By 1965, we built a thing
that was, I would, I, that I
claim is the first classical minicomputer,
and the reason it's that is although this was
a component, was used as a component in some sense, the classical mini was actually
built as a component.
It was to be used for something else.
And I'd say the big, big thing you should take away from that, this is, that in
every generation, you get a machine, a computer that is a component.
The microprocessor, as it was first came out, was a component.
Once it got, the microprocessor got a little bit bigger, the PC,
that began to be used as a component.
In fact, what we just talked about was this guy here.
The cell phone is now a component.
This is the most amazing component you could ever get.
You know, we would never have thought of that as a component.
Because what's in it is, gee, I've got, maybe 32,
64 gigabytes of secondary storage that'll store everything.
It's got enormous processing power.
It's got miniradios in it.
[LAUGH].
And it's got an accelerometer.
It's got a, a GPS unit and guess what?
Who wants one of those?
Well the, all of these nCopter things, the, the Geocopter three,
the three-blade thing, the four-blade, the six-blade.
There's a, I saw a 12-blade that carries people the other day.
All of those things are controlled by this being the central part of that.
>> In a sense, when you first build something like that one
>> I did.
>> You need to keep it flexible.
>> Yeah.
>> Because you don't know what exactly its purpose is.
>> Absolutely, this.
The beautiful thing that, the fun we had with the PDP-1 and I can, could
go back and open the door there and show you, was the I/O system.
The thing that, in fact the first documentation I did on, about the
PDP-1 was I wrote a book, not a book, a 32-page manual,
about how to connect stuff to the PDP-1 because I, that we were enamored with.
How do you connect to that?
And then the difference between the PDP-1 and then subsequent machines that we
built were really, the I/O got much more flexible, it got easier to use.
So that when somebody could read that manual they'd say,
oh my god, I'm going to connect that to a process control,
I'm going to connect it and make it an oscilloscope,
I'm going to make it a pulse height analyzer. And so in a sense,
what the minicomputer did it enabled the
computer to be used as a component in sort of everything, and that's where it was.
And you know, I just wrote an article about the birth and death,
birth and, I guess, I don't remember, rise and fall, rise and fall
of the minicomputer and basically
the editor, you know I went back and
forth with the editors but what happened was I had to, to say look, the function
that we were creating here had not, there was nothing like it in the past.
It wasn't, wasn't a scaled-down mainframe that you could interact with.
That wasn't the goal that we had.
It wasn't a, so it wasn't a record keeper.
It wasn't a computer in the sense of a supercomputer.
We, we weren't after numbers, and we weren't after bits and keeping records.
We were after a component that could be used in any
number of ways and it ended up being used to do
message switching that have telegraph lines coming in and, and telegraph
lines going out, which is the core part of, of networking today.
The Internet, it all works on having computers that
have bits coming in and out and moving them around.
And it was also the ability to have analog
sensing information from some of the first things, we were sensing body information.
So we were sensing things that people were carrying on them.
I normally wear a strap here that has, senses my
my heatflux and skin resistivity and stuff.