Bay Area Day Trips and the Computer History Museum

A friend and I have been making day trips to the San Francisco Bay Area. Sometimes the destination is set when we’re halfway there. Usually, we know before we leave. Some things in San Francisco seem as they were when we remembered them 60 years ago. Other things seem bizarre and foreign.

Last summer, one of those trips turned to the bizarre. We did something I’ve wanted to do for years – park the car in Vallejo on one side of the Bay a good 30 miles from San Francisco and take the commuter ferry. You solve the parking problem and for the princely sum of $11 round trip (the senior rate!) you get a nice 45 minute ride on the bay – past the silent cranes of the old Mare Island Naval Shipyard and under the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge – to the old ferry building on the Embarcadero.

The boat moored and we were surprised to find a lot of restaurants in the old ferry building. There was even a restaurant specializing in caviar offering one plate for $850! Only in San Francisco, I thought, but maybe you’d see something like that in Manhattan. Must have been 10-15 restaurants.

We chose the restaurant specializing in Mexican food and got some tacos. For considerably less than $1700 (for 2!).

Afterwards we decided to walk down the embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf.

We passed all of the old empty shipping terminals – with the pier number on front. Must have been 20 or so. I was trying to imagine what those looked like in the 50s, with passenger ships in and the terminals full of suitcases, taxis, porters, and happy people going out on a venture or returning to loved ones. Now, except for one that had one of those new “mega cruise ships” all were empty. One of the warehouses was used as an indoor parking lot.

Along the way I saw something I wasn’t accepting for the moment. You know, when your eyes are reporting this to the mind but the mind is laughing, telling you “it can’t be. Try again, and send me something believable!“

It was an older man, with long gray hair, completely naked. He was suntanned all over. And I mean all over. Which isn’t an easy feat being in San Francisco.

Know how you can spot the tourists in the summer there? They are dressed in summer clothes.  Anyway, he is strolling down the embarcadero seemingly without a care in the world. And just as strange, nobody on the walkway is giving him a second glance. I made the observation to Inger that most people who wish to flaunt their nudity in public really shouldn’t.

Anyway, my preamble is meandering to the main subject of today’s post, but I wanted to tell you all of a memorable past trip. We’ve had others, perhaps the subject of a later post. Some great ones and some duds.

A few weeks ago I wrote of another trip in which we saw the (alleged) beginnings of Google at Buck’s Restaurant down the Peninsula at Woodside. After lunch we went to the Google complex in Mountain View. It was so large I have come to call this area Googleville. Googleville is not simply some industrial park, but an area that seems to go on….and on. Like our trip visiting Facebook on the shores of the Bay right by the Dumbarton Bridge in Menlo Park, I wondered just why one needed something so huge – with so many people – for something as relatively simple as an advanced program, lots of servers, and a billing department for the advertisers. Of course, you need people to develop algorithms to decide how one sees the ads they do – (and why am I seeing ads on Facebook for a theater in Pennsylvania being on the west coast?) but if you visited either of these complexes, you’d wonder why they are small cities within cities. And perhaps you need people to refine the algorithms as to how users find things. Google’s search algorithm, which revolutionized the Internet, is a closely guarded secret which I am sure is evolving. But why do you need 150,000 employees?

But then, I’m not a multi-billionaire.

So last week, we returned to the outskirts of Googleville to see the Computer History Museum. I didn’t think Inger, hardly a computer geek, would find it interesting, but I was wrong.

Think modern computer history starts in the late 1940s?

You would be wrong.

I’m just giving you a very brief highlight of this museum’s exhibits, leaving out 99.9%. I thought the best way to write the rest of this post is to give you a virtual tour, just as I saw it. So I’m sequentially scrolling through my iPhone’s camera roll.

Years ago, I heard what I thought was a wonderful description of the electronic computer. That is, it is the only machine Man invented for which there is no pre-determined end purpose.

The User defines the purpose.

