

What Google would have looked like in the 1960s - lanbird
http://www.masswerk.at/google60/
Punch cards
======
monsterix
Wow!

This is actually very classy and reminds me of my dad's office back in the
day. I remember going to his desk on Sundays and listening to dot-matrix
printers nearby. Now I know those were ordinary MIS/TPS reports that we've
come to hate so much. But I used to play with that line-feed paper, ripping
its edges where it connected to the printer sprockets.

There was also a huge drum printer in that office, with a giant spool of paper
resting on the false floor. The room was air-conditioned, shoes left outside,
very cozy and well lit. Sure it looked very cool to me then. Thank you for
bringing back those pleasant memories!

~~~
fexl
I get pangs of nostalgia watching this thing. I'm old enough to have worked
with punch cards, teletypes, mag tapes, line printers, front panel switches,
and such -- in the '70s anyway. (... now where the hell are my cigarettes ...)

~~~
hawkharris
This 60s Google app is very cool, and I can see how it might inspire
nostalgia.

But whenever I think about how prevalent cigarette smoking used to be in those
days, I feel sad that so many people smoked without fully understanding the
health risks. Both of my grandfathers lived and worked in that era, and both
died of lung cancer.

~~~
ams6110
The risks were pretty much fully understood in the '70s

~~~
nationcrafting
Indeed. My father quit smoking from one day to the next in the mid-60s, when a
surgeon friend showed him photos of a smoker's lung. The info was available.

~~~
hawkharris
I'm glad to hear that your father successfully quit his first time. According
to the American Cancer Society, he belongs to a 7-percent minority. Please see
my response above for more statistics and qualitative data about what
information was - and is - available.

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kyro
This makes me a little sad that I wasn't born early enough to experience the
rise of that sort of technology. On the other hand, I'm also a little sad that
I was born too early to not live through the era of hyperdrive and mass
consumer space travel.

I guess I'm a little greedy.

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alexhancock
It takes so long to use, but the "printout" feels a lot more permanent and
awesome than the modern digital list of search results.

~~~
sp332
I used to have a box of crummy line-feed paper that I used in a dot matrix
printer hooked up to my Apple IIe. I liked the endlessness of the accordion-
fold paper. Also I felt like it was very cool (and a bit surreal) to take data
that is inside the computer and print it out and leave it in piles on the
desk. I wasn't tied to a tiny screen anymore...

I just re-watched Colossus: The Forbin Project and I thought it was funny how
you could tell that the paper was much higher-quality than the stuff I had in
my box.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vn0...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vn0cz7vYOcc#t=36)
<\- should skip to 36 seconds in

~~~
iMiiTH
I just spent my morning watching that movie, and now I'll probably spend the
rest of the day reading the book. Awesome movie, thanks for posting it.

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Sami_Lehtinen
I got really distracted about totally inaccurate audio and tape functions.
Haven't you ever used those devices? Timing, sounds, tape reel operation,
highly in-accurate. Sorry to complain, idea is nice. But execution is really
non authentic. You should have written authentic simulation code for audio and
tape reels. Now it's just ehh, artistic stuff, just like in movies, which
usually means bad. Also tape storage usually used faster seeks, slower reads
and some pauses in between.

I also deeply hated Brother electronic typewriters, because I could always
write faster than those typewriters were able to extract data from buffer.
There was always an risk that you filled the buffer up and then had a
overflow. Then you had to wait until the buffer was clear so you were able to
see what was lost before continuing. Really enraging. IBM Selectic typewriters
were much better and a lot faster. Anyway, main point is that print timing
differs between letters based on what's being printed.

Of course you were able to connect both of these to computer and use as a
printer.

Good:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter)
Bad: [http://electricinnards.blogspot.fi/2013/04/brother-
ax-250-el...](http://electricinnards.blogspot.fi/2013/04/brother-
ax-250-electronic-typewriter.html)

This should be interesting at least to tech hackers. Old but good stuff.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Selectric.ogv](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Selectric.ogv)

~~~
masswerk
The sounds are actually extracted from footage showing this kind of equipment
at work. The tape drive operations are controlled by random (based on what
assumptions on the index and block locations should we do this?), but should
usually feature some pauses and stops. The action of the tape tensioners is
highly exaggerated in order to provide a substitute for the vacuum columns
that can't be shown in this layout (providing a bit of a visual explanation
for the asynchronous action of the reels).

Please understand that this is not meant to be a full emulation (like, say,
Hercules compiled via Emscripten). Otherwise you would have to re-implement
Google on top of zOS ... ;-)

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kps
Nice. They capture the 360-era console style well. Should use a fast vac-
column tape drive, though — it only reads a few contiguous blocks, so I'm not
able to suspend disbelief that there is no actual search depicted.

The same author has done PDP-1 Spacewar
<[http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/>](http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/>) with a
pretty good re-creation of the original display — see _Notes on the CRT-
Emulation_ down the page.

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edw519
I have been wondering why it took me so long to become a better, faster
programmer. I accomplish as much in a week now as I did in a year back then.

Was I that stupid back then? Have a become a much better learner? Was is the
"10,000" hours that made the difference?

No. It was just that fucking hard to make much progress back then. And it's
changed so gradually that it's hard to notice.

I've have always known this, but I didn't _feel_ it to this extent until I did
this demo.

Great job. Brought back wonderful memories. And new understanding.

Now burn it.

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jes
This is fantastic. I'm 54 and thus old enough to remember writing my programs
one card at a time on an 026 or 029 keypunch. A DECwriter with TSO was like
heaven.

Great simulation and highly evocative of that earlier time. Kudos to the
creators!

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mikro2nd
Not very realistic, though... where were the ads?

Seriously, though, totally impressive!

~~~
masswerk
No ads, but it features some basic Doodles: Dec 23, 24-26, 31, Jan 1.

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mark_l_watson
I love that. I got my first access via a teletype console in 1962, and a few
years later in high school I took a programming extension class at a local
university: punched cards! After college, we would run our own data general
minicomputers, VAXes, etc. I remember backing up my tapes because it would
have been catastrophic to loose programs and data.

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nationcrafting
Gosh, I thought my childhood computers were slow...

(my first computer was an Acorn BBC, with 32K and tape recorders to save your
programs on, zzzzz...)

~~~
louthy
Happy days!

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jamesk14022
This really helps you appreciate how fast modern technology really is.

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skillcode
Props to whoever came up with the idea.

~~~
elwell
Props to whoever executed the idea.

