How I nearly re-invented the modern computer
76I first ran into computer programming when a neighborhood friend and I were trying to work out the logic for "3 dimensional, 4 square, tic-tac-toe".
We had a little box of folded tin that we had hooked lights and toggle switches onto and we were wiring it up to try to 'play' against us. We would enter our moves by toggling a switch, and then a light would turn on where we would have to toggle the move for our 'computer'. Then we would toggle our next move, and another light would go on.
The whole contraption was powerd by an AC/DC power transformer I had taken from my Erector Set. See the photo below of a basic Erector Set with its transformer.
At one point, the box got so over-heated that it melted the insulation on the wires and shorted out the power transformer, which promptly exploded with a loud 'bang.' A huge ball of fire and plume of smoke filled my bedroom and caught the rug on fire.
We unplugged the power cord and carried the burning rug outside onto the lawn, much to the entertainment of my parents, who had been until that point calmly going about whatever boring things grownups do in the kitchen and living room.
After an immediate emergency family meeting called to celebrate the occasion, it was decided by a clear majority that hence forward I was to conduct all experiments involving fire, chemistry, electricity and so on outside -- in the relative safety of the garage or on the patio.
Undeterred, we continued our wiring 'programming' of our now rebuilt tic-tac-toe computer. It got to be pretty complex. We were running out of knowledge, running low on wire, and had no more room inside the box for more wiring anyway.
So we took the tangled rats nest of crisscross wires over to a friend's brother in Las Cruces, NM, who was a student at New Mexico State University. He took us to a math professor there, who looked at our invention with some glee and showed it around the office. I guess my friend Joe and I were about fifteen years old or so, so it must have been around 1963.
After an hour or so being shown around the math and physics departments as mini celebrities I guess, the professor finally reached up onto a shelf and pulled down a little stack of 80-column cards. He walked us down the hall to the IBM mainframe computer they had (or was it a Univac?) and ran the cards into the input device.
It clattered and chattered and printed out a long report onto a nearby high speed printer. The two-foot wide green and white lined computer paper streamed up out of the printer, leaping into the air a full six feet of more and piling into a wire cage behind the machine. We all grinned at each other sheepishly.
The professor sat down at a teletype data entry 'interface' machine and began to play our 3 dimensional 4 square tic-tac-toe game against the computer!
Everytime he typed, the paper on the printer would jump up another few inches, showing his latest move, and the the computer's move.
And, it would printout a neat little computer drawing with x's and dashes and o's, showing the four layers of the cube, and each move as it was made... we were the o's (for losers) and the computer was the x's (for winner of course).
The computer always won.
It was programmed to win.
Joe and I looked at each other in glum disappointment. This guy obviously had already done our life's work, long before we ever met him. We'd wasted months pointlessly.
He already had the full program written, before we ever got there. Some student had written the program as a project, long before we had ever even started our little tin box wired version of course.
Anyway, we all had fun playing against the big computer for the rest of the day, and talking about the details of the program and how the logic worked.
So, that's my story: How I almost re-invented modern computing. Almost...
POSTSCRIPT
None of us were ever able to beat that real university computer, no matter how hard we tried.
Guess it just 'wasn't in the cards!'
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Thanks, sixtyorso! I did read your hub and just now made a long comment to your replay here, but somehow the system ate it! I hate it when that happens, and won't retype it again.
But, just imagine what it was like for all of us baby boomers, as we poured over 50 foot long printouts to do error checking at 3 a.m. when CPU mainframe computer time was cheapest... those were the days. I was using Fortran IV like most engineering students in the University. The year was 1970, about the time whatshisname invented large-scale-integration and changed the world.
Now we have more power in our laptop than our universities had in enormous coputer rooms.
Those were (not) the days!
I love my little punch and click -- and I do click away all night. sleep, such a waste of time. =) let's see, you connect the blue cord to the red cord next to the yellow cord sitting on top of the white cord that fried the purple cord....
gee I don't know what you guys are complaining about...it's so easy
Guess you're right, marisuewrites. You always are! (grin)
Remember when I blew up my bedroom and carried the burning rug out onto the lawn?