Here’s another one from the museum:

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”

—-Marshall McLuhan

We start with an explanation of the 1^st 2,000 years of computing, with one exhibit of an ancient Greek Antikythera:

The Pre-Electronic Computer Age

A CLASSICAL WONDER:

THE ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM

Divers exploring a Roman shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikthera in 1901 found the remains of a baffling device. Fifty years later scholars slowly began to unlock its ancient mystery.

The Antikythera mechanism is the oldest known scientific calculator. A complex arrangement of over 30 gears could determine with remarkable precision the position of the sun, moon, and planets, predict eclipses, and even track the dates of Olympic Games.

This remarkable 2,000-year-old device has revolutionized our understanding of the ancient Greeks’ abilities both their scientific acumen and their craftsmanship.

More here.

There were a number of exhibitions from the Revolutions section, nothing of course electronic, but mechanical implements and tables to aid the user in his work. This is from Elizur Wright, considered the father of life insurance, to use as an aid in making insurance calculations. It was invented in 1869.

I’ve always felt that the insurance industry was interesting, whether it is from the pesky people calling you offering automobile extended warranty insurance, life insurance, or any other kind of insurance. They have risk tables, built up over experience and are betting that you will not need it within their projected window and the consumer is betting that he will need it. Which seems, if you think about it, a bit depressing. Betting that you are going to have an accident, die, or break down before they believe it will occur.  An insurance consumer should rejoice if their fears become unrealized and don’t have to collect!

Ever wonder if people consider you a nerd? (Never mind the fact that these days some of the nerds are billionaires). This miniature tie clasp in the form of a slide rule was a popular retirement gift for engineers in the 1950s.

Ever wonder why one calls the kitchen working surfaces a “counter”?

…This merchant’s table abacus or “counting table”

served as both calculator and shop counter.

 …COUNTERS BECOME COUNTERTOPS!

 Up through the 1700s, the tabletop abacus or counting board was widespread in Europe.

Shopkeepers traditionally faced their customers across the device as they added up purchases.

 This “counting board” evolved into the English word “counter” to describe the working surface in a store, and later any working surface-like kitchen counters.

 What was really the impetus to electronic computers started back in 1890, with America’s census.

…Punched cards got their first big test in America’s 1890 census. Half a century later, they made possible another census: a comprehensive catalogue of British flora and fauna. Documenting the island’s ecology demanded technology both portable and reliable.

 Punched cards fit the bill.

IBM really began its own genesis with the purchase of Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company. It was Hollerith’s machine that revolutionized the counting of the 1890 census.

Herman Hollerith’s first tabulating machines opened the world’s eyes to the very idea of data processing. Along the way, the machines also laid the foundation for IBM.

 … The Census Bureau put Hollerith’s machine to work on the 1890 census. It did the job in just two years, and saved the government US $5 million. After that, Hollerith turned his invention into a business: the Tabulating Machine Company. By 1911, Hollerith’s tabulator had been used to count the populations of Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, Norway, the Philippines, Russia, Scotland and Wales.

 … Not only could the machines count faster, but they could also understand information in new ways. By rearranging the wires on a tabulating machine, the contraption could sort through thousands or millions of cards. Businesses soon realized that the information on those cards didn’t have to be about members of the population—the data could be about a product, or an insurance customer, or a freight car on a rail line. The tabulator allowed users to learn things they never knew they could learn, and at speeds no one thought possible. (Bold characters mine)

 As an aside, the earliest computer terminals paid homage to IBM’s standard 80-colume card. The terminals were 80 columns wide.

My first professional programming job was writing – and maintaining – programs charting aircraft production for Cessna Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas. I felt that I would be working for a company who could afford the latest in equipment – and they were, with an IBM Mainframe. And they had one of the latest (at the time) IBM mainframes – a 4341. But the custom software written in COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was rooted in the 1960s, when card punches (and readers) were in widespread use. And as I was to learn, that is common, even today. Large companies have too much invested in the software over the years, written and modified many times to adjust for changing circumstances – to simply throw it all away and start from scratch. I once had to make a change to a Cessna  production program that was written in the 60s and 20 years later (my time) had the names of 20 programmers who, over the years, made changes to it.

