David777
Well-known Member
- Location
- Silicon Valley
Computers are the most important technical devices of our modern human era. Thus we seniors have lived through a unique era that will over future centuries be proclaimed a uniquely special period of our race's history. On this thread and others, I'll occasionally incrementally point forum members to interesting youtube science videos that are presented at technical levels a general audience can understand.
Youtube has a vast number of videos though trying to locate useful ones requires more than mere searching because it also requires time actually watching each one to understand their worth. Something I can do for others. The following short 6:50 minute youtube B&W video has excellent images of computer hardware over decades.
History of Computers | From 1930 to Present
How does this non-degree peon person fit herein? In 1966, I was thrust into the Viet Nam War as a national draft left no choices. After taking tests to escape being a grunt in swamps carrying an M16, was placed in a Secret classified electronic warfare repair field that led to nearly 2 years of training. That was at the birth of the transition between vacuum tubes and semiconductors.
After an HD in 1971, I began working in Silicon Valley as a junior electronic technician for $2.73/hour at a start up in Palo Alto next to Stanford University on a digital keypunch machine that poked IBM punch cards. Most of my following career over decades was in computer engineering groups debugging hardware. So spent a 4+ decade career exposed to a long sequence of component, hardware, and software advances that required endlessly learning new technology via technical reading of hardware data books, technical standards, and product engineering specifications, while rarely going to any classes or schools.
Vacuum tubes were always failure prone and so were early semiconductors, so I had lots of experience analyzing and solving problems. I also spent 2+ years repairing and testing general lab test equipment that provided an elite skill for following decades. In that era, anyone dealing with hardware was also heavily involved in firmware because of programmable control registers. I used and troubleshot the earliest microprocessor printed circuit boards by directly inputting binary operational code 8 bits (one byte) at a time into memory that then was set to run one instruction at a time before pausing for evaluation.
So by the mid 1980s was also a modestly competent assembly language and C language programmer run on VAX computers. In 1988 over a week, I taught a classroom of Korean engineers on maintaining our company's fault tolerant UNIX computers for their 1988 Seoul Olympics at the birth of their electronics industry. Later those engineers developed Samsung Electronics.
Youtube has a vast number of videos though trying to locate useful ones requires more than mere searching because it also requires time actually watching each one to understand their worth. Something I can do for others. The following short 6:50 minute youtube B&W video has excellent images of computer hardware over decades.
History of Computers | From 1930 to Present
How does this non-degree peon person fit herein? In 1966, I was thrust into the Viet Nam War as a national draft left no choices. After taking tests to escape being a grunt in swamps carrying an M16, was placed in a Secret classified electronic warfare repair field that led to nearly 2 years of training. That was at the birth of the transition between vacuum tubes and semiconductors.
After an HD in 1971, I began working in Silicon Valley as a junior electronic technician for $2.73/hour at a start up in Palo Alto next to Stanford University on a digital keypunch machine that poked IBM punch cards. Most of my following career over decades was in computer engineering groups debugging hardware. So spent a 4+ decade career exposed to a long sequence of component, hardware, and software advances that required endlessly learning new technology via technical reading of hardware data books, technical standards, and product engineering specifications, while rarely going to any classes or schools.
Vacuum tubes were always failure prone and so were early semiconductors, so I had lots of experience analyzing and solving problems. I also spent 2+ years repairing and testing general lab test equipment that provided an elite skill for following decades. In that era, anyone dealing with hardware was also heavily involved in firmware because of programmable control registers. I used and troubleshot the earliest microprocessor printed circuit boards by directly inputting binary operational code 8 bits (one byte) at a time into memory that then was set to run one instruction at a time before pausing for evaluation.
So by the mid 1980s was also a modestly competent assembly language and C language programmer run on VAX computers. In 1988 over a week, I taught a classroom of Korean engineers on maintaining our company's fault tolerant UNIX computers for their 1988 Seoul Olympics at the birth of their electronics industry. Later those engineers developed Samsung Electronics.
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Control Data Institute 1982. Was blessed to be able to do some component level repair and play with an oscilloscope.
