Jun 27 2007
50 Years Ago, The Home Computer
Someone sent me this image from a 1954 Populare Mechanics article on the home computer of 2004. It is a hoot. Sorry I don’t have time to do a blow up version of the picture right now, but the caption says:
“Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yest invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.”
We all are wondering what the heck the ship’s wheel is for. I was wonder if it was used to wind the spring or something. It is interesting to note that ten years later Star Trek would be in production and would envision the automatic sliding doors we now find everywhere and the concept of the blue-tooth com interface (now we know what Uhura had sticking in her ear all these years). All I know is that is one massive keyboard and I doubt that TV is HD.
If that doesn’t ring a bell, here is a link to a classic car page.
Merlin, just as a matter of interest. I went to a computer tech school full time for one year in the mid ’60’s to learn operation and programming. we had all those languages’s that you mentioned and a couple others. this was in the days when they had iron core 4 k memory that could do a hell of a lot. I later went to college full time for 4 years and considered computer science for a major, but by that time, I had learned that in most business’s the computer dept was a dead end, if you were good at it, you couldn’t be replaced and so the upper management jobs went to engineers, so I chose Chem E instead, thank god.. and sure enough got into upper management. but I always continued my fascination with computers and had some of the early models, mostly radio shack, even back before microsoft or apple. Just also of interest, I was a classmate of John Edwards NC State ’74
and I hasten to add, I did not know him. He was in Textiles.