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Highlights from
Volome 8 ---- Spring 1984 |
Contents of Highlights
| The Computer Museum is temporarily closed in preparation for its move to Boston. It will reopen at Museum Wharf in downtown Boston in fall 1984. For more information, call (617) 467-4036. |
The Director's Letter
I'm often asked, "Will there be a lot of interactive exhibits in The Computer
Museum?"
I don't have a short answer. The long answer compares two exhibits: the
TX-0, the first transistorized computer, one of the first computers used for
interactive graphics, and a planned exhibition called "The Computer and the
Image."
Seeing the TX-0 exhibit-with its banks of switches, bulky Flexowriter,
rows of toggle switches, wall of supplies, with its heavy steel chairs with
peeling vinyl covers, tile floor and venetian blinds-sends the viewer back to
the late fifties. And on days that John McKenzie, with his dapper bow tie, set of
tools and complete machine log, is busily maintaining the machine, the visitor
has the extra advantage of a demonstration or discussion of the machine's
state. One of its demonstration programs of a mouse learning its way to cheese
(or a martini) has been a favorite for 25 years-even though its graphics don't
measure up to those on a handheld child's toy. For many, this seems to be
involving enough, although not really "interactive."
To take the next step, to make the TX-0 operable by the visitor, is to put the
clock back: the machine fills a room, yet is less powerful than many program-
mable calculators, takes a half-hour to start and demands programming in its
assembly language MACRO. This is an investment in time that most museum-
goers don't make. But what about the rare person who feels that they must
program the TX-0? For them, the machine is to be simulated on the Museum's
VAX. Dan Klein from the Mellon Institute has put a number of the instruction
sets for the classic machines, including the TX-0, on the VAX. The serious visi-
tor can then have easy access to classic machines at a terminal in the new
library of the Museum.
Another way to experience the TX-0 in action is truly vicarious: watching a
1961 made-for-television film about the machine, how it was used, with demon-
strations of many of the programs. Such classic films will be used with many of
the exhibits on super computers and vacuum tube machines that took in the
order of 100,000 watts to turn on. Even if we got one of these machines together,
the Museum could never afford to run it. Nor does it make any sense when the
same computing power is available on a machine that requires a hundredth of
the electrical power. To experience the size and power decline of the machines
through the generations brings home the point better than any textbook
statement.
Historic machines will only be one dimension of The Computer Museum
when it moves to Boston. Several exhibition areas will emphasize contempo-
rary computing with interactive exhibits that demystify the "black box." The
first of these is "The Computer and the Image Gallery" now being planned by
Oliver Strimpel, on leave from The Science Museum, London. The aim of the
exhibition is to convey the full breadth of computer imaging, from computer-
aided design to the simulation of galaxy evolution, from Landsat image-
processing to computer-drawn animation.
In explaining the concepts of computer graphics, interactive displays will
be used. What better way to understand how resolution affects a picture than
to alter the resolution yourself? Or stretch the contrast, or distort the image
with a simple mathematical function?
Computer graphics can also portray objects that do not exist in real life.
Interaction allows the visitor to walk around them or zoom in on areas of inter-
est. Simulations using computer graphics often rely on the choice of param-
eters by the user, who gets more involved by entering his own choice.
The focus of The Computer Museum is not to create "interactive" exhibits,
but to preserve and explain the scientific and technological history of comput-
ing in the most appropriate and exciting way that it can be done.
Gwen Bell
Up and Running. For the third time
in its history the TX-0 was fully operational, this time at The Computer
Museum. It was built at Lincoln Laboratory in 1955 as an experimental
computer to test transistors, and had
its first birth in 1956. Then in 1958 it was
dismantled and reborn at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
where it operated until the mid-sixties.
The TX-0 fills a room, yet has less
memory than many personal computers. And unlike today's personal computers, the TX-0 demands a skilled
user to maintain full-scale operation.
The machine is a good example of
what computing was really like 20
years ago.
Jack Dennis and John McKenzie
were responsible for the TX-0 at MIT
before its shutdown. This time around
McKenzie was the operations manager
and the first to witness it come back to
life. He worked for months preparing
the classic, 1955 computer for its debut
at The Computer Museum.
His efforts paid off when TX-0
alumni, Museum members and other
computer buffs united on Sunday November 13th, to display their enthusiasm for keeping the artifact in working,
order. For one day, those who had be
vital to the development and day-to
day operations of the TX-0 reminisced
about the days when it was at the apex
of computer technology.
