酋長講古

酋長講古 http://www.pingying.com/history/ 千萬不要讓偶曉得你的過去 en-us Nucleus CMS v3.41 ? Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.pingying.com/history//nucleus/nucleus2.gif 酋長講古 http://www.pingying.com/history/ <![CDATA[e版愛福好自在報第四期]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3821.html
這期偶只有複印版，基於上次滴經驗，複印版再作成電子版品質差粉多，所以一不作二不休，這次乾脆黑白二色150dpi掃描，作成勉強可以看但檔案體積超小滴網路閱讀版就好了。看倌們欣賞過後有蝦米感想，非常歡迎回報，宏揚同志書e版再生粉需要你們滴意見溜~~~ crazymm

愛報第四期下載按這邊 (1.82MB)

目錄

Indigo Girls 南方沼澤的純真少女 / 那那
金賽夫人信箱 / 金賽夫人
[本期專題]
楔
上帝的旨意
渡口觀音笑
東照照‧西照照‧亮光光
小載一程
升學至上‧吾黨所宗
妳不可能是真的
觀音百變
搭錯車 VS 出櫃戰爭 / 女神虫
魚玄阿機的話
簡單的與不簡單的
給？
無題 / 佚名
秋芒 / 小舒
拜火者 / 紀華
獨家番易：等待石牆 / 莎朗

天哪，文獻收集狂發現一件了不得的大事了 exclaim

。這期愛報封底有廣告一本號稱是「台灣第一本女同性戀發展與現況專書」「大成報轟動連載期間讀者熱烈迴響」滴《黑色蕾絲》，號角出版社，作者汪成華。偶偶偶偶怎麼沒有看過這本書滴印象 down

哪位善心人士有看過，或者手上有這本滴，麻煩來通報一下，並且貢獻點相關資訊，感激不盡 crazymm

]]> 酷兒史料收藏 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3821.html Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:58:47 -0400 <![CDATA[常凱申同志您好]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3799.html
打從看到這個新聞報導起，偶都是一想到就笑、一想到就笑
下次再吵中正廟要改蝦米名字時，偶們來建議較常凱申紀念堂吧
基於歡樂的理由，也許比較容易達到共識說 evil

詳細點的錯誤清單請看這篇“?修斯”之后又?“常?申”

北京清大副教授誤譯蔣介石變常凱申

【中央社專電】北京清華大學歷史系副主任王奇所著《中俄國界東段學術史研究》一書，被大陸網友發現錯誤百出，最離譜的是蔣介石（Chiang Kai-shek）被改為「常凱申」。

上海《文匯報》報導，王奇的著作《中俄國界東段學術史研究：中國、俄國、西方學者視野中的中俄國界東段問題》，2008年10月由中央編譯出版社出版。

中央編譯出版社責任編輯陳瓊表示，這本書原本只有前兩章，即第1章「中國（包括台灣、香港）學者視野中的中俄國界東段問題」，第2章「俄國（包括蘇聯）學者視野中的中俄國界東段問題」。

陳瓊說，後來王奇的同事建議加1章「西方學者視野中的中俄國界東段問題」，全書會因為有第三方觀點而更完整。

結果就在第3章共15頁裡出錯，由於時間很趕，誤譯引用資料中用韋氏拼音標注的中國人名。

她說，「當時我覺得清華的牌子那麼硬，王奇的學養也很好，倉促之間沒有深究……」陳瓊承認自己不懂俄語，「但這本書引用自俄語的部分，是由我社的專業俄語校對檢校過的」。

作者王奇則婉拒記者的採訪。

據清大歷史系師資隊伍網頁顯示，45歲的王奇1990年代初在俄羅斯聖彼得堡國立技術大學留學，1995年取得博士學位，同年回到清華大學歷史系任教。任教期間，她曾獲北京市高教系統教書育人先進個人和2000年「清華大學青年教師教學優秀獎」等榮譽。

2000年王奇晉升為副教授，現任清大歷史系副主任、清大中俄文化研究與交流中心副主任、中國中俄關係史研究會常務理事會副秘書長等。著有20萬字的《二戰後中蘇（俄）關係的演變和發展》，主編過《多極化世界格局中的中俄科技、教育、文化交流》等學術著作。