Anyway, with some of the programs in the 1960s, the input was done in 80 column format. With an IBM card punch.  You would put an “X” in the appropriate column and the card punch would make the card. Instead of a card punch during my time they used terminals for input but not in the way we would expect today. The terminal screen had a basic 80 column layout where the operator would type the “X” onto the screen, in the appropriate column on the terminal.

By the way, have you ever wondered why the largest computers are called “Mainframes”? (probably not until I raised the question 😉 )

Electronic Computers from the 1940s…

WHY ARE THEY CALLED “MAINFRAMES”?

Nobody knows for sure. There was no mainframe “inventor” who coined the term.

Probably “main frame” originally referred to the frames (designed for telephone switches) holding processor circuits and main memory, separate from racks or cabinets holding other components. Over time, main frame became mainframe and came to mean “big computer.”

When I started programming, micro computers were just starting. One of the mainframe computers I used for learning was an IBM System 370/135. In the 60s, IBM had a family of computers ranging in power, all under the “System 360” family. In the 70s, they came out with the System 370. All software was backwards-compatible of course. In the early 70s, California’s massive Bank of America at its San Francisco headquarters used a high end IBM 370/168 to talk with its 100s of branches around California and even the thousands of ATMs. If I remember correctly, it had 128 MB of memory. A PC today has far more than that.

 

By the way, this was before computer screens – all communication was done via teletype.

THE FIVE BILLION DOLLAR GAMBLE

 IBM’s revenue in 1962 was $2.5 billion. Developing System/360 cost twice that. Company president Tom Watson, Jr. had literally bet the company on it.

 Watson unveiled System/360 in 1964 – six computers with a performance range of 50 to 1, and 44 new peripherals – with great fanfare. Orders flooded in. The gamble paid off.

 “System/360…is the beginning of a new generation not only of computers but of their application in business, science and government.’

This particular CPU, or Central Processing Unit, was the Model 30 within the new 360 line. It was at the lower end of the System 360 Processing Power.

…IBM System/360 Model 30 Computer – CPU (Type 2030), IBM, US, 1964

 McDonnell Aircraft Corporation bought the first Model 30, the smallest and least expensive of the three System/360 models shipped in 1965. It could emulate IBM’s older small computer, the 1401, which encouraged customers to upgrade.

 Speed: 34,500 adds/s Memory size: 64K Memory type: Core Memory width: 8-bit Cost: $133,000+

Note the memory size of 64,000 bytes vs today’s PC which can handle memories up into the billions. At the time, it was called core memory, and was very expensive. Now you can get billions of byte storage for a few dollars.

Some of the Peripherals that went with this System 360. In the foreground you can see a disk drive. Don’t know the capacity but I know it is less than 20 MB. Disk Space was so expensive and sparse that tape drives were used for most information storage. Tape sizes were 2400’, 1200’ and 600’. Retrieving that information by the CPU was laborious because the information was stored sequentially on the tape. The CPU might have to go back 1000’ – or more – to get the file the program called for. They would use the disk drives for files extracted from the tape for manipulation and program storage.

Something that I had forgotten until now – “JCL” – Job Control Language for IBM mainframes. It was (and is) almost as involved as a programmatic language. It would contain information for the CPU on where the files were (on tape) and many other things. 

I must be getting old, remembering this stuff 😉

IBM Core Memory Cabinet from their Military Products Division for the US Army and US Air Force-  SAGE Early Warning System *, 1950s. Core memory – the predecessor to semiconductor memory – was very expensive. While cabinets would contain Kilobytes of memory, (thousands), not Megabytes (millions), or Gigabytes (billions) – common today.

