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An online action to be held later this month has a veritable treasure trove of computing history. The 20th century is well represented with an Apple 1, an Apple Lisa, an Altair, and more, but for me the star item is a 17th century Pascaline.

German auction house Breker accepts online realtime bids for its auctions and set a record price for an Apple 1 in November last year when an anonymous Internet bidder paid $640,000 (over 490,000 Euros)  for a fully working model. Now the same auctioneers have another Apple 1, this one with a motherboard bearing the signature of Steve Wozniak, “Woz”.

The example to be auctioned on May 25 has been identified by Mike Willegal who runs The Apple 1 Registry as the one that he lists as #37 on account of a signed letter from Steve Jobs to Fred Hatfield offering to exchange the unit for an Apple II for a a payment of $400. The letter is part of the lot that is now up for sale with an estimate of  200-300,000 Euros and a reserve of 90,000. It is is working condition as shown in the video prepared by Auction Team Breker of Lot 14:

Lot 15 in the same sale is an Apple Lisa-1, dating from 1983, and claimed by Breker to be “highly sought and as rare as an Apple1“, explaining:

 For Apple afficianados there”s also the chance to bid for both an Apple II  (Lot 17) and an Apple III (Lot 18), which is described as Apple’s “first significant failure” partly because the design of the case took priority over its technical features. The notes conclude:

Despite, or perhaps because of its original drawbacks, the Apple III is now considered a rare and interesting machine in the development of the firm’s range.

The sale also offers a MITS Altair 8800 with an original CPU board and 16 KB of memory estimated to fetch 400-6,500 Euros. Dating from 1974 the Altair was the first PC, Personal Computer, predating the Apple 1 by about two years. 

The next year saw the introduction of a clone of the Altair 8080 – the IMSAI 8080 – which according to Breker, which has one in the sale with an Estimate of  2,500-5,000 Euros was an imitation that was even more successful than the original.

A slightly earlier milestone in computer history is also included in this sale. The SCELBI-8H Mini-Computer was built in 1973 around the first Intel 8-bit microprocessor. the 8008, the so-called CPU on-a-chip. According to Breker,  around 200 units were produced, of which only three are estimated to have survived. The one available has an estimate of 15-20,000 Euros.

Going back another couple of years, the sale includes a Busicom 141-PF, the first electronic calculator based on the Intel 4004. As only minimal quantities quantities were produced and few remain, Breker’s estimate in 8-12,000 Euros. 

For those interested in early calculating machines, the sale also two arithmometers. The first of these is a model from circa 1900 produced by the Swedish firm. W. Odhner.  Despite being described as a  “Rare Russian spokewheel model” its estimate is only 200-300 Euors.

The other a “rare English brass stepped-drum model
with interesting patent dating from 1909. Listed as the Laytons Improved Arithmometer and dated 1910, its estimate is 3-4,000 Euros.

Those with deeper pockets can bid for the item listed as:

A true milestone in ‘Computer History’!

with an estimate of 80-150,000 Euros and a reserve of 60 Euros.  It is an extremely rare Pascaline, which was designed by Blaise Pascal as the  first numerical wheel-calculator to have the ability to carry over.

According to Breker only 20 machines were ever built, of which just nine are known today and all (apart from this one are in national museums. For my money, although this may not be sold for as high a price as the Apple 1, it is the star of the line up.

Article source: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/82-heritage/5833-computer-history-up-for-auction.html

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Thursday, May 23, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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It’s easy to become jaded about announcements in the tech world.  Slick, media savvy CEO’s announce “revolutionary” new products with metronomic regularity.  Version 1.0 becomes 1.1 and eventually 2.0 and on and on.  It all seems like a blur.

Meanwhile, the truly groundbreaking stuff often goes unnoticed (neither the transistor nor the microchip were instant hits).  Paradigm shifts come in strange guises, with little or no tangible effect on immediate life and often take decades to make an impact.

Nevertheless, we should take notice at the recent news of the Google-NASA quantum computing partnership which marks the beginning of a new digital paradigm.  Although we must account for that which is beyond our present understanding, even the projects currently underway promise a future that seems almost more like science fiction than science fact.

Spooky Action At A Distance

The story begins not last week, or even last year, but in 1911 when a young scientist named Albert Einstein arrived at the Solvay Conference to discuss his discovery of light quanta with the elite physicists of the age.  It was somewhat of a coming out for the young man who, although not yet a professor, had overturned much of classical physics.

Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, his own idea got away from him and he returned to the 1927 conference as an opponent of the new quantum theory.  It was there that he had his famous debates with Niels Bohr and was reported to have insisted that “God does not play dice with the universe.”

“Einstein, stop telling God what to do,” Bohr retorted.

Beyond the issue of whether matter is deterministic or the mere product of probability, what really got under Einstein’s skin was what he called “spooky action at a distance,” the strange phenomenon that we now know as quantum entanglement.  He proposed an ingenious experiment that he believed would disprove quantum theory.

It is a measure of the man that his failures have often proved more fruitful than most people’s successes.  Einstein’s experiment was carried out at IBM Labs in 1993 and resulted in the first quantum teleportation of matter.  The event would finally resolve the 1927 debates in Bohr’s favor and eventually give rise to the project announced last week.

Computing For A Nuclear Age

In the early 1940’s, another promising young scientist named Richard Feynman would find himself included in an altogether different conglomeration of brilliant scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico.  The aim of this gathering, however, was not intellectual debate, but the explosion of an atomic device (put in motion, incidentally, by a letter from Einstein).

Among Feynman’s tasks was managing the unprecedented amount of calculations needed to estimate the potential of an atomic explosion.  To do so, he arranged his computers (which, at the time, were humans equipped with mechanical calculators) to each work on part of the problem, a technique now known as parallel computing.

After the war was over it became clear that an infinitely more powerful bomb, based on hydrogen, was theoretically possible.  However, the calculations required were thousands of times larger and even Feynman’s method would prove useless.  An electronic computer, based on digital technology, was needed to make thermonuclear bombs a reality.

The brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, a friend to both Einstein and Feynman, was assigned the job and he organized a team at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (which, perhaps not surprisingly, was the academic home of Einstein as well) and it was there that the computer architecture was developed that survives to this day.

The End Of Computing As We Know It

Since the 1950’s, the internal technology that powered von Neumann’s architecture has steadily improved, from vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits..  The result has been a doubling of computing power roughly every 18 months, which has enabled all of those slick launches of fancy new gadgets.

However, for some time we have been aware that this advancement would stall, due to physical limitations, sometime around 2020, unless a completely new architecture could be developed.  Many believed that the solution would be quantum computing, a new method based on the same “spooky action at a distance” that Bohr and Einstein hotly debated.

So Google Google and NASA’s recent announcement, along with a separate announcement that the government has been running a quantum internet for several years, marks a new era in which quantum computing is not only theoretically possible, but thoroughly vetted and technically feasible.  Moore’s law will stay intact for the foreseeable future.

In other words, the party will not end, but is indeed just getting started and we can expect the power of our devices to multiply thousands of times over the next generation.  Perhaps not surprisingly, we will not use these super-fast, super-secure new computers to do the same things faster, but to do completely different things entirely.

What The Shift Will Mean

In many ways, the Google-NASA partnership represents a new Manhattan Project, but instead of the aim being a nuclear explosion, the goal is to simulate the human brain, a feat that Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, believes will be completed before the end of the next decade.

Following Kurzweil’s line of reasoning, the vast increase of computing power enabled by quantum computers will result in a technological singularity by the mid 2030’s, where machines will self-replicate, power similar trends of accelerating returns in fields such as nanotechnology, genomics and energy and, eventually, merge with humans.

In the more immediate future, we can expect our computing technology to get a whole lot smarter.  Services that far surpass the capabilities of even today’s most powerful supercomputers will be made available to our mobile devices through the cloud and using them will be almost indistinguishable from dealing with a human.

Google now leads in this area, but Microsoft Microsoft, IBM IBM and others (but strangely enough, not Apple) are making impressive gains as well. The price tag for a quantum computer is around $15 million, so certainly not prohibitive and we can expect more organizations to adopt them in the coming months and years.

Two decades from now, if present trends hold, quantum devices will be available for about $1000 and it’s even possible (if certain technical conditions are overcome) that we will have the opportunity to hold in our hands the power of an intelligence that even Einstein himself thought too bold to even imagine.

Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2013/05/20/why-the-new-google-nasa-partnership-marks-a-new-era-in-the-history-of-computing/

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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Article source: http://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/news/local/history-of-computer-music-at-bletchley-park-1-5100605

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Sunday, May 19, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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Article source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/intel-ceo-paul-otellini-draws-the-history-of-the-computer-industry-in-1-chart/275919/

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Friday, May 17, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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A grandmother is expressing outrage, saying the state missed an alarming red flag for a family allowed to adopt three children.

