WELCOME
By Dale Dougherty
Computers in the Mist
Carl Helmers was designing spaceships in kindergarten. He “lucked out” by learning computers in high school in New Jersey, where he eventually got a summer job programming at Bell Labs. Then, as a NASA contractor in Houston, he installed compilers and even wrote a landing program for the Apollo Lunar Module.
Computers were big, expensive machines in the ’70s. At an Intel press introduction for the 4004 and 8008 microprocessors, Helmers realized he could now afford to build one from off-the-shelf parts: “A lot of guys like me who had experience working for other people with computers began building computers of our own."
James Burke
Just what were these small computers good for? Hobbyists were searching ...
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