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.
Merlin, must be very nostalgic for you. I was a reader of Popular Mechanic back then, but can’t say that I remember that picture.
Aj
The home computer portion they are talking about only related to the Digital Equipment Corporation data entry terminal and the tv screen monitor on the wall.
Now as to the other I can tell you exactly what it is because I spent 12 years running those operator positions.
What you are looking at is the combined control station for a 637 class submarine nuclear power plant.
It is divided in three sections.
From left to right.
The throttleman station which operates the propulsion turbines. The large handwheel is for ahead steam, the small wheel is for astern control.
The center panel is the Reactor Plant control panel which the operator controled the reactor and its support equipment in the reactor compartment i.e. main coolant pumps and valves.
The right panel is the Electrical Control panel from which the operator control the turbine generators and motor generator sets and the submarine battery and all the main remote operated breakers for the ships power distribution system.
Merlin,
You would know wouldn’t you. I agree they coopted some old sub stations to build ‘the model’, but they were serious. Clearly this is the waterproof verison of the home computer.
Do I need to say this is before my time – literally?
Off the top of my head, the terminal is a DEC LA-11 which was the normal choice of input to a DEC PDP-11 that initially only output to the printer on the terminal. It took three years for the screen output hardware to be upgraded into the PDP series of computers and if I recall correctly is was text mode only and a 48 character wide screen display.
With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.
Now that part is just laugh-out-loud funny.
It’s not real, it’s a internet myth, the picture is a fake.
1954 Popular Mechanics Photo Showing the Home Computer of the Future-Fiction!
The ship’s wheel is there because it’s a prototype of the Navy’s NMCI hardware.
Unfortunately, the actual hardware issued is considerably less advanced.
Cameron,
Man you spoiled all the fun! Just kidding. Fake? Who cares. It is about as close as I ever saw come out of the 50’s. I still like the wheel. I think I will add one to my Mac Laptop.
More here and here.
Cameron
Hate to say it buds, but I gotta disagree with you.
The actual photo you are looking at was the training facility in Savannah , Ga for the operators of the USNS Savannah, the only nuclear powered transport ship that was non military.
It used a different model reactor than the submarines did and this was then the training station ashore for the crew.
The terminal was for the training supervisor to input casualty senarios that operated a computer that simulated all the guage indications on the panels for the operators to respond to.
This picture was taken after the facility shut down and the tv screen was used for showing video tapes about the Savannah when this place operated as a museum.
The facility is now long gone.
LOL
Sorry AJ, you could use the wheel in place of the mouse.
AJ
Here is a page of history about my first personal computer
I used a Televideo Intertube 2 terminal for input and output and the printer I had was an NEC Spinwriter
10 grand for the computer with 2 8 inch disks and a 74 meg 14 inch hard drive and 1 meg of memory
800 bucks for the terminal and 3 grand for the printer
It ran Basic, Cobol, Fortran and RPG as well as the DMS database program.
Here is a copy of an old Byte magazine advertisement for my computer.
It is pictured in the lower right corner of the ad.
Top was the cpu cabinet (6502/z80/6502 processors, software selectable which ran)
Second down was the memory expansion card cage
Third down was the hard drive 74meg 14inch
Bottom is the fan cabinet
Guess what the durn thing still boots and runs.
GRR
The three processors were the 6502/Z80/6800
They eventually came up with a 5 processor board which added a 68000 and a Zilog Z8000
My first commercial computer I programmed on was made by Honeywell.
The two cabinets the size of refrigerators contained the CPU and a whole gasp 8K of memory.
It had 6 refrigerator sized tape drives and two washing machine size 5 meg hard drives.
Strictly ran RPG and data and program input was done but punch card readers and output was only a line printer.
My computing experience doesn’t go that far back. My first computer was a Commodore SX-64 with a little five-inch screen built-in. I used to type in some of those machine-language programs published in Compute! Magazine.
Aitch
My second job in computers was running the IBM system 32 based RPG for a shrimp boat builder, mostly payroll and job progress reports.
I was a job I worked by my buds the guy who ran the shop was upgrading the place to a system 34.
Then I moved up to a liquor distributer who was running IBM’s biggest and baddest mainframes with IBM series 1 computers front ending communication to their hundreds of IBM digital cash registers.
They were doing data mining on customer buying patterns and shelf movement optimization with customized product inventory for each store based on turnover of product and correlation of related items sold during a multi item purchase. For example people who bought Colt 45 Malt Liquor would also buy BBQ or Salt & Vinegar chips.
This was when data mining was a gleam in most people’s eyes.
Oh and I was still in high school at the time.
To place that computer I started out with for my own use, it was only about a year after you still were trying to work with such things as the cassette based Trash-80.
In my sophomore year I wrote a Cobol program set that did inventory control, invoice management and just in time ordering for a Standard Oil Distributor my mother worked for.
The hardware I used was the same computer I had with a support board that was available that allowed hooking up 16 serial port terminals to the computer so that the shipping and receiving, accounting and management functions could all access a common data base. It also handled payroll functions.
I sold about 800 copies of the software to other distributors as the word got out by mouth after the owner attended a regional meeting.
Aitch
I was born on a dairy farm in New York about half way between NYC and West Point. My father was a tenant worker and the owner rented out the other side of the massive colonial house on the property.
The gentleman from the couple next door was an early IBM sales person.
My first experience with a computer was when he took me on a trip to IBM upstate and let me WALK INSIDE THE COMPUTER.
The processor was vacuum tube based and programmed by using patch board cables. The memory was totally magnetic core based.
At that time there were no programming languages, not even assembler language, it was all hand coded from primitive binary machine instructions.
Just to give you a hint of how long ago that was he drove a Kaiser Henry J.
Now that’s old.