A series of events were held touch-
ing on all phases of the TX-0's past. The
day's events were videotaped for the
Museum's archives. Included in the program
was a lecture by TX-0 alumni and MIT
Professor Jack Dennis on the history of the
machine; a luncheon for the alumni; and a
hands-on demonstration of the star
attraction-the TX-0.
One alumni favorite was the mouse and
maze program. Everyone
focused on the mouse as he scurried across
the cathode ray tube (CRT) screen to catch a
piece of cheese. Old stories about the TX-0
abounded during the reunion with some
alumni suggesting they should have brought
cards for old times' sake, because bridge
was often played during breaks in the TX-0
room.
The TX-0: Its Past and Present
| The Speech Research Group at MIT. Osamu Fujimura, Hiroya Fujisaka, John Heinz, Gordon Bell (with his hand over his mouth) and Professor Ken Stevens watch Pete Brady at the TX-0 console in 1959 at MIT |
|
Professor Jack Dennis: Because the TX-0
was created as a memory test computer, it
had some peculiar characteristics. The size
of the address for the TX-2 memory was 16
bits, while the TX-0 had an 18-bit word.
How do you build a machine with a 16-bit
address and an 18-bit word size? Since an
ordinary single-address instruction format
was used, only two bits were left for the
operation code.
Wesley Clark was a major force behind both
computers. When asked what happened to
the TX-1, his response was, "We don't build
odd computers." So the plans for the TX-1
were scrapped just like the DEC PDP-3.
Ben Gurly was responsible for engineering
the display system for the TX-0, a unique
piece of hardware that influenced his later
design of the PDP-1 at DEC. The TX-0 was
one of the earliest computers that allowed
the operator to use the cathrode ray tube
for interactive computation. In contrast, the
displays on the Whirlwind were mostly used
for recording information. The TX-0 display
was used to show immediately the results
of changes made to a program.
In the fall of 19581 had just finished my
doctoral thesis and had been appointed
instructor at MIT I also had just moved into
an office in Building 26 near the TX-0. Not
wishing to pursue further my doctoral investigations in
operations research, I was open to new and
interesting adventures. With a new
computer down the hall, the hackery in my
blood soon got me involved in its programs.
This computer, unlike MIT's number
cruncher, the 7090, had the feature of
being intimate with its users. You could
actually go up to the console and ask the
machine to execute instructions and
programs specifically for you. The display
program, which generated interesting
patterns, triggered immediate reactions to
fix it up and try it again. If one was careful
in choosing the number in the "live"
register of the machine, you could cause
some wonderful patterns. You could do this
with a program consisting of a single
instruction-repeated endlessly. Such
informal interaction with a computer was
completely new to the world.
How do you build a sensible machine code
with just two bits?
The TX-0 at MIT
John McKenzie: When the TX-0 was built,
transistors that operated at a five
megahertz speed were not available.
Lincoln Lab put Philco surfacebarrier
transistors, costing $40 each, into bottles
that contained 10 transistors. These were
designed to be tested in a "transistor-
checker." Ken Olsen, Ben Gurley and other
designers didn't know whether transistors
were here to stay. The engineers thought
they might have to replace transistors like
they replaced vacuum tubes, or at least
annually check them. With little
deterioration after 10,000 hours, it was
clear that these transistors were good. It
wasn't worthwhile testing them anymore.
No one cared and the industry was moving
ahead to new products. At MIT, only a
dozen unaccountable failures may have
been due to transistors. Most transistor
failures occured within 500 hours after
installation. Otherwise they made it, and
are still working today.
Every time another feature was added to
the machine, another power supply was
added as a self-contained unit. The
machine is cycled on in sequence and
cycled off in sequence. You get the memory
pulses before you turn on the read-write
memory current.
John McKenzie. who spent months
revitalizing the TX-0 for its Computer
Museum debut, enjoys watching the
machine perform on TX-0 alumni day.
Doug Ross: John Ward had only observed
the art of programming on the Whirlwind.
When the TX-0 came, John decided he
should program.
John Ward: I signed up and there I was in
the room alone with the computer. I was
terrified.
Doug Ross: Earlier at Egeland Air Force we
built an elementary mouse solving a maze
problem on the 1103. So John and I did a
mouse and maze program. I did the logic
and John the display.
John Ward: . . . very slowly. There was no
assembler. You had to figure out all the
addresses yourself. The style of the
program was reminiscent of Shannon's
mouse that used relays.
Doug Ross: It had more flexibility because
we were able to use the light pen to place
the mouse and either hide the three
chunks of cheese or the three martinis.
