Mac dominance.

leileilol wrote:

Mac dominance.

That actually exists in many of the so-called "creative type" companies and communities I've seen. Save for the 3D artists, of course 😀

snorg wrote:

Where do you suppose technology might have gone, if we lived in an alternate universe without the integrated circuit?

Er... going straight into quantum computing, maybe? Through the voodoo/black magic pathway I mean. Or crystals. Who knows what we had back then in the Atlantis days... 😁

Well, I think with discrete transistors, you could probably make something with the complexity of an 8088 (maybe?) but it would be incredibly labor intensive to wire up. And it would probably be a pretty low-memory system since it would need to be core memory or something like that. And huge, I'm sure. But doable, compared to my ridiculous vacuum tube example. 😀

What can we do with analog computers? For office work I mean.

Well, analog systems I think were used for stuff like calculating projectile trajectories, and accounting. Not sure what else. I think the Jacquard loom used a type of analog computer for controlling the loom. So, add basic automation to the list? A transistor system would be digital, though. Vacuum tubes would be analog electronics. The above systems I believe were mechanical analog computers.

In rough order of complexity:

http://www.northdownfarm.co.uk/rory/tim/tim-8.htm

http://www.nablaman.com/relay/

http://isquared.weebly.com/

http://www.clivemaxfield.com/diycalculator/po … -hrrgcomp.shtml

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/index.html

So it would appear quite a lot is possible with just capacitors and relays, and maybe core memory. If you also cracked mass storage in the form of floppies, you could probably build something fairly complex with
4 or 5 filing cabinet sized enclosures? Not sure how or if you would be able to drive a CRT display, since I think these relay based systems have clock speeds measured in kilohertz. But surely a system made out of discrete transistors (while a complete bitch to build) could be shrunk down to a slightly less bulky system? I still don't know if you could have anything as affordable as a home PC without the IC, though. I did think these relay-based systems that I managed to find after a bit of digging were pretty neat, though.

snorg wrote:

Well, analog systems I think were used for stuff like calculating projectile trajectories, and accounting. Not sure what else. I think the Jacquard loom used a type of analog computer for controlling the loom. So, add basic automation to the list?

No saving and editing your paperworks, then. 🙁

snorg wrote:

A transistor system would be digital, though. Vacuum tubes would be analog electronics. The above systems I believe were mechanical analog computers.

I remember the computers in Fallout, though. They have CRT tubes and transistors at most, but apparently such architecture is sufficient to run a human-like AI. 🤣

Year of the Linux desktop, perhaps?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

No saving and editing your paperworks, then. :( […]
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snorg wrote:

Well, analog systems I think were used for stuff like calculating projectile trajectories, and accounting. Not sure what else. I think the Jacquard loom used a type of analog computer for controlling the loom. So, add basic automation to the list?

No saving and editing your paperworks, then. 🙁

snorg wrote:

A transistor system would be digital, though. Vacuum tubes would be analog electronics. The above systems I believe were mechanical analog computers.

I remember the computers in Fallout, though. They have CRT tubes and transistors at most, but apparently such architecture is sufficient to run a human-like AI. 🤣

Well, a floppy disk isn't exactly high technology, you could probably have floppies. I don't think a relay-based computer would be fast enough for video or video games, unless it was really really low-res stuff. You might be limited to blinking lights for output, maybe teletype? It would be interesting to see if the guys that built these relay systems could drive any sort of video display.

If you had a system built up out of discrete transistors, it would definitely be a time consuming build. A 6502 has 3500 transistors, I'm assuming you would need several times that for all the support chips and other logic. Let's call it 7500 to be safe. Wiring up that many by hand would be excruciating, but possible if you broke it down over a long enough period. Testing would be a pain too.
But probably could be done by someone with enough time on their hands. You would probably end up with something like a PDP-1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1

The PDP-1 was fast enough to drive a display, you could probably have an HD for storage. Since one of the first games (Spacewar) was written for the PDP-1, you could probably play stuff like Pong, Nethack, maybe Asteroids.

A system like that might be at the extreme limit of what a single person or small team could build.

I think this would make a very interesting system. But I don't think the size would have to be to the extent of a Chrysler building hehe. Maybe only twice the size of current compnents and very expensive. Would be interesting for Supercomputing tasks.

There's only so much silicon can handle with number of pins, registers, and cores compressed into a single wafer.

Holering wrote:

I think this would make a very interesting system. But I don't think the size would have to be to the extent of a Chrysler building hehe. Maybe only twice the size of current compnents and very expensive. Would be interesting for Supercomputing tasks.

There's only so much silicon can handle with number of pins, registers, and cores compressed into a single wafer.

You could probably have a system as complex as an early 486 or pentium made out of discrete transistors, but you'd likely need a warehouse to store it, and it would be incredibly expensive in terms of cost to build and operate.

I'm not sure a PC the way we think of it is possible without the advent of the IC. You could probably build some sort of toy computer that really wouldn't have any utility outside of being an amusing exercise for an engineer, but that's about it. If you really cut down the system down to the bare bones and simplified the hell out of it, you could maybe implement an intel 4004 type system that would sit on a desktop but I don't know what you would be able to do with it. You would most likely need to program it with toggles and watch LEDs for output.

