Found a reference to ENIASA - Instituto de Informática de Engenharia SARL (computer science engeneering). Rereading your post, I'm not entirely sure if it was just an academic publishing from maybe the same group or if a new branch for computers derived from the mecanograph educational offers. Curious use of ordenador istead of computador as it is nowadays, makes me wonder if it was an early adoption of the term computer.
The book has a picture of the IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive, 1964 to 1975.[1]
That's an exotic peripheral for the original IBM System/360, a tape strip library. Before disks got big, there were various mechanical kludges to select storage media from a library and move them to a read/write unit.
IBM had several such mechanical systems. This one was a commercial product with modest success.
Look up a guy called Pedro Aniceto - he’ll tell you so many stories of when those cards were current here (he used to courier them across town when he was a kid)
>indicates that João A. Fernandes is paid 15$000 (15 Portuguese escudos) per hour
From the linked Wikipedia article, the escudo was replaced with the Euro in 2002, at a rate of about 200 escudos to the Euro. Seems like they had quite a bit of inflation in those three or so decades.
15 escudos was roughly 7 cents of Euro in those days. You could buy one chewing gum with that kind of money. An expresso coffee would cost 50 escudos on the turn of the century.
I have heard a few stories about those times in the 70s and 80s where people were selling their properties and putting the money in the bank which was paying 20% interest.
A bitter lesson on the difference between the nominal Vs real value of money rapidly ensued.
I'm portuguese and there's an oddity in either this chart or my memory.
When we transitioned to the euro it seemed most shops straight up converted from escudo to eurocent. So if something cost 50 escudos it would cost 50 cents. I was a teen at the time so I remember having to pay double for breakfast and arcade coinop games and people blaming the inflation for the doubled price of stuff. Yet the chart doesn't represent this. I know the price of electronics for example wasn't doubled so I wasn't expect a 100% inflation rate or anything, but I still feels it should've been higher than 4%.
Uh 3 years of 22% inflation (give or take) doubles prices. When you're a young kid it sure would seem like everything got twice as expensive really fast, especially since most stores and manufacturers aren't raising prices every week to track inflation.
If I estimate the 10-ish years of 20% +/- 3% that's around 7x which I can't imagine.
'till the 80's, french was the computer dominating language. Terms like "Octeto" (portuguese for byte) were derived from french glossary (tehy had laws to prevent the english tech term colonization and still today they have a french word for every english counterpart). So, "Ordenadores" was pretty common. And before electronics took over, we had "Electrológica", refering mixed hardware like Burroughs or Gestetner.
The term "octet" is used in IETF documentation (for IP addresses, for example) to be specific that the byte is 8 bits in length. Historically the size of a "byte" on a system was machine-dependent. The industry coalesced around the 8-bit byte, and differentiated it from "machine word" in the 70s and 80s.
Mostly because I know it's installed, I can remember pretty much the entire language, and because I'd probably use Python instead but I've been bitten by some environment thing too many times.
Yes, a single variable notification in code, could cost THOUSANDS just because someone would punch ONE card with the new data, compile it (with no errors), save it on a cassete tape, (write the label of the tape with a new version number) and deliver it to the customer. There were no monitors. Computers would have a "BOITIER" (a rectangular box of coloured lamps) who coould have 3 meanings, ON, OFF and BLINKING. We're talking about 16 light points, and the interpretation of those lights would have the answer for the completed action. 3 whites and 3 reds would mean "No errors on compiling". But that action only verified syntax. Logic was another department :)
Mind blowing. 50 years later we are putting VM in a VM in a VM to send videos of funny cats along with bank transactions across the world to everyone’s wireless pocket computer.
I love these old advertisements. BTW, even in late and mid 80's, there were adverts on the Spanish Reader's Digest on courses about computers. I rememember showing images of both PDP front panels and maybe Altair 8800, not IBM PC's. These were top notch stuff for big corporations and banks filling their offices.
BTW, on the 'computadora' term, these looked outdated, and to anyone non-Latin American descent here 'computadora' would mean an old IBM mainframe the size of two wardrobes and more.
Found a reference to ENIASA - Instituto de Informática de Engenharia SARL (computer science engeneering). Rereading your post, I'm not entirely sure if it was just an academic publishing from maybe the same group or if a new branch for computers derived from the mecanograph educational offers. Curious use of ordenador istead of computador as it is nowadays, makes me wonder if it was an early adoption of the term computer.
It was submitted for registration and approved in 1970, according to Diário da República (similar to Federal Register in the US): https://files.dre.pt/gratuitos/3s/1970/09/1970d210s000.pdf , page 4, line 82 of that table. Or here: https://i.imgur.com/GyKPamu.png
It's still "ordenador" in Spain and "ordinateur" in French. Interesting that we moved forward to computer over the years.
Is this because these early computers were more often used to keep tabs and sort things (put things in order) rather than merely compute things?