People are probably thinking that I'm making this stuff up...
Your opening reminds me of the time my friend Larry and I decided to built a power grid along the carpet of his front room and bedroom. We took an erector set and built towers; then carefully laid hair-thin wire from one tower to the next, covered them with petroleum jelly (I have no idea why we did that!) and then plugged the thing into the wall.
It was like one, huge flashbulb going off and we were temporarily blinded, which allowed us to be caught by his mother, beaten to within an inch of our lives (or so it seemed at the time!) and told that we were not "Young Tom Edisons". We ended up scrubbing the remnants of the burnt petroleum jelly out of the carpets over the next few weeks.
So, would your version of the computer have been able to talk, like the ones "invented" on Star Trek? LOL!!!
Hey what a coincidence, CHEF JEFF. The power source we also used for our 'computer' was also taken from an Erector set! We ran it acorss the rug to our box of lights and wires, and didn't know enough to figure our that here was a high probability of melting things down with all the current.
We thought it to be pretty simple, something like stringing the lights for a Christmas tree, only with toggle switches and so on.
If you remember the old Christmas tree lights, they used to get REALLY, REALLY HOT. That was the problem we encountered. We didn't use the same lights. Instead we used lamps with sockets that we ordered from Allied Electronics' catalog. But they got just as hot and that was the ultimate cause that got us exiled to the garage for future inventing.
Thank god we only had a throw-rug for the bedroom instead of a carpet.
I guess thousands of boys must have caused many, many house fires by cannibalizing their old erector set transformers. Never heard of anyone else with such a story, though.
And, no, we never invented another computer, talking or not. We did start writing some science fiction, and we built shortwave radio sets from spare parts, and audio amplifiers and learned to produce some strange smells with chemistry sets.
Thanks for adding to the legend!
My first programming adventure was in FORTRAN on an IBM 1800, which occupied about 50 cubic feet of floor space and came equipped with a keypunch operator. I'd feed Jackie my code, and she'd punch it onto those cards. Then I would take the cards and feed them into the compiler. Indeed, those were the days. I was often wrong, proved by the compiler, but she never was! Magic fingers, extraordinary concentration.
Long before I was born, my father took his little sister to the barn and told her to sit on a wet hay bale while he attached wires to her hands from an old car battery. He told her she'd have a great surprise. And so she did. The next day, she dropped an old cinderblock from the loft of the barn onto his head. Thank goodness I am here to tell the story, and my aunt Katy is still alive and kicking.
My father taught me through carpentry, Erector sets, microscopes, electronics, chemistry sets (remember those?), and the pure dry country humor that leaves you guessing about yourself.
Thanks for prompting me to take a trip down memory lane.
That would be about 50 square feet, for the record. LOL. My father would not be ashamed of me for that mistake, but poke good fun at me instead.
Another Fortran IV person... well of course we all had to learn it. Required for the common core of engineering.
You're very welcome, Sally's Trove. I had no idea that so many people like us grew using and abusing their erector sets. Nice comment... thanks!
Well if we live in a 10 dimensional or 13 dimensional universe, could an extra dimension or two be devoted to floors? (grin)
See the new photos of two Erector Sets with power transformers that I've just added to the photos above.
And, I've added a drawing that shows the actual layout of the gemini spacecraft control panel with its many toggle switches and status lights. By the way, I had NOTHING to do with Gemini, or any other spacecraft, except a minor role as a student in 1965 working on tests of the Apollo spacecraft at Holloman Air Force Base's Aeromedical, Environmental Test laboratory. But, that's another story. See "Monkeys in Space: How they helped open doors to exploring the New Frontier" -- my new hub coming soon!
sixtyorso says:
17 months ago
Great Hub
As you can see from my hub I worked on all that equipment. i plugged those boards and punchd my own cards. Great memories.