If you have the technical interest to read this, you probably do a lot of your finances with your personal computer. Taxes, monthly budgets, check printing (on those rare occasions), and tracking numerous accounts - computers are far better than people at handling such details. A typical personal computer, or smart phone for that matter, contains company names,... Continue Reading →
(Circa 1975-199?) The PDP-11 computer, build by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century, was a classic machine of the minicomputer era. At the time of the -11's introduction, DEC really had no idea what to do about software for its machines, and wasn't even sure what was appropriate in the way of... Continue Reading →
(circa 1973-8) Boston University (BU) developed its own timesharing system in the 1970s for its IBM 360 and 370 mainframes. The system was based on the batch-oriented Remote Access Computing System (RACS) developed by IBM. McGill University also participated in RAX development, but their version was renamed "McGill University System for Interactive Computing" (MUSIC). Although many of the... Continue Reading →
(circa 1970-85, maybe later) The Forth programming system was developed in the late 1960s by Chuck Moore. It provided a very powerful, text based mechanism for controlling a computer and writing programs when RAM and hard drive space were extremely tight. Early implementations were routinely restricted to 8KB of RAM. Some early implementations relied exclusively on diskette... Continue Reading →
