Canadian Communication Firsts

Wired and wireless communications were both Canadian firsts. The invention of the telephone by Canadian Alexander Graham Bell is well known. Less known is the Canadian inventor of radio, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden.

On August 10, 1876 Alexander Graham Bell transmitted human voice electrically 13 km by wire between Brantford and Paris, Ontario. He had previously on August 4 transmitted his voice from Brantford to family and friends at his home 6 km away. The famous earlier experiment where he said "Come here Mr. Watson" was just between offices. This proved that telephone voice communication could compete successfully with the telegraph.

Many people associate the invention of radio with Guglielmo Marconi. He is credited with the invention of the radio telegraph. He developed wireless transmission of telegraph code using a spark transmitter. However the inventor of the radio with wireless audio transmission by modulation of continuous waves was Reginald Aubrey Fessenden. This would be analogous to what we call AM (amplitude modulation) radio today.

On December 23 , 1900 Fessenden made what appeared to be the first wireless audio communication over a distance of 1.6 km. In 1906 he made the first transatlantic radio communication. Then on Christmas Eve December 24, 1906 he made the first radio broadcast of music and voice. He played O Holy Night on the violin and read the Christmas story from Luke chapter 2. He broadcast from a transmitter at Brant Rock, Massachusetts to an unknown number of shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic coast.

Fessenden, like many others, went to the US to be able to get the backing to conduct his research. He got a job working in Thomas Edison's labs. He also worked for George Westinghouse for a time, and General Electric made the equipment to power his transmitter. He never really made any financial success from his inventions and most of his accomplishments have not been well known.

Canadians made these firsts in wired and wireless communications. And Canada has continued to be at the forefront in communications such as satellite and fibre optics.

My First Computer

My first computer was a Radio Shack MC10 Micro Color Computer that I bought in 1984. I believe I got it on sale for about $100. It had 4k of memory and for about another $30 I got the 16k memory expansion (seen plugged in the back.) It connected to a TV as a monitor. Programs were loaded from standard audio cassettes.

It was certainly not what would be termed "user friendly." The MC10 was rated by PC World as one of the 10 worst computer keyboards of all time.

I had a Texas Instruments 300 baud acoustic coupled modem (as seen in the picture above) which was connected by placing the telephone handset over the two "earpieces." I wrote a program to allow me to use this to connect by phone to computers at work to check the progress of large programs running overnight. This was painfully slow by today's standards with each screen of text taking several minutes to load.

Then in 1986 I got a Radio Shack Color Computer 3 which had 128k of memory and also used a TV as a monitor. I got it out and hooked it to our TV to try it out again as seen in the picture above. In the late 1980s Elaine actually used this computer for some word processing including our Christmas letters. It took some patience to use the simple program, and printing took about 5 minutes per page.

Our family played several games on this computer loaded from cartridges or audio cassette. One of the favourites was a classic arcade game called Pooyan that our kids still mention.

These computers had minimal capabilities compared to today's machines. But they did give our family their first introduction to computers.

World's Fastest Supercomputer

IBM has produced the world's fastest supercomputer, doubling the previous computer speed record.



This computer does over 1 quadrillion (1000 trillion) calculations per second, which can calculate circles around any other computer on the planet. But do not expect to have a computer of this speed on your desktop any time soon. This super computer occupies 6000 square feet, weighs 250 tons, and is shipped in 21 tractor-trailer trucks. Its electrical usage is 3.9 Megawatts. It was built for the US Department of Energy and only they could afford it $133 million price tag.

Canadian Computer History

In the early 1960s Canadians were at the forefront of computer development. The FP-6000 computer was developed by Ferranti Packard Canada with the first production machine completed in early 1963. Only five production machines were ever built with the largest FP-6000 installation used by Saskatchewan Power Corporation for twenty years.

The picture above shows a keyboard used by the operators to control the computer and some of the magnetic tape drives. The computer itself filled an entire wing of the building.

