Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:06:31 -0700
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From: Michael Travers 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of the phrase Virtual Community
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Sender: Michael Travers 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of the phrase Virtual Community

    Sender: Sally Bates 
    Subject: ?Origins of the phrase Virtual Community

    I'm interested in tracking down the origins of the phrase vitual
    community.  A friendly Yale library undertook a Nexis search for
    me and could find nothing earlier than Rheingold.  Rheingold thinks
    he may have read it somewhere but isn't sure.  In a paper that's
    been submitted for publication in a meteorology journal, I've
    attributed Rheingold with coining the phrase, but I'm uneasy about
    this.

Rheingold definitely did not originate the phrase. For an earlier
published usage, see the proceedings of the CPSR-sponsored symposium
Directions in Advanced Computing 92. As part of this symposium, I
organized a panel discussion titled "Virtual Society and Virtual
Community". This title was arrived at through discussion with Douglas
Schuler, the symposium organizer. So we may have coined the phrase,
although most likely it was floating around before we used it. BTW I
believe that Rheingold attended this event.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:16:43 -0700
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From: "Peter D. Junger" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> "Vaporware" & MS-DOS.
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Sender: "Peter D. Junger" 
Subject: Re: CM> "Vaporware" & MS-DOS.

Community Memory writes:

:
: Sender: Ersatzzz@aol.com
: Subject: the vapors
:
:
:   hasn't the tale now passed into legend
:   about how Gates and his partner told IBM
:   that they had an operating system ready for
:   their forthcoming PC, and that it just needed
:   a little tinkering... and then wrote DOS in a
:   matter of months, thus getting in on the
:   ground floor with a non-existant product, and
:   deterring IBM from looking elsewhere?

I don't know what Gates and Co. told IBM, but MSDOS and PCDOS was
purchased by Microsoft from a small company--the original DOS was a
quick and dirty rip-off for the 8086/8088 of CP/M for the 8080, 8085,
and Z80.  The original IBM PC was announced as coming with three
operating systems:  CP/M, PCDOS, and the P-system that was used with a
semi-compiled version of Pascal.  (I don't remember ever coming across
the P-system and don't remember much about it.)

To me the really interesting bit of history has to do with the failure
of Digital Research's CP/M to become the standard operating system for
the PC.  By the time the PC came out, Digital Research had MP/M, a
multi-tasking OS that was infinitely better than the original PCDOS.

If anyone knows the true story of why CP/M lost out I certainly would
like to hear it.

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
Internet:  junger@pdj2-ra.f-remote.cwru.edu    junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:21:02 -0700
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From: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> "Virtual Community" & "Digital Community"
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Sender: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"

Subject: "Virtual Community"

Not sure when that started but know I saw "digital villiage" in the
early/mid '80s and it seemed to mean the same thing. Believe DECUS
sposored something along those lines around then with a dialup BBS.

                                                P.fla
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:25:24 -0700
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From: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security" 
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Subject: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne
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Sender: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"

Subject: Vaproware & the Osborne

>Sometimes preannouncement is not malicious but just stupid. Osborne
>Computer com
>pany, the makers of the first portable computer (42 lbs.) went into bankrupcy s
>hortly after announcing a new model while dealer's shelves were stocked with th
>e old stuff. The cash flow dried up and the company ran out of funds before the
> new model could be delivered.

Saw a number of Osbornes and the original model just was not that interesting.
Tiny screen with a limited display. My absolute criteria was that whatever
I bought had to have at least 80x24 to be usable since a major use was to
be in talking to mainframes where the "real" work was to be done.

I had a VT-100 and modem at home at the time, and was just not willing to
spend $3000 (could still buy a good car for that then) for something that
was less capable.

As I have mentioned before, other than the Sinclair ZX-80 and 81 "toys", the
first computer I bought was a Columbia VP-1600 "transportable" - 8088/dual
floppy/32 lbs/128k but was able to emulate a VT-100 "good enough".

                                        Warmly,
                                                Padgett
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:29:47 -0700
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Subject: CM> Vaproware & MS-DOS
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Sender: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"

Subject: Vaproware & MS-DOS

>  back, hasn't the tale now passed into legend
>  about how Gates and his partner told IBM
>  that they had an operating system ready for
>  their forthcoming PC, and that it just needed
>  a little tinkering... and then wrote DOS in a
>  matter of months, thus getting in on the
>  ground floor with a non-existant product, and
>  deterring IBM from looking elsewhere?

May be an urban legend but it just ain't so. My recollection (by crackey), is
that Mr. Bill & co (didn't Pauul Allen do most of MS programming ?) said
"yup" & went to Seattle Computer Products where Tim Patterson has a thingy
called 86/DOS. MS leased it at first, then bought all rights around 1984
or so.

Tim is still around somewhere (see his columns in "Dr. Dobb's" occasionally,
why not ask him what happened ?

While we are on that subject, v1.0 (I have a copy *somewhere*) was pretty
basic. There was no "DEL" command - you used "ERASE", no directory structure
(but then the PC did not support hard disks in 1981). Back then most people
did not even buy an OS (wasn't it around $400 extra then ?) Instead running
almost completely off the built-in ROM BASIC (why IBM was talking to Mr.
Bill in the first place.)

                                        Warmly,
                                                        Padgett
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:38:30 -0700
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From: Phil Gyford 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> "Vaporware" & Ted Nelson's Xanadu, Pointer to Wired story.
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Sender: Phil Gyford 
Subject: Re: CM> "Vaporware" & Ted Nelson's Xanadu.

>There was a very well done article about Ted Nelson in WIRED Magazine a year
>ago or more ago which claimed that his XANADU software project was the
>longest standing and most expensive vaporware project ever.

You can find the complete article at:
http://www.hotwired.com/wired/3.06/features/xanadu.html


' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
 P H I L   G Y F O R D              WIRED UK     work: +44 (0)171 775 3434
                            phil@wired.co.uk     facs: +44 (0)171 775 3401
             http://www.paranoia.com/~fabius     home: +44 (0)171 622 9058
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:42:34 -0700
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From: Nelson Winkless 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Some memories of magazines
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Sender: Nelson Winkless 
Subject: CM: Some memories of magazines

        The comments by Larry Press and Walt Crawford stir recollections
that really deserve some research before I blither about them, but that's
too much work, so...
        SCCS (Southern California Computer Society) Interface Magazine
foundered, as Larry recalls...and my cloudy memory says that Bob Jones (with
his wife and gang of kids) stepped in to publish a magazine for that very
large club of computer enthusiasts. I think some dispute broke out over who
actually owned the magazine, when it turned out to be worth owning, and they
parted ways...Bob going off the publish Interface Age, which flourished for
some years.
        The leader of  SCCS was a round, balding chap (Dr. Lou...unh...Lou
...can't quite make that name snap in) who was a prominent attendee at the
World Altair Computer Conference. During some computer show in San
Francisco, he led three or four of us on a tour of the restaurants at
Ghirardelli Square. This involved walking among the patrons until Lou found
somebody eating a dish that
was interesting. He'd stand over the diner, pointing out the items on his
plate, and commenting on their preparation and desirability. We, his captive
audience, were as puzzled by this remarkable performance as the diners were.
"Why are we watching people eat?" asked Carol Stagg, a member of our party
who was then an ad space rep for Personal Computing. When Larry raises the
topic of SCCS, it immediately evokes memories of embarrassment at Senor Pico's.
        Walt's enthusiasm for Creative Computing brings back a flood of
things. When I became editor of Personal Computing, my dad became interested
in computers, got one, began doing some advertising work (He was a bigtime
ad copywriter...did the Kellogg's cereals spots for years, among other
things, and wrote the Snap, Crackle & Pop song with one of my brothers) for
Gene Murrow at Computer Power and Light in Studio City...and to my horror,
began to publish articles in computer magazines under his own name.
        The problem was that his name was the same as mine. He was NBW Jr.
I'm NBW III... but nobody pays any attention to the numbers. "You can't do
that," I said. "It looks as if the editor of one magazine is writing for
another. It's one thing to have your son follow in your footsteps, but to
have your father do it is too confusing!"
        He was a bit testy, but began to use the name Timothy Purinton in
doing a series of articles David Ahl bought for Creative. (These things
involved a running character, a kid named Stan, who was a wizard at figuring
odds, and applying his computer to matters that involved them.) After a
couple of years of this, David was pretty tired of young Stan, and told me
he thought the idea was worn out. "Don't tell me," I said, "go talk to Timothy."
        ...and one other point. Walt liked the practical "user" aspects of
Creative, in contrast with Byte's relatively heavy technical slant. It was
necessary to find a niche for each magazine. Byte was clearly a technical
journal. We thought of Creative largely as a game magazine (Hammurabi, etc..)
I made a big issue of saying that Personal Computing was a magazine "about
people using computers." I didn't know much about the technology of computers
(and not much about producing magazines), but I could write and select
entertaining stuff about people, so that gave us the niche.
        We had a running them comparing personal computer enterprises with a
kid's lemonade stand. We referred to The Lemonade Computer Company (for
which Kim Behm did a number of of superb illustrations). It wasn't all that
easy to find practical personal computer applications in the mid 70's. We
ran pieces on selling spreadsheet services (pre-VisiCalc), one on keeping
golf scores and statistics for tournaments, and one on selling "instant
portraits" printed out in alpha characters by computer in booths at fairs,
among a few others.
        The situation has changed in twenty years...but not by adding a
whole lot of applications that people can sell as Lemonade services.
Instead, the systems and software packages are placed in the hands of the
end-users of the services. Some of us didn't anticipate this clearly.
        Enough.

        --Nels




-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nelson Winkless                   Email: correspo@swcp.com
ABQ Communications Corporation    Voice: 505-897-0822
P.O. Box 1432                     Fax:   505-898-6525
Corrales NM 87048 USA             Website: http://www.swcp.com/correspo
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:46:35 -0700
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From: "Suzanne M. Johnson" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origin of "Virtual"
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Sender: "Suzanne M. Johnson" 
Subject: Origin of "Virtual"

Regarding the request from Sally Bates on origin of "Virtual Community"..

Back in the early 70's when Tenex became one of the first virtual memory
operating systems, I can recall seeing and hearing "virtual" appended to
many nouns.

I  suggest perhaps looking at the works of Christopher Evans (The Mighty
Micro, The Micro Millenium) and/or Jacques Vallee (The Network Revolution).
(Evans is early 70's, Vallee 70's and early 80's.)
__________________________________________________
Suzanne M. Johnson           Sunnyvale, California
              johnson@rahul.net
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:50:47 -0700
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From: "Bill Anderson" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> IMSAI 8080 and early word processors
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Sender: "Bill Anderson" 
Subject: Re: CM> S-100 microcomputers

I still own an IMSAI 8080, serial no. 25. When I first purchased the
machine in I think February 1973 or 74, it was the Altair/Imsai bus.
That became the Altair/Imsai/Polymorphic bus. I was at the meeting on
the bus standard that changed the name to S-100 bus. Wayne Green was not
to happy about it and blasted in the decision in Byte magazine.

BTW:) My IMSAI still works. However, since I no longer have an ASCII
terminal, I have to use a my desktop or laptop (both Pentiums) as a
terminal. My machine has the first Dutronic 8K memory boards in it, plus
a couple Vector graphic 16K boards. My system went from Teletype and
papertape, to video monitor with a Cherry Keyboard, to ASCII terminal.
Along with paper tape, I tried the audio cassette and then went to 8in
floppy disks. Some of the parts in that machine probably came from
Tarbell. In those days, one had to be could at solder to build a PC.

As for old word processing software. I think I still have an original
copy of Electric Pencil floating around.

Although the machine suffered many upgrades, I continued to use it on a
regular basis until about 1983. Altough I know longer have them, I used
to own an Onyx Z80 with a Corvus shoebox harddisk, and an Onyx Z8000
running the first version of UNIX released by Bob Marsh. Of course, I
just got rid of my 300 baud acoustic coupler on the last move.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:54:51 -0700
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From: "Laurence I. Press" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of "virtual community" and J.C.R. Licklider, 1968.
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: Re: CPSR-HISTORY digest 31

> Sender: Sally Bates 
> Subject: ?Origins of the phrase Virtual Community
>
>
> I'm interested in tracking down the origins of the phrase vitual
> community.  A friendly Yale library undertook a Nexis search for

Licklider, J. C. R. and Taylor, Robert W., "The Computer as a
Communication Device," Science and Technology, April, 1968, 21-31,
speaks of communities of "communities of comon interest" as opposed to
communities of common location.  The context was scientific resarch
and collaborative work using networked computers.  Not the exact
phrase, but perhaps the meaning you are looking for.

Lar

[Moderator's Note: J.C.R. Licklider may well be the most influential, and
least publicly recognized, person in the history of computer science.  He
set ARPA on course towards constructing ARPANET and directed Project MAC at
MIT; he also funded Engelbart's work on creating the mouse and windows.  If
anyone has  recollections of Licklider, I think we would all be delighted
to read them.]
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 01:08:39 -0700
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From: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of word "vaporware."
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Sender: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of word "vaporware."

> Oh yes, Vaporware is not limited to the Software world. When the
> Commodore Amiga (or was that the Atari ST? I can never remember) was
> first demonstrated at a trade show, it was running an amazing set of
> software. The products looked like Microsoft Word, and other such
> products. The demonstrators didn't want you to get to close, though,
> because if you did, you would have found out that it was an IBM PC
> stuffed into an Amiga case!

It certainly wan't the Amiga. Its flagship demos were the bouncing ball,
the eagle, and other graphics wonders. I suspect it might have been the
ST because it was "IBM compatible" in an odd way: it ran a derivitive of
CP/M-68K, the 68000 version of Digital Research's clone of Microsoft's
clone of Digital Research's 8080 operating system. This compatibility
went down all the way to odd design quirks of MS-DOS (like the DUP system
call, copied from UNIX apparently to eventually support multitasking but
finally used for other purposes) but was in the final analysis completely
useless: MS-DOS software wasn't easily ported to the ST because of the
radically different memory management environments.

(I had an ST, briefly, but soon abandoned it for the Amiga)
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 01:15:34 -0700
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From: LESPEA@muze.com (Leslie Pearson)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Early On-Line Services
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Sender: LESPEA@muze.com (Leslie Pearson)
Subject: Early On-Line Services


Does anyone remember the early On-Line services such as the Source? (I
had friends who had an account on that in 1981-1982.) I also recently
found some documents for a service called People Link/Plink that was
active in the mid 1980's. I still occasionally e-mail or exchange
Christmas cards with people I met there.

I briefly glanced at the old literature - the baud rate was 300 baud with
an extra charge for 1200 baud - wow - the on-line world has come a long
way!

Leslie Pearson
(lespea@muze.com)
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 01:20:35 -0700
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From: William Murray 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of the term "Vaporware"
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Sender: William Murray 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of the term "Vaporware"


I'm pretty sure that I saw this word for the first time in a review of
a computer show--most likely Computer Faire.  It was used to by the
reviewer to characterize a program called VisiOn.  The reviewer was
highly critical because VisiOn didn't really exist, and since it had
already been announced, the only possible reason for the show demo was
to deter potential customers from buying competing products.

I don't know if this was the origin of the word.  Soon thereafter it
was in common use.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 01:26:39 -0700
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From: /S=J.WALKERLIDDELL/OU1=S26L07A/AD=ATTMAIL/C=US@mhs-fswa.attmail.com
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: The IBM 360/67
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Sender: /S=J.WALKERLIDDELL/OU1=S26L07A/AD=ATTMAIL/C=US@mhs-fswa.attmail.com
Subject: The IBM 360/67

This may have been the system that inspired one of my favorite
computer folk tunes, "You Can Build a Mainframe from the Things You
Find at Home."  I won't bore you with the first four verses, but the
last goes like this:

     Well I got my system running, I'll admit it's not the best.
     The data isn't [sic] right and the response time is a mess.
     It crashes every hour, and it isn't worth a damn,
     But I'm satisfied because it works just like an IBM!

                                             Jenny
/s=J.WalkerLiddell/ou1=s26l07a@mhs-fswa.attmail.com
         "...I find e-mail to be often undependable and annoying to
access..."  Clifford Stoll, _Silicon Snake Oil_
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 01:31:33 -0700
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From: darrahs@bucks.edu
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> "Vaporware" & Ted Nelson's Xanadu.
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Sender: darrahs@bucks.edu
Subject: Re: CM> "Vaporware" & Ted Nelson's Xanadu.


