Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard for May 20, 2015

I does, but do you have the 14 weeks it will take to play one?

It was great at catching a moth.

H.A.L.’s great…great…great…. (9 days, 2 hours, 45 mins. , 31.52 secs. later:) …great… great..grandather..

Made by Tandy – what is that supposed to mean?

A quest that died pretty quietly somewhere in the late 1990’s.LULZCat, anyone?

The Observer took the wrong human…

Looks like the ENIAC to me. I once met co-inventor John Mauchly. Too bad some ignorant judge invalidated their patent on electronic computing.

ENIAC yup!Computer Questions;1) What was ENIAC used for?2) How did the term bug come about?3) Who is credited with creating the programming language (hint COBOL)?

“Can you still get Forest Mims books ?”-Online? Or crank the telephone and call Amazon?

An early microcomputer was the Tandy Radio Shack Model 80, aka Trash-80, er, TRS-80. The computer in the comic looks more like an IBM 360.

Ted Dude, it has less power than a Cell Phone…

ah, the joy of plug boards…

1) Not remotely like a S/360; as others have remarked, it looks like ENIAC.

2) And, yes, the use of “bug” to mean an engineering defect goes back to Edison’s days; the story about Hopper’s moth is true, but it was a joke even at the time.

3) Not an “ignorant judge”. Eckert and Mauchly had overreaching patent lawyers who tried to patent the whole concept of electronic computing, as though they had gotten the idea straight from God. That claim crumbled to dust in light of Atanasoff’s work in the 30s.

4) However, their big mistake was selling out to Remington Rand. Remington Rand had been IBM’s bitch in the pre-computer market since the 1920s, and they did their usual job of driving away customers in the early-computer era, too. For example, you could only purchase a UNIVAC outright, and they wouldn’t give you a programming manual until you did. IBM gave 30-day leases, and let you get your software in gear on IBM’s own machines until you were ready to take delivery.

5) Radio Shack originally went into the personal-computer business because the president of the company had the foresight to realize that the Citizens-Band craze would die out, and they’d need something new and cool to replace it. That’s a big 10-4, good buddy!

6) ENIAC had something like 1/1,000,000 the power of an Apple Watch.

Can anyone say “Fortran”?