Commodore PET personal computers produced 1977 Commodore International

Personal Computer Revolution 

Amazingly this all-in-one personal computer had a case that combined a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor on a motherboard with commodore BASIC read-only memory, a full keyboard, monochrome monitor, and a cassette deck for memory or data storage.

January 1977; 47 years ago || Introductory price US$795 (equivalent to ~$4,100 in 2024)

Today in 2024 there are many people in many countries that do not have a computer, internet connection, or even understand why they might want that or what they would do with it if someone gave it to them, including hooking it up online so they can read wikipedia or watch YouTube videos, do spreadsheets, publish documents, print recipes, share ideas, communicate with other tribes nearby, networking with other people, social media and much much more.

Some NGO's have gone to rural tribes in South American countries and helped to setup a desktop and satellite based internet connection along with bringing a translator and teaching the local adults how to use the computer and what it might be useful for in their personal use cases, mainly for social networking with other local tribes to create increased solidarity and improve communications to add resilience and strength to their communities by sharing useful information quickly.

I am sharing these ideas and typing this posting on a 2019 iMac Retina 4K, 21.5-inch with 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5 Processor, a Radeon Pro 560X Graphics Card with 4 GB of GDDR5 Memory, 8 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 Memory, via a bluetooth keyboard and Magic Mouse that came with the computer. 

Meg & I purchased 2 of these iMac's off-cycle for a discount at Costco saving about $600 vs buying them new from Apple. These models were the last Intel iMac's since Apple started using Apple Silicon chipsets in newer models, like M2 Pro, M3 Pro, and M4 Pro, and the latest come in fun anodized aluminum colors too, as this one is raw aluminum color :)

Smartphones are handheld touchscreen computers where everything integrated onto the mainboard and the brains or chipsets are condensed along with memory, CPU, GPU, Networking, IO, onto a fingernail sized super complicated SOC system-on-a-chip computer chipset ultra complex integrated circuit made by TSMC in a double sized compact motherboard with power management for wireless and lighting charging the integrated Lithium Polymer Battery of iPhone or Samsung whatever, latest smartphone models all have the same basic platform or layout or system design with a frame, battery, touch screen and mainboard logic SOC based computer containing all the information and power technology, often with a small daughter board for the charge port or antenna or some other fingerprint scanner or similar feature.

The most advanced computer systems today mimic the way the human brain does rapid energy efficient burst processing for pattern recognition & prediction or anticipation or "safety focused driving of a vehicle" & Spiking Neural Networks are the most brain like.

Every human being starts a single cell combining DNA from their biological XX mother and biological XY father, from the egg and sperm of their natural parents Babies don't know anything at first, it takes many years to teach children how to become high functioning adults. So don't be surprised if it takes a moment to program your LLM large language model, ChatGPT whatever version chatbot, artificial intelligent agent or whatever virtual digital assistant like Siri or Alexa or Ok Google via voice search with natural spoken language into related devices. 

Your body, brain, eyes, ears, taste, smell, thinking, perception, emotions, are analog self assembling system of cell systems comprising membranes, electro chemical nerve signals, brain neuron pattern & prediction memory learning system adaptively changing structure & function

All living things on Earth contain analog chemical systems that respond to changes in environments, or analog physical chemical phenomena An orb weaving spider brain for example can use its eyes & working memory to build variable web structure to catch flying insects to eat

Some jumping spiders and hunting spiders have ultra complicate brains able to track prey using eye information, with exceptional pattern recognition, adaptive learning, work and long term memory, and hunting ability that makes them Apex insect predators

Neuromorphic describes analog, digital, mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI, & software systems that implement models of neural systems (perception, motor control, & multisensory integration). Discovered ways to mimic human nervous system through liquid solutions of chemical systems

Implementation of neuromorphic computing on the hardware level can be realized by oxide-based memristors, spintronic memories, threshold switches, transistors

Training software-based neuromorphic systems of spiking neural networks can be achieved using error backpropagation, e.g., using Python based frameworks such as snnTorch, or using canonical learning rules from the biological learning literature, e.g., using BindsNet

With the development of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) technology, Yannis Tsividis' group at Columbia University revisiting analog/hybrid computers design in standard CMOS process

2022, researchers reported development of nanoscale brain-inspired artificial synapses, using ion proton (H+), for 'analog deep learning. Onen, Murat; Emond, Nicolas; Wang, Baoming; Zhang, Difei; Ross, Frances M.; Li, Ju; Yildiz, Bilge; del Alamo, Jesús A. (29 July 2022). "Nanosecond protonic programmable resistors for analog deep learning" (PDF). Science. 377 (6605): 539–543. doi:10.1126/science.abp8064.

