Anecdotes - IEEE Computer Society

Bay Area Computer History Perspectives Bay Area Computer History Perspectives is a series of computer history talks in the Silicon Valley area, organized by Peter Nurkse and Jeanie Treichel of Sun Microsystems. Talks are usually scheduled for the fourth Tuesday of the month, at .5:30 p.m., at different local sites. Peter and Jeanie are looking for people interested in helping to organize future sessions in the Bay Area. If you are interested, please contact Peter at the e-mail address below, or by phone at (415) 336-3819. On February 22, Larry Roberts spoke at Sun on the early history of the ARPAnet. Dr. Roberts was director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA from 1969 to 1973 and managed the growth of the ARPAnet from an initial three nodes to 30 nodes four years later. On March 22, Ivan Sutherland spoke about Sketchpad. Most recently, Dr. Sutherland received the 1993 ACM Software System Award for his work on Sketchpad. Sutherland showed the original film of Sketchpad in operation, as well as lantern slides of illustrations produced on Sketchpad. On May 24 at Apple, Larry Tesler, Bob Herriot, and Larry Breed spoke on the Stanford card stunt routines, an original bitmap graphics program developed at Stanford University in the early 1960s to generate instructions for card displays at football games. Announcements for the Bay Area Computer History Perspectives series are distributed by e-mail. To be placed on the distribution list, send a message to [email protected]. Peter Nurkse and Jeanie Treichel

Discover Awards The Fourth Annual Discover Awards for technological innovation were won by Celeste Baranski and Alain Rossmann of EO for their Personal Communicator in the category Computer Hardware and Electronics. The Personal Communicator comprises an integrated cellular phone, fax machine, and pen-input personal computer. The award for computer software went to Bedrich Chaloupka of Globalink for the Globalink Translation Software.

Niklaus Wirth In honor of Niklaus Wirth’s 60th birthday, the Swiss Federal Technical College (ETH) recently organized a three-day conference on programming languages and system architectures. Thanks to the top-class scientists in the field who participated - among them the four Turing Award winners E.W. Dijkstra, C.A.R. Hoare, B. Lampson, and N. Wirth the conference attracted an audience of far more than 200 delegates.

The topic of each conference day was launched by an invited talk. The topics and invited talks were System Architectures, launched by Butler Lampson with “Interconnecting Computers: Architecture, Technology, and Economics”; Programming Languages, launched by Susan Graham with “Languages and Interactive Software Development”; and Symbiosis, launched by C.A.R. Hoare with “Hardware and Software: The Closing Gap.” Also, E. W. Dijkstra gave one of his truly committed talks on “the role of programs in proofs” (right, not the other way around!). The conference was rounded off by a special Friday afternoon session in personal honor of Niklaus Wirth, with informal contributions by some of his closer friends and former companions, among them C.A.R. Hoare, B. Lampson, Ed McCreight, R. Ohran, and A. and B. Walker of Ada, Oklahoma (“Wirth programs in Ada”). Juerg Gutknecht

Anecdotes JAMES E. TOMAYKO,

EDITOR

The Anecdotes department is an opportunity for participants in the history of computing to contribute reminiscences of salient events. These stories can vary in scale from the origins of a term to first-person accounts of critical turning points. Since the material in this column often represents personal views tempered or sometimes weakened by memory, the editor invites other opinions and evidence.

Electronic Computer for Home Operation (ECHO): The First Home Computer The April 1994 meeting of the Pittsburgh Section of the IEEE featured a talk by now retired Westinghouse Electric engineer James Sutherland, who built what he thinks is the first home computer in the mid-1960s. Based on a diagram he used to illustrate his talk, it looked more like the home was built to house the computer instead of the other way around. Sutherland commented that people have heard about computers controlling the heat. His computer, ECHO IV, provided heat - so much so that he had to add a 1100 CFM exhaust fan to keep his basement cool in the summer. Sutherland has 25 patents and spent most of his 38-year career designing fossil and nuclear power plant control systems. He got interested in building the computer when some Westinghouse controller hardware was declared surplus in

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994

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Anecdotes

Jim Sutherland sits at the ECHO console. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1966.)

\ J965.

His wife puts a raincoat

In 1959, the company built a computer called PRODAC IV using destructive-readout core memory and NO logic. (The “IV” in ECHO IV came from the PRODAC IV.XhS erland’s current computer is called ECHO-4386 since it is a 40-megahertz 386-based machine.) Sutherland designed the arithmetic logic unit. When the custom-built machine was replaced by a UNIVAC, he asked his boss if he could experiment with the surplus boards and memory to build a home computen,The materials left the plant on an indefinite property pass, and the completed ECHO IV computer now resides in the Computer Museum in Boston. The computer consisted of four large (6 x 2 x 6-foot) wooden cabinets weighing roughly 800 pounds - definitely not a laptop. The cabinets housed the memory, arithmetic, CPU, and I/O units. A separate console held a paper-tape reader, punch, keyboard made of parts from an IBM Selectric typewriter, and Kleinschmidt teleprinter. The I/O connections spread from the basement throughout the house. In