(I'm aware that in order to perform those tasks the processing unit will also have to perform arithmetic operations)
Orden in Spanish means both command (mandate, instruction) and order (as from sort).
Yeah, I found that too. But that's all I found.
Read my comment below about the french language domination
The book has a picture of the IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive, 1964 to 1975.[1] That's an exotic peripheral for the original IBM System/360, a tape strip library. Before disks got big, there were various mechanical kludges to select storage media from a library and move them to a read/write unit. IBM had several such mechanical systems. This one was a commercial product with modest success.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell
Look up a guy called Pedro Aniceto - he’ll tell you so many stories of when those cards were current here (he used to courier them across town when he was a kid)
;) Punching cards was in fact my first "decent" job. There were the "punchers" and "the programmers". A real social battle...
I feel like you should submit your own blog posts here!
>indicates that João A. Fernandes is paid 15$000 (15 Portuguese escudos) per hour
From the linked Wikipedia article, the escudo was replaced with the Euro in 2002, at a rate of about 200 escudos to the Euro. Seems like they had quite a bit of inflation in those three or so decades.
15 escudos was roughly 7 cents of Euro in those days. You could buy one chewing gum with that kind of money. An expresso coffee would cost 50 escudos on the turn of the century.
There was: https://www.inflationtool.com/rates/portugal/historical?utm_...
I have heard a few stories about those times in the 70s and 80s where people were selling their properties and putting the money in the bank which was paying 20% interest.
A bitter lesson on the difference between the nominal Vs real value of money rapidly ensued.
I'm portuguese and there's an oddity in either this chart or my memory.
When we transitioned to the euro it seemed most shops straight up converted from escudo to eurocent. So if something cost 50 escudos it would cost 50 cents. I was a teen at the time so I remember having to pay double for breakfast and arcade coinop games and people blaming the inflation for the doubled price of stuff. Yet the chart doesn't represent this. I know the price of electronics for example wasn't doubled so I wasn't expect a 100% inflation rate or anything, but I still feels it should've been higher than 4%.
Ditto in Spanish with the former currency, the peseta.
1 euro = 166 PTS, 6 euro ~ 1000 PTS, the basic banknote.
Guess what happened. Exactly. Bread costing 100 PTS began to cost... 166, 1 euro.
Uh 3 years of 22% inflation (give or take) doubles prices. When you're a young kid it sure would seem like everything got twice as expensive really fast, especially since most stores and manufacturers aren't raising prices every week to track inflation.
If I estimate the 10-ish years of 20% +/- 3% that's around 7x which I can't imagine.
I didn't know they used to call computers "ordenadores" in Portugal. Interesting.
'till the 80's, french was the computer dominating language. Terms like "Octeto" (portuguese for byte) were derived from french glossary (tehy had laws to prevent the english tech term colonization and still today they have a french word for every english counterpart). So, "Ordenadores" was pretty common. And before electronics took over, we had "Electrológica", refering mixed hardware like Burroughs or Gestetner.
English-speaking programmers still say "octet" for byte sometimes, for example when talking about IP addresses.
The term "octet" is used in IETF documentation (for IP addresses, for example) to be specific that the byte is 8 bits in length. Historically the size of a "byte" on a system was machine-dependent. The industry coalesced around the 8-bit byte, and differentiated it from "machine word" in the 70s and 80s.
Edit: I just checked wikipedia, and this is described there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
Spain and France as well. Computadora was a Latin American thing
Ordinateur in French, still.
Ordenador in Spanish, still.
They appear to have in this book, but computadores seems to have taken over.
Very cool. Also good to see someone else still writing Perl.
Mostly because I know it's installed, I can remember pretty much the entire language, and because I'd probably use Python instead but I've been bitten by some environment thing too many times.
Yes, a single variable notification in code, could cost THOUSANDS just because someone would punch ONE card with the new data, compile it (with no errors), save it on a cassete tape, (write the label of the tape with a new version number) and deliver it to the customer. There were no monitors. Computers would have a "BOITIER" (a rectangular box of coloured lamps) who coould have 3 meanings, ON, OFF and BLINKING. We're talking about 16 light points, and the interpretation of those lights would have the answer for the completed action. 3 whites and 3 reds would mean "No errors on compiling". But that action only verified syntax. Logic was another department :)
Mind blowing. 50 years later we are putting VM in a VM in a VM to send videos of funny cats along with bank transactions across the world to everyone’s wireless pocket computer.
It still has great whipuptitude.
I love these old advertisements. BTW, even in late and mid 80's, there were adverts on the Spanish Reader's Digest on courses about computers. I rememember showing images of both PDP front panels and maybe Altair 8800, not IBM PC's. These were top notch stuff for big corporations and banks filling their offices.
BTW, on the 'computadora' term, these looked outdated, and to anyone non-Latin American descent here 'computadora' would mean an old IBM mainframe the size of two wardrobes and more.
Those were the days...