If I recall correctly, Jay Bolter discusses
Nelson's XANADU project extensively in his
book _Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext,
and the History of Writing_  I don't think
Bolter said anything about XANADU as vaporware,
but he did seem to be suggesting XANADU had
acquired some kind of *mythic* status -- and
that (perhaps) it might not ever become a
*reality*  I don't have the book here right now,
so I hope I'm not mis-remembering.

Susan Darrah
darrahs@bucks.edu
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 01:37:13 -0700
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From: Robert.Foster@radiology.msu.edu
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of NEXIS?
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Sender: Robert.Foster@radiology.msu.edu
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of the phrase Virtual Community

Greetings from the Virtual Desktop of Bob Foster

>> How far back does Nexis go?

What is this _Nexis_ that people refer to.
You can email me directly on this thanks.

Bob.

[Moderator's Note: LEXIS-NEXIS may be one of the oldest, and most robust,
examples of an online database accessible from myriad points across the
globe.  If anyone worked on implementing LEXIS-NEXIS, or has stories of its
creation, please send them to the list.  There's also a story here of how
newspapers signed away electronic rights to this service long before
understanding that one day they'd want them back.]
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 01:46:22 -0700
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From: davidsol@panix.com (David S. Bennahum)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of first computer game.
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I am writing not as moderator, but as participant.

For years, I was told that the first computer game (meaning a game with
graphics, arcade-like) was created by Steve Russel, a student at MIT's
Project MAC, around 1963. (For a good recounting of this, see Steven Levy's
_Hackers_.) The game was called Spacewar.  I now leared that the first
computer game may have been built in 1958 by someone named William
Higin-Botham who worked at Brookhaven National Laboratories in Upton, New
York.  Apparently he built a game of "tennis" that sounds a lot like Pong.
His research involved designing radars and graphical displays, and
calculating object trajectories.  Simulating a tennis ball between two bats
was apparently an easy problem, a problem which led to this game.

Is this accurate?

best,
db
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 01:06:41 -0700
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From: Les Earnest 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider
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Sender: Les Earnest 
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider

The Moderator writes:
   J.C.R. Licklider may well be the most influential, and
   least publicly recognized, person in the history of computer science.  He
   set ARPA on course towards constructing ARPANET and directed Project MAC at
   MIT; he also funded Engelbart's work on creating the mouse and windows.  If
   anyone has  recollections of Licklider, I think we would all be delighted
   to read them.

Licklider was a great guy and an inspiration to work with.  He was
indeed very influential, mostly through his recognition and support of
inventions by others, but he did not direct Project MAC nor was he
directly involved in starting ARPAnet, though he created the
environment that made it possible.

I first met Lick in 1949 when he gave me my first summer job as an
undergraduate.  He was spending the summer at the Naval Electronics
Lab in San Diego, experimenting with the intelligibility of digitized
speech under various encodings, a project that was about ten years
ahead of its time.

I next ran into him sometime after 1956 when I went to MIT Lincoln Lab
to work on SAGE and found that he was a professor at MIT and doing
consulting work at BBN.  MIT was a hotbed of computer-related
development at that time, based on Whirlwind, SAGE, MTC (the Memory
Test Computer, used to test Jay Forester's magnetic core memory idea),
TX-0 (a microcoded machine and the first transistorized computer
there) and TX-2 (a 37-bit computer with elaborate byte manipulation
features).

The most important technological advance after the invention of
computers, I believe, was timesharing, which made interactive
computing feasible for the first time.  The basic principles of
timesharing were first stated by Prof. John McCarthy in an MIT memo
dated January 1, 1959, which led to the establishment of Project Mac.
McCarthy's interest in this scheme was motivated by his desire for
economical intereactive computing in support of his research in
artificial intelligence and was substantially influenced by the
example of SAGE, which was a special-purpose timesharing system.

The first two demonstration timesharing systems were created by Prof.
Fernando Corbato at MIT and by John McCarthy and Ed Fredkin at BBN,
both in the summer of 1962.  McCarthy was invited to head Project MAC
but chose instead to move to Stanford, so MAC was headed by Prof.
Fano.

ARPA was established as a result of the acute national paranoia
brought on by successes in Soviet space technology in the late 1950s
and Licklider was recruited to start the Information Processing
Technology office there.  Inasmuch as Lick had ties to both MIT and
BBN and he perceived the importance of timesharing, he used his ARPA
position to fund several timesharing development projects, one of
which was Project MAC.  As we know, timesharing became a very
successful multi-billion dollar industry (in spite of the fact that
IBM never figured out how to do it) and made possible a number of
later developments, one of which was ARPAnet and another was practical
display-oriented interactive computing.

[Aside: One thing that annoys me about a couple of computer histories
that have appeared on PBS television in recent years is the pretense
that interactive computing began with personal computers and
workstations.  In fact, most of the basic principles of display-based
interaction were developed on timesharing systems, which first
appeared in the mid-1960s and continued to offer services superior to
those of workstations until the mid-1980s.]

Licklider also initiated ARPA's substantial funding of artificial
intelligence research in the early 1960s, in the hope that this field
could be developed to the point where computers could contribute to
the so-called command-control problem.  He was quite aware of the
functional failures of SAGE and the other command-control systems
being developed during that era.  While the AI projects did spin off
quite a bit of useful technology over the thirty years or so that they
were heavily funded by ARPA, I believe that it would be fair to say
that artificial intelligence research has not contributed much of
direct value to the military establishement so far.  Meanwhile,
however, the Defense Department has continued to squander orders of
magnitude more money on useless command-control-communications
systems.

After his first stint as head of ARPA IPT, Licklider tapped Ivan
Sutherland to take over around 1965.  Ivan had just finished doing his
PhD dissertation on Sketchpad, using the TX-2 in "slow timesharing"
mode (each user typically got 15 minutes of bare machine time every
hour or two).  Ivan, in turn, recruited Bob Taylor as his assistant
and when Ivan moved on to Harvard, Bob took over and recruited Larry
Roberts from NASA.  Larry had also recently finished his PhD, on
machine perception of three dimensional objects, and had subsequently
developed an experimental communication link between the TX-2
computer, which by then had been converted to true timesharing, and
the AN/FSQ-32 machine at System Development Corp. in Santa Monica,
another timesharing project funded by Lick's office.

Larry Roberts came to ARPA with the idea of developing ARPAnet and was
the true father of that project.  Both Taylor and Licklider recognized
the importance of computer communications between timesharing systems,
though Lick was not affiliated with ARPA at that time.  Taylor
arranged for the financial support of the project that brought it into
existence.  Roberts later took over as IPT head for a time, then moved
on to BBN, which had become the ARPAnet contractor (against his
recommendation, by the way).

It is interesting to note that among those who shared the TX-2
computer at MIT Lincoln Lab's in the early 1960s during most evenings
and weekends were PhD candidates Ivan Sutherland and Larry Roberts
(cited above), Len Kleinrock, who later moved to UCLA and did much of
the ARPAnet traffic queuing analysis, and Tom Stockham, who moved to
the University of Utah and developed audio analysis techniques that he
later was called upon to apply to the infamous recording gap on
Richard Nixon's tape.

Les Earnest (les@cs.stanford.edu)               Phone:  415 941-3984
12769 Dianne Drive Los Altos Hills, CA 94022    Fax:  415 941-3934
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 01:15:23 -0700
Reply-To: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
Originator: cpsr-history@cpsr.org
Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
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From: Audrie Krause 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> CPSR leadership changes.
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[Moderator's Note: Audrie Krause, Executive Director of CPSR, the
organization behind Community Memory, has resigned.  She requested that I
forward the following note to the list, which follows.  Audrie was
instrumental in forming this discussion group and supporting this project.
I want to publicly thank her for making this group possible, and wish her
the best.]
-----------------------------------------------------

Dear CPSR Members and Friends,

I am writing to notify you that I have resigned my position as CPSR's
Executive Director, effective July 23, in order to explore the potential for
creating an organization dedicated to developing grassroots support for
technology-related social and political issues.  My goal is to promote more
effective citizen activism around issues such as technology-assisted privacy
protection, electronic access to public records, and government surveillance
technology.  I hope to accomplish this by creating NetAction, an
organization that will link the online activists who are working on these
issues with traditional community-based organizations.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my tenure with CPSR, and I want to thank all of
you for the support and encouragement that you have given me, as well as for
the significant amount of volunteer  time and energy that many of you have
devoted to CPSR during my tenure as Executive Director.

As most of you already know, many of the technology-related issues being
addressed today by online activists will impact the lives of people who are
not online.  In order to be successful in establishing sound public policy
on these issues, online activists must become familiar with and begin to use
the grassroots organizing techniques that community-based activists have
been using  effectively for years.  Furthermore, we must reach out to and
educate community activists and others in order to build effective
coalitions around technology-related policy issues.

What I hope to do is create an organization that will work to promote
effective grassroots citizen advocacy campaigns by educating online
activists in traditional grassroots organizing techniques, introducing
online organizing techniques to community-based organizations, and creating
effective coalitions around information-technology issues by linking online
activists with grassroots organizers.

If you are interested in learning more about my plans for NetAction, please
send email to: akrause@igc.org, or contact me by phone at: (415) 775-8674.
--
Audrie Krause
Email: akrause@igc.org * Phone: (415) 775-8674  *  Fax: (415) 673-3813
Mailing Address: 601 Van Ness Avenue, No. 631  San Francisco, CA 94102
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 01:25:28 -0700
Reply-To: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
Originator: cpsr-history@cpsr.org
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From: "Bill Anderson" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne
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Sender: "Bill Anderson" 
Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne

During the time of Osbornes collapse, I was a Product Engineering
Manager at Fortune Systems. I learned of the impending collapse from
someone who applied for a position at Fortune. The store is a bit more
complicated. While I don't remember the model numbers, the series of
events went in this order. Osborne purchased a huge inventory of parts
for their current model while pre-announcing the new model. Dealers put
their orders on hold waiting for the new model, which created a serious
cash flow crisis. As they struggled through recovery from that disaster,
Osborne pre-announced yet another new model to which dealers acted in
the same manner as the first pre-announcement. However, this time
Osborne didn't have the cash reserves to survive and closed their doors.

Bill Anderson
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
 Materials may be reposted in their *entirety* for non-commercial use.
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 01:32:09 -0700
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From: mike alvarez 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Why DOS won out.
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Sender: mike alvarez 
Subject: Why DOS won out.

In Robert Cringely's book ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES, he states that IBM visited
Gates and company first and were told they should talk to the guy who
wrote CP/M. When IBM got there, Gary K. was out flying his plane; his
wife Mary, after scrutinizing IBM's disclosure agreement, didn't want to
sign it.  So IBM went back to Gates and the rest is history. Gates bought
Patterson's "quick and dirty" DOS for $50,000 (what a bargain, huh?), he
and Allen got DOS to where it'd run on the brand new IBM PC and that
folks is how we got to where we are today.

[Moderator's Note: Is there anyone on this list with first-hand experience
working for Bill Gates in the early years (or access to someone with those
memories who would be willing to contribute)?  Those recollections would be
much appreciated.]
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
 Materials may be reposted in their *entirety* for non-commercial use.
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 01:39:03 -0700
Reply-To: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
Originator: cpsr-history@cpsr.org
Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
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From: "Bill Anderson" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> The end of CP/M.
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Sender: "Bill Anderson" 
Subject: Re: CM> "Vaporware" & MS-DOS.

There are times when I wished I would have kept more documentation and
magazines from those days. Alas, moving them became to much of a burden.
CP/M lost the war when the machines grew to be larger than 64K of
memory. Digital Research was just too slow in responding to the market
changes. CP/M eventually became DR DOS and was purchased by Novell. I
still have DR DOS 6.0 and use Novell DOS 7 instead of MSDOS on the one
and only machine that I have left running Windows 3.11.

The big battle was between MP/M and OASIS. Without a doubt, OASIS was a
much better operating system. After fighting with MP/M for a few months,
I switched to OASIS. At that time, my IMSAI ran CP/M and OASIS, my Z-80
Onyx was strictly OASIS, and the other ONYX was running UNIX version 7.
All this was in late 70's and early 80's.

My Onyx Z8000 was replaced by a Fortune System and then finally, around
1986, I surrendered and purchased a PC Clone.

Has anyone ever stopped and consider the amount of money we have spent
upgrading and changing machines over the years.

Bill Anderson

On Jul 22, 11:16pm, Peter D. Junger wrote:
> Subject: CM> "Vaporware" & MS-DOS.
>
> Sender: "Peter D. Junger" 
> Subject: Re: CM> "Vaporware" & MS-DOS.
>
> Community Memory writes:
>
> :
> : Sender: Ersatzzz@aol.com
> : Subject: the vapors
> :
> :
> :   hasn't the tale now passed into legend
> :   about how Gates and his partner told IBM
> :   that they had an operating system ready for
> :   their forthcoming PC, and that it just needed
> :   a little tinkering... and then wrote DOS in a
> :   matter of months, thus getting in on the
> :   ground floor with a non-existant product, and
> :   deterring IBM from looking elsewhere?
>
> I don't know what Gates and Co. told IBM, but MSDOS and PCDOS was
> purchased by Microsoft from a small company--the original DOS was a
> quick and dirty rip-off for the 8086/8088 of CP/M for the 8080, 8085,
> and Z80.  The original IBM PC was announced as coming with three
> operating systems:  CP/M, PCDOS, and the P-system that was used with a
> semi-compiled version of Pascal.  (I don't remember ever coming across
> the P-system and don't remember much about it.)
>
> To me the really interesting bit of history has to do with the failure
> of Digital Research's CP/M to become the standard operating system for
> the PC.  By the time the PC came out, Digital Research had MP/M, a
> multi-tasking OS that was infinitely better than the original PCDOS.
>
> If anyone knows the true story of why CP/M lost out I certainly would
> like to hear it.
>
> --
> Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law
School--Cleveland, OH
> Internet:  junger@pdj2-ra.f-remote.cwru.edu
junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu
> ______________________________________________________________________
>             Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
>                     Moderator: Community Memory
>             http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
>          A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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> ______________________________________________________________________
>
>
>-- End of excerpt from Peter D. Junger
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 01:45:04 -0700
Reply-To: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
Originator: cpsr-history@cpsr.org
Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
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From: "Laurence I. Press" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> SCCS Interface magazine.
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: SCCS Interface


> Sender: "Kip Crosby, CHAC" 
> Subject: Tracking mags
>
> Lar Press wrote:
> >Does anyone recall "SCCS Interface?"  It was the second nationally
> >circulated magazine (between Byte and Kilobaud) but fell to gross
> >incompetence very soon.
>
> It would be interesting to define "very soon" more exactly.  The CHAC has
> the first five issues (which we got from somebody in Virginia of all places)
> but we'd like the rest of the set, except we don't know how many that was.

I have Dec 75, Jan-Oct 76, Dec 76, Jan Feb, July, Sept, 1977.  These
were slick and sold nationally.  They were preceded by a local
newsletter which was just offset or Xeroxed.  They also include two
different publishers -- Like Byte there was a big fall-apart with the
original publisher, law suits, two magazines with nearly identical
names (SCCS Interface and Interface Age) and looks.  Lots of lost time
and money and eventually everyone gone.

Larry
______________________________________________________________________
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Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 01:51:02 -0700
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Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
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From: swolff@cisco.com (Stephen Wolff)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider.
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Sender: swolff@cisco.com (Stephen Wolff)
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of "virtual community" and J.C.R. Licklider, 1968.

>[Moderator's Note: J.C.R. Licklider may well be the most influential, and
>least publicly recognized, person in the history of computer science.  He
>set ARPA on course towards constructing ARPANET and directed Project MAC at
>MIT; he also funded Engelbart's work on creating the mouse and windows.  If
>anyone has  recollections of Licklider, I think we would all be delighted
>to read them.]

I heard Lick at an electrical engineering conference once, and I recall him
saying he felt perfectly at home among double-Es because of his initials.
-s

Stephen Wolff                                        Business Development
ciscoSystems                                         703 397 5615(V) 5537(F)
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 01:58:56 -0700
Reply-To: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
Originator: cpsr-history@cpsr.org
Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
Precedence: bulk
From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan & Trevor"@Sunnyside.COM
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning?
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Sender: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan & Trevor"
Subject: RE: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning?

>Sender: "Richard J. Smith" 
>
>Out of curiosity, I'd like to know if anyone on this list
>knows of an early usage of the Internet for distance
>education.

