Home PC Predictions 50 years ago :)

[noko]

Interesting,

Looks like Manuvering on a submarine, left is the throtles, middle is the Reactor Control Panel, and on the right is the Electrical Control Panel.

On the throttles panel you have the steam plant gages for Steam Generator level, feedpump pressure and feed header pressure, main condenser vacuum etc.. The two big wheel, the larger is the ahead throttles the smaller is the astern. Plus the steam plant alarms.

The RPCP, the handle looking knob is for the shimming in or out the Reactor control rods but the plant design layout is foreign to me. Not sure of the plant for this. Instruments have the Reactor coolant system hot and cold leg tempertures, Presurizer level and temperture, rod heights, pressures etc.

The electrical control panel has what is called the mimic bus layed out on the bottom section, meaning a basic diagram of the electrical distribution from the power sources to the major distribution busses where the breakers can be operated remotely.

What does this have to do with computers I've havn't a clue. Nothing in the background has any computing power what so ever. Human operated only.

 

[Trawler]

Maybe it's a Mad Catz Controller for Submarine sims?

 

[WaltC]

Apologies: it seems Fortran was invented in 1954, and released commercially in 1957.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran

Still I believe the picture is fake - different parts have different resolutions and lighting.

I knew it was fake immediately, too, but for different reasons--namely that even in 1974 few if any had ever even imagined or dreamed of the concept of "the home computer" as we know it today. In the Apollo moon missions in the 60's, for instance, most of NASA's computational work was done by slide rule and human brain power, and NASA has itself described the computational "computer" power onboard the Apollo rockets and landers to be the equivalent of that commercially available in the 1990's inside a scientific pocket calculator you could pick up in a WalMart for $70... Makes the moon landings all that more amazing, doesn't it?

IMO, the very first "personal computers" to emerge in the 70's were units sporting 1k-2k of ram with physical wires inside, and of course it goes without saying they were all "U build it and U program it, too" boxes for which no commercial programs of any description existed. If you went to college in the 70's chances were you'd never heard of "the home computer"... I would think if anything that back in the 50's the concept of the "home computer" was the stuff of sci-fi and considered a practical impossibility at the time. It's truly remarkable to think of what the invention of "the solid-state transistor" has meant. Imagine if we were still restricted to vacuum tubes like they were in the beginning--Heh... It would likely take a "home computer" of the size and power requirements of the Pentagon to equal a modern desktop which draws power from a wall socket, not to mention several dozen engineers to keep it running...

 

[radar1200gs]

That typewriter in the front doesn't entirely fit the base it's on, so that's Photoshop action I suppose.
Also, if it is a Teletype indeed, than it is not a 50s model at all. It looks like 70s styling, and I don't think it' a Teletype but something else.
I actually had a Teletype at home for my first printer, so I'm intimately familiar with how they look (yes, mine had the punchtape reader/writer device ).
These are them: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/teletype.html

Heh. One of my computer desks is built off the base of a DEC line printer terminal. Makes a mighty fine and solid desk. My stepfather salvaged a ton of old computer equipment from state high schools.

I remember just as I was entering high school they were upgrading Tasnet (the then state government educational computer network) from a DEC PDP-8 to a PDP-10. The only other computers in class at that time were the first gen Apple 2's. A couple of years later came the Microbee (an Aussie machine http://members.ozemail.com.au/~mikeleys/microbee.html) and then the British BBC's.

 

[KimB]

Imagine if we were still restricted to vacuum tubes like they were in the beginning--Heh... It would likely take a "home computer" of the size and power requirements of the Pentagon to equal a modern desktop which draws power from a wall socket, not to mention several dozen engineers to keep it running...

Haha, this just cracked me up

Such a large vacuum tube-based computer would probably only be able to run for a fraction of a second before a tube would blow

 

[Guden Oden]

How did the old vacuum tube puters handle blown tubes? Was there some method to detect it happening that stalled execution, or was it neccessary to run all calculations multiple times to check for possible errors?

 

[anaqer]

Looks like Manuvering on a submarine, left is the throtles, middle is the Reactor Control Panel, and on the right is the Electrical Control Panel.

 

[Hyp-X]

http://home.att.net/~jeff1_satobserve/manv.jpg

LOL, good find.
It's in a museum right?

(It's not the source pic, but it's taken at the same place.)

 

[Unknown Soldier]

lol .. you think they'll allow me to order a similar setup online??

US