 

 

At the time, IBM estimated a large company had 90% of their computer dollars tied up in hardware, and 10% in custom written software. Now it is the reverse, probably even more extreme but let’s say 90% is software costs. I’m talking about custom-written software, not the off-the-shelf software most buy for their micro-computers.

This was one of the revolutions of the micro computer, with such a huge potential class in a user-base, things like a program compiler (software that converts code the human writes in a given language to the code the machine understands into a program file) that would probably be 6 figures (in then dollars) for a mainframe, 5 figures for the mini-computer of smaller businesses, and hundreds of dollars for a micro computer.

That is what has amazed me.

Anyway I can remember with one job in the 80s, I had a boss who had worked for Aerojet during the heady days of the Apollo program, on a mainframe of course. As far as the then small market share of microcomputers in the early 80s, he said that they were “…just toy computers! Nothing will ever come of them!”.

Which was a common attitude among IT professionals of the day. To walk into a “computer room” of a mainframe in the 60s or 70s was usually an awe-inspiring experience. Most of the floors were white, and raised a foot or so to allow all the cables of the massive peripherals like tape drives and disk drives and CPUs, inter-connection. With all of that, you would hear the constant hum of large fans cooling the whole room, taking away all that generated heat. Programmers were considered to be the high priests of the new Information Age. The micro processor fostered an amazing revolution, with the dissolution of some multi-billion dollar computer companies who couldn’t adjust to the massive shift.

Anyway, let’s continue the museum tour. Please realize that we are only scratching the surface here; I took almost 300 pictures (and now lament not taking a few more). I believe there was a quote by one of the Intel founders about his not believing that semi-conductor memory had any future and wasn’t worth patenting – but I cannot find it. Unless my memory is flakey (always a possibility) even sometimes the computer revolutionaries couldn’t always see the future!

To publish all these photos (even at my reduced size) and use up valuable disk space would be pushing the hospitality of the Chicago Boyz!

The amazing thing to me was their having actual examples of all of these computers – from the ENIAC of the 1940s to the Cray-1 Supercomputer of the 1970s, to “Kitchen Computer” of Dallas-based Nieman-Marcus offered in their famous Christmas Catalog of 1969.

ENIAC

In 1942, physicist John Mauchly proposed an all-electronic calculating machine. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, needed to calculate complex wartime ballistics tables.

Proposal met patron.

The result was ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), built between 1943 and 1945-the first large-scale computer to run at electronic speed without being slowed by any mechanical parts. For a decade, until a 1955 lightning strike, ENIAC may have run more calculations than all mankind had done up to that point.

As I was assembling this post, it amazed me how so many huge enterprises were started by talented individuals from their previous companies. They felt stifled and went on to start their own  successful ventures, their ideas free now to germinate.

Seymour Cray was one of those individuals. Immensely talented at Control Data, a very successful mainframe company of the 1960s, he designed his super computers at Cray Research. Control Data was one of those “Go-Go” stocks in the 1960s. Investing early in Control Data, like Xerox or IBM, would probably have made one a millionaire.

His Cray-1 and Cray-2 supercomputers were so powerful that they were put on an export-restricted list. They were used for such things as predicting weather patterns or designing nuclear weapons.

BYTES FOR BITES:

THE KITCHEN COMPUTER

 Why would anyone want a computer at home? Before the personal computer era and its avalanche of possible uses, the perennial answer was: “to store recipes.”

 Neiman-Marcus took that literally. The 1969 Christmas catalog featured the Kitchen Computer. For $10,600 you got the computer, a cookbook, an apron, and a two-week programming course.

 Inside the futuristic packaging with a built-in cutting board was a standard Honeywell 316 minicomputer. But the console interface featured binary switches and lights. (Does 0011101000111001 mean broccoli? Or carrots?)

 Not surprisingly, none were sold.

 

Their Christmas Catalogue was legendary. Although I never saw it, one year they supposedly offered a flying saucer.

My nomination for the world’s first PC would be the Altair 8800.

