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URI IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80Ã24 display (2019)
thangalin wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
The linage can be traced back to Basile Bouchon's paper tape invention
in 1725. The article doesn't mention the role of punched cards in The
Holocaust, though, which my blog post goes into:
URI [1]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
Animats wrote 1 hour 30 min ago:
The PARC crowd thought displays should have the form factor of a sheet
of paper. Hence the Alto display.[1] That never caught on.
URI [1]: https://www.righto.com/2018/01/xerox-alto-zero-day-cracking-di...
locallost wrote 44 min ago:
I see people doing that today.
BirAdam wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
Man. I love the design of old terminals, computers, and such.
I am, also, extremely glad that these form factors were abandoned.
Having an old terminal, it is possibly the least ergonomic machine I
have ever used.
thakoppno wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
One theory I saw argued the punch card size was the reason for 80x24.
But why were punch cards that size? They were designed off of the
cards used for the census. Why were the census cards that size?
Because they were modeled after the dollar bill size.
I do love thought experiments like this but do believe theyâre
insatiably unresolvable.
staplung wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
And the reason they were modeled after the dollar bill size is
because there were already many types of systems for storing and
organizing them. That came in handy for the census.
The old BBC Connections series has a segment with James Burke using
the old census tabulators.
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0&t=2640s
ronsor wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
In the end, all reasons resolve to either "it's what we had at the
time" or "someone thought it looked good."
theamk wrote 4 hours 52 min ago:
Not always, for example original CD disks had capacity of 74
minutes to accommodate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
rasz wrote 11 min ago:
That one also turned out a myth :) CD size was determined by
Cassette tape dimensions (diagonal, human can still hold one in
one hand) and that combined with conservative pits/lands/track
pitch choice drove the play time.
thus CD runtime was derived from something "what we had at the
time".
veltas wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
From a linked article on shift registers:
> To avoid these astronomical prices, some computers used the cheaper
alternative of shift register memory.
Might be a direction for 2026 too?
II2II wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
Tangentially related: is there a history covering IBM's development of
microcomputers? It is clear that the traditional story of the
development of the IBM PC leaves out many important details. There the
5100/5110/5120, which goes back to the mid-1970's and reflects the
stereotype of IBM. There is also the System/23 DataMaster, where the
hardware seems to be the basis of the IBM PC. This seems to go against
the traditional story that the IBM PC was some sort of renegade
project. (If anything, they appear to be companion projects. The main
difference being the DataMaster's focus upon IBM firmware/software.)
kens wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
Like I need another big project :-)
The IBM Datamaster is an interesting system, but it was doomed. It
had an 8-bit Intel 8085 processor, cost $9000, and came out in July
1981. The IBM PC had a 16-bit 8088 processor, cost $1565, and came
out a month later. So there was no reason to buy a Datamaster
There's a good description of Datamaster in "A Personal History of
the IBM PC" by Dave Bradley (one of the PC's designers).
Unfortunately, it's paywalled.[1]
URI [1]: https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2011.163
hanfoo wrote 7 hours 15 min ago:
Deeply fascinated by these historical threads. It is precisely the
various design choices made throughout history that have shaped the
computer systems we use today.
lysace wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
No idea if this was a factor, but 80x25 on the IBM PC allows for
showing 80x24 plus that extra line of function key labels: [1] (IBM
BASIC screenshot)
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#/media/File%3AIBM_Cass...
bluedino wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
Imagine when edit.com came out and QBASIC used it for the editor. You
lost two more lines of valuable code space!
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor#/media/File%3AMS...
lysace wrote 2 hours 45 min ago:
I recently went back to my 1993 Turbo Pascal code (mostly 2D VGA
and Sound Blaster game engine experiments) on period correct
hardware.
I was surprised by how claustrophobic it felt to only see 21 lines
of code in e.g. Turbo Pascal 7.0. Still didnât like the squashed
80x43 mode. [1] Then I remembered how larger displays and xterm
felt like such a liberation a few years later.
URI [1]: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c38a28c3-84c3-ba28-1011-...
jtarrio wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
You know, this is funny because QBasic did not use EDIT.COM.
Instead, QBasic was the editor and EDIT.COM was a simple program
that called "QBASIC /EDIT" :-)
bluedino wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
It was basically the same thing. That's my point.
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