Fifty Years Ago a Vision of Today

[Gord_in_Toronto]

That half a century!

50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World

I never saw an Alto but do remember the Star from the early 1980s. So forty years of commercial availability.

1981’s Xerox Star, introduced a common graphical interface on the metaphor of a desktop, with graphical icons for files, folders, printers, and the like.

 

[gabeygoat]

digging this

 

[Norman Alexander]

Actually used one of these at university. Shows how old I am.

 

[8enotto]

Oldest computer I ever had used was a Sperry 1100 with punch cards as input. Late 80's on a military base. We had menus stacked up five levels deep and zero graphic ability.

A "desktop" on that was a dumb terminal.

It's something the guys in the computer room would have dreamed of to have something as advanced as that Xerox.

 

[zooterkin]

I used a Three Rivers/ICL Perq, which was heavily based on the Alto, in about 1983.

It was the first commercially produced personal workstation with a Graphical User Interface. The design was heavily influenced by the original workstation computer, the Xerox Alto, which was never commercially produced.

 

[TragicMonkey]

When I was a lad all we had available was Lord Burbank's Automatical Thinking Engine. It was a beautiful machine, over ten large brass tubes full of moving steam and powered by burning clockwork. It wasn't particularly compact, weighing in at five acres and measuring nearly thirty ells. But it was a mighty engine of computation, capable of doing over three mathematory calculations per hour! This was an enormous advantage in the war, the thinking engine calculated many targets for the army and thus helped frustrate the wickedness of the Kaiser.

 

[arthwollipot]

A "desktop" on that was a dumb terminal.

Ironic that in these days of O365 and the Cloud we're all starting to move back to a dumb terminal architecture.

 

[Darat]

Even more so when you think about everything we do in our web browsers.

 

[zooterkin]

Ironic that in these days of O365 and the Cloud we're all starting to move back to a dumb terminal architecture.

It's a pendulum that swings back and forwards over the years.

 

[TragicMonkey]

It's a pendulum that swings back and forwards over the years.

The eternal cycle! "Let's centralize everything, for efficiency!" Millions of dollars and years later..."Let's decentralize everything, for efficiency!" The last time the circle ticked over I was commended for having so many bright ideas on how to centralize stuff -- I'd just kept my notes on how things worked from the last time. I literally just told people how it used to be done and they thought I came up with it.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

It's a pendulum that swings back and forwards over the years.

And sometimes gets stuck in the middle per the IBM 3270 PC^WP. I once used one of these to produce a demo integrated office system using Dan Bricklin's Demo Program. It was so impressive that my boss asked if it was real. Not for another decade, unfortunately.

 

[alfaniner]

I liked Arthur C. Clarke's July 20,2019: Life in the 21st Century, which I bought when it first came out in 1986. It was predictions about what life might be like 50 years after the first man set foot on The Moon. Some of the predictions are really quite amusing, while some are dead-on accurate.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

I liked Arthur C. Clarke's July 20,2019: Life in the 21st Century, which I bought when it first came out in 1986. It was predictions about what life might be like 50 years after the first man set foot on The Moon. Some of the predictions are really quite amusing, while some are dead-on accurate.

Ya learn something new every day! I had never heard of that book. Google shows it to be quite interesting.

I liked the review at https://abitmoredetail.wordpress.co...larkes-july-20-2019-life-in-the-21st-century/

 

[Wudang]

It's a pendulum that swings back and forwards over the years.

And the wheel gets reinvented. I don't know how many times I've helped colleagues reinvent concentrator networks for example.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

And the wheel gets reinvented. I don't know how many times I've helped colleagues reinvent concentrator networks for example.

You made me ask Google: "Does IBM still use SNA?"

SNA is still used extensively in banks and other financial transaction networks, as well as in many government agencies. While IBM is still providing support for SNA, one of the primary pieces of hardware, the 3745/3746 communications controller, has been withdrawn from the market by IBM.

I miss the little wheel with the rubber belt that was always spinning inside the controller. I presume it had something to do with timing. Google does not help.

 

[Wudang]

Yes I know one bank who use it primarily within data centres and I believe that was the standard model for IBM as well. A lot of core banking infrastructure is tied together by SNA's LU62 protocol where it hasn't been superseded by MQ series.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Yes I know one bank who use it primarily within data centres and I believe that was the standard model for IBM as well. A lot of core banking infrastructure is tied together by SNA's LU62 protocol where it hasn't been superseded by MQ series.

You triggered me to look for how well COBOL is doing.

This old programming language is much more important than you might expect. Here's why

New research on the global scale of the COBOL programming language suggests that there are upwards of 800 billion lines of COBOL code being used by organizations and institutes worldwide, some three times larger than previously estimated.

A global study with 1,104 respondents from 49 countries found that more than nine in 10 organizations continue to view COBOL as a strategic priority. It also found that 83% of organizations believe their COBOL-based applications will see out another 10 or more years.

 

[alfaniner]

You triggered me to look for how well COBOL is doing.

This old programming language is much more important than you might expect. Here's why

I don't know why "lines of code" is still considered a benchmark. Even in Jurassic Park it was a red herring.

 

[Wudang]

You triggered me to look for how well COBOL is doing.

This old programming language is much more important than you might expect. Here's why

When I left <big bank> (with head held high and feet held higher) COBOL was still the mainframe programming language and mainframes were still the core of data. Nothing shifts data from disk to memory like a mainframe. When the infrastructure that ties applications together is in COBOL the rest tends to follow. And I like the phrase "software ecology" - a bit pretentious but somes up the idea that a program works in an environment. All the other code is COBOL so how do I write a program that interfaces with them? Here's guide for COBOL.
I hate COBOL. I've written many thousands of lines of COBOL and every program would have been so much simpler in PL/I, or even bloody assembler.
Shame the programming courses were crap.

 

[Wudang]

I don't know why "lines of code" is still considered a benchmark. Even in Jurassic Park it was a red herring.

It's an indicator for managers who have no clue what their staff do but need literally anything that can be measured so they can pretend they know what's happening. This is why one team I was in was happy to install Sonarqube and show our SQALE ratings as we had numbers we could show managers and say "look at the shiny shiny".