For MIT's centennial in 1961, CBS did some
specials on the Institute. The CBS director
said, "Gee, Westerns are so cut and dried
couldn't you write a program for one?" And I
was talked into it. The memory was used to
keep, track of everything down to the
actors' hands. The logic choreographed the
movement of each object, hands, guns,
glasses, doors, etc. A line of English script
was written for each direction, even if it
went wrong. That's how we got the loop
sequence which was an actual error run. If
you watch closely, the sheriff puts his gun
in the robber's holster, and other strange
things.
Doug Ross. Seated at the TX-0's "L" shaped
console, Ross explains how he and John
Ward designed the Mouse and Maze
program: "1 did the logic and John did the
display."
Doug Ross explains the flowchart for the
logical choices in "Saga," the 1961 TX-0-
written Western.
Dit Morse: I've been asked if the error
sequence was rigged. Well, it turns out
that the CBS people were in the TX-0 room
when the machine got into that loop. They
saw what the programmer was doing and
they grabbed that sucker so fast-they knew
it was theater.
The program's 13,000 line code was macro
generated. One of the first and only
programs that I wrote with a real deadline.
CBS would not postpone the shooting
under any circumstances. It took six
calendar weeks to deliver six skits.
Don Troxel: As a graduate student I used
the TX-0 because I had alot of
numbers to reduce statistically, and . was
the best desk calculator around. People in
our group started to use it because of the
display capability. At CIPG under the late
Sam Mason we measured reading speed.
John Allen: The first speech synthesis by
rules scheme introduced in England by
Holmes, Mattingly and Scherm was first
implemented on the TX-0. It made heavy
use of this wonderful bank of switches to
control the various parameters of that
synthesis.
Don Troxel: When Francis Li called me
over to hear it, I expected it to have a
Chinese accent, but it had an English one
since that was where the rules were made.
John Allen: We did experiments with pitch
using the switches for control. The TX-0
and PDP-1 were used to start to build a
reading machine for the blind. The
character recognition part ran on the PDP-1
and the speech synthesis on the TX-0. The
tenuous connection was often lashed
together firmly enough so that we could
read characters on the PDP-1 and have
speech output on the TX-0.
When John McKenzie let you turn the
machine on, you were then part of the in
group. One Saturday, a professor, who will
go nameless, called me on the phone and
said, "I just turned the TX-0 on and it
won't go."
I said, "Just put your hands on the console
and don't do anything until I arrive."
Fortunately he hadn't done anything
disastrous. He just hadn't started up the
clock sequence.
Gordon Bell: Actually with improper clocks
when you started you could ruin the core
memory.
John Allen: The price of the TX-0 was $3
million - from the development costs on the
books at MIT
Gordon Bell: That was a bargain because
it led directly to the TX-2 and Digital
Equipment's first products.
Gordon Bell: I was a member of the
research staff of Professor Kenneth
Stevens' speech research laboratory The laboratory continues to train
researchers and do research in analysis and synthesis of speech. Some
colleagues who worked on the TX-0
included Arthur House, now at the
Institute for Defense Analysis; Osamu
Fujimura of Bell Labs; Hiroya Fujisaki,
University of Tokyo; John Heinz, John
Hopkins; Morris Halle, MIT, and Pete
Brady.
Speech was taken into the computer using a
tape loop with sampling pulses on one tape
channel. The audio (speech) signal was passed
through a bank of 24 filters and read in via TX-
0's Epsco analog-to-digital converter. The goal
was to recognize the speech by analyzing the
frequencies of the resulting acoustic input. The
analysis was carried out by a technique we
invented called analysis-by-synthesis; the
computer posted a model of the speech and
compared it with that to be analyzed by
adjusting the model's parameters.
Gathering vignettes. Steve Levey (left) who is
writing a book on hackers, gathers tidbits from
recollections of Electronic Systems Lab Group
alumni Doug Ross (center) and Harrison (Dit) Morse.
Reminiscing. Shag Graetz's first hands-on
programming experience was at the TX-0
console, although he was a seasoned
programmer before coming to MIT.
Alan Kotok: In the fall of 1958, I was one of
the earliest of the undergraduate crew to come
in. Jack gave a couple of introductory talks to
the Tech model railroad crowd, and brought us
over to demonstrate the TX-0. When we saw it,
we said, "Oh, neat-there's all this time
available." We negotiated with Earle Pughe and
John McKenzie for time. They said if the faculty
advisor was amenable, then we could use the
machine without any supervision.