I can only give you negative information.  In 1985, I was responsible for
setting up the telecommunications for the World Logo Conference.  So far as
I have been able to determine, this was the first fully integrated on-site/
online conference using static data files, email, and real time/chat functions
to involve offsite and onsite participants in the same sessions.  My report on
the conference, "Online from Paradise" was published in Teleconferencing V
and IPCC '87.  (All of which is by the way, because it happened on
Compu$pend.)

In reworking the paper for the more general topic of training, I did an
ERIC search on everything I could think of that potentially related to
computer mediated communications in education.  Of the 32 references I
eventually found, none were based on use of the Internet.  So, unless
someone can come up with a really hidden reference, nothing was *published*
prior to 1987.

However, I *do* know that the husband/SO of an English instructor at SFU
was acting as "poet in non-residence" to a public school English class.
The kids were middle school level, as I recall.  (I had peripheral contact
with the project, although I was not formally involved.)  This was the
1987/88 school year.  During that term an extension course from SFU was
also announced that was to use email and fax.

======================
roberts@decus.ca         rslade@vcn.bc.ca         slade@freenet.victoria.bc.ca
link to virus, book info at http://www.freenet.victoria.bc.ca/techrev/rms.html
Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94663-2 (800-SPRINGER)
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 02:05:12 -0700
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Originator: cpsr-history@cpsr.org
Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
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From: Paul Andrews 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.
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Sender: Paul Andrews 
Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne

Folks, I bought one of the first Osborne I's in Washington State. It
weighed 26 lbs. and my invoice, which I still have, was for $1795 (only
by adding an Epson MX-80 printer, paper, cable and external monitor did I
get up to $3000). Although the II was late in coming Osborne's real
problem was lack of innovation and lousy support. Kaypro came out with a
better machine on the CP/M side (before the gradual shift to IMB PC and DOS).

Paul

Andrews/Seattle Times
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 02:11:58 -0700
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From: Paul Andrews 
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Subject: CM> Vaproware & MS-DOS
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Sender: Paul Andrews 
Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & MS-DOS

Folks, Tim Paterson(cq) is I believe still at Microsoft. Microsoft did
not lease but purchased DOS from Seattle Computer prior to its 1981
release on the IBM PC. For a detailed account of the chronology please
see my and Steve Manes' book; we tried hard to nail this stuff down with
multiple documentation, including material from the Seattle Computer
lawsuit against Microsoft.

Paul Andrews/Seattle Times
co-author, GATES: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made
Himself the Richest Man in America

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 02:18:52 -0700
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Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
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From: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> "Vaporware" & the P-System.
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Sender: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: CM> "Vaporware" & MS-DOS.

> The original IBM PC was announced as coming with three
> operating systems:  CP/M, PCDOS, and the P-system that was used with a
> semi-compiled version of Pascal.  (I don't remember ever coming across
> the P-system and don't remember much about it.)

Ah yes, the P-system.

"Daddy's playing Pascal. That's where you try and see how many dots you
 get before you have to say nasty words."

When it compiled a program to pcode it cleared the screen and put dots
across the top... they had something to do with the code generated, since
different programs produced different dots... but it was mostly feedback
to tell you it was stil alive.

> If anyone knows the true story of why CP/M lost out I certainly would
> like to hear it.

It cost about $30 more, and the first version had a problem where you could
corrupt a disk if you swapped it at the wrong time. I seem to recall that was
because of buffering in the driver or file system. You could force all the
buffers to flush with a ^C at the prompt level.

I've noticed that MS-DOS finally allows you to do that level of buffering
with DOS 7 (under Windows 95).
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 02:24:50 -0700
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Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
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From: "Laurence I. Press" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> First suites, Context MBA?
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: suites

> 
> Subject: Suites
>
> First "suite" I ran into was something that came packaged with the Columbia
> VP-1600 I bought in 1983. The "Perfect" group included Perfect Calc
> (spreadsheet), Perfect Filer (sort of a database), and Perfect Writer.

Anyone recall Context MBA -- spreadhseet, word process, data base and
perhaps terminal emulation all in one giant program for the PC.

Larry
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 02:30:32 -0700
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From: davidsol@panix.com (David S. Bennahum)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of "mirror world" idea?
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In the past six months, like a giant herd wheeling in one direction, large
companies are suddenly racing to "aggregate local content" on the Web and
make it available on a city by city basis.  Microsoft has CityScape; AT&T
has Home Town Network; AOL has Digital Cities -- whatever the name the idea
is similar: to get local newspapers, local information like movie listings,
and pull it all together in one location named after your home town (e.g.
"Digital City: Boston").  All claim their sites will be ready sometime in
1997.  I am wondering if there are earlier examples of on-line services
creating city-wide databases of this sort, and if so does anyone recall
them?  Were they successes, flops?  Is there any historical basis for this
universal consensus that this is a good metaphor based on previous online
services?

In his book "Mirror Worlds" (Oxford University Press, 1991), Yale computer
science professor David Gelernter writes of a future where we can access
minutely rendered computer-generated "mirrors" of our cities, towns, homes.
These mirrors would exist as massive databases, visually rendered, easy to
navigate and querry.  It is a fantasy that's familiar (it reminds of me of
a computer game--SimCity), and I wonder, tracing the idea back, when it
first appeared in computer science.  It seems the current CityScape, et.
al. ventures are possibly a crude permutation of this idea.

best,
db
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 01:05:29 -0700
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From: "christopher f. chiesa" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Plywood computing.
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Sender: "christopher f. chiesa" 
Subject: Re: The IBM 360/67


I for one would like to see the complete lyric to "You Can Build A
Mainframe from the Things You Find At Home"(sic).  E-mail is fine, if this
is not adjudged to be of general interest...

That also reminds me of a real book I owned for a while, called "how to
build a working digital computer" -- out of things like wood, screws,
paper clips, and light bulbs.  (There was even a memory drum made out of
an oatmeal can, I kid you not.)  I was very excited to find this book, and
had visions of constructing a clattering monstrosity that, if nothing
else, might be able to "add 2 and 3 to get 5," that sort of thing.

I've rarely been more disappointed than I was when I got around to READING
the book.  It turned out that while, yes, there was a sort of "input" unit
that let the operator turn a ten-position rotary switch to a particular
position and allowed the binary form of that number to appear on a light
bank, and an "output" unit that operated essentially the same way, there
was NO CPU -- the last section of the book, under "operation," revealed
that the HUMAN operator did all the math, logic, instruction-decoding and
-execution, and simply set the "input" and "output" banks so that the
right patterns of lights appeared on the plywood "display panel."
SHEEEEESH.  I'm sure glad I read through the entire book BEFORE spending
months constructing anything!  You had to BUILD your own rotary switches
and bulb-sockets, for crying out loud!

On the other hand, once when I was a kid, I managed to wire up a couple of
relays, two toggle switches, and two lightbulbs to make a "one-bit"
binary adder!  To me, that's more of a "computer" than the labor-intensive
project described in that doggoned BOOK!

Chris Chiesa
  lvt-cfc@cyber1.servtech.com
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 01:11:53 -0700
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From: Carl Dick 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> "The Colonel"
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Sender: Carl Dick 
Subject: THE COLONEL

Shortly after the Altair kit and Byte Magazine were established, a
flim-flam artist ran a 2 page spread in Byte.  He called himself Colonel ___
(I can't remember the surname).
        The mock-ups in the ads were not functional, and no working products
were ever developed.  I believe there was a 4 KB RAM card, a CPU card, an I/O
card, and maybe a 4th item.
        I recall chatting with a freelance reporter who covered the story.
After Colonel X was arrested, he convinced his jailer to open a mail-drop
business to sell the Colonel's software bundle; something like 100 programs
for $50.
        The programs were junk, or lifted from some other source, or simply
didn't exist.
        As I recall, he once escaped by convincing the guards that he was
some form of OSHA inspector.
        Does anyone recall more detail?

  -- Carl Dick    trimagna@primenet.com
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 01:20:01 -0700
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From: au329@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ronda Hauben)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider, pointers to more info.
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Sender: au329@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ronda Hauben)
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of "virtual community" and J.C.R. Licklider, 1968.

Reply to message from lpress@ISI.EDU of Tue, 23 Jul

Good to see Larry's reference to the Liclider and Taylor article
describing "communities of common interest". The article is
appeared in 1968 before the ARPANET and sets out the vision
that the ARPANET helped make possible.

[~snip~]

Our online Netizens book has several chapters referring to Licklider
and describing the vision that set the basis for the ARPANET and
then the Internet.

See especially Chapter 5 "The Vision of Interactive Computing
and the Future"
and Chapter 6 Cybernetics, Time-sharing, Human-Computer Symbiosis
and Online Communities: Creating a Supercommunity of Online
Communities
The URL for the Netizens netbook is
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/

>
>[Moderator's Note: J.C.R. Licklider may well be the most influential, and
>least publicly recognized, person in the history of computer science.  He
>set ARPA on course towards constructing ARPANET and directed Project MAC at
>MIT; he also funded Engelbart's work on creating the mouse and windows.  If
>anyone has  recollections of Licklider, I think we would all be delighted
>to read them.]

I agree that Licklider is very important and we have tried to document
some of his contribution in our Netizens netbook. It would be
good to see some discussion of his contribution here on this list
as well as hear memories of him and his work.

Ronda
au329@cleveland.freeenet.edu
rh120@columbia.edu


--
Ronda Hauben           "The Netizens: On the History and Impact of
au329@cleveland.freenet.edu      Usenet and the Internet
     http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 01:26:28 -0700
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Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution
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Sender: /S=J.WALKERLIDDELL/OU1=S26L07A/AD=ATTMAIL/C=US@mhs-fswa.attmail.com
Subject: Dead ends of hardware evolution

I've heard of some unusual and now-abandoned ways of putting together
computer hardware:  my father tells me that someone really built a
computer that used decimal memory rather than binary storage, and
another filk tune (to the tune of "Old Time Religion") refers to two
more.  "Oh the IBM 650 had a memory quite nifty on a drum revolving
swiftly and it's good enough for me", and also one I don't completely
recall:  "Oh the _______ is famous, couldn't add so who could blame
us when we called it ignoramus, ...".  What machine couldn't add?
Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?  Did someone really
try decimal memory?  Curious to hear whatever people know.
                                             Jenny
/s=J.WalkerLiddell/ou1=s26l07a@mhs-fswa.attmail.com
         "...I find e-mail to be often undependable and annoying to
access..."  Clifford Stoll, _Silicon Snake Oil_
______________________________________________________________________
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From: "Laurence I. Press" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> SCCS Interface magazine.
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: re SCCS Interface

> large club of computer enthusiasts. I think some dispute broke out over who
> actually owned the magazine, when it turned out to be worth owning, and they
> parted ways...Bob going off the publish Interface Age, which flourished for

With law suits all around!  For a while both mags continued, with
nearly indentical mastheads.  The word "interface" was printed very
large, and Bob's had a teeny "age" between the bars of the last "E" in
Interface.  We (SCCS) felt we were cheated -- I don't know how Bob felt.


>The leader of  SCCS was a round, balding chap (Dr. Lou...unh...Lou

Lou Fields.

Larry
______________________________________________________________________
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Subject: CM> J. C. R. Licklider, pointer to more info.
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: J. C. R. Licklider


> [Moderator's Note: J.C.R. Licklider may well be the most influential, and
> least publicly recognized, person in the history of computer science.  He
> set ARPA on course towards constructing ARPANET and directed Project MAC at
> MIT; he also funded Engelbart's work on creating the mouse and windows.  If
> anyone has  recollections of Licklider, I think we would all be delighted
> to read them.]

I fully agree that Lick's contribution was immense, and he was a super
nice person to boot.  For an overview on Lick, Engelbart, and
others see http://som1.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/articles/history.htm.

Larry
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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From: "Joshua S. Hodas" 
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Subject: CM> Early On-Line Services
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Sender: "Joshua S. Hodas" 
Subject: Re: CM> Early On-Line Services

>Sender: LESPEA@muze.com (Leslie Pearson)
>Subject: Early On-Line Services
>
>
>Does anyone remember the early On-Line services such as the Source? (I
>had friends who had an account on that in 1981-1982.) I also recently
>found some documents for a service called People Link/Plink that was
>active in the mid 1980's. I still occasionally e-mail or exchange
>Christmas cards with people I met there.
>
>I briefly glanced at the old literature - the baud rate was 300 baud with
>an extra charge for 1200 baud - wow - the on-line world has come a long
>way!
>
>Leslie Pearson
>(lespea@muze.com)


I was an early subscriber to the source. My first account was one of their
first 50 or so. I don't remember the year, but I would guess 1979 or so.
My access was from my Apple II (serial #3318) via a hayes 300 baud
"micromodem".  The hayes was a two-piece job with a card in the
Apple two connected to a smoke-grey lucite box about the size of the
current supra modems which acted as a coupler. I recall that it was
quite a task explaining it to the phone company. First I had to have
them come out and install a modular jack in my room (this was, I think
just before the time of the break-up so we still had permanently wired
phones
in our house) and give them the FCC certification number and ringer
equivalence number (which basically rated the electrical load the modem
would put on the line in terms of an equivalent number of bell ringers.)
before they would approve its use.(And recall, in those days the phone
company was always checking the load on your line for signs of
ilegal self-installed phones).

As to the source itself I don't remember a whole lot. I dialed in through
local Telenet and Tymenet (do they still exist) point-of-presence. You
would first get a prompt from the POP and then type a command to connect
to the source (which was in Maclean, Virginia).

Then it was a pretty simple text based interface. They had
email (self-contained of course), bulletin-boards, and chat. I don't
remember
if their was multi-person chat rooms or not. I don't think there was
much source-provided content.

The only real bit of histor I remeber was a time when some guy started
a joke campaign on the bulletin-boards that he called "Americans United to
Beat the Dutch". I have no idea what motivated it, but it seemed to hang on

for some time.  I also recall a period of controversy over the sysops
censoring (or at least reading) personal mail, and an agreement that it
would stop.

At some point in the early 80's the source was bought out and shut down by
compuserve and everyone got a compuserve account. This was soon after
I left for college, and I remember that when I asked for them to change the

billing info from my parents to me, they said this would require closing
the
old account and opening a new one, which I did (only to close the
compuserve
account a few months later since I didn't like it). Last year I was at my
Dad's
apartment and noticed a compuserve magazine. I asked him when he got
an account and he said he had been getting those magazines for years and
just threw them away. It turns out they had never closed the old account
and had been billing his credit card the base charge every month for more
than
ten years. Since his secretary pays the bils and he never looks at them
they had
just been paid. In the end I think compuserve agreed to refund about
$50-$100!


Josh Hodas

------------

Dr. Joshua S. Hodas                     hodas@cs.hmc.edu
Department of Computer Science  (909) 621-8650
Harvey Mudd College                     (909) 621-8465 (fax)
1250 North Dartmout Ave
Claremont, CA 91711                     http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~hodas
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 01:42:17 -0700
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From: deyoung@rpcp.mit.edu (Tice DeYoung)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Early memory of "networking."
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Sender: deyoung@rpcp.mit.edu (Tice DeYoung)
Subject: DATA TRANSMISSION BETWEEN INCOMPATABLE SYSTEMS

Back in the late seventies to early eighties we had a data transmission
problem.  We had two PCs, one had an 8" floppy drive and the other had a
5.25" floppy drive.  Of course we had the need to have similar data on both
systems (I forget why).  Luckily we were running CP/M.  We would put the
data into memory on one system using DDT and check the starting and ending
places for the data.  We had two routines running in the upper parts of the
memory, one to send and the other to receive data.  We took twisted pair
and connected the two systems together.  We told one system to send a
certain number of bytes, starting at the right location.  We then had a
compatriot standing at the other end of the hall who simultaneously started
the receive program, this time receiving a certain number of bytes to be
stored starting at the same location.  It usually took several tries to get
the timing of send and receive correctly, but it worked.  This was my first
introduction to "networking".

Tice DeYoung
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 01:45:53 -0700
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From: rab@well.com
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Ted Nelson, Xanadu, pointers to more info.
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Sender: rab@well.com
Subject: Re:  CPSR-HISTORY digest 34


Someone wrote:
>There was a very well done article about Ted Nelson in WIRED Magazine a
>year ago or more ago which claimed that his XANADU software project was
>the longest standing and most expensive vaporware project ever.