The FP-6000 had very advanced features and capabilities for its time. It only had 32k of memory, which is minuscule by today's standards, but it could control up to 64 input/output devices. It was one of the first computers to use an Operating System to allow multi-tasking of programs. This is now standard with all computers. Prior that computers had to be extensively reprogrammed to allow them to run a single application.

Ironically, Ferranti Packard Canada was located in Malton Ontario just down the road from where the famous advanced Canadian fighter jet the Avro Arrow was developed before being cancelled by the government in 1959. The Canadian computer advancements in the FP-6000 met a similar fate when Ferranti Packard Canada's parent company, owned by the British government, discontinued the FP-6000 and moved all computer development to England. The FP-6000 has been referred to as the "Avro Arrow of the Canadian computer industry". Also similar to the Avro Arrow, the Canadian government was more interested in development in the US than recognizing Canadian innovation.

I was involved in programming the FP-6000 for several years in the late 1970s, using a language called ALGOL, and an assembly language called Autocoder. The programs and data were entered on punch cards as described in my previous post on Computer History. At the time I was not aware of the FP-6000's place in computer history.

In 1983 the Saskatchewan Power Corporation's FP-6000 was donated to the Western Development Museum in Moose Jaw to "provide a lasting example of an important Canadian contribution to the Information Revolution".

Calculator History

For many decades before the advent of calculators and computers the slide rule was the standard for scientific and engineering calculations. Most people learned to use a slide rule in high school science classes. Engineers were known for walking around with a slide rule hanging in a leather holster on their belt. In university I had a very good quality precision slide rule like the one below (Geotec Versalog II). I received it as an award for being the top student in first year engineering.
When I was in first year university one of the other students got the first calculator we had ever seen. Every one crowded around to see this new marvel of technology - a pocket sized four function calculator! (It doesn't take much to get engineers excited.) I believe he paid several hundred dollars. Then a while later I bought my first calculator, a Sears Digimatic 8 like the one below for $89. This made an amazing difference for homework but I still had to rely on my trusty slide rule for many calculations.

After the first pocket sized calculators came out there was rapid advancement with more and more functions resulting in the availability of scientific calculators. By the end of second year university I bought a Hewlett Packard HP 35 calculator like the one below for $255. The HP 35 was the world's first pocket scientific calculator and used Reverse Polish Notation. This was an engineer's dream. Unfortunately after using this all through third year it malfunctioned and wasn't repaired on warranty in time for final exams. I had to go back to my slide rule for my exams (I still did OK though.)

So ends my second chapter in the history of technology. Stay tuned for further episodes.

Computer History

Mary asked me about the old computer punch cards she remembers we had at home. These type of cards were the standard input for mainframe computers from about the 1950s to early 1980s. (Old cards made good note cards or bookmarks.)




The cards were made on a card punch machine like the one shown below. I used one of these many times at university and at work up to about 1980. In the first university computer class I took the computer centre had clerical staff that did all the card punching. We wrote our computer program (FORTRAN) on paper and then handed it in at a window to be punched and run through the computer (filling a wing of the building.) Of course the program ended in errors and we had to rewrite, line up again at the window and repeat until it worked.

The punch cards came in boxes of 2000 cards. I remember seeing Grad students who had developed large programs that took more than one box of cards. There was more than one student who dropped his box of cards and had a scrambled disaster to sort out.

In that era most big companies including the one I work for had a whole department of people at card punch machines entering all the information needed for data processing. Sometimes the card readers chewed up the cards or two cards stuck together. I had an instance where two cards stuck together on reading and a data base was out of alignment causing a billing error for a major customer for a whole month before the problem could be found.

In looking at some information on computer history I found an amusing example of mobile computing. The picture below is a computer card reader machine pulled by an ox. This was in Taiwan and used in processing an early 1960s census.

I have always been fascinated by the history of technology and I was a witness to much of it. (No I never used a computer pulled by an ox cart though.) This may become part of an ongoing blog series.