1960s Archive

  • Japan finally completes its gigantic Gigantor statue (video)

    Japan finally completes its gigantic Gigantor statue (video)

    Move over, Gundam, your time has passed. It's now Gigantor's turn to protect Japan from alien intruders. Based on the giant robot from the anime that was first aired in the 1960s in Japan, the city of Kobe in central Japan is now the proud home of a 18m high statue of the Tetsujin 28 (Iron Man 28), which is the robot’s name in Japan.

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  • SketchPad: the world’s first electronic drafting program

    SketchPad: the world’s first electronic drafting program

    sketchpadIf you think AutoCad is complicated, what with its terrifying number of keyboard shortcuts, you should check out SketchPad, the world's first electronic drafting program. Designed by Ivan Sutherland in the 1960s, it allowed an operator to draw line segments, arcs, and circles on an oscilloscope with a lightpen and a complex set of buttons, switches, and knobs. Videos after the jump!

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  • DIY Lunar Lading Computer

    DIY Lunar Lading Computer

    Here's a project for a rainy year: a DIY Apollo Guidance Computer with 4K RAM, 32K words of ROM, and a 1Mhz processor. One John Pultorak built his own replica in 2004 and released the plans to the world, giving us a glimpse into what was essentially the first pocket calculator on the moon.
    The Apollo AGC itself is a piece of computing history, it was developed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and it was a quite amazing piece of hardware in the 1960s. It was the first computer to use integrated circuits (ICs), running at 1 Mhz it offered four 16-bit registers, 4K words of RAM and 32K words of ROM. The AGC mutlitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time. The user interface unit was called the DSKY (display/keyboard, pronounced "disky"); an array of numerals and a calculator-style keyboard used by the astronauts to communicate with the computer.

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