Photographer Mark Richards elevates dusty computer artifacts to stunning objets d'art in his detailed new book, Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers. Don't let the academic title fool you — this five-decade romp reads less like a history lesson and more like an ode to an old friend. Writer John Alderman captures the excitement of the book's 35 computers — from the room-filling ENIAC to the Commodore 64 — and reveals some of their quirks (the SAGE came with a built-in cigarette lighter and ashtray; the retired WISC was inadvertently hit by bullets). Alderman also revisits the early careers of several industry pioneers, including Bill Gates, who in 1975 wrote the programming language Altair BASIC with Paul Allen, and Steve Wozniak, who a year later failed to convince Hewlett-Packard to build a personal computer. In the end, the book — with its crude yet beautiful images — is a pleasing reminder of how far we've come and how far we have to go.
__1 __The NEAC 2203, released in 1960 by NEC, could handle Roman characters and Japanese kana.
2 The IBM System/360 (1968) provided the basis for NASA's Apollo missions and the FAA's air traffic control systems.
3 The SAGE, the first computer with core memory, was commissioned by the Air Force to analyze radar data. Deployed: 1961. Cost: $8 billion.
4 Among the earliest PCs, the DEC PDP-8 (1965) cost $18,000 and had 4 KB of memory.
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