
The Mothers of the Mother of All Demos - schmudde
https://schmud.de/posts/2020-08-04-mother-of-mothers.html
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drno123
Whenever the von Neumann EDVAC paper is mentioned, I feel it is rightful to
point people to the book that gives proper backround to what we incorrectly
call von Neumann architecture:

[https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-
Compu...](https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-
Computer/dp/0802713483)

~~~
oofoe
Also, if you're interested in that sort of thing, the book "From Dits to Bits"
by Herman Lukoff is a good read from an engineer in the trenches. Seems that
it's now available on the Internet Archive:
[https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4436586M/From_dits_to_bits](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4436586M/From_dits_to_bits)

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082349872349872
The Edvac paper is notable for the ways in which their debugging process is
almost, but not quite, modern.

Another early gui-driven networked computer system was Sage:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-
Automatic_Ground_Environm...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-
Automatic_Ground_Environment)

[https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/](https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/)

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lawlessone
How was that camera feed done? analogue? cannot have been digital

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AlbertoGP
There were no satellites involved, and yes it was purely analogue. They did
build most of the equipment themselves, the hardware to connect the computers
to the video equipment.

But let Douglas Engelbart explain it by himself: "we leased two microwave
lines, up from our laboratory at SRI, up in Menlo Park, so it’s roughly 30
miles, and it took two dish antennas on the roof there, four of them on a
truck up on SkyLine, and two on the roof of the conference center”.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3PWet8fDk&t=19m50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3PWet8fDk&t=19m50s)

Edit: btw, a few seconds later he mentions Bill English: “but anyway it
worked, and the main reason it worked is because Bill English is a genius”.

~~~
schmudde
That quote on English is a great find! I added it to the article and made sure
to give you credit. Thanks.

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_reza
Its notable how defective our current computers are compared to glorious days
of 60s-70s.

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zan2434
Heh, I thought this was going to be an article about Engelbart, et. al.'s
mothers!

