The Young Engineer at Work

[gbrown]

Last weekend my sweetie and I mucked out the basement over my Dad's house. It's amazing how much stuff can accumulate over the years! It's made ME want to clean out before someone has to do it after I've shuffled off this mortal sphere. In a nearly-overlooked envelope containing a bunch of baby stuff (MY baby stuff!) I found a copy of the January 1951 Bell Laboratories Record. I've uploaded some PDF's of Page 38 (http://www.xmn.com/images/lcb1.pdf) and Page 39 (http://www.xmn.com/images/lcb2.pdf) of the article.

Fun Stuff: at the top of page 38 check out my Dad adjusting a BIG hunk of metal. None of them wussy microcircuits for him! Oh...wait. They didn't HAVE wussy microcircuits then! Top left of page 39 has Dad "computing" on that wonderful contraption: the K&E Slide Rule. Said rule now resides in my personal collection. Upper right of page 39... it's kind of hard to see, but Dad is checking out a maze of wires on a breadboard. At least when something went wrong you could actually see the individual component that was going up in smoke.

Last but not least... check out the Cute Baby at the bottom of the page. Your's truly at 2 weeks! Mom and Dad are both gone now <sigh>, but that chair Mom is sitting in lives in my living room.

I wonder what MY kids will dig up when I move on (which I trust is in the far, far, distant future!).

[TJ_Tigger]

Very cool Gary. A Model at just two weeks old. What a keepsake. Yes that comes from a packrat. :D

[Corey]

Cool Gary! :)

[SUF6NEWBIE]

Wonderfull keepsake Gary..tks for sharing

[Intrigued]

Thank you for sharing such treasures Gary.

Sincerely,

[gbrown]

Another blast from The Archives:

Fundamentals of NIKE-ZEUSS Computers , May-June 1959, Revised 1960 by "Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated" (with the "original" Bell System logo on the cover.) The Nike-Zeuss (http://www.wsmr-history.org/NikeZeus.htm) was one of the first anti-missle missles. We lived down in El Paso for a year while Dad worked up at White Sands Missle Range. I actually got to see a launch of the Zeuss up at WSMR. Way Cool for a ten year old!

From The Program Unit section: A digital computer can only operate according to a sequence of instructions that has been prepared for the solution of a given computation. Such a sequences is called a program, and the person preparing it is referred to as a programer. The machine cannot perform any operation that is not provided for in its program.

Remeber, now, that this is from a book that is being presented to trained engineers. "Ok, guys.... this is a C O M P U T E R" Amazing what needed to be in this introductory text. Page after page of Decimal-Binary Arithmetic (I quote from the index.) Cool part: Twistor Memory . This section tells how to build memory modules. Little donuts of ferrite, strips of magnetic metal, little teensy wires. Again, I quote:

The largest of the memories used is the Program Memory in the Program Unit. This assembly consists of 2 packages of 2048 word capacity each for a total of 4096 words.

Each "word" was 24 bits long. 6 bits of data, 18 bits of book-keeping things. So, while our current "byte" holds 8 full bits of data, the NIKE-ZEUSS "word" holds but 6 bits of data. Thus, program memory is 12288 bits, or in our current scheme, 1536 bytes. Good heavens! Dear old Dad had to stuff his active program into 1.536 KB. Talk about having to optimize code, eh?

[Brett]

Good heavens! Dear old Dad had to stuff his active program into 1.536 KB. Talk about having to optimize code, eh?

Yeah right! VB.NET could not get the top 1 mm of its pinky finger into that kind of space. It would be:

dim s as string <<<<<ERROR - OUT OF MEMORY>>>>>>

:p :p

[Worm]

C'mon Brett, use meaningful variable names :D

[Intrigued]

C'mon Brett, use meaningful variable names :D
(with all the exuberance of Steve Balmer at a M.S. developers' conference)...

Optimize! Optimize! Optimize! (the code, less is better!)

:D

[Intrigued]

Whaaat? *shaking head with but a whisper of laughter*

As in...

Developers!
Developers!
Developers!
Developers!
Developers!
Developers!

Developers!

*Steve, nothing but love! :p