• In the early years of the 1980’s, the idea of the 3M Computer was born
  • Proposed by Raj Reddy et al at CMU
  • On Megabyte of memory
  • One mega-pixel of (B&W) resolution
  • One Million instructions per second (MIPS roughly 1 MHz)
  • One mega penny ($10,000)
  • The Raspberry Pi 4 has:
    • Can complete roughly 6 Billion instructions per second (6,000MIPS), not including the graphics chip
    • 1024MB of RAM
    • Can drive 4.14 Megapixel displays
    • Costs $35, $65 if you want to quadruple the RAM
• Computers are better than ever
  • Phones, laptops, computers
  • Very inexpensive, widely available
  • High performance
  • Ubiquitous network connectivity (Internet)
  • Yet they are falling far short of their potential
• Computers are a general purpose tool - one of very few
  • Reading
  • Lathe
  • Mathematics
  • Computers
• Mother of all demos
  • Doug Englebart and team in 1968
  • Credited as inventor of the mouse - so much more
  • Showed the future of what computers could one day be and today are
  • The early users were also programmers
• Xerox Parc Alto computer
  • Built as the first computer with a true GUI
  • Copied by Apple, Microsoft and others
  • Built with an environment called Smalltalk - Built to be modified by the end user
• Booting to BASIC
  • Early home computers booted to BASIC
  • Users could type programs from magazines, use commands to load programs, etc
• The distinction between user and programmer was not always a sharp line
  • User skill in any tool exists along a spectrum
  • Computer users, as they gained skill, were able to pick up programming
  • Tools were built do make things easier
    • FileMaker & Access
    • Hypercard
    • Macro recorder
    • Early computer systems came with software source and hardware schematics for the user
      • When the first system came to MIT without software for the hardware, the people working there were upset.
      • One of them was Richard Stallman - this lead him to develop the idea of Software Freedom
      • This ethos still exists in the Free Software and Open Source communities
        • Share and share alike, information wants to be free
  • Emacs is an editor program that is designed to be modified easily
    • Some secretaries in the early days of computers read the manuals and became programmers. The thought would have scared them
  • Most early programmers were domain experts that learned programming, not programmers that picked up domain expertise
  • People who are experiencing a problem and are empowered to solve it do the best job solving it
• Spreadsheets are a unique mode of computing
  • They are very flexible, visually driven programming
  • Proposed in 1964. They reached their current form in 1979
  • Would they be created today?

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References

• Raspberry Pi 4 Info
• 3M Computer
• The mother of all demo’s
• Xerox Alto Demo from 2017
• Story of secretaries learning to program in LISP/Emacs
  • The relevant snippet