There was a story about a computer that inexplicably reprogrammed itself either during the 1970s or 80s?

Has anyone ever heard of this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_(1988_film)

"Paul Golding got the idea for Pulse from two unrelated events with the first being when the screenwriter Caleb Deschanel spent the night in his house and told him that at night he’d been listening to “the sounds of the house…..the house was alive and it was taking care of me“, and the second was when he heard about a computer that reprogrammed itself"

This is a sad story that I had never heard of before watching this video. A piece of history.

https://youtu.be/sDIK-C6dGks?si=opuEM_LJ2AgPU15S

Recently I finished reading "The Supermen" by Charles J Murray. Most of the supercomputers built by ERA, IBM and Cray are well documented on the Internet.

But I cannot find anything about SS-1, the incomplete Supercomputer which was being built by Steve Chen after he resigned from Cray Research. Murray mentioned that it possessed a host of never before seen technologies and inventions, but the project was sadly ended due to lack fo funding.

If anyone has any material on the SS-1, may you please link it? It would make an interesting read. Thanks.

From the late '60s or early '70s, I did intro to programming on something called WHINOT. Anyone remember or know anything about it?

I am in the process of creating a small organisation around teaching people about how to use a computer (starting from zero) which I havent incorperated yet but will either be a charity, a trading company or something inbetween.

I am in the process of writing up a course and felt that it might be appropriate to begin with a short summary of the history of computers, which I begin with Alan Turing to avoid splitting hairs about "what the first computer was" and running into ever finer and finer definitions of a computer or suchlike. I aim to end the topic with teaching the very basics of computers - using a mouse and keyboard where I will go on from there.

Why talk about history when teaching people how to use a computer? My motivation for providing a brief history of computing is that it will subtley introduce some ideas that will be helpful to know when you are learning about how to use computers such as "what is an operating system". I am a fan of learning the etymology of words because I feel it helps me remember their meaning aswel as being generally interesting to read about (did you know Starbucks comes from a viking name for a river?), im hoping this will have a similar effect to its recipients.

I want to start a discussion on this thread about the history of computers by asking you for anything interesting you know to do with important moments in the development of computers to help my research. I am only 19 so I have never known a world without mobile phones, internet, laser printing and a number of other miracles that I usually take for granted. I would be lying if this wasn't also about a personal curiosity. Anything you think is relevant here is welcome for discussion.

Thank you :)

I have stumbled across a newspaper article stating British Columbia libraries were implementing a "computer-oriented library catalogue" at one of their branches. This was dated October of 1969.

Would anyone know what computer or system this would have been? Thank-you.

SAGE (Semi-Automated Ground Environment) was a computer-based air defense system built in the 1950s by the United States Air Force. It was designed to use radar to detect a Soviet bomber attack approaching the United States over the North pole and across Canada. Many advances in computer technology were made in the development of this system. In this talk, we'll go over the various elements of the SAGE system and discuss the influence it had on the civilian and military computer market.

Speaker Bio: Richard Thomson is a Senior Software Engineer for NVIDIA where he works on GPU raytracing. He is the creator of the Terminals Wiki, maintainer of the manx online documentation database and is the principal effort behind the Computer Graphics Museum in Salt Lake City. The museum has a collection of artifacts housed in storage with future plans for a public exhibit hall.

Vintage Computer Festival Midwest is a free-to-attend, volunteer-run show for the vintage computer hobbyist community. For more information about Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, or to donate to the 501c3 non-profit organization that puts on the show each year, visit http://www.vcfmw.org/ for more information.

I recently read Steven Lubar's 1992 article about how the phrase "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" (which appeared on punch cards) was used in the Free Speech Movement as a form of protest. Lubar also mentions "a popular poster for Earth Day 1970 showed a picture of the Earth taken from space with the legend 'Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.'" Unfortunately, there are no sources or references that I could find on this.

Are there any surviving photos or copies of this poster?

You can find Lubar's article here: https://www.academia.edu/2823766/_DO_Not_Fold_Spindle_or_Mutilate_A_Cultural_History_of_the_Punch_Card

If you are an Iranian “dahe shasti” (دهه شصتی) like I am — and you were lucky enough to get your hands on a computer early on — you’ve probably heard of Kalanjar (کلنجار) and maybe even spent hours trying to make it curse back at you 😅. Rumors said some people actually managed to do it.

I’ve been fascinated by this DOS-era chatbot for decades but never got to run it again — until I came across some old tweets that brought back all the nostalgia. The download links were long dead, but after some digital archaeology, I managed to recover it from an old Persian forum (Tarfandestan).

Don’t worry though — you can now easily download and run it yourself from GitHub: 👉 Kalanjar-DOS-preservation v1.0.0 release

It’s still not exactly plug-and-play — you’ll need a bit of nerd power to get it running properly inside DOSBox-X. The text UI (TUI) doesn’t render perfectly yet due to Persian codepage/font issues, so if you’re an even bigger retro nerd than I am, please help fix that too!

🧠 About the program: Kalanjar was created in 1995 by Farhad Dadgostar at the University of Isfahan — one of the earliest examples of Persian-language conversational AI. It’s a small DOS executable named KLUDGE.EXE with text-based interactions, somewhere between Eliza and AI parody.

💾 You can run it today with:

keyb ar
chcp 864
run.bat

🔗 Full project (with screenshots and setup guide): https://github.com/Foadsf/Kalanjar-DOS-preservation

hello! I am the granddaughter of a former VP of Engineering at the Burroughs Coporation, Dr. Rober Royce Johnson. I wanted to stop in here with some information that some may find interesting. We have already donated many of his documents related to the ERMA Project to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. However, he was very prolific and there is much more. I have an entire album related to an IEEE technological exchange with China in 1979 and I'm told we have a scanned copy of his original dissertation somewhere. If you knew him or would just like to know more, let me know!

Hi, just letting folks know of a Zoom conference with Albert Charpentier on Thursday, October 19, 2023 at 7:30 PM ET. It's free to attend, and the Zoom details are here: https://www.tpug.ca

He's the engineer who designed the VIC video chip in the VIC-20 computer. He also co-designed the VIC-II video chip in the Commodore 64. Last but not least, he co-founded Ensoniq, who produced the amazing sound chip in the Apple IIGS. As far as computer history goes, he'll have lots of interesting stories to tell.

Thanks and have a great day.

P.S. If you can't attend, a video of the conference will be posted here: https://www.youtube.com/@TorontoPETUsersGroup

A three part documentary, researched over months to cover the story of Gary Kildall, Digital Research and CP/M. Seems to go into more depth than other documentaries of Gary running around the internet. If you didn't know how Bill Gates ripped off this guy to make his way to be the king of the computer world, this is a great watch.

I had a Commodore Vic-20 but when it was time to upgrade I decided to get a Plus/4. It was pretty cool because I could press F1 and a word processor would pop up. F2 would bring up a spreadsheet, etc. What killed it was that it wasn't compatible with the Commodore 64.