據知情人士透露，王奇正在「緊急回爐」，將網友指出的人名和史料謬誤搜集起來，細細核對，將給讀者準確的訂正本。

]]> 瞎說胡搞 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3799.html Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:51:25 -0400 <![CDATA[e版愛福好自在報第二期]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3771.html 結果e書不止沒有size變小，還越做越大

不過這次連封面封底一共有 40 頁，而且係從原版直接掃描下來滴清晰版
多佔點硬碟空間還係值得滴啦 fist

偶一直粉好奇這鍋封面係來自於騰雲駕霧救苦救難滴觀音顯靈像嗎 question

當年滴主編或作者如果剛巧路過這邊，麻煩顯靈出來指點一下 evil

愛報第二期下載按這邊 (23.6MB)

目錄

編者言/俞小屁

[獨家報倒] 同性戀人權公聽會漏網消息大公開 / 大B

[本期專題] 同志國 (Queer Nation)
楔子 / 小屁
漫漫長路 -- 同志史 / 魚幼薇
愛如潮水在 T bar -- 台灣女同性戀的悲喜曲 / 徐淑卿
妖精‧異鄉‧女神龍 -- 談女同性戀的文化實踐 / 露莓
七嘴八舌 T bar / 愛報討論‧小屁整理
群妖像 -- 同志模樣 (Dyke's style)
叛逃與拓荒 -- 同志新版圖

[性壇芬芳錄]
金賽夫人信箱 / 金賽夫人

[同志拾遺]
潔後餘生 / 大浴肛
愛的路上我和你 / 小精靈

[私說心語]
暗戀薰衣草原 / 也春
給小安 /P.P
給貓咪 / 布魯
片斷‧不連續 / 仔仔

[分類廣告]

]]> 酷兒史料收藏 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3771.html Sat, 6 Jun 2009 17:13:57 -0400 <![CDATA[e版愛福好自在報第一期]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3751.html
不過有得看總比沒有好吧

跟第三期的32頁(連封面)相比，第一期只有24頁，這款成長速度真係接下來幾年台灣同運發展滴好兆頭ㄚ twisted

愛報裡的某編者以前跟偶說過，當年他們係用MAC 做排版跟編輯，的確咧稍微注意就看得出係蘋果產品 evil

愛報第一期下載按這邊 (14.5MB)

這一期沒有目錄，不過為了看倌方便，偶就簡單打一鍋囉

開始，就有 - 希望 / 果東
[梅花一弄] 尋花問柳：戀同大事紀 / 張小肛
[梅花二弄] 淚的小花：給異性戀友人的一封信 / 小球
[梅花三弄] 踏雪尋梅：童戀 /果東
[性談芬芳露] 金賽夫人信箱
[媒體小舖]
玫瑰含苞待放--金馬國際影展中的女同性戀電影及其效應 /露莓
認識同志-- K.d Lang /那那
[野女獻曝] 時間 / 小肛
[私說心語] 給 P.P / From BB
給K /FROM JJ

這係封面

但本期最出名滴好像係下面這鍋偽分類廣告頁

這款神經搞笑風格也係粉昭示接下來同運滴歡樂路線啦 twisted

]]> 酷兒史料收藏 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3751.html Sun, 31 May 2009 01:02:57 -0400 <![CDATA[e版愛福好自在報第三期]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3742.html 愛報第三期 下載按這邊
因為係生手，還不曉得掃描要點
所以雖然只有32頁，檔案卻接近20MB

請大家多包涵

編者言 -- 古老妖
[獨家報倒] 1994鱷魚隨手記 -- 餓魚
[本期專題] 想要有個家
家 -- 辜敏倫
給媽媽的一封信 -- 沙朗
會有那麼一天 -- 魚幼薇
[同志陰光] 同志陰光 -- 小虫工
[媒體小舖] 女同性戀，美國媒體新寵？ -- 露莓
[同志拾遺] 給北一女高三良班 -- 溫逸、莎莎
忍不住想說 -- 三三咪
[私說心語] 汝 -- 安
For My Dear Chinese Teacher -- a Stubborn student
如果思念妳 -- 紀華
[理論導毒] 異性戀的佛洛依德、佛洛依德的同性戀 -- 果東

