Ask HN: What story from the PDP-8 era would make a good script?
Got me wondering - we've had way too many shows now dealing with modern digital culture (hello Silicon Valley). There's been some attempts to tell stories from the early days of microcomputers (Halt And Catch Fire for instance), and that makes sense, given that those are the machines that many GenX played with at home or at school.
But Hollywood's version of Silicon Valley - Silvercon Valley? - has yet to celebrate the Minicomputer and Mainframe eras in a real way. They have done a bit of deep diving into the 50s, but only in the form of standard issue Genius Porn where the computer operators who broke wartime codes were like Harry Potter characters or something, with modern social causes overlaid as a historical corrective of sorts, and I somewhat doubt that Turing is any happier for the fact that the world no longer cares that he was gay, but remains unable to grasp the awesome stuff he did do. He's not here for it.
Grim thoughts aside, these PDP-8s and the people who worked with them daily deserve a story, complete with looooots of pornographic shots of the machines themselves. Love stories that begin by someone bumping their true love's pile of punchcards into a game of '52 pickup that ends with lurid shots of stacks of cards being sucked into the reader.
Anyways, the best story would heroize someone real from the era. I know a lot of stories but cannot really find the one that really deserves someone having a go at making it into a script set in that gorgeous era of earthtoned data.
What do you think, HN?
65 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThere were a few decades of research into symbolic AI and expert systems - "Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence" before the modern deep-learning revolution. Lots of promise, interesting research, and very cool (and esoteric) hardware came out of it, which never found wide application outside the lab. You could pitch it as a sort of analogue to Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006).
https://github.com/PDP-10/its
But then, so does the name "Incompatible Time Sharing" as a strong reaction against the major "Compatible Time Sharing" project.
"The Soul of a New Machine is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. The machine was launched in 1980 as the Data General Eclipse MV/8000.[1]
The book, whose author was described by the New York Times as having "elevated it to a high level of narrative art"[2] is "about real people working on a real computer for a real company,"[3] and it won the 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction[4] and a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
Yeah, if anyone could do it, Sorkin could.
I'm not sure what was down in NC at the time but when I joined a few years later there was a manufacturing plant in Apex and, at some point, software development in Research Triangle Park. A lot of the later Unix development as well as at least databases was in RTP.
For anyone interest in that book, this is an interesting internal year-in-the-life style book that was published a few years later. https://archive.org/details/year-in-dev
But, yeah, Soul of a New Machine is still relevant (even if I'm biased because I knew a lot of the people involved). Showstopper about Windows NT is another good one in a similar vein.
You certainly could make a film. Not sure to what degree even geeks (especially younger ones) would connect. Times were pretty different.
(I think one person who is in the book is still at the "same" company by way of EMC and Dell.)
I feel like it was serialized in some industry magazine before the book itself came out, but I may be misremembering.
There's a story about the IBM System/360 Model 75. The engineers who designed the Model 65 put the registers on roller blinds, so that one row of flashing lights could display one of several different registers. The plan was to do the same for the much-faster Model 75. Senior management is said to have nixed that: if the machine costs 3 times as much as the 65, it must have 3 times as many lights. So the 75 lost its roller blinds.
So do I.
Right around then, Berkeley BSD development mostly shifted from PDP 11 to the DEC Vax 11/780.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
> He earned a B.S. in Astronomy in 1973 from the University at Buffalo (SUNY). While studying for his undergraduate degree at SUNY Buffalo, Stoll worked in the university's electronic music laboratory and was mentored by Robert Moog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll
https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...
The Story Of C, by Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze.
Kurtwood Smith plays old Kernighan. Peter Boyle or Christopher Lloyd as old Ritchie.
I can't wait till I can type that into an AI prompt.
https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/SpacewarOrigin.html
https://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html
(At least if you aren't completely set on the PDP-8.)
[1] https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html#DEC
[1] "How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!" - Guy L. Steele Jr. (Strange Loop 2010) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPK6t7echuA
Runner-up: the story of Texas instruments, and their innovative use of cheap transistors.
The first part of the book describes MIT's Project MAC and AI Lab, from the TX-0 to the PDP-10.
Lee Felsenstein - Homebrew Compter Club, Osborne 1, Sol-20 (this + Community Memory is a good story)
Ed Roberts - MITS
Nat Wadsworth - created a PC in 1973, heartbraking story http://www.willegal.net/feature_stories/Nat%20Wadsworth%20-%...
Dr Robert Suding - Create Digital Group computers
Robert Noyce - Founder of Fairfield semi and Intel. Really good book called The Man Behind The Microchip
And the very beginning of Microsoft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o
...not to mention Ken's story of Doug McIlroy writing a compiler for TCG on a sheet of paper, then using it to compile itself - by hand - thus "feeding his sheet of paper his sheet of paper."
Reverse-engineering the unknown bits of hardware?
Troubleshooting compatibility bugs in common software packages and fixing them in hardware?
Putting a PC into a luggable case with a small display and carry handle?
All that was exciting engineering!
Luggable microcomputers were not new at this point, both Osborne and Kaypro had z80 CP/M systems that were luggable.
Compaq definitely had the most compatible BIOS until Phoenix released theirs for OEMs to use (AMI was probably more popular in the 80s, but was a relative late-comer).
The first third of Hackers by Steven Levy has some interesting stories about the PDP-8 I think also could be adapted to film.
He was working for the Columbia, SC city government on maintaining the code on their mainframe. However, due to some bureaucratic mixup, he never got the parking pass he was supposed to get, and kept getting parking tickets. But, as it so happened, the tickets were issued by the mainframe he was programming. So he just changed the code to make all of his parking tickets disappear.