The third generation of computers began with the IBM 360 series of computers in 1964. The first of these machines used «solid logic technology» in which several distinct electronic components were soldered together on a ceramic substrate. In 1956, IBM had pulled ahead, rub n tug san jose ca with 76 IBM computers installed vs. This linguistic drift has been driven by the kinds of stories about computers which the press chooses to report. Unable to grasp the concept of a purely joyous manipulation of information, the media prefer to look for stories about the dreary old Moloch themes of money, best massage san jose power and war. The split between the old world of mainframes and the new world of personal computers is crucial. The funky old mercury delay line memories were replaced by memories in which each bit was stored by a tiny little ring or «core» of a magnetizable compound called ferrite. A vertical line of dots in the center of the screen represented a fence; this fence had a hole in it that could be in either the upper or lower half of the screen, and by placing his hand in the light beam of the photoelectric paper tape reader, an operator could cause the hole to be moved from the lower half to the upper half.
It also had a screen capable of displaying a dozen or so characters at a time. The PDP-1 was of key importance because it was the first machine which people could use in real time. The first of these chips used four-bit «words» of memory and was called the 4004; it was quickly followed by the eight-bit 8008. An obscure company called MITS (Model Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, had the idea of putting the Intel 8008 chip in a box and calling it the Altair computer. By now the vast majority of computers were made by IBM, but one of the most famous second generation computers was the first PDP (Programmed Data Processor) model from the Digital Equipment Corporation. The fourth generation of computers began in 1975, when VLSI circuits got so refined that a computer’s complete logical and arithmetic processing circuits could fit onto a single chip known as a microprocessor. The first generation of commercial computers ran from 1950 to about 1959. These machines continued to use vacuum tubes for their most rapid memory, and for the switching circuits of their logic and arithmetic units. One might best view the coming of the decentralized personal computers and desktop workstations as an ongoing fifth generation of computers.
A microprocessor is the heart of each personal computer or workstation, and every year a new, improved crop of them appears, not unlike Detroit’s annual new lines of cars. The standard procedure for running a program on one of these machines was to turn your program into lines of code and to use a key punch machine to represent each line of code as a punch card. If the operator moved the hole from top to bottom in some regular way, the learning program would recognize what was going on, and after a short time, the line of dots would always get through the hole. Periodically a line of dots would appear on the left hand side of the screen… As mentioned above, with the «real-time» PDP-1, instead of handing your batch of punch cards to the priestly keepers of a hulking giant mainframe, you could sit down at a keyboard, type things in, and see immediate feedback on a screen.
As I mentioned in the first essay, the meaning of the term «computer hacker» has changed over the years; «hacker» is now often used to refer to more or less criminal types who use computer networks for purposes of fraud or espionage. Perhaps if I had a sex toy then I would use anal stimulation more often. The age of digital computer chips is going to be over and done, if not in a hundred years, then certainly in a thousand. This is then sent to Bob. Fleeing to the then-pirate enclave of Caye Caulker was, as we found out, equally dangerous, but at least your killers’ motivation was concrete: an uncomfortable choice, but better to be killed for your money than for looking like you might have read a book or two. Steven Levy’s wonderful book Hackers chronicles how the arrival of the PDP-1 at MIT in 1961 changed computing forever. When the improved PDP-6 arrived at MIT in the mid 1960s, it was used for a wide range of hacker projects, including The Great Subway Hack in which one of the hackers went down to New York City and managed to travel to every single subway stop using a single subway token, thanks to a schedule interactively updated by the PDP-6 on the basis of phone calls from MIT train spotters stationed around Manhattan.