Maybe all our efforts would be focused on simplifying and mass producing what we could with that kind of technology, but I'm sure something on the level of a C-64 would be a several thousand dollar system instead of something affordable to the middle class. As someone else suggested, maybe we would be forced to start working on quantum systems a lot earlier, or come up with some other hybrid or novel tech to get the performance we need.

snorg wrote:

Well, a floppy disk isn't exactly high technology, you could probably have floppies. I don't think a relay-based computer woul […]
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Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

No saving and editing your paperworks, then. :( […]
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snorg wrote:

Well, analog systems I think were used for stuff like calculating projectile trajectories, and accounting. Not sure what else. I think the Jacquard loom used a type of analog computer for controlling the loom. So, add basic automation to the list?

No saving and editing your paperworks, then. 🙁

snorg wrote:

A transistor system would be digital, though. Vacuum tubes would be analog electronics. The above systems I believe were mechanical analog computers.

I remember the computers in Fallout, though. They have CRT tubes and transistors at most, but apparently such architecture is sufficient to run a human-like AI. 🤣

Well, a floppy disk isn't exactly high technology, you could probably have floppies. I don't think a relay-based computer would be fast enough for video or video games, unless it was really really low-res stuff. You might be limited to blinking lights for output, maybe teletype? It would be interesting to see if the guys that built these relay systems could drive any sort of video display.

If you had a system built up out of discrete transistors, it would definitely be a time consuming build. A 6502 has 3500 transistors, I'm assuming you would need several times that for all the support chips and other logic. Let's call it 7500 to be safe. Wiring up that many by hand would be excruciating, but possible if you broke it down over a long enough period. Testing would be a pain too.
But probably could be done by someone with enough time on their hands. You would probably end up with something like a PDP-1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1

The PDP-1 was fast enough to drive a display, you could probably have an HD for storage. Since one of the first games (Spacewar) was written for the PDP-1, you could probably play stuff like Pong, Nethack, maybe Asteroids.

A system like that might be at the extreme limit of what a single person or small team could build.

Is it possible to have Wordstar-like application with pure analog (relays-only?) computer? Without transistors at all?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Is it possible to have Wordstar-like application with pure analog (relays-only?) computer? Without transistors at all?

I think its called a type-writer. 🤣

"Tube computers" did exist historically, and did accomplish stuff in their lifetime, but certainly not to the scale of modern computers. Here's a list from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vacuum_tube_computers

This is supposed to be the "king" of vacuum tube computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7

I'm not sure if the 75,000 IPS is for all 24 machines, or per machine. Also not sure if the $10 Billion (in 1954 dollars) is per each, or for all 24 either. It costs a lot and uses a ton of power though.

This is probably a more practical idea of a valve computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti_Pegasus (they were "mass produced" and weren't just designed to fight a war)

I'm sure another 50 years of evolution along that path would've yielded faster machines, but I doubt we'd be playing Fallout or animating Toy Story on them.

Kreshna,

Going to 2nd Obobskivich here and say probably not possible? I think back in the days of analog and mechanical and other similarly slow systems, the sorts of problems or jobs they were using them to solve were of the nature of "we need to run this really long calculation, it will take Johnson here 3 weeks but if we run it on the Vacuum Tube 5000 Mark V it should run in a day". So something that you've worked out all the inputs ahead of time and has a clear end result, and not an interactive system. So yes, no word processors. You could name your typewriter Wordstar, though. 😀

Found this in another search, maybe this is where we would have gone with Vacuum tube technology if we hadn't switched to transistors and then ICs and microprocessors:

http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/05/vacuum_tubes_co.php
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1172604
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/24/nanosca … -glowing-12au6/

Maybe that's what the Fallout/Fallout 2 PCs are using 😉

I seem to remember finding a more in-depth article on a similar technology that was started in the 60s, but can't find it right now.

And after checking out the Ferranti Pegasus, I think I know where the Fallout guys got some of their design inspirations. Neat, but an hour of preventative maintenance every day? Yikes.

I'm pretty sure we would have made the leap to transistors even if we (for whatever reason) couldn't have made the leap to ICs. It is doubtful we would be using them for art or games, though. Certainly not running around with tablets like characters in Star Trek. 😀 That's definitely one thing I'm kind of surprised happened as quickly as it did, I didn't think the performance would necessarily be a stumbling block but more a battery/weight thing. Strange the way things turn out sometimes.

I don't see an alternative to the transistor in terms of performance per watt. Tubes would fail all the time and we all know that one failed transistor / tube will change the output.

Without transistors Maths skills would be more valuable. All of this is before my time but doing calculations was a job I believe. People also used tables and charts for logarithms for example.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I don't see an alternative to the transistor in terms of performance per watt. Tubes would fail all the time and we all know that one failed transistor / tube will change the output.

Without transistors Maths skills would be more valuable. All of this is before my time but doing calculations was a job I believe. People also used tables and charts for logarithms for example.

Mechanical and valve-based calculators also exist; they're not as simplified as a modern pocket calculator, and can't approach the capabilities of something like an HP 49 or TI-92, but can still be useful compared to doing absolutely everything by hand.

Supposedly these nano vacuum tubes have 10x the performance of transistors, but it may not be possible to make them as small yet.

snorg wrote:

Supposedly these nano vacuum tubes have 10x the performance of transistors, but it may not be possible to make them as small yet.

But what heat would they produce? A CPU has billions of transistors.