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on daughter

Sally, while Jay and Arm look on.

the kitchen there was a Selectric I/O typewriter, in the living room a keypad, and in four rooms of the house, binary coded decimal clock displays. Three of these were over doorways or at a similar height; the fourth, in the master bedroom, was on the ceiling! The ceiling clock made it possible for Sutherland to monitor the computer’s operation overnight. To save power (the machine drew 3.5 kilowatts), it remained powered off until one minute before the change of hours. A continuously powered comparator looked at the minutes portion of the BCD clock output and switched the entire machine on at the 59-minute mark each hour. After running a self-test, the computer would increment the hours and put itself to sleep. By glancing at the clock over the bed in his and his wife’s room, Sutherland could tell if the computer had gone off into cyberspace. The architecture of the computer reflected the technology of the early 1960s. It was essentially hand-coded in octal.


There were 18 instructions, mostly standard transfer of control and incrementing codes. The memory had 8,192 locations, with the program counter, accumulator, and index register in memory in separate registers. The memory was core, and Sutherland had to install temperature-controlled lamps in the memory cabinet to minimize sudden changes in temperature when booting up in the winter. There were eight input and output channels. The total number of power supplies came to 19, and they would power up in sequence, making a clicking noise like a rifle drill team snapping to attention. The Westinghouse public relations department made the computer known to the media in 1966. Interestingly, newspapers and magazines mostly tried to measure the impact of the machine on the family, rather than make any technical evaluations. The Sutherlands (Jim and Ruth) found themselves making a series of presentations to meetings of home economists. Their son, Jay, now a PhD student in electrical engineering at Cornell, is probably the first person to have grown up in a house with a computer (he was born the same year as ECHO, 1965, and his recollections follow in a separate piece). The accompanying photo from an early article on the machine shows Jim Sutherland at the console with his wife putting a raincoat on daughter Sally while Jay and daughter Ann look on. The food is supposed to symbolize how ECHO had the potential to track the groceries, and the raincoat was in case ECHO learned to predict changes in the weather, which it never did. Some things it did do routinely. One was the clock update. Sutherland says his children read time in BCD quite naturally, and had trouble with analog clocks when they went to school. Another was the use of the keypad in the living room to “program” the TV. In those precable days in the Pittsburgh suburbs, it was necessary to have a directional antenna to get good TV reception. It was possible to program the computer to automatically orient the antenna for best reception on each channel. Certain shows were selected for future viewing much the way a VCR can be programmed now to record them. The kitchen I/O setup included the printer, and Mrs. Sutherland could use it as a word processor to print out recipes and letters. ECHO IV was finally retired in 1976 and sent to the Computer Museum in 1984. It was the first of several home computers for the Sutherlands it was followed by a Heathkit and then commercially available off-the-shelf machines. Sutherland, a winner of a Westinghouse scholarship for his electrical prowess while still a teenager, graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia with a BSEE. He is still able to make even discarded hardware, such as old fax machines, work as well as ECHO IV. The ECHO is not on permanent display at the Computer Museum, but anyone wishing to see it will be accommodated. Editor’s note: I asked Jay Sutherland recollections of ECHO.

to write about his

I remember that 1969 was definitely an exciting time to be four years old. On television astronauts walked upon the

moon, while in my basement I imagined the collection of glowing blue lights and whirring fans to be my own personal lunar module. Panels of buttons and switches, a forest of hanging cables, and Teletype clatter blended to form a mixture of the interesting and the ordinary, similar to the way kids today regard microwave ovens and Nintendo. I honestly

Interestingly, magazines

newspapers

and

mostly tried

to measure the impact of the machine on the family, rather than make any technical evaluations. had no idea that everyone didn’t have a computer. Unfortunately, certain rules curtailed my natural curiosity - don’t touch this, don’t do that, don’t swing on the cables. We all got in trouble sooner or later, even the cat for her regular perch on the always-warm kitchen IBM typewriter. I confess that I had fun playing with the paper-tape reader when no one was looking. The BCD clocks where hard to understand at first, but after Dad explained that three lights in a row equaled seven, I could easily tell when it was 7:00 or 7:07 not immediately but still a good first step. I also learned that computers behave kind of like people - they get cold in winter, hot in summer, and are sometimes uncooperative and hard to understand. It seems that some things haven’t changed in 25 years. Jay Sutherland Cornell University

Biographies ERIC A. WEISS, EDITOR

Dreams That Get Funded: Programming Rolls Its Own Reality This is the third episode of a memoir of a career in computing that began in 1957. The first episode appeared in this journal, Volume 13, No. I, 1991; the second in Volume 14, No. I, 1992. The title is taken from a remark made by my friend Bob Brill when I objected to some proposal of his as not showing much sense of reality: “What is reality but -Mark Halpern dreams that got funded?”


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