The family adopting the children failed to admit to a sexual assault inside their home and Channel 2 Action News has learned a background investigation also missed the crime.

The adopting family’s home was the site of a sexual assault by an 18-year-old family member on a younger family member.

The molester is now serving 25 years in prison. But the family wasn’t fully forthcoming about the assault.

“The things they’ve done to me and my grandchildren and my family are horrendous,” grandmother Flora Richardson told Channel 2′s Richard Belcher.

Richardson is angry because she lost custody of her three grandchildren whose father was in prison.

The Department of Family and Children Services won’t talk, but Belcher learned the agency asked a judge to give custody to another local family even though the adopting family initially withheld shocking information.

“I have done adoption law for about 37 years,” said James Outman, who is Richardson’s lawyer.

“Ever seen a case like this?” Belcher asked Richardson.

“No,” he replied

What shocked Outman was that 18-year-old Otis Jemison Jr., had been charged with aggravated child molestation against a younger family member in the adopting parents’ home.

But when the private agency families first interviewed the Jemison family, they never mentioned the assault.

Richardson said DFCS dropped the ball.

“If I could find it out not two hours after we left court, surely DFCS had to know this,” Richardson told Belcher.

Richardson says she left an adoption related hearing at the Fulton County Courthouse last fall, went straight home and got on her computer.

“And that’s when I found there was that the man’s name, I put in, had an open case for child molestation, aggravated child molestation and sodomy,” Richardson said.

Richardson thought DFCS or the judge would oppose the adoption when it became clear the Jemisons hadn’t disclosed the assault.

At the last minute, the family confessed.

“It came out actually under oath that the adoptive parents stated that they intentionally withheld the information from the department, intentionally withheld information from the agency that conducted their home study,” Outman said.

And the adoption went through.

Virtually no officials will talk, but Belcher has learned that five DFCS workers were investigated for misconduct.

Article source: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/family-allowed-adopt-3-kids-despite-sexual-assault/nXrKR/

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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sjohnson@mercurynews.com

Clusters of corporate techies hunched over their laptops one recent evening in Mountain View, feverishly trying to figure out how RK Industries hacked into and stole critical information from its rival, EntraDyn.

It’s a common occurrence, but in this case the firms were fictitious, and the event — a simulated exercise put on by security firm Symantec — featured rock music, a buffet and an open bar for the participants. Even so, it had a serious purpose: Increasingly under Internet attack, more and more businesses are using “cyberwar games” to learn how to spot and counter the tricky tactics used by hackers.

“It keeps you on your toes,” said Michael Scheck, an information security investigations manager at Cisco Systems (CSCO), which hosts its own war games and takes part in others. In the fast-evolving combat with computer-savvy antagonists, he said, “you have to play cat and mouse.”

Getting bested by the bad guys can be expensive. A study sponsored by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) last year concluded the average cost of a cyberattack on a U.S. company was $591,780 — and rising. In response, companies are

sending their employees to so-called cyber ranges and other venues to engage in make-believe hacking scenarios.

In a survey of about 1,400 businesses last year, management consultant McKinsey Company said it found that 3 percent of them had conducted “cyberwar games to help ensure they are ready to manage a cyberattack.” McKinsey wouldn’t identify the respondents or say how many were from the Bay Area, but noted, “most were in high tech and financial services.”

Although several of those attending Symantec’s event at the Computer History Museum didn’t want their employers identified, companies represented there included Intel (INTC) subsidiary Wind River Systems, Tesla, Google (GOOG), Workday and Fujitsu.

Many firms also routinely test their ability to withstand attacks, including PGE.

Using employees he calls “my ninjas” who periodically attempt to hack into the utility, James Sample, its chief information security officer, said “we do mock-up scenarios” to assess the company’s vulnerability to cyberattacks.

Firms find the war games especially helpful, where they compete against other companies to see who can best respond to hypothetical cyber incursions.

Mountain View-based Symantec, which sells widely used Norton anti-virus software, puts on these “cyber readiness challenges” worldwide. It contends the games help participants think like hackers, so they can better recognize and respond to their corporations’ vulnerabilities.