Altair 8800, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), US, 1975

 The basic Altair 8800 had only toggle switches and binary lights for input/output. Yet it was the first microcomputer to sell in large numbers: more than 5,000 in the first year. Most customers were hobbyists, who tolerated a primitive interface.

 

MOORE’S LAW

 The number of transistors and other components on integrated circuits will double every year for the next 10 years. So predicted Gordon Moore, Fairchild Semiconductor’s R&D Director, in 1965.

 “Moore’s Law” came true. In part, this reflected Moore’s accurate insight. But Moore also set expectations- inspiring a self-fulfilling prophecy. Doubling chip complexity doubled computing power without significantly increasing cost. The number of transistors per chip rose from a handful in the 1960s to billions by the 2010s.

  

Software – A Bit On Unix, Photoshop, Texts and MP3 files…

We cannot complete this post without talking a bit about software! After all, if I may be a bit poetic, it is the software that brings these circuit boards to life! It’s the written operating system, usually millions of lines of code, that brings the machine to life and then the application programs, or “apps” to use the current vernacular, that talk to the operating system and performs the user’s wishes. It is the compiler (itself sophisticated software) that bridges the application programs and the operating system. With a 1-time use, it converts the programmer’s written instructions it to a “machine-readable” file; i.e.., a “program” or “app”.

When I started programming in 1980, there was a friendly debate over the nature of software. Is writing it a science or an art?

The debate continues.

I fall on the “art” side. We application programmers will get instructions on what the “user” wants – what kind of information – weather reports or financial reports? Finding all the information that can be had on the Net of a desired subject? When the app is being written, we know what the result is supposed to be but how you get that result is up to us! If programming is an art, and compared (as I do) to a painting, it can either be a Jackson Pollack or a Renoir.

And to see a Renoir, or make a Renoir, is a thing of beauty. Other decent programmers can look at a well-written program and the easily-followed logic just flows using the best the language laws of the selected programming language. And there is no one way to write it. You can have 2 programmers writing programs to get the same results, and I can guarantee you that those 2 programs will be different.

Using the Cessna program I mentioned before, that fell into the Jackson Pollack category. Stuff going here and there and everywhere with seemingly no beauty – excruciating to follow (although there are Jackson Pollack fans – and maybe they would say I simply don’t understand it! Point taken).

I was assigned all those years ago to find a bug in that program and spent 3 days following a particular section of code. At the end of 3 days, tracing all the selected code, I realized that 1,000 lines of code was just “dead”.

It did all this stuff asked of the various programmers and in the end, did nothing with it.

Some of those previous 20- maintenance programmers didn’t really understand the program and just started adding their own code. Like a good gardener, they should have done some pruning!

A well written program is a thing of beauty and if you wrote it, gives you pride. If someone else wrote it, you admire their work.

Anyway.

I came across this at the museum, who agrees with my view:

“Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty”

 — Donald Knuth 1974

 

Wherever you are reading this, you are in all likelihood reading it off an Internet server powered by the Unix operating system. Or Linux, a derivative that was started by a Finnish programmer, Linus Torvalds.

Today, it could be called the one universal operating system, running on many different kinds of computers.

And like a lot of revolutionary things, it was invented initially for internal use inside the fabled Bell Laboratories. It eventually became the medium for communication between Internet servers around the world.

The elegant and flexible Unix operating system sprang from Multics, a complex time-sharing operating system developed at MIT in the 1960s. When Bell Labs withdrew from the project, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and other Bell researchers created a similar but simpler system for smaller computers.

Bell Labs freely licensed Unix, which was written in C and easily ported to other computers. It spread swiftly.

 

A Few Origins On Some well-known Applications Today

 

The Origins of Computer Graphics

 

If you were interested in computer graphics in the 1960s, you probably kept an eye on Utah. The Graphics Lab at the University of Utah Computer Science Department attracted many early, innovative pioneers. Faculty included Ivan Sutherland, fresh from virtual reality experiments at Harvard, who volunteered his Volkswagen Beetle to be digitized.