Actually, I would call that WIRED article one of the most disgusting
examples of yellow journalism, biased reporting, and shoddy research that
has ever seen print.  The author did not get any significant facts right
beyond those dates and events which had already been widely published, and
even those he managed to creatively reinterpret in the worst possible way.
If you read the article, I suggest you also read Ted's response to it,
available on the Web at    http://www.well.com/user/rab/lemonade.html
Also see Ted's pages at    http://www.xanadu.net/the.project/

Adding up all the money spent over the years on Xanadu would be tricky
at best, but I'm quote confident in asserting that the total is at least
an order of magnitude, and maybe two, *smaller* than what the typical large
computer industry vaporware vendor spends on marketing non-existent products
in just one year.  As for the number of years it's been pending, well, there
it's clearly the hands-down winner.    ;-)

--
  Robert Bickford           rab@well.com
     Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
______________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 01:49:34 -0700
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From: "Peter D. Junger" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of NEXIS?
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Sender: "Peter D. Junger" 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of NEXIS?


Our Moderator writes:

: [Moderator's Note: LEXIS-NEXIS may be one of the oldest, and most robust,
: examples of an online database accessible from myriad points across the
: globe.  If anyone worked on implementing LEXIS-NEXIS, or has stories of its
: creation, please send them to the list.  There's also a story here of how
: newspapers signed away electronic rights to this service long before
: understanding that one day they'd want them back.]

LEXIS, which is an online database of law cases, statutes, and related
matters started out in life as a project of the Ohio Bar Association
and was originally known as OBAR.  It started up in 1970 or 1971, I
believe.  That was the first academic year that I taught at Case Western
Reserve University Law School which was the first Law School in the
country to have an OBAR terminal.

The terminals were large dedicated boxes connected by a 300 baud modem
and dialup telephone lines (at least I don't think that they were
dedicated) to a central mainframe that held the database.  The
terminals were connected to a printer.  (I think--though today it is
hard to believe--that the printer was one of those that used that
slippery and nearly unreadable heat sensitive paper.)

The initial data base consisted of the full text of many--perhaps
most--Ohio cases and nothing else.  The cases were all in upper case
as if they had all been entered into the system by Archie the
cockroach on the day that the capital key was locked on.

One could search through the cases using boolean operators; the
present Lexis system still uses a superset of those operators.  It
was, and remains, an excellent system for finding cases dealing with
the subject that one was interested in.  But I doubt if anyone
originally dreamed of using it as the source of cases--between the
slow speed and the solid capitals it would have been useless for that
purpose and, even if that were not true, the output from the system
went only to the terminal and the printer.  (I remember that several
years later after it was taken over by Mead Data and renamed Lexis, I
tried to figure out some way to supstitute and Apple // or an Osborne
luggable for the printer.  Not being a hardware type I never did
figure out a way to do it.  I also remember staring at it, trying to
determine whether it would be possible to get into the data base and
erase the word ``not'' in some critical court decision.)

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
Internet:  junger@pdj2-ra.f-remote.cwru.edu    junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 01:53:38 -0700
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Subject: CM> Early On-Line Services
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Sender: "J.D. Abolins" 
Subject: Re: CM> Early On-Line Services

On Wed, 24 Jul 1996, Leslie Pearson wrote:

> Does anyone remember the early On-Line services such as the Source? (I
> had friends who had an account on that in 1981-1982.) I also recently
> found some documents for a service called People Link/Plink that was
> active in the mid 1980's. I still occasionally e-mail or exchange
> Christmas cards with people I met there.

I was also on People Link (let me see, I think it was a part of the
American Home Network company).  It was the first online service I was
on.  Back about 1986 or so, I saw a little article in some newsletter or
another than mentioned a Jewish Activist Network upon People Link.  THis
was of interest to me and I signed up.  Yes, it was a simple 300-1200 baud
system.


J.D. Abolins
Meyda BBS (Ewing, NJ) 609-883-8124  "Meyda means 'Information.'"
WWW Home Page:  http://pluto.njcc.com/~jda-ir/
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 01:57:15 -0700
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To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Early On-Line Services
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Sender: jgro@netcom.com (Jeremy Grodberg)
Subject: Re: CM> Early On-Line Services

Leslie Pearson wrote:
>
>Does anyone remember the early On-Line services such as the Source?

The only one I remember was Portal, which seemed like a really good
deal.  I remember planning to sign up for it, except no one else I
knew had email and I was not that interested in reading Usenet to be
worth the money.

--
Jeremy Grodberg
jgro@netcom.com
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 02:01:23 -0700
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From:  (Peter Capek)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Pointer to article on origins of "vaporware."
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Date: 24 Jul 1996 10:22:43 EDT
From:  (Peter Capek)
Subject: Origin of "vaporware"

According to

     http://www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art26.htm

the term "vaporware" was coined to describe OVATION, a product announced in
1983 and never shipped.

              Peter Capek
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 01:07:10 -0700
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Subject: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning, PLATO.
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Sender: "Peter H. Salus" 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning?


I think that distance learning on the Net precedes the
Internet as we know it by many years.  The first real
system was PLATO, developed at U.Illinois in the
late '60s and marketed by Control Data for ``computer-
aided instruction.''  In 1976 this was priced at
$5 million for the software + $6K per terminal.  Essick
and Kolstad elaborated the Illinois software to produce
``notes,'' announced at the Santa Monica USENIX in
January 1983.

See Hiltz & Turoff (1978, 1993); H.J. Peters in Computer Decisions
8 (1976); J.S. Quarterman, The Matrix (1990; and P.H. Salus,
Casting the Net (1995).
-----------------------------------------------------------
Peter H. Salus  #3303  4 Longfellow Place  Boston, MA 02114
        peter@pedant.com         +1 617 723 3092
-----------------------------------------------------------
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 01:14:13 -0700
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From: davidsol@panix.com (David S. Bennahum)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Was,  Why DOS won out, Is: Myths of personal computing?
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Sender: Bryan Pfaffenberger 
Subject: Was,  Why DOS won out, Is: Myths of personal computing?


I recall reading an interview with Gary Kildall (can't remember where,
sorry) that he strenously denies what he calls the "myth" that he gave IBM
the cold shoulder, and was not "flying his plane" when IBM came to call.
Rather, as I recall, he said the non-disclosure that IBM proposed would
have limited DR's then-current business (in some way, sorry don't
remember), and he needed time to figure out the implications of the
agreement. This wasn't fast enough for IBM's taste, apparently. Anyone else
recall this interview?

Bryan Pfaffenberger
Div. of Technology, Culture, and Communication
School of Engineering/University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22936 USA 804 924-6098
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 01:24:35 -0700
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From: "keith reid-green" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Earliest interactive computer game
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Sender: "keith reid-green" 
Subject: re: Earliest interactive computer game

Yesterday, somebody asked about the earliest interactive computer game.
There was a tic-tac-toe game on the IBM 704 where I worked in 1957.  The
player played against the computer, using two of six sense switches to
denote the row and column to play in.  The computer then made its play, and
results were displayed on a CRT (cathode-ray tube).

The tennis game referred to in yesterday's note probably was the one played
on an analog computer at Brookhaven Labs in 1958.  This is according to
David Ahl's essay on computer games in Encyclopedia of Computer Science,
3rd. ed., C 1993, Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY.

Keith S. Reid-Green
Educational Testing Service
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 01:34:56 -0700
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From: bill@atd.co.za (William Bowles)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> History of E-Publishing on the Net
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Sender: bill@atd.co.za (William Bowles)
Subject: History of E-Publishing on the Net

I don't know if you're developing Community Memory in some kind of
chronological order but I've been involved with the Internet since around
1979 when I was living in New York and set up the New York On-Line (NYOL)
BBS, probably the first BBS dedicated to the networking of non-corporate
news and information over the Internet (and FidoNet).

Essentially NYOL started as a 'best of' Peacenet. I would download around
180 newsgroups per day and extract the best stories, journalism, press
releases etc and re-network them using FidoNet feeds. The idea was that
PeaceNet would offer them as a 'value-added' service to PN subscribers,
whereby users could get the essential info on around 25 subjects without
having to go through the tedious process of searching through 100s of
Newsgroups (though this never happened).

But it was from this that developed I think probably the first electronic
journal produced outside the corporate world, "SouthScan - A Bulletin of
Southern African Affairs". SouthScan is a weekly print publication based in
London that probably offers the most authoritative analysis of South Africa
and the southern African region available. It targetted policy makers in
govt and business, and in the US its subscribers included the CIA, the
State Dept as well as universities and libraries and of course the UN and
relevant NGOs.

I met the publisher of SouthScan in London in 1986 where we decided to
produce an electronic edition for US readers. This was in the days before
cheap leased lines and 28.8 modems, let alone Web sites!

A Chronology of the creation of the Electronic and Print Editions of SouthScan

Wednesday PM or Thursday AM:
1. The stories in ASCII format would be sent (x-modem) from London to
PeaceNet in California. This was the most hazardous part of the process as
x-modem transfers were liable to crap out and often involved sending the
files many times before they made it through intact.

Preparing the Print Edition
2. I would dump the stories into a Pagemaker template, format the layout
and produce camera-ready artwork on my laser printer.

3. A highspeed copier-binder would be used to create the edition and around
4 hours after laying out the pages, the edition would be in the post box on
its way to our subscribers.

Preparing the Electronic Editions
4. I would then prepare 3 different electronic editions;
   a. for the NYOL BBS (this could be searched rapidly)
   b. for PeaceNet
   c. for Newsnet (this had to contain special format commands so that it
could be
      searched, headlines called up etc.

By the end of the day, a print and three electronic editions were created.
Considering that the entire process was done by one person (me), it was a
pretty advanced development for the time. And aside from glitches, the
entire process was completed in about 4 hours (not including the writing of
the stories of course!).

The US edition was done this way with changes, for nearly four years. As
communications reliability improved, instead of receiving ASCII files from
London, I would get PageMaker files which cut down on the production time
for the print edition but increased production time for electronic
editions.

Today of course, such things are commonplace but in 1986 the idea of using
the Net for this kind of product was virtually unknown.

Bill

+----------------------------------------------------+
+ All Things Digital (Pty) Ltd - Internet Architects +
+   158 Jan Smuts Av, Rosebank 2196 South Africa     +
+      Tel: +2711-788-0263 Fax: +2711-788-0210       +
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+               http://www.atd.co.za                 +
+----------------------------------------------------+
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 01:43:37 -0700
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From: kateley@yuma.ACNS.ColoState.EDU (Julian Kateley)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider
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Sender: kateley@yuma.ACNS.ColoState.EDU (Julian Kateley)
Subject: Re: CM> J.C.R. Licklider

He also made major contributions to the 1966 EDUCOM Task Force on
Information Networks "Summer Study" held in Boulder, Colorado. These
contributions are documented in the book
"EDUNET - Report of the Summer Study on Information Networks". I have a
vivid recollection of him at that month-long meeting and very much enjoyed
his participation.

[Moderator's Note: Could you share with us some specifics as to how he
participated, what he recommended?]

-- Julian Kateley, kateley@colostate.edu, (970) 491-5778
-- ACNS, Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO 80523-2028
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 01:50:28 -0700
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From:  (Peter Capek)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> City-oriented on-line services, Minitel.
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Sender:  (Peter Capek)
Subject: City-oriented on-line services

David Bennahum wrote:

>        I am wondering if there are earlier examples of on-line services
> creating city-wide databases of this sort, and if so does anyone recall
> them?  Were they successes, flops?  Is there any historical basis for this
> universal consensus that this is a good metaphor based on previous online
> services?

I recall a service advertised in New York Magazine (I probably tore
out the ad, and will look for it) about 3 years ago which was based on
the use of the French Minitel terminal and for a relatively small
monthly fee offered a service such as you describe.  My vague
recollection is that it offered some yellow-pages-type information,
movie and other entertainment schedules and information and so on.
Aside from the ad, I never saw it mentioned anywhere else.

               Peter Capek
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 01:57:15 -0700
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From: Paul Ceruzzi 
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Subject: CM> Licklider, Timesharing, and Popular History
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Sender: Paul Ceruzzi 
Subject: Licklider, Timesharing, and Popular History

In an aside to a posting about J.C.R. Licklider, Les Earnest lamented
the tendency of popular histories, esp. recent PBS documentaries, to
credit interactive computing too much to the PC and not enough to
timesharing.

As one of the consultants and narrators of the PBS/BBC series "The
Machine that Changed the World," I plead guilty to this error. However I
offer as an apology my belief that the mental model of a "computer
utility," which early time-sharing advocates had, impeded progress. That
is, they thought of one or a few central computers (one even proposed
siting it in Kansas City), accessed through a jack in the wall just like
you get electric power. For a variety of technical reasons (so far!) it
is not practical to have individual electric power plants in everyone's
home, car, briefcase, etc. But it _is_ not only practical but preferable
to have computing power so distributed (with a few exceotions). That was
what I was trying to point out in the series. If I/we seemed to have
slighted the time-sharing pioneers, I apologize.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 02:04:49 -0700
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From: au329@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ronda Hauben)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider
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Sender: au329@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ronda Hauben)
Subject: Re: CM> J.C.R. Licklider

Reply to message from les@Steam.Stanford.EDU of Thu, 25 Jul
>
>
>Sender: Les Earnest 
>Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider
>
>The Moderator writes:
>   J.C.R. Licklider may well be the most influential, and
>   least publicly recognized, person in the history of computer science.  He
>   set ARPA on course towards constructing ARPANET and directed Project MAC at
>   MIT; he also funded Engelbart's work on creating the mouse and windows.  If
>   anyone has  recollections of Licklider, I think we would all be delighted
>   to read them.
>
>Licklider was a great guy and an inspiration to work with.  He was

Les, why do you say Licklider was an inspiration to work with?

>indeed very influential, mostly through his recognition and support of
>inventions by others, but he did not direct Project MAC nor was he
>directly involved in starting ARPAnet, though he created the
>environment that made it possible.

Do you have any sense of what guided him to determine what to
support?

Though he didn't direct Project MAC originally, Robert Fano describes
talking to Licklider and making up the proposal after the talk.

Also, several people, including Larry Roberts have written that
Licklider's view of the most important problem in computer science
played an important role in their recognition of the importance of
computer networking.

The vision of an intergalactic network seemed to play a significant
role in guiding the development first of time sharing and then of
computer networking.

Also, the vision described at the end of the paper "The Computer
as A Device"(Science and Technology, April 1968), that Licklider
wrote with Robert Taylor raised the crucial question in
developing computer networking as "Will `to be on line' be
a privilege or a right? " They said that the impact of computer
networking on society would rest on the resolution of this question.
That the impact would be good if all would have the advantage,
and bad if computer networking weren't made available.

This is still a crucial issue that hasn't been enough considered
and taken into account, at least with respect to the policy
that the U.S. is currently developing on access to computer
networking for the U.S. population.

It does seem particularly farsighted for Licklider and Taylor to
have raised this criteria as the crucial criteria back in 1968.

>I first met Lick in 1949 when he gave me my first summer job as an
>undergraduate.  He was spending the summer at the Naval Electronics
>Lab in San Diego, experimenting with the intelligibility of digitized
>speech under various encodings, a project that was about ten years
>ahead of its time.

Did he have much day to day contact with the project you were working
on?

(...)

>The most important technological advance after the invention of
>computers, I believe, was timesharing, which made interactive
>computing feasible for the first time.  The basic principles of

This is important. It doesn't seem that the significance
of timesharing to make interactive computing possible, and then
networking of remote computers possible is adequately understood
or recognized.

>timesharing were first stated by Prof. John McCarthy in an MIT memo
>dated January 1, 1959, which led to the establishment of Project Mac.
>McCarthy's interest in this scheme was motivated by his desire for
>economical intereactive computing in support of his research in
>artificial intelligence and was substantially influenced by the
>example of SAGE, which was a special-purpose timesharing system.
>
Interesting. It also seemed that getting support for timesharing
at MIT originally involved a struggle that McCarthy bravely took up.

>The first two demonstration timesharing systems were created by Prof.
>Fernando Corbato at MIT and by John McCarthy and Ed Fredkin at BBN,
>both in the summer of 1962.  McCarthy was invited to head Project MAC
>but chose instead to move to Stanford, so MAC was headed by Prof.
>Fano.
>
Do you know why McCarthy chose to move to Stanford? He had
pioneered the work that made timesharing work possible at MIT.

>ARPA was established as a result of the acute national paranoia
>brought on by successes in Soviet space technology in the late 1950s
>and Licklider was recruited to start the Information Processing
>Technology office there.  Inasmuch as Lick had ties to both MIT and
>BBN and he perceived the importance of timesharing, he used his ARPA
>position to fund several timesharing development projects, one of
>which was Project MAC.  As we know, timesharing became a very
>successful multi-billion dollar industry (in spite of the fact that
>IBM never figured out how to do it) and made possible a number of
>later developments, one of which was ARPAnet and another was practical
>display-oriented interactive computing.

