|
|
Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However, the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface & the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use. |
My Uncle Al sent me this picture and I thought I’d share, as it is really fascinating. This is how an article in the 1954 edition of Popular Mechanics magazine envisioned home computers in the year 2004.
I think we swallowed the fishing pole as well and were half-way up the fisherman’s arm.
On a side note, anyone know how to program the clock on a Sony VCR, I can’t seem to get rid of the blinking 12:00 that has been annoying me for the past 10 years? 🙂
Well I decided to get some backstory on this because, well, that’s my thing 😉 and I went to my favorite source of myth debunking: Snopes and found the truth was pretty much just what John suggested.
But going still further, the image isn’t actually an ancient sub photo. This image was actually doctored from the image shown here, a photo from 2000 of a full-scale mock-up of a typical nuclear-powered submarine’s maneuvering room. It was doctored in Photoshop to look just as it does. Well we bit hook, line and sinker (for the fishermen out there) on this one. It came from a pretty reliable source, our uncle. But it just goes to show once again how urban legends propogate.
Interesting point John. Somehow the picture looked genuine to me. Maybe home computers were first used in US nuclear submarines;-)
Natasha, somebody’s leg is being pulled.
That’s not a picture of an “early computer”. It’s actually a display of a portion of a US nuclear submarine’s control room. Note the large wheel toward the left-center of the picture? No computer needs a wheel like that, and no, it’s not a primitive “pointing device”! But it’s a great picture nonetheless. Futuristic in the “Flash Gordon” sense, leavened with a touch of reality.
Fortran? What about Cobol?
Anyways, Star Trek. Star Trek. Star Trek. In 1968, Roddenberry and crew had communicators which flipped open. Cell phones anyone?
Also, scientists have already experimented with “beaming” light from one end of a lab to another…
Now, if they only had self-programming video quadrifiers!
“Lucky” I mean. See what I mean? If I was using that monster of a thing, I probably would not be able to fix my error until two weeks later.
Wow. All I have to say for us avid computer users: We are all so luck and fortunate!
FORTRAN…what a huge joke. Although in it’s time it was the best programming language. Just don’t forget about those pesky “columns” and going to pick up the results one week after submitting the program, only to find out you had a small error and had to wait another week to get the output for the next run.
Although the picture shows a primitive computer, it is much, much smaller than the ones that covered one city block, weighing around 30 tons and would require technicians to change more than 18,000 vaccum tubes, 6000+ switches and plugs manually. And talk about price, today the computer is one million times cheaper than an old mainframe.
I know! I’m very happy with Windows! Long gone the days when we had to decipher BASIC, DOS and the rest. They were too complicated for me;-)
Thanks God we don’t have to use Fortran as predicted.
Jim