]]> 酷兒史料收藏 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3742.html Wed, 27 May 2009 21:02:39 -0400 <![CDATA[The Innovation of PCs in the 1970s (12)]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3434.html An Unfinished Revolution
The computer revolution happened in the mid-1970s, as proclaimed in the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, originated from “a hobby for fun.”⁷⁴ These computer hobbyists were certainly heroes. However, this study showed that computer hobbyists were different from hackers, who worried that personal computers had become a threat to their culture. While most historians would agree that the direction for developing computer technology had changed dramatically since the innovation of the Altair 8800 in 1975, it is still uncertain who should be credited for this change. This study suggests computer hobbyists as a more possible candidate than hackers.The whole story of personal computers is more complicates than has been presented in this essay, and the story itself certainly has not ended yet. In 1980, IBM finally decided to enter the market of personal computers, and it acted fast.⁷⁵ In August 1981, the IBM Personal Computer was already in retail stores.⁷⁶ By 1984, IBM sold two million computers and the IBM Personal Computers had become an industry standard.⁷⁷ While Apple Computer and IBM continuously fought for their market shares in the following years, both companies eventually lost to Microsoft, which was a company devoted solely to software development. Moreover, if the personal computer has “atomized” its users—as Steels had once complained—then the rise of the Internet in the 1990s was again redefining the computers.⁷⁸ Will the combination of the Internet and personal computers finally achieve the hackers’ belief in information-sharing?⁷⁹ Nobody has an answer to this question, but surely many will come forward and attempt to finish this revolution.

⁷⁴Fred Moore,. “It’s A Hobby,” Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter (Menlo Park, CA). 7 June 1975.
⁷⁵Campbell and Aspray, “The Shaping of the Personal Computer,” 253.
⁷⁶Ibid., 256-57.
⁷⁷Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1, 183.
⁷⁸Steele, “Confessions of a Happy Hacker,” xiv.
⁷⁹Raymond, The New Hacker’s Dictionary 3d ed., 234.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources:
Byte, September, 1975 – December, 1977.
Creative Computing, December 1974 – December 1976.
Dr. Dobb’s Journal, January, 1976 – December 1976.
Electronics World, January, 1974 – December, 1975.
Popular Electronics, January, 1974 – December, 1976.
Radio Electronics, January, 1974 – December, 1975.
The Amateur Computerist, 11 February 1988.
Nelson, Theodor H. Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now. South Bend, Ind.: by the author, 1974.
________. The Home Computer Revolution. South Bend, Ind.: by the author, 1977.

Secondary Sources:
Bard, Doug. The People’s Computer Company Alumni Pages. 15 May 2001 (29 November 2002).

Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray. “The Shaping of the Personal Computer.” In Computer: A History of the Information Machine, 233-58. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. I, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

Damer, Bruce. The DigiBarn Computer Museum. <http://www.digibarn.com> (13 November 2002).

Delaney, Frank. “The World’s First Commercially Available PC.” In History of the Microcomputer Revolution. Spokane, WA:KPBX, 1995.

Espinosa, Chris. “It Wasn't Supposed to Be Like This: The People Lost. The Priesthood Won.” MacTech 11, no. 1 (1995).

Freiberger, Paul, and Michael Swaine. Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. Berkeley, California: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984.

________. Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. Second ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 2000.

Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic: A Radical Approach to the Philosophy of Business. New York: Random House, 2001.

Keep, Christopher, Tim McLaughlin, and Robin Parmar. “Ted Nelson and Xanadu.” The Electronic Labyrinth. November 1995. <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/
hfl0155.html> (29 November 2002).

Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Light, Jennifer S. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 455-83.

Luckow, Al. Personal website for Steve "the Woz" Wozniak. <http://www.woz.org> (12 November 2002).

Margolis, Philip E. The Random House Personal Computer Dictionary. New York: Random House, 1991.

Raymond, Eric S. The New Hacker's Dictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991.