“Every day you hear about new attacks,” said Samir Kapuria, Symantec’s vice president of business strategy and security intelligence. “What we try to do is take that knowledge of what’s happening to companies and organizations around the world, and weave that into the scenarios.” That way, he added, they can “hone their skills so the first time they are up against something, it’s actually something they’ve practiced.”

In Symantec’s virtual contest, which was akin to a video game, participants were given hints that helped them hack into the fictional RK Industries and figure out what RK stole from EntraDyn.

“Think of it as a giant scavenger hunt, where you are given a riddle or clue about how to find something,” said Josh Chin, executive director of Southern California-based Net Force, who placed third in the competition. Besides teaching him how to better guard his client’s data, he said, such exercises offer a way to “show how good you are” when pitted against other security experts.

During an earlier challenge Symantec hosted for its own employees, one grandstanding prankster even surreptitiously hacked into the game’s scoreboard, according to spokeswoman Pamela Reese. She said she wasn’t sure what the person was up to, but figured it was “either to improve their score or mess around with players’ names.”

Cisco’s Scheck said his company also has taken part in war games put on by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, some of which had the businesses work together to blunt cyberattacks. That’s been helpful, he said, because to counter sophisticated and organized hackers, “corporations are realizing they need to share more information with each other to make life more difficult for their adversaries.”

Finding skilled workers for that fight is another priority.

In March, Cisco, Workday, McAfee, PGE and other companies sponsored a cyberwar game in Pomona for college students, during which several of the firms recruited the players for their security departments, according to Daniel Manson, a computer information systems professor who helped organize the event.

Given the shortage of employees skilled in dealing with cyberattacks, he viewed the effort to hire the students as indicative of a major shift in corporate thinking. Although many businesses failed to take cybersecurity seriously in the past, with so many of them getting hacked these days, he added, “it’s a risk I think they are starting to appreciate.”

Contact Steve Johnson at sjohnson@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5043. Follow him at Twitter.com/steveatmercnews.

Article source: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_23228195/cyberwar-games-used-more-by-companies-thwart-hackers

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Monday, May 13, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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Hacktivist: n. a person who uses computer crimes to further social or political ends – Australian Oxford Dictionary.

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Hacking: A long and complex history.

Computer hackers aren’t an especially earnest bunch. After all, lulz (a corruption of the phrase “laugh out loud” and a reference to hackers’ penchant for tomfoolery) was the primary objective of the hacker collective Anonymous before it graduated to more serious cyberoperations in the latter half of the 2000s. But if the hacking community likes to flaunt its glib side, it also has a rich history of political activism – or “hacktivism” – that has come to define it in the era of WikiLeaks. If there’s one thing that unites hacktivists across multiple generations, it’s dedication to the idea that information on the internet should be free – a first principle that has not infrequently put them at odds with corporations and governments the world over.

1950s-1980s

A culture of “hacking” springs up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the term is coined by members of the Tech Model Railroad Club as they play around with track circuitry. The original “hacks” are mostly harmless pranks and practical jokes perpetrated by students in early artificial intelligence labs. Hackers soon discover that toy whistles produce the right frequency for them to “phreak” Ma Bell’s telephone system, allowing them to place long-distance calls for free. Among those who make names for themselves as “phone phreaks” are Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the future founders of Apple.

October 1989

Computers at NASA and the US Energy Department are penetrated by an anti-nuclear “WANK” worm, which alters computers’ login screens to “WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS … Your System Has Been Officially WANKed.” The malware, believed to have originated in Australia, is the second major worm deployed in history, but the first with an explicitly political aim. (The genesis worm was released a year earlier by Robert Morris, a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate, who said he wanted to approximate the size of the internet but ended up running afoul of the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.)

November 1994

A mostly British activist group known as the Zippies launches an “email bomb” and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against British government websites to protest against Prime Minister John Major’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which outlawed outdoor raves featuring music with “a succession of repetitive beats.” The attack, known as the “Intervasion of the UK,” knocks out several government websites for more than a week. It is the first known use of DDoS (denial of service) – which takes down a website by overwhelming it with communication requests – for political purposes.

1996

“Omega,” a member of the Texas-based computer-hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), coins the word “hacktivism” in an email to the cDc listserv. Although somewhat tongue in cheek, the term aptly characterises the group’s increasingly political ethos. Founded in 1984 for the whimsical goal of “global domination through media saturation,” cDc is by the mid-1990s an explicitly political organisation, one that leverages technology to advance human rights and protect the free flow of information. In subsequent years, cDc members team up with a group of dissidents calling themselves the Hong Kong Blondes to hack the computer networks of Chinese government agencies and companies with poor human rights records in China.

