JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
The cover of this magazine–Computers and Automation, one of the earliest popularly-based journals dealing with electronic computation–features a rather remarkable image, an English message, a response to a problem, from a computer. The editor, Edmund C. Berkeley, wrote a short appreciation of this “output device for an automatic computer”, a “symbol generator and viewer”.
“The screen of the picture tube shown will present as many as 10,000 characters per second. Each character is formed by an array of bright spots, a selection from a rectangular array of a total of 35 spots, five wide and seven deep. For a capital letter T, for example, the selection is five spots across the top and six more spots down through the middle…
For 1957, it would have been a remarkable thing to see messages displayed in such a fashion, in a revolutionary new way.