________. The New Hacker's Dictionary. 3d ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999.

Segaller, Stephen. Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet. New York: TV Books, 1999.

Steele, Guy. “Confessions of a Happy Hacker.” In The New Hacker's Dictionary, edited by Eric S. Raymond, ix-xiv. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999.

________. The Hacker’s Dictionary. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1983.

Veit, Stan. Stan Veit's History of the Personal Computer. Asheville, North Carolina: WorldComm, 1993.

Weyhrich, Steven. Apple II History. <http://apple2history.org/> (25 April 2003).

Williams, Gregg, and Mark Welch. “A Microcomputing Timeline.” Byte, September 1985, 198-207.]]> 計算史 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3434.html Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:14:00 -0400 <![CDATA[The Innovation of PCs in the 1970s (11)]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3433.html From a Hobby to an Industry
Personal computer magazines soon flourished after the arrival of the Altair 8800 in January 1975. The old hobby electronics magazines, which occasionally offered special topics on computers, no longer could satisfy the fast growing population of personal computer hobbyists.⁷⁰ Byte, for example, published its first issue in September 1975. Together with Dr. Dobb’s Journal published by People’s Computer Company, Byte as well as some other earliest personal computer magazines remains popular to this day.Beside their focus was solely on personal computers, personal computer magazines inherited most of the characteristics from hobby electronics magazines. First of all, “hands-on” was still the key word. For example, among the eighteen articles on video displays that Byte published in its first year, ten discussed how to construct graphics interfaces or monitors; even the two product reviews were on graphics processors and interface kits. Unlike later consumers who could simply buy a ready-made interface card or monitor, earliest owners of personal computers had to build most parts by themselves.

Therefore, advertisements played the same or even more important roles in personal computer magazines than in hobby electronics magazines. Readers could order chips and boards from the companies advertising in the magazines to improve their computers. Moreover, they got the information about the newest models of personal computers by reading advertisements. Besides the Altair 8800 from MITS, every issue of Byte had advertisements for personal computers from other companies—the SCELBI-8B, SPHERE 1 System, IMSAI VDP 80, etc. These advertisements always contained detailed, and sometimes over-promised, feature lists for their computers. While very few readers could offer to buy several personal computers in a short period of time, these advertisements at least kept them updated with related technology and products.

Further analysis on personal computer magazines shows how fast the industry of personal computers grew. When the photo of Apple I first appeared in the April 1976 issue of Byte, it looked as unattractive as most other personal computers—a single board without even a power supply or a case (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7. Photo from Apple I’s First Advertisement in Byte, April 1976

Compared with the four-page, color advertisement of Apple II that appeared just fourteen months later (Fig. 3), Apple Computer and the whole industry certainly had accomplished a lot. In fact, Apple II was a success because it strove to include most features that a personal computer should have. Enclosed by its pretty plastic box were features like keyboard, graphics interface, and tape storage interface, and it came with the basic yet necessary software support. While other personal computers might have come with one or two of these features, Apple II was the first personal computer to include all of them in a box for $1,298 (roughly equivalent to $3,863 in 2002 dollars).⁷¹

Moreover, Apple Computer transformed the personal computer from a hobbyist project to a consumer product. When many companies still charged extra fees for assembling, Apple I and Apple II were sold only assembled. The concept of building a computer was replaced by using one, and the advertisement of Apple II proudly announced: “Only Apple II makes it that easy. It’s a complete, ready to use computer, not a kit.”⁷² While the flyer of Apple I still claimed, “it opens many new possibilities for users and systems manufacturers,” the advertisement for Apple II warned: “You’ve just run out of excuses for not owning a personal computer.”⁷³

⁷⁰Popular Electronics, for example, had only two cover stories on personal computers in 1975.
⁷¹“Introducing Apple II,” Byte, June 1977, 45.
⁷²Ibid., 43.
⁷³Steven Weyhrich, “Apple-I Advertisement,” Apple II Historical Museum, 2003 <http://apple2history.org/museum/ads/a1ad1.html> (28 April 2003); “Introducing Apple II,” Byte, June 1977, 43.]]> 計算史 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3433.html Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:07:00 -0400 <![CDATA[The Innovation of PCs in the 1970s (10)]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3432.html

