January 8, 2009 by Lyno Sullivan
1124 My First Portable Computer
My First Portable Computer
By 1970 I had finalized the general design for my first portable electronic computer. It featured four PDP-11 computers and an electrical generator of sufficient capacity. This was to become my Rolling Home, permitting me to roll down highways, of a nomadic life filled with music, women, and everything necessary to living inside a self-driving portable computer.
In late 1969, as a Computer Science major, I had the opportunity to program the IBM 1620 computer. I remember quite well turning on the computer and waiting while the machine went through its power-on self diagnostics and startup sequence. The computer had no disk drive so everything was controlled by console switches and pre-punched eighty column cards.
Once the machine had warmed up I sat at the console and toggled my hand written bootstrap loader program into the computer, one machine instruction at a time. I pressed the Run button. The machine loaded whatever program had been placed into the card reader input tray and ran it.
The most common program I loaded was the Fortran compiler. I learned to program in Fortran on the punch card based IBM 1620. I later learned the Dartmouth Basic language on the paper and magnetic tape based DEC PDP-11 computer.
The PDP-11 computer gave me the vision of putting the computer inside a bus, along with an electric generator. I figured that would allow me to travel around the country, in my bus and with my computer.
I figured I would program the computer to drive the bus for me. I planned to ride along as co-pilot, in the driver’s seat, ready to disable the self-driving system at the push of a button. I planned to be ready to resume driving the bus whenever it encountered a situation I had not programmed it to handle.
I foresaw needing four computers: 1) for controlling the sensors and actuators used in driving the bus, 2) for listening to me program the bus to drive itself, 3) for watching the road, and 4) for decision making controlling the overall system.
I designed all of the systems but never got around to building my portable computer, for obvious reasons: lack of money, lack of a shop, abundance of the necessary affairs of life, and so on and so forth.
http://digg.com/design/My_First_Portable_Computer
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