July 2001

Hacktivismo, an offshoot of cDc, issues a code of conduct for online civil disobedience that draws on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This “Hacktivismo Declaration” affirms the right to “freedom of opinion and expression” and declares the hacker community’s intent to develop technologies to challenge “state-sponsored censorship of the internet.” The declaration, which can be read as a disavowal of hacking techniques such as DDoSing that interfere with free speech, largely falls by the wayside as the next generation of hacktivists increasingly seeks to take government and corporate websites offline.

2003

Christopher Poole, 15, sets up the website 4chan.org from his suburban New York bedroom. The site receives attention primarily for its proliferation of humorous feline memes (LolCats) and gag hyperlinks (Rickrolls) to Rick Astley’s insufferable 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up, but over time it attracts a global army of anonymous hackers, many of them politically minded, who exchange coding tips and eventually plot cyberops. What begins as a series of pranks carried out for idle amusement gradually evolves into systematised cyberwarfare or, as one Anonymous member puts it, “ultra-coordinated motherfuckery.” Anonymous is born here.

April 2007

Estonia removes a Soviet war memorial from its capital, provoking a series of cyberhits – mostly DDoS attacks – originating on Russian servers. Details about who is responsible for the attacks, which disable various Estonian government websites and substantially disrupt commerce for several hours, remain murky, but the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi eventually claims responsibility, though it denies having carried out direct orders from the Russian government. Whether state-sponsored or an especially virulent example of nationalist hacktivism, the cyber assault against Estonia amounts to one of the largest DDoS attacks in history.

January 2008

Anonymous releases a YouTube video announcing Project Chanology, a deliberate campaign to destroy the Church of Scientology due to its “campaigns of misinformation” and “suppression of dissent.” “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us,” the group declares in an ominous, automated voice. Less than a month later, Anons hold their first physical protest (also against Scientology) simultaneously at various places around the world, with many demonstrators wearing the signature Guy Fawkes masks that will become symbols of the movement.

November 2010

Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali blocks access to WikiLeaked US State Department cables noting massive corruption in his government. In response, Anonymous hackers launch “#OpTunisia,” attacking Tunisian government websites and at one point bringing down the Tunisian stock exchange. As protests rage across the region in the following months, the group launches a series of “Freedom Ops” to assist pro-democracy activists – Anonymous’ biggest foray yet into world politics.

December 2010

Anonymous launches Operation Avenge Assange after MasterCard and Visa block payments to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. Anons knock out the websites of the credit card giants and briefly slow web traffic to PayPal using an application called Low Orbit Ion Cannon, which directs massive amounts of traffic to specified websites.

December 2011

AntiSec, an offshoot of Anonymous that takes particular issue with the cyber security industry, hacks the Texas-based private intelligence company Stratfor, knocking its website offline and lifting 200GB of data, mostly emails, which it hands over to WikiLeaks. It is the largest public “d0xing” – the posting of private information online – attack that Anonymous has carried out to date.

January 2012

A group of pro-Palestinian hacktivists calling themselves “Nightmare” knocks out the websites of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al airlines. In an online post taking credit for the attacks, the group says it is joining Saudi hacker 0xOmar, who previously released tens of thousands of Israelis’ credit card numbers on the internet, in a “movement” of “Islamic hackers against Israel.” The next day, Israeli hackers going by the name IDF-Team retaliate by knocking the Saudi Stock Exchange and the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange offline.

February 14, 2012

On the first anniversary of Bahraini armed forces’ violent dispersal of rallies in the capital, Manama, during the Arab uprisings, Anons carry out a series of hacks against the Bahraini government and its backers, notably the Pennsylvania-based tear gas manufacturer Combined Systems. The kingdom is eventually moved, in February 2013, to ban the import of Guy Fawkes masks to its still-roiling territory.

February 29, 2012

Interpol arrests 25 suspected Anonymous hackers from around the world following an FBI sting operation that flipped an Anonymous ringleader, Hector Monsegur, known online as “Sabu.” The information he provides leads to a wave of hacktivist arrests – for taking part in everything from the Stratfor hack to illegal eavesdropping on an FBI conference call – dealing Anonymous a major blow.

