Category Archives: 1963

Tandy Corporation

  ,

TandyCorpLogoTandy was originally formed in 1919 by Norton Hinckley and Dave L. Tandy, and was known as the Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company. In 1963 it bought Radio Shack, paving the way for the company to be part of the computer revolution in the 1970s. In 1977 it introduced the TRS-80 to record sales and followed up with the color version in 1980. Later machines were IBM compatible, as most home computers of the day were clones of the venerable desktop made by Big Blue. The Tandy line sported a cheaper price along with better than average sound and video.

Tandy has become a well remembered name in the annals of computer history and the minds of millions of computer geeks everywhere. Many early computer enthusiasts cut their teeth on a Tandy in the 80’s, and the color version sold quite well, making them a fierce competitor with other computers of it’s time such as the Apple II, <IBM-PC, and Commodore 64. Today the company lives on without the Tandy name and still operates thousands of Radio Shack stores worldwide.

oNLine System (NLS)

  ,

nls2The oNLine System, or NLS, was created by Douglas Englebart and the Augmentation Research Center team at Stanford Research Institute. The computer system was years ahead of it’s time, designed as a collaboration system, it employed the use of hypertext, the mouse, video monitors, and many other aspects of today’s modern computers.

Funding came from U.S. agencies ARPA and NASA as well as the U.S. Air Force. It was designed around an SDS 940 time sharing computer. With a 96MB storage disk, it could support up to 16 workstations equipped with a mouse, monitor and what was known as a chord keyset. Devlopment was done in 1968 and it was demonstrated publicly in San Francisco December 8th, 1968. Eventually the system would be outdated by a steep learning curve and the emergence of the distrubuted computing model.

The First Mouse

  ,

firstmouseThe first computer mouse was developed by Doug Englebart in 1963 at Stanford Research Institute. He had been creating the oN-Line System, or NLS, a hardware and software system that incorporated many of the concepts of today’s modern computers. Using two gear wheels at perpindicular positions, it allowed movement of the mouse on the X and Y planes of axis. Each wheel’s rotation was translated to motion on the plane. Englebart patented the “X-Y Position Indicator For A Display System” in Nov., 1970. Later Bill English devised a variation of the mouse at Xerox which used a single round ball that could move in any direction. An inverted trackball, it became the dominant form of computer mouse in the 80s and 90s. Even later the advent of the optical mouse further evolved the device again.

J.C.R. Licklider

  ,

licklider3Born in 1915 in St.Louis, Missouri, J.C.R. Licklider (Lick) studied physics, chemistry, fine arts, and psychology, eventually earning undergraduate degrees and a Ph.D. He was a professor at Harvard University in the 40s, before moving on to MIT. There he was in charge of a human engineering group at Lincoln Lab, MIT’s air defense laboratory, where he worked extensively with computers. He believed that technology had the power to save humanity, and in 1960 published “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, which put forth the idea that computers would eventually help humans make decisions. It was an unorthodox view to say that computers would become more than just calculating tools, but he believed they would augment the human intellect.

He eventually accepted a position as head of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). Licklider formed alliances with the most advanced academic computer centers across the country, which he calls the Intergalactic Computer Network. During his two year tenure, he made important contributions to computer science. He wrote a memo, “To Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”, in which he put forth the idea of an interactive network linking people via computer. He was responsible for planting the seeds of the World Wide Web and saw it’s birth before his death in 1990.

Rancho Arm

  ,

ranchoAcquired by Stanford University in 1963, the Rancho Arm, a machine that is used as a human arm, holds a place among the first artificial robotic arms to be controlled by a computer. The dream has been fulfilled for the unfortunate children and adults that have been taken hold of a terrible disease and left without an arm. Researchers at the Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey, California designed the Rancho Arm as a tool for the handicapped.

ASCII

  ,

programming2Acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced ask-ee, ASCII is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another.

Text files stored in ASCII format are sometimes called ASCII files. Text editors and word processors are usually capable of storing data in ASCII format, although ASCII format is not always the default storage format. Most data files, particularly if they contain numeric data, are not stored in ASCII format. Executable programs are never stored in ASCII format.

The standard ASCII character set uses just 7 bits for each character. There are several larger character sets that use 8 bits, which gives them 128 additional characters. The extra characters are used to represent non-English characters, graphics symbols, and mathematical symbols. Several companies and organizations have proposed extensions for these 128 characters.