Fig. 6. Home-study courses advertised
in Electronics World, June, 1974. These advertisements often used descriptions such as “college level course quality” and “a career in engineering.” Apparently, the advertisers were assuming their readers were different from those of the engineering journals, who probably already had more than a college degree and held prominent academic or industrial jobs.To some extent, this reflected the difference between hackers and hobbyists. On the one hand, hobbyists and hackers were similar because both were fond of machinery. The hobbyists’ enthusiasm for electronics projects certainly qualified them as hackers. This was also the reason why Steven Levy treated hobbyists as part of the hacker tradition in his Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. On the other, the hobbyists who developed the earliest personal computers were not in the same elite status as hackers, who were largely affiliated with the research institutions at universities. Despite the control of the computer priesthood, hackers already had access to computers. Most hobbyists, however, had to build themselves computers because they did not necessarily have the formal qualifications that the computer priesthood sought.

The story of Steve Wozniak further illustrates the difference between a hobbyist and a hacker. Wozniak was well known as “Woz” for his prodigiously engineering talent in personal computers.⁶¹ However, Wozniak did not have a college degree when he co-founded Apple Computer Co. with Steve Jobs in 1976 in Jobs' family garage.⁶² At that time, Wozniak was only a junior technician at Hewlett-Packard.⁶³ There was no computer that Wozniak was allowed to access at his workplace, and Hewlett-Packard had denied his request for a transfer to a computer-related division. If Wozniak was serious about his hobby, he had to begin by building a computer for himself. Fortunately, Wozniak was indeed serious. Moreover, because the Altair 8800 was still too expensive for Wozniak, he designed a new personal computer, called the Apple I, based on a cheaper processor—the Mostek 6502 at $20 apiece.⁶⁴ In two years, Steve Jobs had successfully transformed this hobbyist’s project into a popular consumer product, the Apple II.

Although nobody will deny that Wozniak is one of the best personal computer hackers, the classic hacker community was suspicious about personal computers, their hobbyists and users. When Steele edited THD in 1983, he was concerned about the threat of personal computers to the hacker culture. He predicted:

hackerdom might be dying—killed off, ironically, by the spread of knowledge about computers. As programming education became more formalized, as the personal computer atomized hacker communities previously knitted together by timesharing, and as the lure of big money in industry siphoned off some of the best and brightest, it seemed as though hackerdom’s unique values might be lost.⁶⁵

Steele’s negative evaluation of personal computers was not a singular event among classic hackers. When Raymond tried to restore the hackers’ reputation in the 1990s, he not only emphasized the difference between hackers and the users of personal computers, but also implied that crackers originated from personal computer users. As Raymond wrote in the 1993 third edition of TNHD:

From the late 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards has been developing separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of pirate boards in habited by crackers, phone phreaks, warez d00dz [sic]. These people (mostly teenagers running PC-clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.

Though crackers often call themselves ‘hackers’, they aren’t (they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems). Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom’s.⁶⁶

Moreover, while Steele’s prediction “didn’t survive an editor’s objections” and was not published until Raymond’s TNHD in 1991, it is noteworthy that hackers did not have an entry for “priesthood” in THD either.⁶⁷ According to TNHD, “priesthood” could be traced back to the TMRC at MIT in the 1950s. It was not a phrase limited to the TMRC or MIT hacker community because other writers such as Nelson also used this term in their descriptions.⁶⁸ Why, then, was “priesthood” not included in THD or Jargon Files until the 1990s? Steele and other editors said at the very beginning of THD: “This, we warn you, is supposed to be a fun book [sic].”⁶⁹ Hackers, and the editors of THD included, probably were so indulged in the image of hackers happily working in a computer laboratory that they half-consciously ignored the restrictions that the computer priesthood had placed upon them. In this vein, the classic hackers portrayed themselves as an elite group, which happily worked with the mighty time-sharing computers, in contrast to the technically insignificant and sometimes evil-intentioned owners of personal computers.

