A New History of Modern Computing - An Important Book for Fans of Computing

I've read and very much enjoyed the book "A New History of Modern Computing" by Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi.  I've completed the book and I thought I should post a review and let readers know what they could expect from the book.  The contents of the book is copyrighted and is not one of the books that MIT press publishes online, but the price is reasonable.  A free sample is available on Kindle.

In addition to reading the free sample, you can get a bit more of the flavor of the book by reading the paper "Finding a Story for the History of Computing".  This idea of having a story to tell, or even better multiple stories to tell is quite compelling.  The book unfolds as a series of developments from the various users points of view, scientific computing, business computing, home computing, etc, as well as the more typical stories of the people who designed the machines and the chronology of developments.

The early parts of this book filled in many knowledge gaps for me, not just isolated facts but also connections between the history of the concepts and their current use.  As an example, the fact that pipelining and hardware parallelism were originally features of mainframes before they "trickled down" to workstation computers and PCs.  Of course it makes sense but because I had no exposure too mainframes, and little too workstations, I did not know this.  For me, the earlier parts of the book were both interesting and informative.

Once the books's history moves into the Home Computer and Personal Computer revolution, nostalgia will kick in, depending on your age, that may happen at different points in the timeline, but there is good coverage from a wide range of developments.  There are a couple of nostalgic games that one naturally plays when reading the book, answering these questions:

The first computer mentioned in the book that you ever used:
Apple II, Page 181.

The first programming language that you ever used:
Microsoft BASIC, Page 171

The first computer in the book that you had at home:
Commodore VIC-20, Page 196

And of course the lists of computers that you've every owned or worked on.  If you are a computer collector, then of course you'll be interested in reading about the computers that you currently have in your collection.

But as the book moves into modern times the tone of the book shifts.  Or perhaps it's just my response to the nature of the stories.  The book explains well the rise of the smartphone and AI, the idea that software is everywhere and that it is a universal solvent that dissolves everything (for example, the iPhone replacing: alarm clocks, maps, land line telephones, mail, TV, etc, etc),  This point of view is quite interesting.  As an example, when I look back at videos and lectures from as recent as 2014, I notice that the dominance of Intel is still assumed, but I'm writing this bLog article on an ARM powered Apple M1 machine, the fastest computer I've ever owned.  Apple has made three hardware architecture changes in the lifespan of the Macintosh and this last one has been by far the least painful, almost un-noticeable, and again this is arguably because of how good of a job Apple has done on the software emulation layer that's used to bridge the gap between old software and this new hardware.

I believe that the paradigm that the authors suggest is a very helpful one as we consider the future of computing.  It challenges us to try to decide what is the best kind of life that we can live, and how computing fits into that life given its ubiquity.  I came to the end of the book with more serious questions than answers, but perhaps this is fitting for those of us who work in the tech world and have a disproportionate impact and a therefore a responsibility to our fellow human beings.  

Technology is not inherently good or evil.  These are tools that we as individual human beings wield.  To the extent that we each understand how to use these tools we bear the responsibility to use them well.  My kids will tell you that they get sick of hearing this, but Uncle Ben (Or Aunt May, depending on your age) was right when he/she told Peter Parker that with great power comes great responsibility.

If you want a book that will make you think, I recommend "A New History of Modern Computing".

Digital Equipment Corporation - AlphaServer 300 4/266

This year I missed VCF Midwest in Chicago.  I had a really great time last year and I was disappointed to miss out.  One of the retro collectors I know from Free Geek Twin Cities was willing to set aside several of the machines that he was planning to sell there.  You'll be hearing more about these computers on my bLog as I work my way down the stack.  The first in the series is a Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha Server 300 4/266.  This line was released in 1995 and this particular machine dates from 1996 or 1997.  It's one of the lower end from the Alpha Server line, but given the desktop form factor it should perform nicely as a workstation.