Any idea why IBM had such a hard time trying to do time sharing?

Also, didn't the vision of a time sharing public computer utility
or of an intellectual public utility grow out of the time sharing
work.
>
>[Aside: One thing that annoys me about a couple of computer histories
>that have appeared on PBS television in recent years is the pretense
>that interactive computing began with personal computers and
>workstations.  In fact, most of the basic principles of display-based
>interaction were developed on timesharing systems, which first
>appeared in the mid-1960s and continued to offer services superior to
>those of workstations until the mid-1980s.]
>
It does seem that time sharing is left out of popular accounts.

(...)
>
>Larry Roberts came to ARPA with the idea of developing ARPAnet and was
>the true father of that project.  Both Taylor and Licklider recognized

But even Larry gives credit to Lick as helping him to recognize
the importance of the computer networking issues.
Roberts writes that after speaking with Licklider, Corbato, and
Perlis in Nov. 1964, he "concluded that the most important
problem in the computer field before us at the time was computer
networking" and that "That was a topic in wihch Licklider was very
interested and his enthusiasm infected me." (See chapter 8 of
Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet,
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook) for further details about
this issue).

>the importance of computer communications between timesharing systems,
>though Lick was not affiliated with ARPA at that time.  Taylor
>arranged for the financial support of the project that brought it into
>existence.  Roberts later took over as IPT head for a time, then moved
>on to BBN, which had become the ARPAnet contractor (against his
>recommendation, by the way).
>
(...)

>Les Earnest (les@cs.stanford.edu)               Phone:  415 941-3984


Ronda
au329@cleveland.freenet.edu
rh120@columbia.edu

--
Ronda Hauben           "The Netizens: On the History and Impact of
au329@cleveland.freenet.edu      Usenet and the Internet
     http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 02:14:37 -0700
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From: Josh Hodas 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.
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Sender: Josh Hodas 
Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.


On Thu, 25 Jul 1996, Paul Andrews wrote:

> Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne
>
> Folks, I bought one of the first Osborne I's in Washington State. It
> weighed 26 lbs. and my invoice, which I still have, was for $1795 (only
> by adding an Epson MX-80 printer, paper, cable and external monitor did I
> get up to $3000). Although the II was late in coming Osborne's real
> problem was lack of innovation and lousy support. Kaypro came out with a
> better machine on the CP/M side (before the gradual shift to IMB PC and DOS).
>
> Paul Andrews/Seattle Times


As I recall, while the delay of the Osborne II was a serious
problem, the coup-de-grace was the delays with the Osborne Executive.
I can no longer remember what the features were on that box
though for some reason I remember it having an reddish-amber display.
Was it a DOS compatible?

Also, anyone know what Adam Osborne is up to these days?

It seems to me that Kaypro suffered one of the most ignominious
business disasters in memory. I still remember when they announced
they were missing two million dollars (that's the number that
comes to mind now) in inventory. Then it
turned out they were storing their inventory in a tent do to
space problems at their plant!


Another note mentioned the Fortune and I am racking my
brains to remember the details of that machine. Was that the
really pretty machine in a platinum case (perhaps running
a unix variant) an an early ergonomic (ie what is now standard but
in those days was very slimline) keyboard?  This
made me think of all the machines of
the mid 80's that captured the hearts of some of us for
their innovative features, but never quite took off,
and noone today has ever heard of.
Some that come to mind:

        Sage 68k        A 68k based unix box. I almost bought one,
                        it came down to a choice between it, a Lisa,
                        and a ...

        Compupro        S-100 Bus CP/M MP/M machines built like tanks.
                        I owned one for several years. It was Jerry
                        Pournelle's machine of choice for ages. Where
                        is Bill Godbout now?

        Fortune

        Morrow          First cheap fully configured (and non-S100) CP/M
                        machine. One of the principals, Bob Dillworth is
                        now CEO of Metricom. (I installed 2 or 3 of
                        these for my parents and siblings over the years.)

I also recall selling (I worked in computer stores through most
of high-school and college, 1978-1985) an early very nicely designed
DOS compatible portable. It was in a pale beige case with an amber
screen and had a nice keyboard and I think it was made in Canada.
My mind is coming up with the name "Orona" or "Otrona" (not to be confused
with Corona who also made machines in that period).

Well enough rambling.

Josh
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 02:21:55 -0700
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From: John Clark 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> "Vaporware" & the P-System.
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Sender: John Clark 
Subject: Re: CM> "Vaporware" & the P-System.

>
> Sender: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
> Subject: Re: CM> "Vaporware" & MS-DOS.
>
[~snip~]

> When it compiled a program to pcode it cleared the screen and put dots
> across the top... they had something to do with the code generated, since
> different programs produced different dots... but it was mostly feedback
> to tell you it was stil alive.

Thats right, i used P-system Pascal as a freshman computer sci student at
CSUN in 81 ( if memory serves ). I recall it as dependable, and a good
way to implement my class projects on my Apple II. My final had several
thousand lines of code and used the virtual memory capabilities to swap
in/out programme segments off those 140KB?? flops.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 02:28:37 -0700
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From: T Bruce Tober 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Epson QX-16 - was:The end of CP/M.
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Sender: T Bruce Tober 
Subject: CM> Epson 16 - was:The end of CP/M.

In message <164099420745.LTK.013@cpsr.org>, Bill Anderson
 writes
>Has anyone ever stopped and consider the amount of money we have spent
>upgrading and changing machines over the years.

Yes, and we know where the blame falls for that.

Speaking of blame, does anyone else here remember the Epson QX-16. That
was my first "real" computer. I bought it from a discontinueds dealer at
a really bargain price in late 84. I couldn't believe how easy it was to
set up and use, especially since I had no prior experience of PC's
except the trs-80 five years earlier, and which quickly found its way
into my closet and then to a used office gear dealer).

The blame for the defeat of the Epson QX16 was allegedly one of the SF
writers (whose name I won't mention) who wrote a monthly column for one
of the prestigious magazines discussed here recently. He claimed it to
be only about 35% dos compatible. The machine ran dos, cp/m and its own
proprietary os and suite of software, VALDOCS (VALuable DOCumentS).

Valdocs included a word processor, database (addressbook), spreadsheet,
comms and drawing programs. It replaced the cp/m and valdocs only QX10.
it had the most wonderful keyboard I've ever had the pleasure to use and
a high res green monitor.

As for the SF writer's claim of 35% compatiblity with DOS. Well a few
years after I bought the machine I was happily (if slorly) running
WordPerfect 5.0 on it's dual floppy system. 35% compatible my left leg.

tbt
--
| Bruce Tober - octobersdad@reporters.net - Birmingham, England            |
| pgp key ID 0x9E014CE9. For CV/Resume:http://pollux.com/authors/tober.htm |
| For CV/Resume and Clips: http://nwsmait.intermarket.com/nmfwc/tbt.htm    |
|                                                                          |
| "Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our   |
| liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the|
| First Amendment protects." -- three wise federal judges                  |
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 02:35:37 -0700
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From: Richard Brodie 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Why DOS won out.
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Sender: Richard Brodie 
Subject: RE: CM> Why DOS won out.

Cringely's book is rife with inaccuracies, but he got this one mostly
right. By the was, his TV series is just the opposite, probably the most
accurate account I know of those early days at MS.

I talked to Bill about this some years ago and he said he did indeed
refer IBM to Digital Research, but that for whatever reason they came
back to us. Tim Paterson, one heck of a programmer, had written QDOS
(quick & dirty operating system), a very small and incomplete core OS
for the 8088, on his own. MS bought it and, with the work of many
developers including Mike Courtney (I don't think Paul was that
involved, but I could be wrong), brought it up to speed.

By the way, someone wrote a letter to the local Seattle paper lambasting
Microsoft for "cheating" Tim P by only paying him $50K for what has
become a multibillion dollar business. The writer had an image of Tim
begging with a tin cup in the streets of Seattle while Bill & co. wined
and dined on their riches. Tim wrote a GREAT letter to the editor in
response (Paul Andrews, maybe you can dig it up from the files) saying
that he in fact had been a Microsoft employee for some years now and was
doing fine, thanks, but that the tin cup was a great idea and he would
get one. To this day, Tim still works at MS and still has a tin cup
hanging from his door which receives regular donations.


Richard Brodie  RBrodie@brodietech.com  +1.206.688.8600
CEO, Brodie Technology Group, Inc., Bellevue, WA, USA
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie
Do you know what a "meme" is?
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/meme.htm
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 02:43:29 -0700
Reply-To: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
Originator: cpsr-history@cpsr.org
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Precedence: bulk
From: PHavholm@ACS.WOOSTER.EDU (Peter Havholm)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.
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Sender: PHavholm@ACS.WOOSTER.EDU (Peter Havholm)
Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.

>Sender: Paul Andrews 
>Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne
>
>Folks, I bought one of the first Osborne I's in Washington State. It
>weighed 26 lbs. and my invoice, which I still have, was for $1795 (only
>by adding an Epson MX-80 printer, paper, cable and external monitor did I
>get up to $3000). Although the II was late in coming Osborne's real
>problem was lack of innovation and lousy support. Kaypro came out with a
>better machine on the CP/M side (before the gradual shift to IMB PC and DOS).
>
>Paul
>
>Andrews/Seattle Times

     I bought Osborne I's and eventually an Executive or two for the public
relations department I was then running (in the early '80s) because $1795
was a good price for the bundle: WordStar, SuperCalc, MSBasic, and what was
-- except for the screen -- a very competent computer. My memory is that I
could not get the same functionality (software + hardware) for a better
price. Portability was not the issue.

     One should remember that, at that time, lots of people were buying
"word processors" -- machines that could only do one thing -- for
significantly more than $1795. And then you had to buy the monitor and the
printer. I remember a salesman explaining how his huge and very expensive
word processor had been dumbed down and its operation rigidified so that it
could meet the needs of "the secretarial mind."

     I dunno about support. All our machines worked fine until we threw
them out and bought Macs some years later because no one was willing to
learn any more commands. They had certainly paid for themselves by that
time.


Peter Havholm
Department of English
The College of Wooster
Wooster, OH 44691
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 02:50:26 -0700
Reply-To: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
Originator: cpsr-history@cpsr.org
Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
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From: "Don Senzig" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Wayne Green, Byte, Kilobyte, and Kilobaud
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Sender: "Don Senzig" 
Subject: Re: CM> Wayne Green, Byte, Kilobyte, and Kilobaud

> Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
> Subject: Re: CPSR-HISTORY digest 30

> There were also several newsletters before Byte.  One published by
> Carl Helmers, as Nelson menitoned, another on the 8008 by a West coast
> man whose name escapes me off hand (Hal Singer?), the Bug Book guys in
> Virginia had one I believe, another by Stephen Gray (?). etc.  These
> were followed shortly by many local club newsletters, one of which,
> SCCS interface, had a short run as a national magazine.
>

Carl Helmers (and his brother Peter?) published "Experimenters
Computer System" which outlined a 8008 based system.  I think that I
read that Peter was working on a BASIC interpreter for it.  Carl cut
whatever deal with Wayne Green and carried his ECS subscribers to
Byte, which I didn't know when I first subscribed to Byte, and was
surprised to receive two copies of Byte a month and none of ECS.

There was also a fellow named Scelbi who sold a 8008 based system
and published a number of programs in book form. Later some of these
were rereleased with the programs rewritten for the 8080.

The first PCC publication I came across was "What to do After You
Hit Return or P.C.C.'s First Book of Computer Games", copyright 1975,
printed Jan 1975.  The bulk of the programs in it are for Hewlett
Packard 2000F BASIC and the book bears a HP part number "HP
36000-91005".  As I recall, a few years later some of these games
found their way into a collection of CP/M software and had to be
pulled due to no permission being granted for their inclusion.

Don Senzig  -  http://www.execpc.com/~dsenzig
Video Engineer
MATA  -  http://www.execpc.com/~dsenzig/mata
Public Access Cable Channels 14/47 in Milwaukee Wisconsin
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 02:57:17 -0700
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From: Charles Brownstein 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning, Licklider.
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Sender: Charles Brownstein 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning?

Educom hosted meetings on educational networking starting around 1971-72,
with similar agendas as those that became common by the 80's- and with
reports on the use of the ARPAnet for research and teaching. Early ones
list ALL the machines (w owners and addresses, that were part of and
reachable via ARPAnet. The lists are almost 2 pages long1

At one of the meetings, J.C.R. Licklider, having returned for a second tour
to APRA, predicted "hundreds of thousands" of consols all around the nation
by the year 2000 (or something likethat). Backers of the new "webtops" are
hoping he's right! I have the book and I'll send the cite when I get back
to my office next week.

Also, I had in 1971, a phone link to Dartmouth's "Impress" system from
Lehigh, which my students used to study statistics, math modeling and data
analysis (using libraries of datasets from the US and abroad). Kept the TTY
next to the counter sorter clacking.  That qualify?
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 03:04:51 -0700
Reply-To: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
Originator: cpsr-history@cpsr.org
Sender: listserv-reply-errors@Sunnyside.COM
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From: "christopher f. chiesa" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of "mirror world" idea, science fiction.
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Sender: "christopher f. chiesa" 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of "mirror world" idea?



On Thu, 25 Jul 1996, David S. Bennahum wrote:

> In his book "Mirror Worlds" (Oxford University Press, 1991), Yale computer
> science professor David Gelernter writes of a future where we can access
> minutely rendered computer-generated "mirrors" of our cities, towns, homes.
> These mirrors would exist as massive databases, visually rendered, easy to
> navigate and querry.  It is a fantasy that's familiar (it reminds of me of
> a computer game--SimCity), and I wonder, tracing the idea back, when it
> first appeared in computer science.  It seems the current CityScape, et.
> al. ventures are possibly a crude permutation of this idea.

I don't know about references in computer science, or other real-world
texts, but for a cool example of what Virtual Reality COULD be -- and, I
feel, someday WILL be, maybe a hundred or two years from now, or maybe
next month :-) -- check out the classic (well... to ME it's a classic)
trilogy that starts with "The Gentle Giants of Ganymede."  I _think_ it's
by James P. Hogan, though I might be wrong.

In that trilogy, humanity makes contact with an alien race who essentially
live out their lives connected to a full-sensory, fully-networked,
negligible-response-time, etc. VR network.  The experience is complete
enough to be indistinguishable from _actual_ reality ("AR").  To me, this
foreshadows a social issue of our future:  when VR becomes
indistinguishable from AR, one runs the risk that, once one "plugs in,"
one can NEVER BE CERTAIN, thereafter, that one has actually UNPLUGGED
again!  One might THINK one has unplugged, but perhaps that was only a
simulation...  Hogan doesn't QUITE deal with that issue, but he comes
close in a roundabout way... and I've heard references to other SF stories
which DO center on this issue...

Chris Chiesa
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 03:12:53 -0700
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From: Jay Robert Hauben 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Licklider, Quotes about him, and bio-timeline.
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Sender: Jay Robert Hauben 
Subject: RE: JCR Licklider

I have put together an outline of JCR Licklider's life. I too would like to
hear more rememberances about this important pioneer. I have appended a few
quotes from written rememberances of Lick as he asked everyone to call him.

JCR Licklider (1915-1990)

Rememberances:

1) "J.C.R. Licklider's work affected many people, most of whom will
never be aware of him. But his spirit endures in the people who
knew him and who were effected by him. Few people who knew Lick
will forget him."  Robert F. Rosin (quoted in Computer Pioneers
edited by J.A.N. Lee, p. 444)


2) "I think I first met Licklider at the recommendation of Minsky
amd McCarthy, who worked together in artificial intelligence at
MIT. Lick was a delightful enthusiast. Sometime after the
symposia he went to work for ARPA to head up an information
sytems office. In that position, he managed to convince the
Department of Defense to allocate a very tidy sum to support the
development of time sharing. Then, instead of despensing money
around the country, he asked us to mount a concentrated effort at
MIT to do the R&D and evangelize the technology worldwide, which
we were glad to do. Lick was a dreamer with his feet on the
ground. He knew how to inspire and he knew how to get resources.
In other words, he knew how to make dreams become reality. In my
estimation, no one deserves more credit than he for making good
on the visions of that era." "Martin Greenberger, Technology's
Marathon Man," in Educom Review, Vol 31 no 2, March/April 1996,
pp. 20-26. p. 22


3) "Lick had a vision of a better way of computing.... Lick
believed we could do better and, more than any other single
individual, saw to it that we did."

