TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Does Your Computer Look Like This?

Re: Does Your Computer Look Like This?

Robert Bonomi (bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com)
Sat, 02 Apr 2005 09:19:55 -0000

In article <telecom24.140.17@telecom-digest.org>, Patrick Townson
<ptownson@cableone.net> wrote:

> In 1954, the well-known Popular Electronics Magazine in connection
> with the Rand Corporation put together an artist's conception of what
> computers would look like in fifty years, in 2004. Look at it here.

> http://www.mountainwings.com/past/5082.htm

> This is _not_ an April Fool's joke.

While it may not be an "April Fool's" joke, it is, in actual fact, a
JOKE, or at best "creative fiction". That picture, as shown, I can
guarantee, did *NOT* run in _any_ 1954 (or even approximately that
year) publication.

Proof: the "console" in the foreground is a DECwriter LA-36 (or
possibly a LA-120 -- a very similar-looking, but _newer_, model), that
was first manufactured in 1974. See:
<http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html>

Proof: the 'cut-line' mentions the FORTRAN programming language, which
was first released in 1957. Three years _after_ the purported
publication of this material.

Note: whomever created the "fiction" also got the geometry slightly
wrong -- the white frame of the LA-36 does not _quite_ line up with
the console panel it is supposedly part of. The front-left corner is
slightly 'behind' the front edge of that panel, while the front-right
corner is slightly _in_front_ of the front edge of that same panel.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: As I said in the last issue, it is very
hard -- damn near impossible -- to pull the wool over you guy's eyes.
Try as hard as I may. PAT]

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