Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 160 pages
• Published by: Chronicle Books May 10, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0811854426
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0811854429
• Book Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.6 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 2 pounds

Book Description
An unprecedented combination of computer history and striking images, Core Memory reveals modern technology's evolution through the world's most renowned computer collection, the Computer History Museum in the Silicon Valley. Vivid photographs capture these historically important machines including the Eniac, Crays 1 3, Apple I and II while authoritative text profiles each, telling the stories of their innovations and peculiarities. Thirty-five machines are profiled in over 100 extraordinary color photographs, making Core Memory a surprising addition to the library of photography collectors and the ultimate geek-chic gift.

About The Author
Mark Richards's work has been featured in numerous publications. He lives in Mill Valley, California. John Alderman, author of Sonic Boom, lives in San Francisco.

Reader Reviews
Computers have settled into a fairly standard design, with the basics being monitor, keyboard, and mouse. They were not always so simple, and they were certainly not so powerful as the laptop on which I am typing this review. It is good to remember that a computer used to be a roomful of tubes that could barely multiply a couple of big numbers, and that no one really could predict the ways that computers would become smaller, more useful, more powerful, and more ubiquitous. So while my laptop might trace its descent from the Universal Automatic Computer, or UNIVAC, of 1951, there were plenty of steps along the way, as well as branches that proved to be dead ends. Many branches of the computer's genealogical tree are illustrated in _Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers_ (Chronicle Books), with photographs by Mark Richards and text by John Alderman. Computers are barely fifty years old, and many of the artistic and handsome photos here look like ancient jumbles of vacuum tubes or transistors and capacitors, while others look like gadgets the Jetsons would be glad to own. While the vibrant pictures are the show in this large-format book, the short text that accompanies each of the thirty-two computers shown here puts them in a historical and technological context. The computer that starts the pictures, the Z3 Adder, no longer exists, and pictures here are only of a reconstruction; it was a German model bombed out of existence in Berlin in 1944. America didn't enter the computer race until after the war, although ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was part of the war's technological drive. ENIAC cost about a half million dollars, and had a memory that could process twenty ten-digit numbers. It is shown in pictures of rows and rows of silvered vacuum tubes. It could not store programs, so it had to be physically reconfigured every time it was run, a fault that would be corrected in the UNIVAC. These computers all had primitive memories, but in 1951 came the first computer with a magnetic core memory, based on rings of iron suspended in a grid of wires, so that current flowing through the wires could magnetize the ring in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction, corresponding to bits meaning 1 or 0. You could turn the electricity off and the magnetization would remain, so the memory would be intact when you turned things on again. The intricate threading of wires through rings is displayed in several lovely pictures here, showing how signals could easily be sent to specific wires that would get to a particular ring. The core memory was what computers used until integrated circuits came along. The least successful computer here seems to be the Kitchen Computer built in 1969 by Honeywell for Neiman Marcus, which crowed, "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." It turns out she could cook a lot better. It had a two week operating course, and the number of housewives willing to learn to make their recipes in binary was exactly zero. Not a one sold. Memory is what it is all about in this entertaining visual review. It cannot be that the machines here were from any "Golden Age" of computing; our own computers may not be as fast or as reliable as we might like, but the ones here were generally very expensive and very weak machines. Their visuals, though, have a classic look that evokes a time of growth when we did not really know what computers were going to do and we distrusted them even more than we do now. It is hard to imagine that anyone looking upon and into our own computers will be able to bring out the sort of lines and colors on display here; there will be nothing, for instance, like the lovely sculptural quality of the mass of blue and white wiring that can been found in the picture of the insides of the Cray-3. Our computer parts have gotten tiny, and the exteriors anonymous. _Core Memory_ is a reminder that it wasn't always so. Comment | | (Report this)