Speaking about graduate programs in comput science at "U.C.
Berkeley, CMU, MIT, and Stanford.... Their success would have
been impossible without the foundation put in place by Lick in
1962-64."

"Lick's vision provided an extremely fruitful, long-term
direction for computing research.... And he laid the foundation
for graduate education in the newly created field of computer
science. All users of interactive computing and every company
that employs computer people owe him a great debt."

Preface by Robert W. Taylor "In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider 1915-
1990," Digital Research Center Research Report #61, Palo Alto,
CA, August 7, 1990.
---------------------------------------------------------------

1915      Born March 11 in St. Louis, Mo

193?-1937 Studied math, physics and psychology at Washington
          Univ., St. Louis. BA 1937

1937-1938 Masters study [?????] Washington Univ., St. Louis. MA
          1938

19??-1942 Graduate study University of Rochester. Ph.D. 1942
          Thesis "An Electrical Investigation of Frequency-
          Localization in the Auditory Cortex of the Cat."

Early WWII Research Associate at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA
          Studied Gestalt psychology with Wolfgang Koeller

1943-1946 Research Fellow in the Psycho-Acoutics Laboratory, Harvard
          University, Cambridge, MA, advancing "theories of pitch
          perception and the intelligibility of speech" (NYT 7/3/90)
          "Interested in high-altitude communication,
          particularly in ways of compressing speech to increase
          the carrying power of radio and stuff like that."
          (Annals, 14, 2, p. 16.) Fano said, "There was some very
          substantial work that he did during the war .... He did
          something called "clipped speech"-- he invented [it]:
          it worked very well." (Annals) Numerous scientific
          papers published e.g., Jur. Acous. Soc. Am.

1946-1949 Lecturer at Harvard "mainly doing research, but also a
          little bit of teaching ... statistics and physiological
          psychology ... subjects like that" (Babbage interview)
          "At that time Norbert Wiener ran a circle that was very
          attractive to people all over Cambridge, and on Tuesday
          nights I went to that." (Annals, Vol 14 no 2 p.16)

1950-1957 Went as Associate Professor to Massachusetts Institute of
          Technology to "start up a psychology section which we
          hoped would eventually become a Psychology Department
          ... in the Electrical Engineering Department ...
          taught a little bit of electrical engineering."

Summer '51 Participated in Project Hartwell (Navy supported
          research concerning underseas warfare and overseas
          transport)

1952-1953 Participant in Project Charles (Air Force study of air
          defense). "At that time, some of the more impressional
          ones of us were expecting there would be 50,000 Soviet
          bombers coming in over here." (Annals) Lead to the
          creation of Lincoln Laboratories. "I was trying to
          model how the brain works in hearing with an analog
          computer .... My time was divided a third time
          acoustics lab, a third time trying to build a
          psychology section ..., and one third in the Lincoln
          Laboratory... I really had to learn digital computing,
          because I couldn't do this stuff wh analog computers" (Annals)

1957      Franklin V. Taylor Award, Society of Engineering
          Psychologists

1957-1962 Vice President for Psycho-acoustics, Engineering
          Psychology and Information Systems at Bolt Beranek and
          Newman.

1958      President of the Acoustical Society of America

1959-1962 Did research and management work at BBN using DEC PDP-I.
          Worked under Council on Library Resources grant (1991-3)
          "I was having such a marvelous time at BBN, working on
          computer based library stuff and all kinds of aural
          radar." (Annals) Did "a little study ... on how I would
          spend my time. It showed that almost all my time was
          spent on algorithmic things that were no fun, but they
          were all necessary for the few heuristic things that
          seemed important. I had this little picture in my mind
          how we were goimg to get people and computers really
          thinking together." (Annals)

1960      Published "Man-Computer Symbiosis"

1962-1964 Directed ARPA information processing technology and
          behavioral sciences section (IPTO 1963-4). Encouraged
          research into time-sharing at SDC, Berkeley, UCLA, etc
          and distributeenough money to incubate the formation
          of computer science departments that eventually would
          be linked up via the ARPNET. (Funding for Project MAC
          started in 1963.) Fano said, Licklider was "very
          different from most heads of branches of the
          government, .... not sitting in your office waiting for
          proposals to arrive after sending out a brochure ...
          running around the country trying to generate
        enthusiasm." (Annals)

1967      Published "Public Television: A Program for Action." In Report
          of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television.

1964-1967 Manager of Information Sciences, Systems and Applications
          at the Thomas J. Watson Center of International
          Business Machines. Lived near Mt. Kisco, NY.

1965      Published Libraries of the Future

Summer 1966 Participant in EduCom Summer Study on Information
          Networks at Boulder Colorado planning EduNet.

1968      Published with Robert Taylor "The Computer as
          Communication Device"

1968-1970 Director of MIT Project MAC concurrently as Professor
          of Electrical Engineering. Encouraged and helped initiate the
          Student Information Processing Board

1971-1973 MIT(???)

1974-1975 Director of IPTO

1975-1986 Professor at MIT in the Laboratory for Computer Science

1986-1990 Professor Emeritus at MIT (1988 had 8MB RAM 150MB HD
          computer on his desk.)

1990      Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service

6/26/90   Died in Arlington, MA from complications after an asthma
          attach.

Memberships: National Academy of Sciences, Acoustic Society of
          America, Academy of Arts and Sciences, Association for
          Computing Machinery
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 01:12:19 -0700
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From: "Dennis G. Perry" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning?
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Sender: "Dennis G. Perry" 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning?

     I am not certain about whether anything was published about distance
     learning, but when I was at DARPA in 1985-1987, I was funding an
     effort to do multi-casting on the Arpanet and we were wanting to do a
     demonstration of training to multiple sites.  This effort led to what
     we now see in the Internet as the MBONE and related broadcasts.

     dennis


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning?
Author:  cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM at INTERNET
Date:    7/25/96 7:41 AM



Sender: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan & Trevor"
Subject: RE: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning?

>Sender: "Richard J. Smith" 
>
>Out of curiosity, I'd like to know if anyone on this list
>knows of an early usage of the Internet for distance
>education.

I can only give you negative information.  In 1985, I was responsible for
setting up the telecommunications for the World Logo Conference.  So far as
I have been able to determine, this was the first fully integrated on-site/
online conference using static data files, email, and real time/chat functions
to involve offsite and onsite participants in the same sessions.  My report on
the conference, "Online from Paradise" was published in Teleconferencing V
and IPCC '87.  (All of which is by the way, because it happened on
Compu$pend.)

In reworking the paper for the more general topic of training, I did an
ERIC search on everything I could think of that potentially related to
computer mediated communications in education.  Of the 32 references I
eventually found, none were based on use of the Internet.  So, unless
someone can come up with a really hidden reference, nothing was *published*
prior to 1987.

However, I *do* know that the husband/SO of an English instructor at SFU
was acting as "poet in non-residence" to a public school English class.
The kids were middle school level, as I recall.  (I had peripheral contact
with the project, although I was not formally involved.)  This was the
1987/88 school year.  During that term an extension course from SFU was
also announced that was to use email and fax.

======================
roberts@decus.ca         rslade@vcn.bc.ca         slade@freenet.victoria.bc.ca
link to virus, book info at http://www.freenet.victoria.bc.ca/techrev/rms.html
Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94663-2 (800-SPRINGER)
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 01:26:37 -0700
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From: Ross 
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Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution
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Sender: Ross 
Subject: Re: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution

> I've heard of some unusual and now-abandoned ways of putting together
> computer hardware:  my father tells me that someone really built a
> computer that used decimal memory rather than binary storage [...]
> Did someone really try decimal memory?

ENIAC had decimal memory, I seem to recall. There's no end of books on
the subject...

.----------Ross Hamilton, PhD Student in the History of Computing-------.
| http://quartz.dcs.warwick.ac.uk:8080/ | mailto:ross@dcs.warwick.ac.uk |
|       Department of Computer Science, | 12 Newbold Place, Leamington  |
|    Uni. of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL | Spa, Warwks, CV32 4HR, UK     |
`----------------- Office: 01203 528043 | Home: 01926 886146 -----------'
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 01:35:57 -0700
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From: "keith reid-green" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution
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Sender: "keith reid-green" 
Subject: re: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution

>From KReid-Green@ets.org
Subject:: Dead ends of hardware evolution

""Oh the IBM 650 had a memory quite nifty on a drum revolving
swiftly and it's good enough for me", and also one I don't completely
recall:  "Oh the _______ is famous, couldn't add so who could blame
us when we called it ignoramus, ...".  What machine couldn't add?
Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?  Did someone really
try decimal memory?  Curious to hear whatever people know."

The IBM 650 was IBM's first generation bread-and-butter machine.  It had a
drum instead of a disk because not only hadn't disks been invented yet, but
neither had random-access memory (1954.)  Well, it's not fair to say that
random access memory wasn't invented yet, but it certainly wasn't widely
used.  The first 650's had 1,000 ten-digit words on the drum (2,000 words
in later models) and of course the program was executed from the drum, so
programmers had to write their programs so as to take advantage of drum
revolutions.  This was possible because the instructions had two
addresses--the first was the data address and the second was the drum
address of the next instruction.  If the program was written sequentially,
then one instruction per rev was the best you could get--12,500
instructions per minute!  The display console of this machine showed the
ten digits of an instruction in bi-quinary code.  One of two lights marked
0 and 5 had to be lit, and one of five others marked 0,1,2,3,4.  Input and
output were punched cards.  The output had to be taken to a tabulator like
the IBM 407 to be printed.  (There's more, but I don't want to write too
much.)

Another decimal machine (I liked it a lot) was the IBM 7070.  It was a
second generation machine, but it was restricted to a random access memory
of 10,000 ten-digit words.  The instruction set was very powerful and very
large--there were about 200 instructions, with lots of options in the ways
some instructions could be used.  The 7070 was available in 1960 and was
pretty much obsolete by 1965 when the IBM 360 series came on the market.

I worked on both these machines as a programmer and the above is all
recalled from memory and could be less than perfectly accurate.  But if
anybody wants more detail I have Principles of Operation manuals for both
machines at home, along with an IBM 704 manual.

Keith Reid-Green
Educational Testing Service
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 01:44:02 -0700
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From: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution
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Sender: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution

Jenny: the IBM 1620 used decimal data storage and used a look-up table
to implement addition and multiplication. There's an excellent book
on the 1620 by Daniel N. Leeson and Donald L. Dimitry. It was printed
in 1962, LOC catalog number 62-19796.

As for drums, it's much easier to design a recording unit where all the
tracks are the same length. The first audio recordings were also made
on drums. It's not as cost-effective: they're harder to handle and they
require a lot more sheer physical hardware... but until solid state
memory got cheap enough it was quite common to have relatively fast
memory on a fixed-head or multiple-moving-head drum, between the very
expensive electronic memory and the slower but cheaper disks and tapes.

That's why the swap device on early UNIX systems was called "/dev/drum".

If you want to ponder *really* esoteric stuff, do some research on CRT
and mercury delay line memory. Pretty much anything that can change state
quickly enough and retain that new state for a while has been used for
memory. I remember reading a Scientific American article on the use of
tiny amplifiers and ultrasonic transducers etched onto the surface of a
silicon wafer, storing information as sound waves in the surface of the
silicon.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 01:50:54 -0700
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From: John Oliver 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution
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Sender: John Oliver 
Subject: Re: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution

At 01:29 AM 7/26/96 -0700, you wrote:
>I've heard of some unusual and now-abandoned ways of putting together
>computer hardware:  my father tells me that someone really built a
>computer that used decimal memory rather than binary storage, and
>another filk tune (to the tune of "Old Time Religion") refers to two
>more.  "Oh the IBM 650 had a memory quite nifty on a drum revolving
>swiftly and it's good enough for me", and also one I don't completely
>recall:  "Oh the _______ is famous, couldn't add so who could blame
>us when we called it ignoramus, ...".  What machine couldn't add?
>Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?  Did someone really
>try decimal memory?  Curious to hear whatever people know.
>                                             Jenny

Could be the same machine.  The 650 was actually "bi-quinary" 2-5 storage
but the effect was decimal. Memory was a rotating drum which could be
thought of as 20 parallel loops of tape with 20 read/write heads.  Each
track allowed 100 10-digit decimal numbers. The instructions contained the
usual info plus the address of the next instruction (two addresses for a
branch).  To avoid latency, optimum programming required figuring how far
the drum would rotate while an instruction was being executed, and the
putting the next instruction at a location that would be coming under the
heads at that time. I programmed on a large tab sheet where I literally
mapped the entire memory space. Two tracks were special ... input from the
card reader showed up in 80 locations on the input track, output to the card
punch came from the output track.  I programmed this sucker in ML and SOAP
(Symbolic Optimized Assembly Program). It was a great intro ... lots of
archane skill development. I still remember going to the machine room,
tugging my forelock, and handing the card deck to the priest (who would
frequently make motions suggesting an iminent "floor shuffle"). I would
return the next day to see whether the machine had stayed up the necessary 6
hours to run my code (which would run in a fraction of a second on my
ThinkPad today).  The 650 used vacuum tubes of course and if the power
failed, there was great panic as the acolytes removed the enclosure in hopes
of releasing enough heat to avoid "meltdown".  Ah yes ... those were the
days ...
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 01:58:43 -0700
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From: Stephen Wolff 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution
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Sender: Stephen Wolff 
Subject: Re: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution

> Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?  Did someone really
> try decimal memory?  Curious to hear whatever people know.

I did my first computing on a 650.  Yes, it had a 2000 word drum
memory; IBM hadn't discovered disks yet.  The internal number
representation was indeed decimal, with the lofty name "biquinary":
think of numbering your fingers from 0 to 9; biquinary representation
is basically "which finger? which hand?"

The first language I used was "Bell I", an interpretive 3-address
language for the 650, written at Bell Labs.  Later I graduated to
Assembly language with the marvelous SOAP (Storage Optimization
Assembly Program).  SOAP knew the execution times of all the machine's
commands, and laid out your assembly code on the drum so that when an
instruction had completed, the next instruction would just be coming
up under the read heads; it made an **enormous** difference over
simply laying the instructions out sequentially on the drum.

We always envied the folks who were allowed to go up to NYU and run on
the 704 which, according to legend of the time, would crash unless its
operating temperature was kept correct by propping open its cabinet's
back door with a copy of "Methoden der Mathematische Physik".

-s
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 02:05:21 -0700
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From: thvv@best.com (Tom Van Vleck)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution
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Sender: thvv@best.com (Tom Van Vleck)
Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution

J.WalkerLiddell wrote:
>What machine couldn't add?
>Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?  Did someone really
>try decimal memory?  Curious to hear whatever people know.

The IBM 1620 was known as CADET: Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try.
It, and IBM's 1401 and 7070 all used some kind of decimal memory.
The 1620 and 7070 had fixed size words that could store 10 decimal
digits and a sign: characters were encoded as pairs of digits.
The 1401 used variable-sized fields. Each memory position had
seven bits, BA8421M, where the M was called the "word mark," and
if on indicated the end of a "word." Each memory position in the
1401 could hold either a digit or a letter.

I used all three of these machines in the 60s. For more information, see
  http://www.best.com/~thvv/1401s.html
  http://www.best.com/~thvv/7070.html
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 02:12:41 -0700
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From: "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of NEXIS, RECON.
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Sender: "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols" 
Subject: CM> Origins of NEXIS?

On 26 Jul 96 at 1:49, Peter D. Junger wrote:
> Our Moderator writes:
>
> : [Moderator's Note: LEXIS-NEXIS may be one of the oldest, and most robust,
> : examples of an online database accessible from myriad points across the
> : globe.

Actually, I believe the oldest online information resource of this
sort was NASA's RECON system. While it wasn't, and still isn't, a
publicly accessible online DBMS, even from the early days it was widely
available in NASA and space science circles. RECON got kicked on, I
believe, my RECON manual  is missing, in the middle 70s. The company
that built it then took the lessons learned from RECON and built a system
called DIALOG--one that I'm sure we all know.

Steven


Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols                  sjvn@vna1.com
     http://www.access.digex.net/~sjvn/vna.html
QOTD: "No, you have a job, you don't work for a living,
I'm a freelancer, I _work_ for my living."--sjvn
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 02:19:35 -0700
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From: "Michael R. Williams" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution
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Sender: "Michael R. Williams" 
Subject: Re: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution


>Subject: Dead ends of hardware evolution
> my father tells me that someone really built a
>computer that used decimal memory rather than binary storage, and
>another filk tune (to the tune of "Old Time Religion") refers to two
>more.  "Oh the IBM 650 had a memory quite nifty on a drum revolving
>swiftly and it's good enough for me", and also one I don't completely
>recall:  "Oh the _______ is famous, couldn't add so who could blame
>us when we called it ignoramus, ...".  What machine couldn't add?
>Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?  Did someone really
>try decimal memory?  Curious to hear whatever people know.


