50 + Years of Computing

Or what you can get For $6 that was over a $1,000,000 50 years ago

I didn't appreciate how far computing had changed until I saw an article in the July edition of Australian personal computer, about the Raspberry Pi Pico.

The first computer I ever used, I never saw. It was in 1967 when I was at High School. See about it here

I have no idea who the maker of that computer was, its name or anything about it. But based on the date I can make a reasonably accurate assumption that it had no operating system. Computers at the time only allowed you to run one program at a time, and where operated by a person, most likely, with a science background. Later computers could only be operated or a specialist person called a computer operator.

No doubt that 1967 computer would probably cost millions of dollars, in the money of the time, would have taken up an entire room, used heaps of electricity, and required special air conditioning to stop it from melting.

Second computer I used was an ICL 1901A at Preston Institute of technology, where I was doing a diploma of business studies/EDP which I started in 1970

EDP stood for Electronic Data Processing, which was the name given to computing at the time.

That computer had a very rudimentary operating system called George. However only the computer operator was allowed to use the operating system and most programs where run without the operating system. Again I never physical saw the computer because we would submit programs on Punch cards and get the results of the program, if it worked, the next day.

At least I can find the specifications of ICL 1901A

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICT_1900_series

It appeared to have memory of, what was called Page size, 1024 words,most likely 1024 Kb by today's standard. Nothing to indicate how fast it was. The base unit, Mainframe, did not come with savable storage. That would have been extra if available at all.

Today,a Raspberry Pi Pico has no operating system, just like those early computes. It is a single board computer about the size of a USB memory card. Its designed to run one program for doing things like measure temperatures, actuate motors, light LEDs, sound buzzers and the like.

BUT it would be able to do far more than the mainframe computer of the late 60, 1,000s of times faster.

Here are the Pico specs:

The microcontroller on the Pico is the new RP2040 and features a dual-core 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ design running at up to 133MHz, with 264KB of RAM and 2MB of on-board flash storage.

Price $6.00

Thats a gigantic reduction in price with increase in performance over 50 years.

In 1977 I started working for olivetti selling their business computers. They were basically computerized ledger machines. They had no operating system but only took up the size of a desk, took two people to lift them and sold for between $12,000 and $18,000

Here is what they looked like and did

About 1979 I purchased my first computer, A Tandy TRS80.

It also did not have an operating system. But used A cassette recorder to save and load programs.

I think I paid about $1,500 for it.

The Pico of today for $6.00 could easily do everything the Tandy could do.

Admittedly the Tandy came with a keyboard screen and cassette player.

Our Daughter Kristi using the Tandy in 1979

Our Son Glen using the Tandy in 1981

See also My Computer history.