[Leica] Back ar work

[Herbert Kanner]

My mail program went nuts last week. Twice I sent a rather long piece of mail describing the circumstances around a Gallery picture and each time the mail went into a black hole and the text had to be composed again. This time I'm being smarter and writing and saving it first in a word processor.

OK. Don't remember what I last posted re health, but I was in the hospital for over a week with congestive heart failure. Made a rapid recovery as soon as I got home, and after a couple of weeks, returned to volunteer week at the Computer History Museum.

As a consequence of the loss of the Babbage Difference Engine, I rejoined the group that gives twice monthly demonstrations of a working PDP1 computer (vintage 1960), the first “mini-computer”, in fact, the manufacturer (Digital Equipment Corporation) coined the term.

The PDP1 is about the size of three household refrigerators. It's turned on at the throw of one switch. It sold for $120,000. In the year it came out, the manufacturer donated one to MIT. One professor permitted “hackers” access to it from midnight to morning. This was before “hackers” became a pejorative term. One of those hackers was Peter Samson, who figured out how to make the machine play four-part music, and our demo inclueds the opening of a Bach fugue. The other, Steve Russell, largely wrote the code for the world's first video game, Space War, which later became an arcade game.

When I arrived at the Museum a week ago Saturday, I found the PDP1 team in the cafeteria area enjoing a post-lunch bull session. I just had to take a picture. We were all wearing our uniform red shirts. Note the guy on the right; that's Steve Russell.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1000005_001.jpg.html <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1000005_001.jpg.html>

Please look “large”.



Herbert Kanner
kanner at acm.org

Question Authority and the authorities will question you.