Implementation of neuromorphic computing on the hardware level can be realized by oxide-based memristors, spintronic memories, threshold switches, transistors

Analog computers superior power efficiency when solving problems involving continual variation of electric, mechanical or hydraulic systems producing analog signals Way more efficient than software running on digital computers to accomplish the same tasks, also much faster

Mechanical or automatic wrist watches are examples of analog computer, with energy stored in spiral springs, released through a gear train to spin hands displaying seconds, minutes, & hours on the dial, so the wearer can know "what time it is" to a few seconds of precision

Stereo amplifiers used to boost or amplify weak input signals to produce strong current output signals to drive speakers to produce mechanical oscillation to shove air molecules into waves that move the sound data as pressure undulation patterns to our Ears for brain to listen

Analog computers continue to be used today as the Fuzzy logic controller of automobile automatic transmission shifting, in the latest direct-shift 10 speed of the Toyota Camry or Lexus models :) Those these transmissions are also partially digital & can be updated with software

Other examples of digital analog systems can be seen in military missile guidance computers Inertial Navigation + gyroscope data, IMU data, analog part mixes data from many sensors in a power efficient way with rapid switching control of active steering fins to strike target

Some ASIC FPGA systems with Digital to Analog or Analog to Digital for Synthetic Aperture Radar are yet other examples of composite analog digital systems

Before Ti graphic calculators, Slide Rules invented in the 1620s, allow multiplication & division operations to be carried out significantly faster. A slide rule is a hand-operated mechanical calculator consisting of slidable rulers for evaluating mathematical operations such as multiplication, division, exponents, roots, logarithms, and trigonometry. It is one of the simplest analog computers.

Very early computing for math & accounting, to calculate larger numbers that would be hard for most people to do in their brains working memory. Consider the Abacus.

Record keeping, tax records, inventory management Early Fertile Crescent civilizations had to have a method for keeping track of agricultural production stored in clay vessels, to know when such was stored & how much, to keep spoilage to a minimum with first in first out idea

Several mechanisms by which strings of digits can represent numbers "00012345" represents 0001.2345 scientific notation scaled by a power of 10, orbital period of Jupiter's moon Io 152,853.5047 seconds in standard-form scientific notation as 1.528535047×10^5 seconds

Binary machine code a long set of strings of "0" and "1" encoded data to switch transistors in the CPU integrated CMOS circuit system for processing to produce DATA output that executes the instructions in the binary, originally entered into large computers with punch cards

Early computer took up entire rooms and required multiple people to operate then, and cost so much in capital and electrical operating costs, that only large companies and well funded universities could afford such machines, like the well selling IBM 360 line used by Airlines

Foating-point arithmetic (FP) arithmetic represents subsets of real numbers using an integer w/ fixed precision, called significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base Refers to number's radix point, can "float" anywhere to left, right, or between significant digits

Speed of floating-point operations, often measured as FLOPS floating point operations per second A metric to compare computer performance, useful to known to heavy mathematical operations in machine learning or simulation

Directly Copied TLDR OS information from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET

The BASIC included on the original PET 2001 was known as Commodore BASIC 1.0; Microsoft supplied Commodore with a source listing for their 6502 BASIC, essentially a port of BASIC-80, and Commodore performed the rest of the work themselves, including changing the startup screen and prompts, adding I/O support, the SYS command for invoking machine language programs, and fixing bugs. BASIC 1.0 still had numerous bugs and IEEE-488 support was broken, so that when Commodore later came out with disk drives, they could not be used from BASIC (although the kernel routines supported them), and only supported 256 array elements. The PEEK function would not work on memory locations above 49152 so as to prevent the user from viewing the copyrighted code in the system ROMs.

Aside from the 8K BASIC ROM, the PET also included a 4K character ROM and an 8K kernal ROM. The first half of the kernal contained screen editor functions (the screen editor on 80 column PETs differed from 40-column models) with the second half containing a number of function calls for tasks such as inputting and outputting data to and from different I/O devices, reading the keyboard, and positioning the cursor. In addition, the kernal ROM received system interrupts and scanned the keyboard. The kernel, an idea of John Feagans, was the first personal computer OS ROM to be a distinct entity from BASIC. The character ROM was 4K in size, containing four different 128 character tables, the uppercase/graphics character set and upper/lowercase character set, plus reverse video versions of both. This included a number of graphics characters for creating pseudographics on the screen as well as playing card symbols (reportedly because Jack Tramiel's sons wanted to play card games on the computer). On the original PET 2001, the uppercase/graphics character set and upper/lowercase character set were reversed compared to how they would be on later machines; PET owners who upgraded their machines to the BASIC 2.0 ROMs often also swapped out the character ROMs for the newer version