Oh my, it must be nice to be young enough not to have had to work on these
old machines!!!!

(The rest of you old-timers can get back to work while I try to explain to
Jenny what happened...)

The IBM 650 was a machine that was developed in the 1950s (before you  were
born) as an "inexpensive" machine for smaller firms and universities.
Memory was once VERY expensive (in the 50s you couldn't get more than a few
thousand words of memory no matter how much you were willing to pay because
the addressing schemes would simply not deal with it).  In order to keep the
cost down, the IBM 650 had all its memory on a magnetic drum (ie it had
nothing like what we would call RAM today).  Both instructions and data were
stored on the drum and you had to wait until the next instruction was under
the read head before you could execute it.  This made it rather SLOW - but
it did work and a lot of the "old-timers" (like your father, I suspect) got
their start on that machine.  The reason for no disk is that disks were not
available - experiments had been done with disks as early as about 1950
(perhaps even a little earlier) but they were not a viable item until IBM
really got the bugs out of them much later in the 50's whe  tey developed
them for storage on the STRETCH (IBM 7030) computer.  (if any of you old
timers are still reading, yes I do know about the 650 RAMAC disks - but
these were special case items and not really the disks that Jenny was meaning)

As to machine that had decimal memory - well that was often the case - even
today we have decimal memory (ie a byte - or half a byte - is really a
decimal digit - or at least capable of storing a decimal digit). The first
UNIVACs were essentially decimal storage (implemented by mercury delay lines
- don't ask, you will never believe what they were!) as were many other
machines.

Machines that couldn't add - sure lots of them.  One of the most famous was
the IBM 1620 (really the successor of the 650 as an inexpensive machine for
smaller groups, but this time produced in the early 60s).  In order to keep
the cost down it didn't have an arithmetic unit (at leas the model I didn't,
I think maybe the model II did, but I can't really remember now - must be
getting old).  Instead it had a set of "tables" stored in memory between
locations 100- 400 (that was a decimal memory machine, so each location
could store a decimal digit).  When ever it had to add (or subtract,
multiply or divide) a pair of numbers, it simply took the digits from each
pair of numbers and used them to address into these tables to find the
answer (and any carry that might be needed).  for example if you had to add
5+3 it would look in (for example, my memory is failing me for exact detail
again) memory location 153 to find the sum (8) and use that in building up
the answer digit by digit.

This scheme had a lot of good uses - you could change the tables yourself to
get octal or hexadecimal arithmetic out of an ordinary add instruction (as
long as you remembered to change them back again before anything else was
done on the machine.

I hope this helps in giving you some idea of what it was like back then -
ask some more and perhaps we can enlighten a lot of other people as well.

Mike Williams

---------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael R. Williams
Editor-in-Chief, Annals of the History of Computing
Department of Computer Science
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta
Canada      T2N 1N4

Ph:  (403) 220-6781
Fax: (403) 284-4707
email: williams@cpsc.ucalgary.ca
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 02:30:09 -0700
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From:  (Peter Capek)
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Subject: CM> Drums revolving swiftly, and machines that can't add
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Sender:  (Peter Capek)
Subject: Drums revolving swiftly, and machines that can't add

Jenny writes:

> more.  "Oh the IBM 650 had a memory quite nifty on a drum revolving
> swiftly and it's good enough for me", and also one I don't completely
> recall:  "Oh the _______ is famous, couldn't add so who could blame
> us when we called it ignoramus, ...".  What machine couldn't add?
> Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?  Did someone really
> try decimal memory?  Curious to hear whatever people know.

More than you ever wanted to know about these machines...

The IBM 650 did indeed use a 2000 word drum (4000 words was an option)
for its "main storage" The drum spun at 12500 RPM.  Each word was 10
decimal digits plus a sign.  I believe it was, as so many such things
are, the result of cost considerations.  Core memory in that era (the
650 was first delivered in late 1954, but the goodness of its design
is supported by the fact that it was a remarkably successful product
which continued to be manufactured until 1962; almost 2000 were made).
Core memory in those days was very expensive.

In the 650, core was an option with a very specific purpose: to buffer
data transfer operations between the drum and tape drives.  Because the
two devices operated at different speeds, core was necessary to avoid
losing data during the transfer.  So reading a tape consisted of
reading a record into core memory, and then transferring core memory
to drum.  Perhaps it was possible to operated on the data directly in
the core memory; I think so, but I'm not certain.

An interesting aspect of the 650 is that the performance of a program
was very dependent on where its instructions were placed on the drum.
Each instruction included the location of the instruction to be
executed next.  So "optimizing" a program consisted of placing
instructions in such a way that the program didn't have to wait a lot
for the drum to turn to fetch the next instruction.  SOAP, the
Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program was an assembler which automated
this function.

In the early 60s, IBM made a machine called the 1620, and I think
that's the one referred to as an ignoramus.  It had core memory, but
no real arithmetic unit.  It performed arithmetic by using a table
stored at reserved locations in memory.  It formed an address by
concatentating the table address with the two digits to be added and
looking at that location in memory to find the sum or product of the
two digits.  Division was done entirely in software, and I believe
subtraction was done using the same table as for addition, but taking
advantage of the fact that each memory location stored two digits,
plus an extra bit which was used to indicate a carry.  (This is all
from memory, and it has been many years..) The thing most people know
about this machine who know about it at all is that its code name was
CADET: Can't add - doesn't even try.

               Peter Capek
______________________________________________________________________
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Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 02:36:46 -0700
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From: "christopher f. chiesa" 
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Subject: CM> Early On-Line Services
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Sender: "christopher f. chiesa" 
Subject: Re: CM> Early On-Line Services



On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Joshua S. Hodas wrote:

> >Sender: LESPEA@muze.com (Leslie Pearson)
> >Subject: Early On-Line Services
> >
> >I also recently
> >found some documents for a service called People Link/Plink that was
> >active in the mid 1980's.

Don't know whether Plink is still active, but a whole mass of Amiga users
migrated OFF of Plink onto Portal (which was at that time my sole ISP)
around early-to-mid-1988 if I recall correctly.  They're still active,
now on Portal.

> local Telenet and Tymenet (do they still exist) point-of-presence.
                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yes, they do.  I still occasionally use Telenet (now called SprintNet)
to access Portal, and I believe on the rare occasions when I de-mothball
my CompuServe account I access it through Tymnet.

> You
> would first get a prompt from the POP and then type a command to connect
> to the source (which was in Maclean, Virginia).

Yep.  SprintNet, at least, still works that way.  Ill-documented, no
line-editing, no error  messages (just a "?" mark if you mis-type
something).  Lovely.

Chris Chiesa
______________________________________________________________________
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Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 02:43:47 -0700
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Subject: CM> Early On-Line Services
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Sender: "christopher f. chiesa" 
Subject: Re: CM> Early On-Line Services



On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Jeremy Grodberg wrote:

> Leslie Pearson wrote:
> >
> >Does anyone remember the early On-Line services such as the Source?
>
> The only one I remember was Portal, which seemed like a really good
> deal.

At the time I signed up for Portal, the deal was VERY good: $19.95 a month
"base rate," plus something like $0.05/Kbyte/month for stored e-mail (at
that time, and for a few years afterward, you didn't have personal "files"
per se); connect charges applied, I think, if you came in via modem, but
if you came in via SprintNet, as I did, Portal didn't charge you for con-
nect time -- but SprintNet did!  The "deal" to get, then, was SprintNet's
"PC Pursuit" program, which allowed individuals to use SprintNet's nation-
wide (worldwide?) data network during its "off-peak" hours: 6PM-7AM week-
days, and all day weekends and certain holidays, for a FLAT FEE with NO
LIMIT on connect-time.  I knew several people who spent upwards of 200
(yes, TWO HUNDRED) hours a month connected to Portal.  Unfortunately,
about a month after I signed up, Portal set an industry precedent by
instituting a connect-time charge that did what no other charge in history
had previously done: it got MORE expensive per hour, the MORE time you
used!  That killed off the majority of Portal "big-timers" all at once
and totally changed the online ambiance there.  Not to mention ticking
ME off for having not told me a month earlier that there was a change
in the works that might have made Portal less attractive in the first
place...

Chris Chiesa
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 02:50:28 -0700
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From: "Kip Crosby, CHAC" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> IBM 1620, 650, CADET.
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Sender: "Kip Crosby, CHAC" 
Subject: Re: CPSR-HISTORY digest 36

>I've heard of some unusual and now-abandoned ways of putting together
>computer hardware:....  What machine couldn't add?
>Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?  Did someone really
>try decimal memory?  Curious to hear whatever people know.
>                                             Jenny

The IBM 1620 couldn't add "natively;" it used lookup tables.  Its IBM
internal codename, CADET, was widely taken as an acronym for Can't Add
Doesn't Even Try.

The 650 had a drum instead of a disk because there weren't disks yet.  The
first hard disk, the IBM RAMAC or 305, was developed circa 1953 and first
sold in 1956.

ENIAC (at least) had decimal memory, with ring-tail adders.\
__________________________________________
Kip Crosby                 engine@chac.org
        http://www.chac.org/chac/
Computer History Association of California
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 02:57:22 -0700
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From: Nelson Winkless 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> SCCS etc...
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Sender: Nelson Winkless 
Subject: CM: SCCS etc...

Well, now that Larry Press has the ball rolling on the Southern
California Computer Society (SCCS) of old...

In the Fall of 1976, David Bunnell and I went from Albuquerque to
L.A. to attend an SCCS meeting, and see what we could find of interest
to Personal Computing Magazine. I think the special occasion was that
Bob Marsh of Processor Technology was showing a prototype of the SOL
computer.

The meeting was in the auditorium of a junior high school, and the crowd
was big. Several hundred people were there, the most distinctive of whom
was an elderly skinny guy who was identified to me as the retired technical
genius behind Consolidated Electrodynamics. He sat up in one of the front
rows, and participated actively in the meeting. The thing that made him so
distinctive was that he was wearing tights, a belted tunic, and a beret.
He seemed just right for a computer society in Southern California.

A number of vendors set up tables in the lobby of the auditorium, and
an active bazaar got going after the meeting. Lore (La Funelle) Harp
and Carole Ely were selling circuit cards out of a brown paper grocery
bag over a card table they had brought with them. Within an hour on a
Saturday morning they sold a couple of thousand dollars worth of stuff.
Then they folded the card table and the bag, and went home. In that hour
it became clear to me that this personal computer notion was economically
non-trivial.

I don't know whether Carole and Lore had yet officially formed Vector
Graphics, which company grew out of this activity, and flourished for
a few years. (Carole and husband Bob Wickham are in Santa Fe these days,
and I hear from Bob now and again.)

Does SCCS yet live?

--Nels
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nelson Winkless                   Email: correspo@swcp.com
ABQ Communications Corporation    Voice: 505-897-0822
P.O. Box 1432                     Fax:   505-898-6525
Corrales NM 87048 USA             Website: http://www.swcp.com/correspo
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 03:04:15 -0700
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From: "Michael S. Hart" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Early On-Line Services
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Sender: "Michael S. Hart" 
Subject: Re: CM> Early On-Line Services

I remember the Source. . .and the program called Re-Source
made to beat the price they charged by slowing you down on
all those stupid menus.

I once won a bet with our Atari Computer Club that it must
cost at least $10 to work your way through the menus for a
movie review. . .ANY movie review. . .just one.

It ended up $11.40, so I won the bet, but we lost the $11.

This was in the days when they charged by the minute, when
it was nearly impossible to cruise through more than about
one menu per minute. . . .

I won't comment. . .yet. . .about what kind of deal it was
to make a system work slowly on that basis.


Thanks!

=============================================

Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Benedictine University, Lisle, IL  60532-0900
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
Permanent Internet Address!!!  hart@pobox.com
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 03:10:56 -0700
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From: asr@geom.umn.edu
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Plywood computing...Danny Hillis' Tinkertoy Computer?
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Sender: asr@geom.umn.edu
Subject: Re: CM> Plywood computing.

> That also reminds me of a real book I owned for a while, called "how to
> build a working digital computer" -- out of things like wood, screws,
> paper clips, and light bulbs.  (There was even a memory drum made out of
> an oatmeal can, I kid you not.)  I was very excited to find this book, and
> had visions of constructing a clattering monstrosity that, if nothing
> else, might be able to "add 2 and 3 to get 5," that sort of thing.

What about Danny Hillis' tinkertoy computer?  Can anyone give an authoritative
account of Hillis' project?  All I know is that he (and possibly others) built
a computer out of tinkertoys to show the universal nature of computation, and
to show that it could be done.

.. Adam
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 03:17:33 -0700
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From: "Suzanne M. Johnson" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> "Collaborative Research Community":  another pointer.
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Sender: "Suzanne M. Johnson" 
Subject: "Collaborative Research Community":  another pointer to

Regarding the origin of "Virtual Community" and early uses of computer
assisted learning:

A paper titled "Networking and a Collaborative Research Community:  a Case
Study Using the DENDRAL Programs",  appeared in Computer Networking and
Chemistry, ACS Symposium Series, #19; and was presented at an ACS (American
Chemical Society) meeting in 1975.

This group of authors (I was one of them), all either worked on the DENDRAL
Project (very early AI), or for SUMEX (Stanford University Medical
Experimental Computer) the computer that hosted the Dendral effort. Sumex
was located at Stanford and was connected to the  Arpanet.  In the paper we
describe the variety of remote development projects that used Sumex, and
report the somewhat unexpected feedback from all the projects regarding the
utility of the various communication enhancing capabilities available to the
research groups and their worldwide users.  We were using Tenex on SUMEX,
and with the use of LINK and ADVISE commands could fairly regularly conduct
remote training for individual users on complex software, aided by a phone
connection.  (There have been many times since that I have wished to have
access to similar capability...LINK would blend the two terminal i/o streams
so each user could see what the other was typing...ADVISE would allow the
advisor to provide command input to the program being run by the advisee).

I'd like to echo the comment made by another contributor regarding looking
beyond the time frame of the "personal computer" for the source of major
accomplishments and contributions to collaborative computing.  The PC was
designed to be a disconnected desktop machine.  Only relatively recently did
it learn how to reach out and touch something.

...and sitting here on my Win95 Pentium system, I do sometimes wonder if I
really am better off than I was in those early Tenex days.
        Suzanne


__________________________________________________
Suzanne M. Johnson           Sunnyvale, California
              johnson@rahul.net
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 01:09:45 -0700
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From: Bill Selmeier 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution
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Sender: Bill Selmeier 
Subject: Re: CM> Dead ends of hardware evolution

>Sender: /S=J.WALKERLIDDELL/OU1=S26L07A/AD=ATTMAIL/C=US@mhs-fswa.attmail.com
>Subject: Dead ends of hardware evolution

>I've heard of some unusual and now-abandoned ways of putting together
>computer hardware...

I started my business career with Procter&Gamble.  They had one of those 650
monstor machines.  P&G was trying to push the state of the art in the early
'60s and a year or so before I got there they tried to tune the Toilet Goods
Manufacturing operation by simulating it on the 650 in real time.  Even in
those days they wanted to be able to test out different operational choices
on a computer before making the change in the plant.  They cranked up the
simulation and after 24 hours the computer had actually simulated almost 23
hours of them.  :)  In those days P&G was trying a lot of automation early.

> and also one I don't completely
>recall:  "Oh the _______ is famous, couldn't add so who could blame
>us when we called it ignoramus, ...".  What machine couldn't add?

Your thinking of the IBM 1620 unofficially the "CADET" = Can't Add, Doesn't
Even Try.  It looked all the anwsers up in tables because that was faster
than the addition circuits.  Another early '60s business machine.  Pre IBM
360 machines were either Business or Scientific meaning they had floating
point circuits.

>Why did the 650 have a drum instead of a disk?

It looked like a disk to me.  A really big disk:) probably 36-48 inches in
diameter and the stack of platters were over.5 inch apart and stood 3+feet
tall.

