#CHM #PDF of oral #history #interview with Napoleone Cavlan and Ronald Cline about the #Signetics field programmable logic family. #electronics #hardware #toread
on 02026-05-27#video of Len #Shustek explaining #readtape and its #history, for recovering 7-track and 9-track tapes using 16-channel analog data captured by a Saleae logic analyzer. Including Whirlwind tapes at the #CHM. A lecture from 02020. #retrocomputing
on 02026-05-25Fran Allen oral #history #interview by the #CHM
on 02025-12-14Announcement of the 01998 #SAGE #history #lecture at the #CHM.
on 02025-12-11Transcript of the #SAGE #history #lecture at the #CHM in 01998.
on 02025-12-11100-minute #video on #SAGE #history from a Sun-sponsored #lecture at the #CHM in 01998. Relevant context is the USSR’s first atomic bomb test in 01949. Aircraft kill ratios in the Battle of Britain were 10%, so an effective air defense was unthinkable. At 30'00” Paul Edwards gives the cost as US$4–12B in 01960 dollars. At 30'40” Paul Edwards explains that IBM got paid US$500 million to build the planned 56 computers (28 duplexes). Western Electric film on it starts at 5'11”. 800 programmers (34'00”) which was 20% of the world’s programmers, all working at SDC, which spun off from RAND toward the end of 57, as James Wong explains (55'20”). Maguire went online in June of 01958. Stuart Air Force Base in September. Apparently MIT’s original proposal was to put the whole system underground, but the Pentagon decided that was too expensive. Invited speaker #Les-Earnest (?) says, “This gave rise to this whole industry of ‘L-systems’, so-called: 438L, 465L, all this stuff, that were competing for funds with other things. And for the most part, none of them worked worth a damn. Uh, there were a few exceptions. The satellite control system, I would say, and provided good intelligence, but most of these others, including the Strategic Defense Initiative, were basically boondoggles, and we ain’t through it yet. This stuff is still going on. It gave rise to a multi-billion-dollar industry that basically produces useless junk. And here we are 40 years later.” They tried doing SAGE in JOVIAL, but ended up doing it all in assembly. Mean time between failures of each half of the duplex was maybe days.
on 02025-12-11on Ken Thompson’s #oral-history #interview with the #CHM
on 02025-11-07Ken Thompson on Unix #history, some excerpts from the #CHM oral history #interview
on 02025-10-27Don Chamberlin oral #history interview with the #CHM, focusing on relational #databases, 39 pages, #toread
on 02024-05-03Chris Date oral #history interview with the #CHM, focusing on relational #databases, 51 pages, talks about how he founded a company with Codd and about the “Required Technology” “Transrelational” model. “While I’m pleased that these #SQL systems are now ubiquitous, I wish they were relational systems.”
on 02024-05-03