March 2012

Frustrated with the way WikiLeaks handled the Stratfor data dump – it was an unqualified media flop – Anonymous launches its own WikiLeaks clone: Par:Anoia (Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence Agency). The website relies on purloined “submissions” provided by the Anonymous community and publishes everything from hacked emails from the Syrian Foreign Ministry to New York City Police Department video footage of the 2011 eviction of Occupy protesters from Zuccotti Park.

April 2012

Anonymous turns its guns on China, knocking out several corporate and local government websites and tagging them with the message: “Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.”

October 2012

WikiLeaks puts millions of its documents behind a paywall, prompting a vicious rebuke from the freedom-obsessed web underground. The main Anonymous Twitter account tweets @wikileaks: “die in a fire.” The Anonymous-WikiLeaks breakup is complete.

January 2013

Computer whiz kid and internet activist Aaron Swartz hangs himself in his New York City apartment after federal prosecutors indict him for hacking into JSTOR’s digital library, presumably to free millions of academic articles from behind its paywall. His death in many ways symbolises the battered state of the hacktivist movement and the futility of its utopian vision – after all, Swartz stole mostly obscure journal articles – but hardly sounds its death knell. Within weeks of Swartz’s death, sympathetic Anons hack into the website of the government agency responsible for the sentencing policies of federal courts, at one point turning its home page into a version of the computer game Asteroids.

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Article source: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/it-pro/security-it/a-short-history-of-hacktivism-20130510-2jbv0.html

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Saturday, May 11, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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Article source: http://www.techhive.com/article/2036854/a-brief-history-of-computer-chess.html

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Wednesday, May 8, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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An online action to be held later this month has a veritable treasure trove of computing history. The 20th century is well represented with an Apple 1, an Apple Lisa, an Altair, and more, but for me the star item is a 17th century Pascaline.

German auction house Breker accepts online realtime bids for its auctions and set a record price for an Apple 1 in November last year when an anonymous Internet bidder paid $640,000 (over 490,000 Euros)  for a fully working model. Now the same auctioneers have another Apple 1, this one with a motherboard bearing the signature of Steve Wozniak, “Woz”.

The example to be auctioned on May 25 has been identified by Mike Willegal who runs The Apple 1 Registry as the one that he lists as #37 on account of a signed letter from Steve Jobs to Fred Hatfield offering to exchange the unit for an Apple II for a a payment of $400. The letter is part of the lot that is now up for sale with an estimate of  200-300,000 Euros and a reserve of 90,000. It is is working condition as shown in the video prepared by Auction Team Breker of Lot 14:

Lot 15 in the same sale is an Apple Lisa-1, dating from 1983, and claimed by Breker to be “highly sought and as rare as an Apple1“, explaining:

 For Apple afficianados there”s also the chance to bid for both an Apple II  (Lot 17) and an Apple III (Lot 18), which is described as Apple’s “first significant failure” partly because the design of the case took priority over its technical features. The notes conclude:

Despite, or perhaps because of its original drawbacks, the Apple III is now considered a rare and interesting machine in the development of the firm’s range.

The sale also offers a MITS Altair 8800 with an original CPU board and 16 KB of memory estimated to fetch 400-6,500 Euros. Dating from 1974 the Altair was the first PC, Personal Computer, predating the Apple 1 by about two years. 

The next year saw the introduction of a clone of the Altair 8080 – the IMSAI 8080 – which according to Breker, which has one in the sale with an Estimate of  2,500-5,000 Euros was an imitation that was even more successful than the original.

A slightly earlier milestone in computer history is also included in this sale. The SCELBI-8H Mini-Computer was built in 1973 around the first Intel 8-bit microprocessor. the 8008, the so-called CPU on-a-chip. According to Breker,  around 200 units were produced, of which only three are estimated to have survived. The one available has an estimate of 15-20,000 Euros.

Going back another couple of years, the sale includes a Busicom 141-PF, the first electronic calculator based on the Intel 4004. As only minimal quantities quantities were produced and few remain, Breker’s estimate in 8-12,000 Euros. 

For those interested in early calculating machines, the sale also two arithmometers. The first of these is a model from circa 1900 produced by the Swedish firm. W. Odhner.  Despite being described as a  “Rare Russian spokewheel model” its estimate is only 200-300 Euors.

The other a “rare English brass stepped-drum model
with interesting patent dating from 1909. Listed as the Laytons Improved Arithmometer and dated 1910, its estimate is 3-4,000 Euros.