The fact that classic hackers did not view personal computers as a challenge to the computer priesthood but to the hacker culture shows that the tradition of electronics hobbyists, instead of hackers, was more important to the innovation of personal computers in the 1970s. Surely the hackers and hobbyists communities had some overlaps. However, most of the important personal computer innovators—Steve Woz, Steve Jobs, Ed Roberts, etc.—did not have connection to the university-based hacker community. Furthermore, hackers suspected personal computer users for damaging their reputation and culture. Therefore, electronics hobbyists should be distinguished from hackers when analyzing the origin of personal computers in the mid-1970s.

⁶¹Al Luckow, “Short Bio for Steve Wozniak,” Personal website for Steve "The Woz" Wozniak, 4 January 2000, <http://www.woz.org/wozscape/wozbio.html> (April 28, 2003).
⁶²Ibid.
⁶³Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (New York: TV Books, 1999), 151.
⁶⁴Levy, Hackers, 251.
⁶⁵Guy L. Steele, “Confessions of a Happy Hacker,” in The New Hacker's Dictionary, 3d ed., Eric S. Raymond (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999), xiv.
⁶⁶According to Raymond’s explanation of the cracker culture, “phreak” is an intended misspelling of “freak” and crackers referred to themselves as “warez d00dz.” Raymond, The New Hacker’s Dictionary, 24, 478.
⁶⁷Steele, The Hacker's Dictionary, xiv.
⁶⁸Nelson, Computer Lib, 2.
⁶⁹Steele, The Hacker’s Dictionary, 7.
]]> 計算史 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3432.html Thu, 9 Apr 2009 21:55:00 -0400 <![CDATA[The Innovation of PCs in the 1970s (9)]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3431.html Electronics Hobbyists
While Nelson blamed the shortsighted industry giant IBM for never attempting to “develop personal luxury computer systems for the very rich,” some people took this matter into their own hands.⁵⁸ They were not rich families that pooled money together to buy computers for kids, as Nelson had expected, but a “peculiar breed” of engineers whose hobby was playing with any available and affordable electronic hardware.⁵⁹ Without doubt, many of these hobbyists must have read Nelson’s Computer Lib and would have been influenced by his vision. However, what connected the electronics hobbyist community was electronics magazines such as Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, and Electronics World, which Nelson did not mention in his recommended resource list.

Fig. 5. A typical article from Radio Electronics, March 1974. Its logic and circuit diagrams occupied more space then the textual description.

Such hobby electronics magazines, indeed, have their peculiar tradition. Radio Electronics and Electronics World, for example, were first published in the 1950s. Hobby electronics magazines were highly hardware-oriented. Diagrams of electronic logic accompanied most of their articles. Moreover, these magazines appreciated innovations and experiments. Fig. 5 above is a typical article that appeared in Radio Electronics in the 1970s. Besides the huge diagrams that occupied more space than its textual description, the editor of Radio Electronics inserted a note to readers:

NOTE TO READERS
This is not a construction article! We have not seen an assembled version of the Electronic Casino. However, this story does contain enough information to enable a reader who expects to do a bit of experimenting to build the unit. If you do build your own version of the Electronic Casino, we’d appreciate receiving a glossy photo of the assembled unit and will publish it in our Letters column. —Editor⁶⁰

Hobby electronics magazines encouraged readers to share their experiences. They were not only one-directional information distributors, but also open discussion forums for hobbyists. Hobbyists looked for interesting electronics projects in these magazines, and they worked together to produce more projects. When a hobbyist needed more parts or instruments for expanding a particular project, he or she could easily collect them from advertisements in electronics magazines.

Indeed, the minicomputers that appeared in the July 1974 issue of Radio Electronics and the Altair 8800 featured in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics were just some of the diverse topics that electronics magazines covered. A quick examination of the magazines from 1973 to 1975 showed that although a large proportion of the articles were related to Hi-Fi sound systems or radios—then the most popular electronics—their topics actually ranged from automobile tape players to home electronic security alarms and to color televisions. Probably the most interesting was the cover story of the January 1975 issue of Radio Electronics: “Build a Brainwave Monitor and Turn-Up Your Mind,” which appeared exactly when the first affordable personal computer was shown on the cover of Popular Electronics.