I've always wanted a RISC Windows NT machine ever since they were new.  When I bought this machine I was thinking that it may have been limited to run VMS or True64 Unix, but I was willing to purchase it anyway because VMS is also quite nostalgic for me, as that was the OS that was running on our VAX cluster back in my college days at MSOE.

As usual I started my intake process with some cleaning and inspection.  I was surprised when I opened the case and found a Matrox Millennium II PCI card and a Sound Blaster 32 ISA Sound Card in the machine, I didn't know that these were supported.  The machine was really clean inside.  I was happy to find an enterprise grade SCSI HDD (hopefully less likely to die soon) and fully populated RAM slots (which ended up being 256MB of RAM).  The HDD had a sticker on it indicating that the drive had been wiped at Free Geek at some point.  The machine also needed a new clock battery, but this machine uses a standard CR2032 so that was an easy fix.  After that the machine was clean and there were no loose parts and connections, so it was ready for a first boot.  

The machine booted for me, and just as I had been told it was coming up to a prompt:
>>>>
After some reading I learned that this is the Alpha's ROM prompt. 

I started googling around and reading about this machine.  As you may know Alpha was a short lived platform and it was sold off (killed) after Compaq acquired DEC.  The main software architect of Windows NT, Dave Cutler, was previously a Digital employee who was a member of the Vax / VMS software team.  I think there's a pretty convincing argument to be made that Alpha was the primary target platform for Windows NT during it's early development at Microsoft with x86 being a runner up.  It's interesting to think about how things might have turned out differently if Digital would have been able to reinvent itself.

But back to this machine.  One of the first items I encountered was this document, a procedure for installing Windows NT.  I was anxious to try it out since I didn't know if this would work or not.  I found a Windows NT 4.0 disk image on WinWorld and got to work.  In hindsight, if you are doing this, you will want to also download the full ISO CD version of Service Pack 6.  It has additional files that are not available in the self extracting EXE version of the last Service Pack and it's helpful when looking for drivers to be able to have both the entire Windows NT installer and the entire uncompressed SP6 on the local hard drive.

I struggled getting a driver installed for the Matrox Millennium graphics card.  After reading a bit on the forums, I planed another trip to Free Geek.  My contact at Free Geek set me up with an S3 video card from 1995.  I was concerned that this was not "specialized' hardware, but in hindsight this machine does not require specialized hardware, as it came right up at boot time.  Windows NT Plug and Play recognized the S3 video card on boot and I had 256 colors for the first time since working on the machine!

Getting Audio working was also a bit of a pain with lots of trial and error, but I think having both the NT installer files and the SP6 files on the hard drive would have avoided most of the difficulty.  The key enabler for getting this card to work was that ISA cards don't have Plug and Play out of the box.  On the NT install CD ROM Extras there is an installer for ISA PnP. After installing this and restarting the machine the ISA sound card is found at startup.  I ended up having to move the card to the bottom ISA slot and to manually assign resources (Default Resources 0000) too the card, but after a couple of restarts the sound card is working in Windows NT!

So, in hindsight, I think the trick is to use only hardware that is on the Windows NT 4.0 Hardware Compatibility List.  I had trouble finding a readable version of this document on the web, so I'm including a link here to an Archive.  Perhaps it's good that I didn't find this doucment till later as the AlphaServer 300 is not on the HCL.  Still, after many hours of runtime the machine is stable and running well with zero hangs or bluescreens.

I'm quite pleased with how this machine turned out paired with a large CRT monitor.  Being that these machines were so expensive at the time and were often used for art or engineering they were often paired with larger CRTs...

The entire appeal of these machines at the time was that they were faster than the x86 machines of the time.  How much faster is I suppose a matter of debate but loading this up with period correct software like MS Office, VB 6.0, Visual C++ 4.0, and other tools, it does seem quite a bit faster than Pentium PCs of the era, although I'm sure a good part of that is the benefit of a fast wide SCSI bus vs. IDE.