Going back to the future with computer memories

Net Results/Karlin Lillington: The earliest encounter with digital technology most of us had probably involved an electronic calculator or one of those plastic, digital watches in the 1970s or 1980s.

I was thinking about this the other day, and marvelling how few of us could have foreseen what was to come in the years following such early introductions to microprocessors.

But my own first encounter with the digital world came earlier and was more unusual. That meeting with the future arrived in the summer of 1969. My father, a doctor, had taken sabbatical leave while he worked for the Rand Corporation. The name, redolent now of intrigue, secrecy and high-tech government contracts, had no significance to me then.

One day, Dad brought me to the office with him, where I met his work partner, Dr Ginsberg (a PhD and computer researcher, but I just thought he was an MD too). Dr Ginsberg asked me if I would like to play a game of Hangman - with a computer.

A computer! I barely knew what one was: a thinking machine like the one they talked to on that new series Star Trek. Of course I wanted to. I was brought into a room, seated at a small desk on which sat a typewriter.

Except when I sat down, it typed by itself - printing out the words "Hello". Then it printed out a gallows shape so we could play Hangman.

I was delighted. We played Hangman and I lost, several times. Dr Ginsberg explained that this typewriter was the way you talked to the computer. The mysterious computer actually filled a whole other room and, rather disappointingly, I wasn't allowed to go look at it.

And that was that. They let me keep the printout of the game and I used it to prove I wasn't lying when I told disbelieving friends the story.

Fast forward a few decades. I have a life that involves talking to the people and the companies devoted to the machine that didn't turn out to be too much like the Star Trek computer after all. I love the technology sector, its energy and edginess, its sometimes arrogance and occasional foolhardiness. I enjoy talking to its researchers and workers and figures from its history. I especially love its history.

That led me last year to visit and interview the director of the newly opened Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley - a wonderful place full of hardware and software and many individual computers important to the history of computing.

One such exhibit - my immediate favourite - was the Johnniac, a beautiful behemoth the size of five refrigerators, made of polished metal, with glass doors that opened to reveal its wires and tubes.

The director explained it was named in honour of computing pioneer John von Neuman and cost $470,000 when it was made in 1954. Once the very cutting edge of technology, the Johnniac was notable for being one of the first computers to have a memory in which to store data, although its entire brain capacity was 4k - about the size of a brief email.

I enjoyed the visit so much that I took my father on a tour a few days later. At the end, the director came over to say hello and chat with us. Dad said: "You know, my daughter even played Hangman with one of those exhibits back in 1969." I was gobsmacked. "The Johnniac," he said. My jaw hit the ground.

The director was immediately intrigued - and that's how I found out that my father had been involved in one of the very early attempts to create an "expert system". He'd written a textbook on respiratory diseases using a then-unusual diagnostic approach - which Dr Ginsberg thought might be a base on which you could structure a computer program that could analyse symptoms and diagnose a disease. Rand Corporation funded the research.

Rand also built the Johnniac, still a valuable computing tool accessible only to government-cleared researchers in 1969 - hence I was not allowed to see it in all its glory.

And in yet another bizarre coincidence, Dr Ginsberg, whom my father had not seen since the early 1970s, tracked down and emailed my father a few days later. My father thought he'd be amused to know the small daughter had become a writer on technology. Given the link by my father, Dr Ginsberg paid a visit to my weblog, where he saw my entry about the Johnniac, complete with a picture I'd taken.

He confirmed that I had indeed played hangman with that machine. He sent these interesting comments as well: "The Johnniac may have been 'decommissioned' at some point but I remember clearly that we were using it for time sharing using Teletype terminals well into the late 1960s if not into the early 1970s. By that time we had IBM mainframes, but the JOSS time sharing (for Johnniac Operating System or something like that, which formed the basis for the BASIC programming language invented by John Kemeny at Dartmouth) kept on ticking for quite a while.

"Also, I have heard that there were actually two Johnniacs - one at Rand and one at Princeton, where Von Neuman was. There's no doubt that was the machine Karlin played on since that was the only time sharing system we had in those days."

And that's how I unexpectedly went back to the future, watching a little piece of personal and computing history come full circle.

weblog: http://weblog. techno-culture.com