Power Tools

Here’s one being used by schoolboys in 1969.
The Tomorrow’s World clip is a gem.

That youtube clip was actually filmed at my office this morning and shows the boot process for the Beta 2 version of Windows 10.
Aahh! How I long for the days when computers needed an Oscilloscope…

When I worked in advertising, many years ago, I came up with a line of copy for the services of a new-fangled computer company which went: “If it goes mad, it gets us first.”
Smartarse me was only saying what a lot of people hinted at then that all early computers (of which I had not one in my house, as opposed to the five we seem to have now) were quite capable of being deranged.
What I didn’t know then but have found out since is that the derangement comes from the lunatic users of such devices. The box on your desk with its flickering lights and whirring tape reels (as I am sure you know comprise the inner workings of all ‘puters) is in fact quite sane.

In 1935, my father learned about a correspondence course in “electrical signal transfer” which discussed the idea of sending images from one place to another via radio waves. That is, television. He spent $3.00 and bought it. Ultimately, he became and electrical engineer with degrees from MIT and a long employment with the military industrial complex. We had an Oscilloscope in the basement in his “Paging Dr. Frankenstein” work area, where, with model trains he designed stuff that’s used in modern jet fighters to this day. He talked about personal computers when I was a kid in the 1960s.
Thanks, David for posting this. Brought back some wonderful memories.

That UI looks a lot more intuitive than Microsoft Malware Platform 2012.

That Elliot 405 link is to a machine in my old school! I did know that The Forest School had owned a computer early on, but interesting to see it.

See, now I’m feeling quite youthful and vivacious compared to you old timers.

How do they expect to play Doom on that?

Thank you David, you’ve made some old codgers very happy. I fondly remember the days of Raymond Baxter explaining AND and OR gates on Tomorrows World. Today’s sixth formers (I teach them) think they’ve done something clever if they create a Facebook page.

I recall seeing an old (1960 or so vintage) IBM computer at my old university at an open day. The great thing was they could set it off calculating something and then if you nipped around the back you could see these columns of lights that lit up sequentially rather like something in an old sci-fi film. That was the machine adding up or so we were told, the lights were output from accumulator circuits and displayed progress on the calculation, for troubleshooting purposes.
And the joys of running down to the data entry facility to make a deadline with a box full of punch cards, and tripping over a step…..

Norwich Cathedral built one of the first clocks in England (c.1280) – it’s also been an early adopter.

I learned to write assembler code on a 360, back inna day.