A friend sent me this photo from a 1954 Scientiific American. I thought that it was worth a look.
For the visually challenged, the text says:
Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.
Back in the early '60s, Willy Ley wrote an article for Analog magazine, comparing the actual pace of technological progress with the expectations of the man on the street, scientists, and science fiction writers. He found that, in general, the actual pace far outstripped even the predictions of science fiction writers.
I think that went to a hydraulic system that would allow unmounting of the hard disks. You know, the 10 kB disks that were projected to weigh only a half ton.
Darwin, thanks for this. It gives me hope that they will overcome their actual little problems with lightspeed too and that human colonies in other galaxies might become reality one day.
LIVE LONG AND PROSPER!
This was a post that I ran on another thread. Although the incident happened 13 years after your picture was taken, computers were still pretty big machines in 1967:
My hat goes off to Tim Joyce who was in Mrs Moore's high school math class with me in 1967. True story:
Following Mrs Moore's explanation of why we needed to understand how to solve problems algebraically, Tim pointed out that he didn't need to learn the stuff because he was going to have a computer do the work for him. After everyone finished laughing at poor Tim and chiding him because no room in his house would be big enough to hold his future computer, he simply replied, "It's going to sit on my desk." When the laughter from that died away, Mrs Moore responded, "But if you want it to work, you're going to need to know how to program it." Tim remarked, "Other people will have already done that for me." Freaky stuff -- Tim was either a prophet or a time traveller . . . I'm still not sure which.
Will O'Ban
The unit pictured there is actually much smaller than the first computer that I actually got to touch. It was really interesting to walk through the memory. However it was rather warm from all of those vacuum tubes. I forget whether it was one tube per bit or two tubes per bit. They had 26 volt filaments that were operated on 12 volts to prolong the life. That was computing then. It was much less complicated. Of course we didn’t have Bill Gates.
A recent article (er I read it recently, I but I don’t remember whether it was the latest, or one of the ones from 1976) from that same magazine (Analog), that I read, talked about how the pace of technological improvement was more of an exponential curve. The major problem with predictions was that people tended to predict based on linear assumptions. Hence, in the near future, the guesses were well over the actual result, but in the more distant future well under! (I think this is like 1 and 20 years for near and distant respectively)
The thing that confused, and should have alerted me was the poor wording in the text: “..created this model to illustrate how a ‘home computer’ could look like…”
This is not the word choice of a Scientific American copy writer, even in 1954.
