30 years of PCs
On this day, August 12 in 1981, the biggest shake-up in the history of computing took place at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City: The IBM Personal Computer model 5150 was released.
There was a choice of monochrome or CGA (16-color) display adaptors, a cassette player and up to two 5 1/4-inch drives, and if you opted for a bonus power supply you could even get a 10MB hard drive. Believe it or not, the IBM PC was nothing to write home about — it wasn’t particularly cheap ($3,000, or $7,500 in today’s money) and there were other, very capable home computers, like the Apple II, already on the market — and indeed, the original IBM PC was never a huge success.
Under the hood, however, the IBM PC was revolutionary. IBM, realizing that the small office and home computing markets were about to take off, set up a small 12-man task force called the Entry Systems Division. Prior to the Personal Computer, every IBM product (computer, printer, storage system) went through a laborious design process that could take years to get to market. The Entry Systems Division, however, were given free reign to do whatever it took to launch the IBM Personal Computer as quickly as possible. As a result, the IBM PC was designed, produced, and brought to market in a year.
The only way IBM could do this was by eschewing proprietary components and building the PC from off-the-shelf OEM parts. Instead of using its own processor, the IBM PC used the Intel 8088 CPU. Rather than using its own operating system, it outsourced the work to Microsoft. Old, proven monitors and printers were used, rather than designing new ones. Beyond this, though, IBM went one step further and also made the PC’s architecture completely open, which allowed other companies to make and sell PC-compatible hardware and software without a license.
This open architecture would not only create an entire ecosystem around the PC, but it would also herald the eventual demise of the IBM PC and the rise… of the clones.
[via Extremetech]
The evolution of computer languages (infographic)
Programming languages, believe it or not, have existed for over 200 years, since the invention of the punch-card-programmable Jacquard loom. It wasn’t a programming language in the modern sense — there was no computation and no logic — but it started a cascade that would eventually lead to Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and Ada Lovelace’s 1842 deconstruction of his work which led to the first computer program.
It was a whole 100 years before the first electrical, programmable computers would burst into existence, however. Machine-specific assembly language in the 1940s was probably the first (vaguely) human-readable programming language, but by the 1950s computer engineers realized that assembly language was far too laborious and error-prone to build entire systems out of — and thus in 1955 the first modern programming language was born: FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator). LISP (LISt Processor), ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language), and COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) would follow in the next few years — and as they say, the rest is history. Almost every language today is a derived from one of these first four languages — and indeed, FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL are still actively used by large, lumbering institutions like the National Weather Service and the US Postal Service.
By 1964, BASIC had been invented, and then C was released in 1969. Unix was famously re-written into C — the first major OS to not be written in assembly language — and today, Linux is written almost entirely in C, and both Windows and Mac OS X have large swaths of their code written in C.
For the rest of the history of modern programming languages — because C was really just the beginning! — check out the infographic below. You can click it to zoom in.
Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
Is it a portable DVD drive, or is it a 32GB thumb drive? As a matter of fact it’s both: the Isostick, which is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, is basically a memory stick that automatically converts ISO images into physical, mounted optical drives — or at least as far as the host computer is concerned. This all happens so transparently that you can put an image of Ubuntu or Windows on an Isostick, restart your computer, and boot from it; as far as your computer is concerned, it’s an optical drive.
Does it sound too good to be true? Well, it gets better: you can put as many ISOs as you like on an Isostick and a built-in bootloader lets you select which ISO to boot from — and with 32GB of space, you can keep images of just about every operating system on a single Isostick. There’s also a hardware read-only switch, which you can flip if you want to remove any chance of viruses meddling with your images — and there’s a configurable activity LED that you can alter the brightness of, or disable entirely.
Hardware-wise, the Isostick is basically a MicroSD card (non-removable) that’s capable of 12.5MB/sec read (81x and 9.5x in CD/DVD parlance) and 4-6MB/sec write. By default the drive will only boot from ISOs (and only ISOs — not BIN, DMG, or NRG) stored on a FAT32 partition, but future firmware updates may remove those restrictions. You can also create a separate NTFS or UFS (or whatever) partition to store data on, as long as you keep a FAT32 partition for the ISOs. Finally, the firmware — the clever bit that actually converts ISOs into virtual drives — will be open-sourced when Isostick production finishes (though that might never happen).
There are caveats, of course: Isostick isn’t cheap — it’ll cost around around $100 for an 8GB stick, $175 for a 16GB stick, and $225 for the big daddy 32GB drive. The other problem is that Isostick only exists as a beta product seeking funding on Kickstarter — but given the fact that it’s already half-funded and has 25 days to go, it shouldn’t have a problem meeting its target. If you jump in and invest in the project today, you should be holding your very own Isostick in about 10 weeks.
If you’re an IT technician, power user, or administrator, you’re probably drooling at the prospect of dropping every utility and operating system on a single thumb drive, and never laying your eyes on a CD or DVD ever again. Imagine never having to leaf through the huge wallet of discs… only to discover that the disc you need is scratched. Imagine never having to perform that frantic, sweaty hunt for your Windows or OS X disc when your computer refuses to boot. Best of all, though, imagine the warm feeling that you’ll get by backing an excellent idea and helping a new company get off the ground.
Recycled Art: 66 Masterpieces Made From Junks
Ever shocked by the beauty of toilet paper rolls, or saw the chicken formed by the egg shells, or witnessed coolest lion made by tires? Heck, all of them are even made by common things you discarded every day, and they are known as recycled art.
(Image Source: Kyle Bean)
Recycled art is not something that’s beautiful but just a waste of time and space. It’s like alchemy which turns base metal into gold, except that it turns trashes into gold. Take recycled Optimus Prime with 2.5 meters tall as example, it was sold with 7800 U.S. dollars, sounds like a good price for a combination of metals which were originally treated as trashes.
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