16 Jun
2018
16 Jun
'18
7:11 p.m.
And I believe at the time, KO was commenting in terms of Bell’s ‘minimal computer’
definition (the ‘mini’ - aka 12 bit systems) of the day -DEC’s PDP-8 not the 10. IIRC The
8 pretty much had a base price in the $30k range in the mid to late 60s. FWIW the
original 8 was discrete bipolar (matched) transistors built with DEC flip chips. And
physically about 2or3 19” relay racks in size. Later models used TTL and got down to a
single 3U ‘drawer.’
Clem
Also please remember that originally, mini did not mean small. That was a computer press
redo when the single chip, ‘micro’ computers, came to being in the mid 1970s
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
On Jun 16, 2018, at 8:51 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
From: Dave
Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
> one of the Watson's saying there was a
probably market for
> <single-digit> of computers; Ken Olsen saying people wouldn't want
> computers in their homes; etc, etc.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that these
were urban myths... Does
anyone have actual references in their contexts?
Well, for the Watson one, there is some controversy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attribution
My guess is that he might actually have said it, and it was passed down orally
for a while before it was first written down. The thing is that he is alleged
to have said it in 1943, and there probably _was_ a market for only 5 of the
kind of computing devices available at that point (e.g. the Mark I).
E.g. Watson was talking about the multi-megabuck
704/709/7094 etc
No. The 7094 is circa 1960, almost 20 years later.
Olsens's quote was about the DEC-System
10...
Again, no. He did say it, but it was not about PDP-10s:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Olsen
"Olsen later explained that he was referring to smart homes rather than
personal computers." Which sounds plausible (in the sense of 'what he
meant',
not 'it was correct'), given where he said it (a World Future Society
meeting).
Noel