Category: Computer Tech/History

The History of ASCII.  I just wanted to include this short bit on a small archive of material related to the development of ASCII from one of the team members who helped to create it.  A more full description appears in the “continue reading” section, below. [Since writing this in 2012 the archive has been donated to special collections at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, where I assume it can be viewed and utilized.]

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

“Leprechaun, an Automatic Digital Computer the Size of a Television Set”  was a short article written for Computers and Automation in the July 1957 issue.  It is uncredited, by the two-pager I think was the product of the editor, Edmund Berkeley, and discussed a remarkable new computer that was as “small” as a not-by-today’s-standards small television set.  The Leprechaun used seriously fewer components than a “regular” machine (though that standard is not identified), using “only about 9,000 electrical components”, half of which were transistors).

Leprechaun represents a significant advance in computer design, with its innards very reachable and accessible, making it a highly useful tool for testing other components for other machines. The TRADIC (for TRAnsistor DIgital Computer or TRansistorized Airborne DIgital Computer) was also the first transistorized computer in America, completed in 1954, and the godchild of  J. H. Felker of Bell Labs for the for the U.S. Air Force, and was initially designed for use aboard an aircraft or a naval vessel (making it the first airborne transistorized digital computer). The idea of the manageably-sized computer had only recently lifted itself from science fiction thoughts of it being able to fit in the trunk of a car (as envisioned somewhat earlier by Isaac Asimov) and here we see it, already in the future-made-present, miniaturized to the size of a television set.

JF Ptak Science  Books      Post 1741

Well, perhaps not “fun”, unless that was an acronym for “fabulously understated nomenclature”.   The first mobile computers–as science fiction-y

The Mobile Digital Computer was intended to be a transistorized van-mounted computer used to store and route data as part of the U.S. Army’s Fieldata system.  The machine was indeed built and deployed by 1959–as were the MOBIDIC A,B,C,D,E and 7a by the early 1960’s–and it was a successful component, even though the overall network was not successful.  Fieldata was supposed to integrate all manner of information and distribute it to battlefield recipients. My friend (Dr.)  Carl Hammer (1914-1904), who I knew from being in the neighborhood in Georgetown, was a delightful man who had long and significant history in the development of the modern computer.  He told me one afternoon–stopping in to visit on his constitutional–in his sly and amusing way about working on the MOBIDIC while he was at Sylvania. (He had just finished heading up Remington Rand’s UNIVAC European Division before going to Sylvania.) Anyway he started his story about the MOBIDIC by telling me that it was the world’s first portable computer (sitting in a 42-foot-long semitrailer) and that it had gun racks.  The reason for the gun racks was simple–if something was made by the U.S. Army, and it had wheels, then it had to have a gun rack.  Case closed.

Now, to the contender, the “other” first mobile computer, the DYSEAC on its computer trailer.   Most of what I have read places the MOBIDIC with priority, but others clearly place the machine in operation in 1954, years before the MOBIDIC became operational.  In any event the DYSEAC was the Second Standards Electronic Automatic Computer, a first generation National Bureau of Standards computer built for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Here’s the cross-section cutaway for it:

And so on to the battle between the two, outfitting them perhaps with crunching and sawing devices, metal biting bits, and so on, I wonder which might be the one to come out on top?  I think I’d like to claim the MOBIDIC, if for no other reason than it was armed.  And the name, of course.

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This lovely illustrated story appears in the December 1957 issue of Edmund Berkeley’s Computers and Automation, which was the world’s first semi-popular magazine devoted to the computer.  The article is divided into questioned sections, including:

 “What is ‘Operating a Computer’ Like?,  showing the “new Computing Center” at the famous Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, the place where most of modern computing in America was born in 1944/5/6.