{"id":486,"date":"2003-04-08T09:40:17","date_gmt":"2003-04-08T14:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/?p=486"},"modified":"2003-04-08T09:40:17","modified_gmt":"2003-04-08T14:40:17","slug":"those_who_forge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/04\/08\/those_who_forge.html","title":{"rendered":"Those who forget the past are doomed to reprogram it"},"content":{"rendered":"

A fascinating bit of computer history here, as one of the gents involved in programming VisiCalc (remember it?) relates details of the development, and the hardware of the day, which are hard to believe<\/a> now, just a few decades later.<\/p>\n

Before discussing keyboards, it’s worth noting that back in 1979 people viewed the keyboard as an impediment to using computers. After all, only secretaries could type and the rest of us need to be able to talk to the computer. Hence the decades spent on trying to get computers to understand speech. It turns out that most people could type (at least those who used spreadsheets) since it was a basic skill necessary for getting through college. In fact, speech is a very problematic way to interact with a spreadsheet. In fact, the spreadsheet itself is used as a communications vehicle rather than speech.
\nThe Apple ][ had a simple keyboard that only had upper case letters and only two arrow keys. There were no interrupts nor a clock. If the user typed a character before the keyboard input buffer was emptied it would be lost.
\n[…] In 1978 the Apple ][ was viewed as a game machine. In fact, it was intended to be a hobbyist game machine. It had up to 64KB (that’s kilo bytes) or 65336 8 bit bytes, or 2^16 compared with today’s PC’s which now have 2^29 (512 Megabytes) or 8000 (ok, 8196) times as much memory. We had no hard drive. Apple had cornered the market for floppy drives but they weren’t universal so we supported the cassette tape player as a storage device but, fortunately, few users even know about it.
\nThere was no way to start or stop the tape drive. We had to leave gaps in the data on the tape to allow for processing of each chunk of data before we got the next one.<\/p>\n

Cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fascinating bit of computer history here, as one of the gents involved in programming VisiCalc (remember it?) relates details of the development, and the hardware of the day, which…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hi-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":31417,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/19\/logged-and-ordered.html","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":0},"title":"Logged and Ordered","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 19-Nov-12 7:11am","format":false,"excerpt":"An analysis of the outcomes of 456 episodes of \"Law & Order\", and how those outcomes changed over the two decades of the series. \u00a0Cool. Embedded Link The Law and Order Database: All 20 Seasons 450 people died to make this spreadsheet possible. Google+: View post on Google+","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":25267,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/10\/command-and-control-and-computing.html","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":1},"title":"Command and control and computing","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 10-Jan-12 1:23pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Cory Doctorow on general-purpose computers and how they are a challenge not just to Big Media, but to pretty much every other interest out there ... and what's at stake in defeating Big Media attempts to try and lock them down. #ddtb Embedded Link Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5788,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/07\/18\/frankensteins_e.html","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":2},"title":"Frankenstein’s #ERROR","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 18-Jul-04 1:56pm","format":false,"excerpt":"US geneticists are having big problems with data stored in Excel. The problem, which can cause medically important genes to be hidden from view, is widespread, and has affected some...","rel":"","context":"In "Hi-Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Hi-Tech","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/hi-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10850,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/06\/14\/on_the_naming_of_names.html","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":3},"title":"On the naming of names","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 14-Jun-07 11:14pm","format":false,"excerpt":"It's a Word document. It's an Excel spreadsheet. It's an Access database. It's a Powerpoint ......","rel":"","context":"In "Hi-Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Hi-Tech","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/hi-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5695,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/01\/22\/browsy_goodness.html","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":4},"title":"Browsy goodness","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 22-Jan-04 12:36pm","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the most annoying bits of behavior in Web browsing (and I don't know that it's true outside of Windows, or outside of IE -- I can only speak...","rel":"","context":"In "My Computer"","block_context":{"text":"My Computer","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/my-computer"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":52006,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/31\/vintage-computer-cheesecake.html","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":5},"title":"Vintage computer cheesecake","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 31-Jul-15 1:26pm","format":false,"excerpt":"What initially struck me about so many of these pictures is how modern they looked to my eye -- at which point I realized how my image of what computers \"look like\" came from Hollywood during the 60s and 70s -- the 2001 and Andromeda Strain and UFO era --\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}