Lala asked:
I am writing a paper for my artificial intelligence class about how computers have changed since the 1980s (we were watching war games, but I missed the last part). Can someone help me out? Also, if you could tell me it is called with the old computers where you typed onto the screen and everything showed up there? (Like, it's a black screen and you type in commands.) Thanks!
I am writing a paper for my artificial intelligence class about how computers have changed since the 1980s (we were watching war games, but I missed the last part). Can someone help me out? Also, if you could tell me it is called with the old computers where you typed onto the screen and everything showed up there? (Like, it's a black screen and you type in commands.) Thanks!
Rhonda (13)
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Ammu (5)
DOS / unix what do ya want to know ==== you can go ren War games the wife and i love that movie oh and if ya can find it watch hackers the women that plays tombrader shows her bare boobs when she was 18
The differences in computers thirty years ago compared to now?
Compression & Processing Power = Computers are smaller & more powerful than they were 30 years ago.
Some search terms: L2 Cache, RAM, CD-Rom, DVD-Rom, Hard Disk
if you could tell me it is called with the old computers where you typed onto the screen and everything showed up there?
Most likely it was DOS (Disk Operating System) which dominated the the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions Windows 95, 98, and Me.
30 years ago was 1979. The IBM PC hadn’t come out yet. the big guns were
Commodore 64
Apple II and IIC
CP/M (running on lots of different computers)
Computers were 8 bit, so memory space was limited to 64k (although we were bank-switching in CP/M to get a little more than that) (Many of us were building our own computers – from scratch. Designing the hardware too.)
Businesses didn’t use microcomputers – they used mainframes or nothing.
About the only common languages were BASIC (Microsoft had a compiler, but everything else was interpreted BASIC (script)), Fortran, FORTH, LISP, ALGOL and – mostly – assembly for anything serious.
That “black screen” was the same as a command prompt today – but usually 16 lines of 64 characters. I think the word you want is ‘terminal’.
1979 – the year I graduated with a CS degree and started work.
Differences: computers. Most computers were large and time-shared: you had a “dumb terminal” – essentially just a keyboard and display – that connected to that machine. The Internet existed, but unless you were at one of a few schools or a DARPA-connected institution, you didn’t have access to it. Even NASA wasn’t on the Internet yet. Some personal computers were available, as noted, but they were small and relatively slow. A typical mainframe required a team of systems programmers to maintain, update, and extend the operating system (typically 5 or 6 of them) and a 24-hour operations staff (anywhere from 1 to 5, depending on how busy the machine was). Machine time was carefully recorded and charged to your account; you had to be careful not to run out of money by making too many runs; every run that found a syntax error and didn’t actually execute your program was more money spent, so people tended to spend a lot more time hand-checking their code even before punching it on cards (or typing it in on the terminal if they were lucky).
Mass storage: Relatively small and very expensive. I worked on an IBM mainframe at the time; its large disks were 100MB (yes, megabytes. 1/4 the storage of the original Mac’s floppy disks). The smaller removable disks were 29 megabytes. If you could get a terminal you were lucky. Most folks still submitted jobs via the card reader, and big boxes (and filing cabinets) of cards were the affordable offline storage. Tape was also available; one 9-inch reel would store around between 20 and 140 MB, depending on the capabilities of the tape drives. Tape was less convenient, because the tapes had to be handled by the system operators, which meant going through a lot of bureaucracy to check them in and out. Cards you’d handle yourself. A box of cards was capable of holding 16K of data, but most always carried far less than that, since typically you’d have source code on them, one line per card.
Software: Nearly everything was command-line software; Unix shell existed, but was rare because buying a Unix license was expensive, relatively speaking; in addition, none of the IBM mainframes ran it, so you were in a distinct minority if you wanted that. Most IBM mainframes ran OS/360 (NASA always trailed behind on this stuff, mostly because they bought in early and had to get as much life out of their machines as they could – we retired our last 390/95 in the mid 1980’s if I remember properly); if you had one of the new 370 machines with virtual memory, you had the option of running VM, which allowed you to create many virtual machines to run other IBM OS’es in, both the “big iron” OS/360 and the interactive CMS. Text editing was in line-oriented editors; if you used special IBM-only (and very expensive) terminals, you could do full-screen editing.
Debugging: primitive in the extreme. Since you generally couldn’t interact with your program, you were limited to adding print statements and trying to zero in on a bug that way. If you had a bad bug (using a system call improperly, or addressing memory outside of your program), you’d get a “core dump”: a big printout of all of the storage your program was using, in hexadecimal, with a character translation next to it, with a pointer to the address where your program died. You’d then work your way through the machine code to figure out where your program went wrong, and then try to map that back to a particular statement in your program. This was not easy, and commonly there would be a support group attached to the computer installation whose job it was to help do this.
Cuture: Pretty hierarchical. The system programmers were the high priests, and their word was law. You did not want to tick off the systems programmers, as they might get you barred from the machine. The operators were looked down on by the users, but at the same time feared, as they had the power to cancel your job if they wanted to (you didn’t want to tick off the operators either!). Cultures varied from machine to machine; some had a systems group that was accessible and worked with the users; others acted as if it was their machine and they were deigning to let the users, well, use it. Getting to be a systems programmer was a big deal, as you had to understand the intricacies of the OS and how it worked to be able to do your job. If there was a problem with the OS, the systems guys had to delve into the source code, come up with a fix, and then rebuild that part of the OS, or figure out how to patch it without a rebuild (this was preferred, as a build of the OS might take as long as a week and used a lot of resources).