Bill Selmeier
bills@aimnet.com
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 01:23:06 -0700
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From: bill@atd.co.za (William Bowles)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> PLATO in South Africa.
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Sender: bill@atd.co.za (William Bowles)
Subject: Re: CPSR-HISTORY digest 37


>I think that distance learning on the Net precedes the
>Internet as we know it by many years.  The first real
>system was PLATO, developed at U.Illinois in the
>late '60s and marketed by Control Data for ``computer-
>aided instruction.''  In 1976 this was priced at
>$5 million for the software + $6K per terminal.  Essick
>and Kolstad elaborated the Illinois software to produce
>``notes,'' announced at the Santa Monica USENIX in
>January 1983.

An interesting aside to the PLATO project is that it was commissioned by
the US Armed Forces for teaching soldiers but it involved a sophisticated
tracking system which when Congress learned of its implications, promptly
threw it out as a dangerous 'Big Brother' system!

When Control Data realised that it had a multi-million dollar boondoggle on
its hands, it sold it to the South African Govt! The Apartheid regime
started to install it in the Black school system as a method of tracking
students and their activities (both educational and political) and even
went as far as linking it to Employment Centres so that for example, when a
Black student who was politically active finally left school and applied
for a job through an Employment Centre, his/her activities were there in
the file and any activists of course, couldn't get jobs. The Apartheid
regime installed it in the Orange Free State and had plans to use it
nationwide but I don't think it got that far. It had to use the teachers in
the school system as a source of information on the students, effectively
using the teachers as spies.

Bill

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______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 01:28:07 -0700
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From: "christopher f. chiesa" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> City-oriented on-line services, Toronto kiosks.
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Sender: "christopher f. chiesa" 
Subject: Re: CM> City-oriented on-line services, Minitel.

> >        I am wondering if there are earlier examples of on-line services
> > creating city-wide databases of this sort, and if so does anyone recall
> > them?  Were they successes, flops?

I have no idea how it was done, nor whether an "online service" was
involved, but I recall visiting Toronto, Ontario, Canada around 1983 or 84
and seeing interactive "city info" kiosks.  These things were everywhere
-- in hotel lobbies, on the floor in shopping malls, even out on the
streets.  They had touch screens and color displays, and presented all
manner of information about the city of Toronto -- its geography,
attractions, bus and subway routes and schedules, etc. -- in low-res
object-style graphics (a picture of a building would be built up of
overlaid solid rectangles, etc., rather than appearing line-by-line in
"raster" format).  Interestingly, the first selection in the system was
"Toronto or San Francisco."  And yes, you COULD select "San Francisco" and
view equally in-depth information about THAT city!  A year or two later I
happened to visit relatives in SF, and found the "OTHER end" of that kiosk
system -- and was, of course, able to view information about Toronto!  So
does anybody else recall this system, or perhaps have actual stories of
involvement with it?  I was in my early 20s and thought this was a pretty
neat system, but it disappeared from Toronto so evidently "never caught
on..."

Chris Chiesa
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 01:33:13 -0700
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From: "Laurence I. Press" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> early interactive games
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Sender: "Laurence I. Press" 
Subject: early interactive games

> Sender: "keith reid-green" 
> Subject: re: Earliest interactive computer game
>
> Yesterday, somebody asked about the earliest interactive computer game.
> There was a tic-tac-toe game on the IBM 704 where I worked in 1957.  The
> player played against the computer, using two of six sense switches to
> denote the row and column to play in.  The computer then made its play, and
> results were displayed on a CRT (cathode-ray tube).

Cristopher Strachey, who wrote an oft-referenced pre-timesharing paper
that outlined a system for several programmers debugging at the same
time, wrote an interactive chess (checkers ?) program for one of the
English research machines during the 1950s.  It was written up in the
Annals of the History of Computing, but I don't have the reference off
hand.

Art Samules' checkers program that learned and beat Samuels was
described in the IBM journal of R&D around 1959.  (The year of
Strachey's tss precursor paper).

Lar
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 01:37:51 -0700
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From: FAFNIR@delphi.com
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning, PLATO.
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Sender: FAFNIR@delphi.com
Subject: CM> Origins of Net for distance learnin

I recall Stu Umpleby having a significant role in putting PLATO together.  He
spent at least one summer at the Institute for the Future in the early 70's
with documentation on PLATO.

I remember considerable work being done on making the teleconferencing
capability of DARPANET more user friendly to non-technically-oriented end
users in the 72-74 period.  Does learning from the exchange of data
transmitted during teleconferences qualify as "distance learning?"  If so,
then there was "distance learning" back then....

Rick

Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
New York University
          and
Fafnir Associates. Ltd.
Fafnir@Delphi.com
Chaos@usa.pipeline.com
 ______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 01:42:57 -0700
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From: Murphy@SBAServ.SBA.UConn.Edu (Murph Sewall)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Article on origins of "vaporware."
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Sender: Murphy@SBAServ.SBA.UConn.Edu (Murph Sewall)
Subject: Re: Pointer to article on origins of "vaporware."

On 7/26/96 2:00 AM, Peter Capek wrote:
>According to
>
>     http://www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art26.htm
>
>the term "vaporware" was coined to describe OVATION, a product announced in
>1983 and never shipped.

That's ALL the article has to say on the subject; I regard this assertion
as flimsy evidence because it's undocumented.  For instance, how long after
Ovation was announced did someone (who, where, and on what date) refer to
it as "vaporware."  The earliest use that I can document was by an Atari
executive quoted in the Wall Street Journal in late 1983 (December?) or
early 1984 (probably January) in reference to the much ballyhood but not
officially announced IBM "Peanut" (eventually marketed as the IBM PCjr).
Somewhere there probably is an earlier example of the use of the term, but
the Byte claim is too vague.  My guess is that more than one person thought
of it without knowing about others; so, several "firsts" are possible.

/s Murphy A. Sewall       (860) 486-2489 voice
   Professor of Marketing                          (860) 456-7725 fax
   http://mktg.sba.uconn.edu/MKT/Faculty/Sewall.html
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 01:47:49 -0700
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From: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Vaproware & other candidates.
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Sender: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.

> This
> made me think of all the machines of
> the mid 80's that captured the hearts of some of us for
> their innovative features, but never quite took off,
> and noone today has ever heard of.

        HP Integral:    UNIX in a lunchbox in 1984! Had a ROM-based root
                        file system, booted in a snap, and automatically
                        mounted floppies. HP didn't trust portable hard
                        disks. I wish they'd do something like this in a
                        laptop. 68000, amber screen, custom window system
                        bearing kinship to HP's DOS-based "PAM" menu system.

        AT&T 7300/3b1:  AT&T's personal computer. UNIX, telephony support,
                        very fast little window system with the ability to
                        write window applications in shell scripts (an
                        ancestor of WKSH?). 68010, green screen, detached
                        keyboard that lived on a ledge in front of the
                        floppy drive.
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 01:52:40 -0700
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From: "Mike O'Brien" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning, PLATO.
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Sender: "Mike O'Brien" 
Subject: Re: CM> Origins of Net for distance learning, PLATO.

Peter Salus writes:
> I think that distance learning on the Net precedes the
> Internet as we know it by many years.  The first real
> system was PLATO, developed at U.Illinois in the
> late '60s and marketed by Control Data for ``computer-
> aided instruction.''
...
> See Hiltz & Turoff (1978, 1993); H.J. Peters in Computer Decisions
> 8 (1976); J.S. Quarterman, The Matrix (1990; and P.H. Salus,
> Casting the Net (1995).

        Or see me.  I was a user of PLATO III, and helped install and run the
first PLATO IV remote site at what is now the University of Illinois at
Chicago.  PLATO IV is the version of PLATO with which most people are
familiar.  I've got a load of memories of this particular grand experiment
stored away if anyone is interested.

[Moderator's Note: I think we are; please send them.]

Mike O'Brien
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 01:57:18 -0700
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From: "Bill Anderson" 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro, Fortune computer.
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Sender: "Bill Anderson" 
Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.

On Jul 27,  2:14am, Josh Hodas wrote:
> Subject: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.
>
> Sender: Josh Hodas 
> Subject: Re: CM> Vaproware & the Osborne, Kaypro.
>
>
>
> As I recall, while the delay of the Osborne II was a serious
> problem, the coup-de-grace was the delays with the Osborne Executive.
> I can no longer remember what the features were on that box
> though for some reason I remember it having an reddish-amber display.
> Was it a DOS compatible?

The OSborne II was pre-announced, which Osborne I sales to a sliding
halt. The real disaster was the inventory in parts that were ordered for
the Osborne I to fullfil orders that were canceled. Osborne II sales met
aa similar fate when the Osborne Executive was announced. With no income
and a huge inventory, the company disappeared overnight.

>
> Also, anyone know what Adam Osborne is up to these days?
>
If I remember correctly, he continued on with Osborne books. However, I
am not totally sure.

> Another note mentioned the Fortune and I am racking my
> brains to remember the details of that machine. Was that the
> really pretty machine in a platinum case (perhaps running
> a unix variant) an an early ergonomic (ie what is now standard but
> in those days was very slimline) keyboard?  This
> made me think of all the machines of
> the mid 80's that captured the hearts of some of us for
> their innovative features, but never quite took off,
> and noone today has ever heard of.

Since I worked as a Product Line Engineering Manager at Fortune, I
remember the product very well. It was a UNIX based machine targeted to
the OEM market, and VARs that worked with larger customers. Based on the
Motorola 68000, it ran ForPro a version of Unix that contained elements
of Version 7, System 3, and BSD 4.2. ForPro was one of the first, if not
the first, international version of UNIX. We built English, French,
German, and Spanish versions. A European distributor created the string
files for an Italian version. When we release a new version of the OS,
one build created every language version for every hardware platform
supported. The biggest customers in the US were Ford, and Southern Bell.
In France, it was the standard machine in every French postoffice.

I loved the Fortune keyboards because they were designed to compete in
the high-end word processing market. The word processor looked and acted
much like Wang's word processor. In 1987, the company was bought my SMC,
because of its excess manufacturing capability. The company continued
for several more years before disappearing.

Besides its multi-lingual capability, the Fortune had a great software
maintenance interface, with capabilities to install, backup, and
uninstall any software product. By uninstall, I mean the system returned
to the same state it was before the product was installed. Even the
inode count had to be the same. In 1984, ForPro supported sockets with a
token ring network. There were also models based on the 68010 and 68020.
Fortune's biggest mistake was that it never entered the workstation
market. With dynamically configured kernel, it would have made a great
workstation.

I would like to know what happened to Dave Olson and the other engineers
that worked at Fortune. We had a great development team and over the
years, I have lost contact with them.

Bill Anderson
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 02:02:05 -0700
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From: Les Earnest 
To: "Multiple recipients of list cpsr-history@cpsr.org" 
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider
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Sender: Les Earnest 
Subject: CM> J.C.R. Licklider

Earlier I said:
   >Licklider was a great guy and an inspiration to work with.

Ronda Hauben asks:
   Les, why do you say Licklider was an inspiration to work with?

His approach to any issue was entirely open and almost playful, but he
focused on what he was trying to accomplish and systematically
discarded approaches that looked unpromising.  He was especially good
at engaging and motivating those who worked with him.

   >He was indeed very influential, mostly through his recognition and support
   >of inventions by others, but he did not direct Project MAC nor was he
   >directly involved in starting ARPAnet, though he created the
   >environment that made it possible.

   Do you have any sense of what guided him to determine what to
   support?

He always had long range goals in mind and supported those things that
he thought would contribute to achieving them.  Enhancing individual
productivity and the quality of life through the use of computers was
high on his agenda, I believe.

   [. . .]
   Also, the vision described at the end of the paper "The Computer
   as A Device"(Science and Technology, April 1968), that Licklider
   wrote with Robert Taylor raised the crucial question in
   developing computer networking as "Will `to be on line' be
   a privilege or a right? " They said that the impact of computer
   networking on society would rest on the resolution of this question.
   That the impact would be good if all would have the advantage,
   and bad if computer networking weren't made available.

   This is still a crucial issue that hasn't been enough considered
   and taken into account, at least with respect to the policy
   that the U.S. is currently developing on access to computer
   networking for the U.S. population.

Doesn't look very crucial to me -- between home computers and public
facilities such as terminals in public libraries it is already a right
for much of the U.S. population and is destined to be treated much like
the ubiquitous telephone.

   >I first met Lick in 1949 when he gave me my first summer job as an
   >undergraduate.  He was spending the summer at the Naval Electronics
   >Lab in San Diego, experimenting with the intelligibility of digitized
   >speech under various encodings, a project that was about ten years
   >ahead of its time.

   Did he have much day to day contact with the project you were working
   on?

Yes -- I was working primarily as a guinea pig, attempting to
understand garbled speech produced by his infernal machine.

   >The most important technological advance after the invention of
   >computers, I believe, was timesharing, which made interactive
   >computing feasible for the first time.  The basic principles of

   This is important. It doesn't seem that the significance
   of timesharing to make interactive computing possible, and then
   networking of remote computers possible is adequately understood
   or recognized.

Quite right.  The PR machines of certain companies have succeeded in
hoodwinking the media and the historians seem to have accepted their
accounts uncritically so far.

   >timesharing were first stated by Prof. John McCarthy in an MIT memo
   >dated January 1, 1959, which led to the establishment of Project Mac.
   >McCarthy's interest in this scheme was motivated by his desire for
   >economical intereactive computing in support of his research in
   >artificial intelligence and was substantially influenced by the
   >example of SAGE, which was a special-purpose timesharing system.
   >
   Interesting. It also seemed that getting support for timesharing
   at MIT originally involved a struggle that McCarthy bravely took up.

Not much of a struggle, I believe -- as far as I know his colleagues
acknowleged that he was right as soon as they saw his ideas.

   >The first two demonstration timesharing systems were created by Prof.
   >Fernando Corbato at MIT and by John McCarthy and Ed Fredkin at BBN,
   >both in the summer of 1962.  McCarthy was invited to head Project MAC
   >but chose instead to move to Stanford, so MAC was headed by Prof.
   >Fano.
   >
   Do you know why McCarthy chose to move to Stanford? He had
   pioneered the work that made timesharing work possible at MIT.

I suspect that he preferred the California lifestyle and weather, as
any sensible person would, but if you really want to know I suggest
that you ask him: jmc@cs.stanford.edu.  John continued working on
timesharing at Stanford through the mid-1960s by developing the first
display-oriented timesharing system, called Zeus.

   [. . .]  As we know, timesharing became a very
   >successful multi-billion dollar industry (in spite of the fact that
   >IBM never figured out how to do it) and made possible a number of
   >later developments, one of which was ARPAnet and another was practical
   >display-oriented interactive computing.

   Any idea why IBM had such a hard time trying to do time sharing?

There are many possible answers to that question but one of them is
given in a book by the person who was responsible for IBM's
timesharing software development project: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.,
"The Mythical Man-month," Addison-Wesley, 1975.

   Also, didn't the vision of a time sharing public computer utility
   or of an intellectual public utility grow out of the time sharing
   work.

Certainly.  There were a number of companies, such as Tymshare, that
made a success of raw, seething timesharing in the 1970s.  A number of
current Internet service providers are still in that business.

   >Larry Roberts came to ARPA with the idea of developing ARPAnet and was
   >the true father of that project.  Both Taylor and Licklider recognized

   But even Larry gives credit to Lick as helping him to recognize
   the importance of the computer networking issues.
   Roberts writes that after speaking with Licklider, Corbato, and
   Perlis in Nov. 1964, he "concluded that the most important
   problem in the computer field before us at the time was computer
   networking" and that "That was a topic in wihch Licklider was very
   interested and his enthusiasm infected me." [. . .]

Fair enough -- I had moved to the Washington DC area in 1963-65 and so
was not talking to Larry very often in that period.  I recall that he
gave us a demonstration of the computer link from MIT to SDC in the
summer of 1966.  I was not aware of Lick's earlier influence on this
project but am not surprised.

Incidentally, I believe that Larry Roberts also contributed the
development of crytographically secure television by the U.S. Defense
Department in the 1960s.  He had done a Masters thesis at MIT around
1962 on a scheme for avoiding quantization contours in digitized
images that was based on dithering the low order bit in a coherent way
using a pseudo-random number generator.  After reading about that idea
it occurred to me that it was a perfect match for the secure
television system that the Defense Department was then developing,
given that the key generators they were planning to use to encrypt the
digitized image could also be used to dither the low order bits.

Sometime around 1962-63 I arranged for a meeting in Washington between
Larry, me and some people who were doing that work.  They said "Very
interesting!" but were noncomittal about whether they were going to
use it.  I'm pretty sure that they did, but in traditional "spook"
fashion they never acknowledged using this innovation.

        -Les Earnest
______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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