Customer Reviews

Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers

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4 star:		(7)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

A coffee table book about technology? Are you kidding me? What an unusual idea...but what an awesome book! My copy arrived on my doorstep yesterday and I couldn't resist flipping through it right away...then I couldn't put it down for another hour.

If you're in any way interested in technology in general and computers in particular you need to check out this book. The photos are gorgeous. I know it sounds funny saying that pictures of computers could be gorgeous, but they really are!

You'll find entries for all the classic systems, from the ENIAC to Google's first production server, and all points in between. The close-up shots of some of the vacuum tube-based systems are truly fascinating, but it was just plain fun to once again see a device you probably haven't set your eyes on for 20 years. A good example is the Commodore 64 and the original Macintosh. The early "portables" are a hoot to see again too, especially the Osborne 1, with a screen so small it looks like a large digital watch display!

This book is going right to my office Monday morning where it will sit on my meeting table for everyone to admire. Chronicle, thanks for this wonderful trip down memory lane!

P.S. -- This one's not just for the "over 40 crowd" like me: My 18 year-old son spent the last 30 minutes looking through it and loved it as well. That said, Father's Day is just around the corner, so think about this one if your dad is into technology...

The book is very pretty, and has some *outstanding* photographs of classic machines. If only the selection of machines and printing (at least on my copy) matched the quality of the photos, this would be on my "must by" list.

Newer photo-books like this rely on some special printing techniques to make their images stand out, such as printing a glossy image, with the non-printed portion paper treated to make it flat and bright white. It makes for a stunning presentation when it is done properly.

My book has several pages where the glossy images are scratched, and others where the pages are covered with scratches and dirt. I don't know if my pages sat on the top of a pallet or the presses were just dirty, but it clearly happened before binding, as in some cases, page 64 on the left hand side is very dirty, page 65 on the right is totally clean. The beautiful dust jacket is also badly scuffed up--a book like this should have been shrink wrapped--and the cover dinged. This Chinese-printed book would have been considered a "hurt" at my local press.

On this sort of book, that totally shatters the beauty of it all, and I think I will end up returning it. I considered asking for a replacement, but I am further disappointed by the selection of machines.

There are major companies of the era not even represented here. Not a single Data General machine...I would have expected the "70's photogenic" Nova, or a later machine like a S/150. No Burroughs, no DEC-20...the entire history of DEC reduced to two photos and one closeup of a pdp8 and a glimpse of the boot console panel from a DEC-10.

VAX? What's a VAX? No mention of a VAX here, but the TRS-80 I and 100 get four pages. I *loved* my Model 100, but this is not the place for it.

With a title like "core memory" and a pdp8 on the cover, I expected more early machines, yet the book dedicates six pages to the Apple I/II and four to the Commodore 64.

There is more coverage of the Commodore 64 PC than the entire history of Digital Equipment Corporation. Control Data is limited to a photo of the CDC6600 console, a photo of backplane wiring and two images of a boot switch panel.

Home PC's should really be their own book. But if they wanted to cover home PCs up to 1983, they should have hit "visually iconic" machines like the IMSAI or the Ohio Scientific PCs. How about some classic rare peripherals; the Atari 815 dual disk drive is a 9x9x12" box with nine LEDs in three colors, surely some unique peripherals like this deserve inclusion more than a two-page closeup of the Commodore 64's keyboard.

Now, I would like to mention the wonderful photos of SAGE and Johnniac. Had it not been that the photo of the SAGE light gun was covered with scratches, I would have kept it for SAGE alone. But as I said, in a photo book, damaged photos ruin the whole point.

I spotted a few factual errors and typos in my quick scan of the book, but the major errors are really errors of omission.

Conclusion: If yours is printed correctly and clean, it is a beautiful book and a bargain at the Amazon sale price. But if you are expecting a book primarily about machines running core memory, or minicomputers/mainframes from the 1970s as would be inferred from the cover and the name, you will be disappointed. I am.

It doesn't matter if your a PC Guy or a Mac Guy or a total Luddite, you've got to buy this book. Mark Richards photographs are archaeological gems of the most important technological creation of the last fifty years. Richards exposes the guts of the machine in a way few have ever seen and fewer still could imagine would be so beautiful.

"Core Memory" was a happy surprise to come across, and a total home run when shared with my family and friends. I feared the book would be a dry catalogue that spoke only to the geek-iest of computer fans. What I found was a book that spoke to everyone: photographer Mark Richards studies these machines with a cold detachment yet still seems to somehow remind us that it is human beings that created these things: anthropomorphic machines, wires that looks like human circulatory systems, computers that look like oddly like faces, sometimes just a dada-ist collection of wires and knobs that don't look functional at all. The text by Alderman grounds everything and makes it accessible to the masses. This book will tie you up for hours, and you'll never look at your laptop the same again.

Alderman provides a useful service to those of us who use computers for a livelihood. (And isn't that many these days?) He reminds us of the still-recent heritage. Computer improvements have occurred at a rate unprecedented in technological history. The photos and descriptions from the computer museum show such dinosaurs! Yet still well within living memory.

A prosaic image of a punched card will take some readers back to their first programs. In Fortran or Cobol. Hacked out on a stack of those cards. While the photos of the mainframes and minicomputers might have been of types you ran those cards on. Sobering to realise that other readers weren't even born when all this happened.

Who would have thought a parade of historic computers and their physical innards could be so beautiful? These images are an exquisite march through the physical evolution of computers as seen through an artist's eye. And don't skip the text! Plenty of fascinating historic info, even for someone like me who does not necessarily think of himself as a computer person...

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.

HAL is alive and well in "Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers." Great photography and concise but informative text combine to provide a visual walk down history lane. For anyone who remembers working with an early Apple II or 8080 and wonders what came before.

i poured over this book and didn't want to put it down, it had great text and beautiful pictures. i guess i should be embarrassed that i've actually used some of the computers featured, but learning about the ones i had never used or seen was a bonus.

Core Memory is a must have book for everyone. Richards photographs of computers are stunning works of art in their own right: clean and compositionally beautiful. He has captured the computer in an unprecedented way and allows us to see a world long forgotten. This book is perfect not just for the computer lover but for anyone interested in the evolution of such a complex system.