I chuckled when I saw this picture over at Café Hayek on a post about purchase power back then versus now. The Olivetti 101 was the first computer I played with – back when I was a freshman in high school in 1970. An all-in-one “desktop computer” it had the printer (left hand side), a slot for flexible paper based magnetic card (1′ by about 2″ or 3″ wide) that could store your program and data, a specialized keyboard, and that blue/red on the right hand side was “das blinken lights” so you could “see” it thinking.
We played “moon lander” a lot – who could write the smallest program with the most features and then create the “operational data” that would land that virtual lander in the fastest time without crashing it (too high a G force). Yes, we were hackers in the original sense of the word. We spent hours tweaking and tweaking. And that was the first program that we “ported” to the DEC PDP-8E when it was installed; we all learned BASIC in a hurry and the “hack race” started all over again (and again in PASCAL, FORTRAN, FOCAL, and assembler). Good times, good times….
And now my car key fob has more compute power….and I think we’re only getting started…