 Students smothered it in a grid of tape to take measurements. The Lab’s research brought advances in art, computer animation, and graphical user interfaces.

 Faculty and alumni founded influential firms such as Silicon Graphics, Evans & Sutherland, Adobe, and Pixar.

 

THE UTAH TEAPOT

Computers manipulate data. So, how do you get them to generate images? By representing images as data. Martin Newell at the University of Utah used a teapot as a reference model in 1975 to create a dataset of mathematical coordinates. From that he generated a 3D “wire frame” defining the teapot’s shape, adding a surface “skin.” For 20 years, programmers used Newell’s teapot as a starting point, exploring techniques of light, shade, and color to add depth and realism.

 From that research at Utah in the 1970s came my newly-reproduced auto part, that required exact measurements of the old part to give to the 3-D Printer.

  

Mp3 sound files

 

I, like millions of others, have changed my music buying habits. The internet and the digital world was the driver. I really enjoy listening to SiriusXM in my car. They have a multitude of channels devoted to a hundred interests – among them, music from the 40s, 50s, up the decades through 2010. There’s a channel for each. If I don’t catch the artist and title on the screen, my Shazam app on my iPhone will tell me. That in itself is amazing to me to think that virtually all published music has been digitally saved and available on the Net.

Shazam will “listen” to the music for a few seconds, convert the sound to digital values (for that small musical segment) and then 99% of the time, match the captured digital segment to the title and artist in the library. Then I will go to amazon and look it up – and for all of $1.29, download the song where at a later time with other software I make custom CDs for my car (it is an old car!). I’ve used the program anywhere there is music – from a supermarket’s music to the TV to SiriusXM.

I have heard music I haven’t heard in decades from the 50s, and have learned to appreciate the big bands of the 40s.

And through this method, I have 4-5 versions of California Dreaming, written and made popular by the Mamas and the Papas in the 60s. I even have an Italian version I heard on the Paramount + miniseries of The Offer, about the making of The Godfather.

The download from amazon takes a few seconds, thanks to data-compressed mp3 sound files. The files are much smaller than would be found on a factory-produced CD. It was all made possible by a German researcher named Karlheinz Brandenburg. He thought in 1986 music could be delivered over digital phone lines. A week later, he had developed the code that eventually became mp3.

Mp3 files are compact because they discard sounds that are in the music, but inaudible to the human ear. And that is a source of contention (and irritation) with audiophiles. They claim that like a gourmet meal in which one can’t discern every ingredient, these inaudible sounds nevertheless contribute to the meal.

… Hearing combines physical structures that capture sound waves, and neural systems that interpret them. Our brains suppress sounds that follow each other too closely, or are drowned out by louder sounds. MP3s exploit these psychoacoustic principles.

 The Mother of mp3

 …”Tom’s Diner”

While refining his MP3 code, Karlheinz heard Suzanne Vega’s hit “Tom’s Diner” playing on the radio. He realized that this a cappella song would be nearly impossible to compress successfully.

 Nearly.

 “Tom’s Diner,” Brandenburg’s worst-case scenario, became his test song and Vega herself got dubbed the “Mother of the MP3.”

 Listen to it here.

 

MRIs

 What is an MRI?

MRI machines use a magnetic field, radio waves, and a computer to detect the properties of living tissue. All body parts have water (and thus hydrogen).

 An MRI machine creates a magnetic field around your body, causing the hydrogen atoms, which are partially magnetic, to align with the field. When radio waves are applied quickly, they excite these atoms, causing them to emit a unique electronic signal that sensors record – and which MRI software uses to create an image.

Painting the Picture

 We think of MRI machines as “hardware”. Yet much of their power lies in their software, which controls the magnetic and radio-frequency pulses, and then transforms this data into images.

 Depending on the MRI settings, images can highlight fat, fluid, air, bone, or soft tissue in the patient.

