What were computers like in the 1960s?

The first PDP-10 came out in 68 with up to 1,152KB memory. You could write programs, play simple text games, and do simple text formatting. It was the most popular machine on the Internet in the early 70s. Nothing like a VGA monitor existed, just green text screens. No viruses, spreadsheets, GUIs, Web, floppies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10

I think email was still using UUCP where you had to specify the route between the emailer and the reciever. You didn't have the friendly [email protected]. Unix wasn't even around in the 60s it the early ARPA net was more of a 70s thin. Most people were still assembly programming computers in the 60s. The apollo guidence computer was all assembly with editing being done with numeric key punches using some strange noune verb parameter notation. There were no monitors so when you type commands on the Teletype (Keyboard) answers would come out of a line printer. Your programming interface was a card punch device where as you typed the instructions the character on the card would advance such that each character was punched one at a time. The original card punch machines where purely mechanical. Later models actually had advanced features like being able to store a few characters so they you could correct them if you miss punched. Each card represented one line of code usually and it was up to you to keep the sequence correct when you moved the cards to a tape encoder. You would feed your cards into a machine that would load your cards on tape so you could load your rogram and run them faster. Originally computers used only card readers but since computers were expensive and owners rented time to use their systems tapes were very convienent as many people could use the card reader to load their tapes while other peoples programs were running on the computer. Card readers are slow where as tape was fast so that several people would be loading their cards in parralel on tape while say your program was running. Most computer storage was on tape rather then on hard drives so viruses weren't much a a concern back then as computers weren't nearly as connected as they are these days and didn't really have much in terms of external storage other then tape. Your computer program woulden't have access to other peoples tapes so you could mostly only hurt your self.

Satan2016 really doesn't know what it's talking about. After all, it uses wikipedia, the number one source of misinformation known to mankind.

I gather that Satan2016 ALSO doesn't know anything more than you do. Guess what, a Floppy is just a SMALL VERSION of magnetic tape storage, and we STILL use magnetic tape. YES WE DO! Compared with just how cheap it is per Terabyte vs other forms of storage... you have no idea at all do you?

CRC32 is a fair bit better, but I want to correct something he claimed.
The Apollo Guidance system was not "Assembly" as we know it. That is PURE misinformation. Assembly as we know it is a highly complex system that is mostly intended to be used by compilers where as the noun verb PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE of the Apollo Guidance system was how people interacted with the system, NOT REALLY ASSEMBLY!

Consider, a calculator allows you to interact by pressing buttons and outputting an answer. You wouldn't claim this was assembly, but that is what CRC32 is claiming. The guidance system did NOT have a conventional OS the way we think of it... and astronauts were required to be able to write small programs... it's a PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE!



There was something else that developed rather rapidly called "workstations" OOPS! I KNOW SOMETHING!

Basically there would be a huge computer that actually processed things and all computers in the college would timeshare with the huge computer to get things processed. You'd wait in queue and then the machine would send the information back to your workstation and you'd get the results. Often this was printed back (monitors were expensive).

One of my college professors talked about how he played Adventure (really old game) this way... and how great the printing was because it kept track of what moves he made so he could make them again. Look up the game, it was one of the original computer games made out of a mapping program!

Basically, you need to think of "old computers" as the way "new computers" are... they were the same thing.

The ONLY difference is that people TODAY are too stupid to know how to use computers and need to have GUIs and all kinds of things to baby them into using them.

Do you want to access a remote computer, request information, and parse that information into a photo that you can then print? You could do that back then, but no one was doing it because there wasn't really a demand for it and people were using FILM instead of digital cameras.

See, the difference between me and Satan2016, CRC32, and TheMan18 is that I actually know how computers work... most people don't... and even fewer people who use the internet as their source of wisdom and information.

What I've been trying to explain is that you're asking the wrong question... the question isn't what COULD you do with a computer, but what WOULD you do with a computer.


There were computer games, Monochromatic monitors (not ALL of them were Green Satan2016) were common because controlling multiple color outputs was not seen as required until demand for it came. Could a 60's computer have done it? Yep. There just wasn't demand.

But a computer would be used to make calculations that you wouldn't want to keep doing by hand. Say, stock market calculations... or to play games on (Again, Adventure!) if you were VERY VERY RICH.

In short, Hidden Figures (not the nonsense politics that came out of that movie) is a very good way to think about your question. Computers replaced people who would just push buttons on a calculator over and over again. The nonsense politics of "they were more than button pushers" is just that and ignores what computers were and what they did.

Electronic Computer vs Human Computer.

Once you grasp that, and add in that an Electronic Computer could then perform actions (electrical signal to open a door based on an electrical signal that it is raining) you can grasp what people would do