Those with deeper pockets can bid for the item listed as:

A true milestone in ‘Computer History’!

with an estimate of 80-150,000 Euros and a reserve of 60 Euros.  It is an extremely rare Pascaline, which was designed by Blaise Pascal as the  first numerical wheel-calculator to have the ability to carry over.

According to Breker only 20 machines were ever built, of which just nine are known today and all (apart from this one are in national museums. For my money, although this may not be sold for as high a price as the Apple 1, it is the star of the line up.

Article source: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/82-heritage/5833-computer-history-up-for-auction.html

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Monday, May 6, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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Born a tiny mewling arcade cabinet manufacturer in 1979, Japan Capsule Computers wasn’t to become the Capcom we know and love until the arrival of Kenzo Tsujimoto (he of Irem fame) in 1983.

It’s a well known fact that he merged together the Cap and Com of its old name to form Capcom. Less known is the offshoot of the titular remnants, Suleputer (not a joke) – the official home of Capcom merchandising.

Capcom became proud parents to its first game Vulgus – a vertical scrolling space shooter – in 1984, and shouted it from the rooftops. Well, rather it shouted it out fourteen years later from beat ‘em up Marvel vs Capcom, when it gave Captain Commando the very odd win quote: “Capcom’s first game was Vulgus, made in 1984!” Thanks for that, Cap’n!

Incidentally, Captain Commando used to be Capcom’s mascot until Mega Man’s huge success usurped him. In his appearance in Marvel vs Capcom he was known for shouting “Capcom!” at random points in battle. A real (Cap)company man, then.

Vulgus also introduced the Capcom motif of the Yashichi, a health power-up that was to raise its ugly health-replenishing mug in more than thirty (unrelated) further games. It’s a small red circle with a pinwheel-esque white cross emblazoned upon it; tracking it down is the gaming equivalent of counting Eddie Stobart lorries. Not that we know anything about that, of course.

This motif is the perfect symbol for Capcom’s signature trait – its inability to let go. Its franchises seemingly stretch out for eternity – as over 20 Resident Evil games, 20 main Street Fighter games and over 100 Mega Man titles prove, though the latter has taken a backseat of late – and the characters resurface time and time again. Just look at the Resident Evil, Final Fight, Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Mega Man and Strider mishmash of a roster that forms the ragtag Capcom half of Marvel vs Capcom.

For the millions they made between them, both Street Fighter and Mega Man teetered on the edge of non-existence to begin with. Yoshiki Okamoto, creator of Street Fighter in 1987 (a franchise that now has more than 30 million sales under its karate belt), only ended up at Capcom after he was booted out of Konami HQ for developing shooters Gyruss and Time Pilot. But they were great games, weren’t they? Of course they were. But they weren’t the driving games that Konami tasked Okamoto with making. Whoops.

The rather loopy Okamoto – known for jotting down cruel caricatures of people on the business cards they give him so that he won’t forget them – later went on to head up Flagship, an independent studio funded by Capcom, Nintendo and Sega that generated scenarios for other games, such as Onimusha. Flagship also developed the excellent GBC Zelda Oracles pairing and GBA’s Minish Cap, though it was sadly closed down in 2007.

A fellow Street Fighter alumni takes responsibility for Mega Man, or Rockman as he’s known back home (he was almost named Rainbowman, due to the seven powers players collected through the game). Keiji Inafune, an illustrator on Street Fighter, took inspiration from rock/paper/scissors and applied it to the end-of-level Robot Masters – each could be easily defeated by only one of the others’ weapons.

Rockman’s instantly recognisable image was a bit of a design fluke, however. The NES only had a palette of 56 colours to display, the majority of which sported a blue-tint. Thus, the blue suited Rockman was born.

Remember that 100+ figure from above? It almost started and ended here. The original Rockman didn’t sell nearly as well as Capcom had hoped, prompting it to pull support and set Inafune the task of designing Professional Baseball Murder Mystery instead. As you’ll no doubt notice, there aren’t 100 Professional Baseball Murder Mystery games, so you can guess what happened next.

Inafune agreed to the barmy ‘death in the diamond’ notion on the grounds that he could ‘fix’ Rockman. And fix it he did. It’s a just a shame that while Resident Evil, Street Fighter and the like continue to get love from Capcom, the blue bomber seems to be strangely neglected these days.

Article source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/404501/features/history-lesson-capcom/

Filed under: computer history by jointhec on Saturday, May 4, 2013 | Social tagging: computer history
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