 Software Inside

 Software is a valuable tool throughout the MRI process. During your MRI, technicians use the software to select imaging parameters and administer pulse sequences. After your MRI, software is used to process your images so the doctors can interpret them.

 Software systems also archive and display MRI images, allowing doctors to consult and connect patients to far-flung medical specialists when needed.

 The museum gives many other examples of well-known applications that we use today. When developing cell phones,  Developers implemented texting in the Global System for the Mobile Communications (GSM) standard. Carriers at the time thought it might only be useful for sending announcements to customers. Developers originally thought cell phones would be used only for…phone calls.

It was Scandinavian young people who started using texting rather than pay for the calls and that’s when the phone companies (at the time) realized that they had another revenue stream. By 2014, it was generating $115 Billion globally.

I guess it took Steven Jobs of Apple to realize the possibilities with a Smartphone. Even I was late to that realization, wondering why anyone would care to have a camera implemented with a phone! Guess that is why I am not a multi billionaire 😉.

Like my blindness towards the potentials of the Smartphone, texting also initially mystified me. I guess it took the Millennials to show me why it was so popular. To borrow some old computer terms into this context, a phone call could be considered Interactive, and Interrupt-driven. You get a phone call, and you stop doing whatever you are doing (the interrupt) to answer the call. (We will forget about voice mail for this purpose).

A text could be considered as batch mode. Like a line of jobs your mainframe would get, that it processes sequentially and at its leisure, you get a text and can then respond to it at your leisure.

Call me a slow learner, but this also illustrates new technology coming and people initially can’t really find the best uses for it.

How Does Photoshop Work?

Photoshop is an inspired marriage of math and art.

 Digital pictures – like all computer data – are simply coded series of 1’s and 0’s. Numbers. Manipulating those numbers changes the way the computer draws the image.

 The calculations involved are complex, but Photoshop’s user-friendly interface lets people alter an image without ever seeing the math behind it.

 Creating Photoshop

 John and Thomas Knoll grew up developing photos in their Dad’s darkroom. So when Thomas got a Macintosh in 1987, it was natural for him to try and improve its photo handling abilities.

 The result? A program called Display which he and brother John (employed at special effects pioneer Industrial Light and Magic ) expanded into Image-Pro, forerunner of Photoshop.

 The Knoll brothers photography program was promising…but not profitable. They licensed one version to a scanner manufacturer.

The big break came when Russell Brown, Adobe’s art director, became interested. Brown persuaded Adobe to help refine the Knoll’s software. Adobe released the expanded product – Photoshop – in 1990.

 The initial version of Photoshop – version 1.0 – had 100,000 lines of code. The later ones have over 10 million lines of code.

 

I found the Computer History Museum to be fascinating, and hope that I have piqued your interest to visit.

---

 

03-21-23 Most of the italicized sections of this post were extracted from digital photos my iPhone 13 Pro extracted. Apple’s sophisticated programming looks at all of those pixels and determines what constitutes text –  even if the photo was shot at an angle. In what seems to be a microsecond, it highlights that text allowing one to copy and paste it. 

Pretty amazing to me – both the computer power and the programming! 

 

** 03-22-23 0152 When I was sent to Army Air Defense School at Ft Bliss TX  back in 1972, we learned on this SAGE computer. Apparently it was extremely reliable and used up to 1983. Pretty amazing for a computer system life! As far as its memory capacity, I couldn’t not readily find it but I am sure each cabinet was surprisingly small by today’s standards – under 100KB?  When I was sent to Germany, we were under an Air Force detachment and used their own computer.

A bit more on SAGE which in the 1950s was a technological marvel. Many technological innovations from this system were spun off into other products. 

 

03-23-23 2215 I forgot to mention in this post, concerning the marriage of the camera and the smartphone, that as of a few years ago – I read a statistic that more digital pictures are uploaded to Facebook in a year than all the film prints ever made.