The Box presentation layer. This is where the man machine interface was designed, perhaps as far back as cave paintings or astronomical observatories where on flat surfaces carvings were places which the sunlight would illuminate the face of a dial (Sun Dial) These were computers which would calculate particular times and events which were beneficial to the Observer.
I think if man could have taught the stones to speak the message who knows what the form factor would look like. Early computers often had a bank of switches and lights which were used to sequentially enter the machine codes needed to boot the machine. Like a Crank in the front of an early automobile. It was a notable feature of the Early IBM PC's and clones to hav NO switches on the front panel. Often only a power Led. I dont believe they had Hard disk activity lamps (or hard disks for that matter) I have in My basement several artifacts. Kaypro II CPM portable, 2 Osborne 1's and an Osborne Executive. I got rid of my Compupro 8-16 with the 8"floppy drives. The Comodore 64 was revolutionary. Can you imagine saying that about a Machine with a 40 Charachter screen display? Uh the 64 refers to the amount of Ram....Not 64 megs (64k WOW!) The Coolest little computer I had was the Sinclare with its whopping 2 k of ram. What a long strange trip it's been. I been doing this stuff since 1969. Anyone here ever heard of a Bendix analog computer? 1345 Vacuum tubes Mag Drum storage. Man I'm gettin old. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Lars Aronsson Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 2:23 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [BAWUG] Wi-Fi and Hi-Fi The other day I was philosophizing over the name Wi-Fi. It is a play on Hi-Fi in the sense that Wi-Fi gives you high bandwidth, good quality wireless in the same way that Hi-Fi once gave us good sound. But they are also similar in another way: In the early 1970s, Hi-Fi was a hobbyist movement, a matter of attitude, a way to show that you actually cared about sound quality. Hi-Fi could not be taken for granted. There was a name for it, because the normal state was worse. People still listened to music on jukeboxes, where chrome and neon lights were more important than high fidelity playback, and on AM car radios. Early Hi-Fi hobbyists built their own equipment from kits, and many of them went on to build home computers, using the same form factor with a flat box containing a big, horizontal printed circuit board with connectors on the rear and knobs and switches on the front. This is the same design we recognize from the first IBM PC. I'm too young to remember these details, and I never built any of these myself. Who can fill in? Did the Hi-Fi movement actually kill the jukebox? What happened to the pay-per-tune business model? In those days, RIAA was a pickup filter, not a legal threat. -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxk�ping, Sweden tel +46-70-7891609 http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/ -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