Assembling one’s own computer did not seem an unusual practice to hobbyists. Unlike Computer Lib, which gave a survey about how to buy computers, the articles in hobby electronics magazines discussed how to build appliances. Radio Electronics, for instance, showed the picture of a Brainwave Monitor as a hand-assembled circuit board directly attached to a person’s head by some wires. Similar to the Altar 8800 and many of the earliest personal computers, the Brainwave Monitor did not have an attractive appearance. It was not enclosed in a case and literally was a board with a number of chips and wires. In fact, this is one of the characteristics that distinguish an electronics hobbyist from a general consumer. Hobbyists enjoy the assembly process and innovation. Their productions are always works in progress, because hobbyists always want to add new ideas and additional parts to their projects. Therefore, there was no need to put a hobbyist’s on-going production into an inaccessible box. Consumers, however, want workable products that are self-contained. When there is a need to perform some repair or to add new parts, many of them will choose an official repair services rather than doing the work themselves.

⁵⁸Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, 44.
⁵⁹Ibid., 51.
⁶⁰Waller M. Scott, “Electronic Casino,” Radio Electronics, March 1974.
]]> 計算史 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3431.html Wed, 8 Apr 2009 21:43:00 -0400 <![CDATA[The Innovation of PCs in the 1970s (8)]]> http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3430.html Computer Lib did not include hobby electronics magazines. Instead, it mostly consisted of references to IBM systems or related technical and mathematical journals.⁵³ Secondly, how visionary Nelson was, indeed, debatable. In a lesser known book, The Home Computer Revolution, that Nelson published in 1977, he credited himself for having point out repeatedly since the mid 1960s that the future market for computers was in the home.⁵⁴ However, Nelson spent only one page to introduce minicomputers in Computer Lib, and his endorsement was limited to suggest: “For several families with children to pool together and buy one for the kids makes a lot of sense.”⁵⁵ Ironically, the earliest personal computers were not aimed at children’s educational needs, but were marketed more like hobbyists’ toys. Lastly, the innovation of personal computers might have been completely outside the scope of Nelson’s expectations. He constantly used “accidental” to describe the birth of Roberts’ Altair computer. In his descriptions, the amateur computer club was a “strange phenomenon,” and the hobbyists who tried to figure out how to build their own computers were “a peculiar breed.”⁵⁶

An analysis on Nelson’s emphasis on computer graphics (CG) in Computer Lib will summarize the remote possibility that his vision could have directly lead to the innovation of personal computers in the 1970s. In his Dream Machine, Nelson devoted one-fifth of the contents to discuss CG, then the most advanced and fancy technology that only a special designed mainframe computer could perform. Apparently, CG was Nelson’s favor. However, the development of CG for personal computers turned out to disagree with some of Nelson’s advocacies. Nelson downplayed the importance of hardware. Yet CG did not become a standard feature of personal computers until the mid-1990, not because its theory or software was not developed, but because the necessary CG hardware was too expensive for the general public. Therefore, CG had long been a technology that only rich users could enjoy. Nelson’s advocacies were almost never related to the financial affordability. Instead, it was “the computer people” whom Nelson blamed for manipulating technology that had worked diligently for decades to finally bring CG to the common personal computer users.

The sadness of Nelson’s story was not that he failed to propose a workable paradigm for his contemporary computer hobbyists. Instead, it was in the fact that there was no one more visionary than Nelson. The editor of Byte commented in 1975 that Nelson’s ideas were overly simplistic, but none in the following decades came foreword with a better vision than Nelson. Nelson once said: “I thought there would be a real computer revolution; I see complete betrayal.”⁵⁷ If Computer Lib represented the vision of the computer revolution in the mid 1970s, then it was too vague and arbitrary to be put into reality. In this vein, Nelson was a lonely revolutionist, who was not betrayed but lacked followers.

⁵³Nelson, Computer Lib, 6-7.
⁵⁴Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, 44
⁵⁵Nelson, Computer Lib, 36.
⁵⁶Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, 49-51.
⁵⁷Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley, 2d ed., 441.]]> 計算史 http://www.pingying.com/history/item_3430.html Tue, 7 Apr 2009 21:23:00 -0400