Farms: Mainframes and the Unix Revolution - Computerphile
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No internet, no networking; just a screen and a keyboard, or a pile of cards to punch holes in; mainframes were a world apart from today's smartphones and integrated circuits. Professor Brailsford remembers the Unix revolution. To hear about the omission of Gnu and Richard Stallman: http://youtu.be/Wi326Leuemg ICL computer photographs courtesy of couperus.org ICL punch-card photographs courtesy of yesterdaystechnology.com Professor Brailsford's discussion on the origin of Computer Science in academia http://youtu.be/uNuFVq5QeRk http://www.facebook.com/computerphile https://twitter.com/computer_phile This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley. Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: http://bit.ly/nottscomputer Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. See the full list of Brady's video projects at:http://periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/...
Comments
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Apparently Linus Torvalds programmed the Linux kernel on Minix. I remember he also insulted how the Minix kernel worked too. Listening to the man's opinions is such a fun time. He's so opinionated and says some of the greatest things.
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Why no love for Richard Stallman?
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I worked at Bell Fruit Manufacturing in Nottingham as late as 2001. We had a PDP 11 there to build slot machine code on before burning eproms for use in a machine. We used to set the build off, go for lunch and it might just have finished by the time you got back. My god that made you a careful and efficient programmer.
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14:50 This is why I love Computerphile. It's their give no fucks approach to editing that really sets them apart
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I loved learning on the ICL 1900 series.
When I went to work as a computer auditor for a large accounting firm, I bumped into IBM, NCR, Honeywell etc. and discovered that the George III and George IV Operating Systems ("GEneral ORGanisational Environment" I think was the translation of the acronym) were a long way in advance of the US competitors. Some of the big CDC and Burroughs systems came close, though.
I never worked with the new 2900 series, but there are still some standard features of the George systems which are not implemented in modern OSs. George systems defaulted to peripheral device independence, had internal file version management, virtual storage and dynamic memory management.
Ah, yes, nostalgia - not what it used to be... -
Watching David Brailsworth reminds me of learning maths and science from Johnny Ball or art and painting from Tony Hart. I absolutely love hearing his unique and knowledgable stories on the history of computing.
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What happened to the "Early Data Storage" video?
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Great narrator. I bet this guy's grandkids love it when he reads books to them and tells them stories.
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Is there only one extant photo of Ken Thompson? I've only ever seen the one.
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This is BY FAR my favourite person on Computerphile. I can listen to the stories this man has to share for days! Please keep these videos coming.
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yeah - in 1969 as a student you had to be very certain your program would run - if your punch cards had a simple error - you would lose a whole day - since your turned in punch cards would be returned the next day with your printout - I made a program that printed 99 bottles of beer on the wall down to 0 and was declared a genius by my drinking buddies
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Interesting. I was working for Singer Business Machines when we were sold to ICL. The machine on which I was programming became the ICL 1500 and was made in Utica, NY, USA. All the programming I did was written in 1500 Assembler. I had originally learned programming on an IBM 360, also using IBM Assembler.
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I think one of my test benches used one of those disk @3:50 Damn I feel old now.
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We had a PDP-11/23 and then a 11/73 at college... we were supposed to be doing CoBOL, but we were constantly getting into trouble for hacking around with the RSTS/E operating system, crashing it and annoying the other users... So the mainframe-era "hatred" of CS students followed through into the minicomputer era. ;)
When we first had Unix, it was wonderful... SO minimal, SO elegant... Not like the cumbersome, complex Linux systems we've got these days... I suppose that's the price of plug 'n' play. -
Such a shame to hear Linus credited tremendously, but no mention of Richard Stallman, the visionary who actually started the GNU (GNUs Not Unix) project.
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12:26 - I bet people who don't know computers would laugh at this.
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Professor Brailsford is a wonderful story teller.
His narration and personal reflection on the past makes this video a fascinating ride through a historic frontier in computing. -
Man, the memories. I remember BASIC programming using the local college's PDP 1170 running RSTS/E. That thing was just this massive mystery to a 16 year old kid. By the time I got to college in 1987 they'd changed to a VAX 6210 using VMS. I loved DEC equipment and VMS. I remember railing against having to use UNIX at my first job. UNIX's command line case sensitivity alone drove me mad. There wasn't such a thing in VMS, and typically I would use VMS with the caps lock on all the time. The thing that turned me around was the power of the UNIX shell scripting language. I fell in love with Bourne shell, and then more so Korn shell. The idea of piping command output to another command, parsing text with awk and sed; mind blown. I was hooked. It was like silly putty. You could bend, twist, and shape your scripts as you pleased. That was 1991. Still hooked.
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Hah I remember running a 64kb computer at home, a Tandy Radioshack TRS-80 Color Computer II, starting from 1984 I remember. It plugged into your TV and ran a version of Microsoft Basic. I can't remember the graphics resolution but I think it might have been something like 160x120 with 9 set colors, which were frankly aweful and didn't even include a proper white but instead an awful salmon buff colour. It was awesome xD
My programming experience was a bit stunted however for two reasons. First it didn't have a disk drive. Instead it used audio case tapes as mass storage. They were pretty finicky but worse we kept loosing the cable to connect the tape drive to the computer. I think we went through about 4 of them, and most of the time didn't have access to any sort of non-volatile memory. I think when it did work it could store about 8 full memory dumps or programs, each of which had to be loaded (slowly) into the memory with a CLOAD.
Secondly I didn't understand what PEEK and POKE did. Basically PEEK reads from an address and POKE writes an address. I didn't understand that all of memory was accessible in this way and even that the entirety of computer memory was a long array of bytes. What I could have done if I understood this... -
playing with it can be done on your PC or laptop with SIMH or HERCULES (for the IBM).
Have fun!