.110 --> 49:33.930]  Does anyone recognize any of these sports?
[49:34.270 --> 49:36.510]  Anybody buy some CVVs there or something?
[49:36.510 --> 49:37.830]  Chances are it was file sharing.
[49:38.290 --> 49:38.970]  File sharing?
[49:39.190 --> 49:39.710]  Okay, alright.
[49:40.870 --> 49:42.930]  It could be core dumps, it could be anything.
[49:43.270 --> 49:43.870]  Oh, okay, alright.
[49:43.870 --> 49:44.710]  Pictures of dumps, I don't know.
[49:47.310 --> 49:48.890]  See, that was a great thing about...
[49:48.890 --> 49:49.470]  What?
[49:49.690 --> 49:52.050]  The guy running is running a dance studio in Dumps R Us.
[49:52.490 --> 49:54.150]  Yeah, but the pictures were ASCII art.
[49:54.510 --> 49:54.550]  Yeah.
[49:57.730 --> 49:58.050]  Alright.
[49:59.750 --> 50:00.550]  Anybody else?
[50:01.830 --> 50:05.770]  Alright, well, if you have an old computer that you need to have rescued, see us.
[50:05.890 --> 50:07.690]  Maybe we can come out and drive out and get it.
[50:08.410 --> 50:14.150]  We, certainly, that's part of our charter is to save and preserve these computers and actually fix them and get them up and running.
[50:14.650 --> 50:18.830]  That's our thing, and I guess we're done then.
[50:19.030 --> 50:19.450]  The end.
[50:20.590 --> 50:21.110]  Thank you.
[50:21.470 --> 50:21.990]  Thank you.
[50:27.720 --> 50:28.440]  Good job, Bill.
[50:29.420 --> 50:29.940]  Thanks, Evan.
[50:30.700 --> 50:30.920]  Thank you.
[50:30.920 --> 50:31.080]  You too.