Jack Dennis: As an undergraduate I wrote a
large linear program on the Whirlwind to solve
the transportation problem. After midnight, I
could get my hands directly on the Whirlwind,
and get scope postmortems all on my own. This
led me to believe that informal direct
programming by students was the way to work
with machines. Then we formalized it on the TX-0.
Dave Gross: I was a freshman at MIT in 1957
and got a tour of the new TX-0 computer room.
In 1958 we, the model railroaders, discovered
the TX-0. I was told that under no
circumstances could I turn it on, since I was
not an authorized user. The most elaborate
program I wrote for the machine was a three by
three matrix of dots that made a search. One
night Alan Kotok and I had the idea that it
would be awfully nice if you didn't have to run
your program tape through the reader twice. So
we wrote a program that put it on mag tape the
first time with enough space for binary to be
added.
Alan Kotok: Before that no one had used the
tape except to write from the beginning and fill
it full. Here we wrote-and then left space along
the way.
Dave Gross: We tuned it to leave just the right
amount of space.
Alan Kotok: We put two load points on all
tapes, with the utility at the beginning and
then a point that allowed use at the end. We
did anything to avoid having to punch another
binary program on this Flexowriter that
punches ten characters per second.
Dave Gross: Alan, do you remember the
expensive tape recorder program? You had your
FM receiver here in the computer room and we
said we'd hook up the audio to the A to D
converter and write a program to record on that
tape. Alan Kotok: That was digital recording
more than 20 years ahead of its time.
Dave Gross: It would write the whole
tape as one long record. Play back
through the accummulator created a
whistle, so we used the scope's D/A
converter fed back into the speaker that
was under the console.
Jack Dennis: Could you recognize
Beethoven?
Alan Kotok and Dave Gross: It wasn't
bad, considering . . .
Alan Kotok: After the PDP-1 arrived and
before any of the fancy high speed links
had been installed between the
machines, the hackers of the day and I
were contemplating how we could make
use of both computers. We hooked up a
serial line between the two with a
buffered program to the typewriter. You
could type a line at one machine and it
would come out on the other.
After we got it working, I said, "What can
we do with this?"
Someone said, "Play chess."
Since some of us had been working on
chess on the 7090, we got together a
panel of chess players in the TX-0 room
with a chess board. Some of us sat in
the PDP-1 room with a chess board and
waited for an unsuspecting chess player
to walk down the hall and into the room.
Some fairly gullible graduate student
was enticed to play this great new PDP-1
chess program. Our victim typed his
plays in. The group in the other room
replied. It worked well for a while, but
then there was confusion about one of
the moves with an argument over the
terminal. Alas, our victim smelled a rat
and started for the door to the
connecting TX-0 room.
Gordon Bell: In the spring of 1960, 1
went out to DEC and bought some
modules so that we could add a mag tape
unit on the machine.
Alan Kotok: And that took us into big
time computing.
Jack Dennis: I remember that my
dream at the time was getting support
for interactive programming on the TX-0,
even though the one itty-bitty tape unit
was the only bit of auxiliary storage we
had. I was dreaming up schemes to keep
peoples' files and images on this tape
unit, so that one user could take the
machine over from another, but that
project was scuttled when the PDP-1
arrived in 1961. Then we started to use
it to build a timesharing system.
Shag Graetz: By 1961 this machine was
a legend among programmers. I had been
eased out of the nest at Harvard where I
used the 704, with about three times
this amount of equipment, that no
ordinary programmer could ever use. I
came to write a diagnostic program for
the 906/2 tape drive-every bit the kludge
that it appears to be.
My first question was, "Who is the
operator and how do I submit my
programs?" Jack Dennis said, "This is it.
What you see is what you get." The
entire room of machinery was under the
control of whoever was signed up to use
it at the time. During the next academic
year, I went to work for Doug Ross; the
PDP-1 arrived and I moved over to work
on it, where in our spare time we
developed SPACEWAR!
Deja vu. John McKenzie who was the
technician on the TX-0 at MIT, once
again readies the machine, but this time
at The Computer Museum.
Maintaining the TX-0
Electronic Systems Lab Group
Cognitive Information Processing Group (CIPG)
Actor Jack Gilford played the role of the
robber in a "shoot out with the sheriff." The
climax of "Saga" written in 1961 by the TX-0
with the help of programmers Dit Morse
and Doug Ross.
Speech Research Laboratory of the Research Laboratory for Electronics
The Hackers
| Otis King's Pocket Calculator |
|
Otis King's Pocket Calculator, gift of Harvard University Professor I. Bernard Cohen, was moved to Boston with the Calculator Collection in February and will be on permanent display in the Pre-Computing exhibit.
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