Ferranti Mercury

[Doc Shipley]

Vintage Computer Festival wrote:

> On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Tom Jennings wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Jules Richardson wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>http://wps.com/archives/Ivall/Ferranti-Mercury-computer.jpg
>>>
>>>That's the same pic everyone seems to have :)
>>>You've got some interesting other stuff on there, though.
>>
>>They're all from a book that's reasonably available:
>>
>>Computer Design and Hardware	Electronic Computers, Principles and Applications	T.E. Ivall	1960	Iliffe and Sons	Overview, history, direction, pictures, for tech audience, analog, digital state of the art
>>
>>Hmm, paste from OOo, ugly, data there. Try abebooks.com
>>
>>Mostly English machines, obviously. My next concentration...
> 
> 
> Speaking of photos of old computers, I was watching Revolution OS last
> night (I give it a thumbs up so far...really good history on GPL, OSS,
> etc. right from the folks who started it all) and they had some nifty
> pictures of the PDP-1 at MIT and other machines that I've never seen
> before.  Good stuff.

   Heh.  I got to see that flick's premiere at the SXSW film festival 
here.  The guy who made that movie, JT Moore, presented the movie and 
gave some commentary about both the making of the movie and his view of 
the OSS/FSF/GNU/Linux culture.  He really is a total geek.  He obviously 
also started that process without any agenda or points to prove.

   For once we agree, Sellam.  The movie's about a lot more than just 
Linux, and while it's very pro-Linux and pro-OpenSource in general, it 
comes off as pretty even-handed and non-fanatical.  People like Bruce 
Perens and Eric Raymond get as much credit as Stallman and Torvalds do.

   There's also a lot of history there for anybody who ever installed 
AIX or SunOS or A/UX or *IX and then spent hours downloading GNU tools 
to make it useful.

   I didn't know it was out on DVD, either.  There's something cheap for 
my Christmas list....


	Doc