MIT Science Reporter—"EDM: A Magic Slate" (1962)

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kind of corporation that has been emerging in america during the past 15 years a corporation built entirely on modern photographic and electronic technology and designed to deal with the mid-century phenomena of computers and automation today the mit science reporter visits itech to take a look at one of these new research-based companies in action we'll examine a computer that can communicate in the speedy easy language of pictures itec calls it edm we call it the magic slate [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello i'm john fitch mit science reporter and i'm very glad to be back with you once again right now i'm in the large drafting room of the itech corporation which is just off famous route 128 in lexington massachusetts i'd like to show you something this man is working on a large printed circuit diagram typical of such diagrams it requires a great deal of work to produce this finished drawing perhaps 60 days as much as 600 man-hours might go into a drawing like this and yet as you can see by looking at it it's quite repetitive there are only three or four elements which are repeated over and over again it all has to be hand drawn very accurately inked in and all this requires a great deal of time and of course time is money i know i was from my own experience how surprised it was the first time i handed a group of sketches to a draftsman to turn into finished product just how much time and money was charged to an engineering project just through this kind of uh drafting well you can imagine would be pretty wonderful if we could have some sort of a machine to do this kind of drafting well this is a problem that itec has been working on for about a year and a half and just about three weeks ago they announced success it took a team of some 20 people working on this project continuously and they were all under the direction of one of the vice presidents of the itech corporation mr norman taylor whom i'd like to have you meet now mr taylor we want to thank you for letting us come to visit itech and also see this particular machine uh how did you happen to get started on building a drafting machine well the whole aim of the itech corporation's goal in information technology is to do something in the graphic information area to complement what has been done in the digital information area over in the last 10 years and we are quite interested in doing something to help the human being with his problem in graphics because most people do communicate with graphics in fact when most people try to use a digital computer they find themselves surrounded by what we call a man-machine barrier what do you mean by that well uh digital computers which are perhaps the the best tool for manipulating information that has come along the pipe uh use binary numbers and binary bits we have a little uh tape here this is the typical way that the binary numbers are inserted into such a computer that's the only kind of language that the computer itself understands numbers or really uh really understands holes in a piece of that's paper tape that's what it comes down to right and you've heard that people can write programs using letters and numbers and each one of these holes or group of holes is perhaps is one letter in a word that you tell a computer what to do next you see however there's so many things that people do when they communicate with each other that don't fit this pattern too well a good example of this is uh if i were to try to tell you how to get to my house let's uh let's just consider this if i were going to tell you over a telephone and i hear of course i'd have to use words it would be like trying to talk to the computer because you can't show it something you can't show it something you see i'd take an example i have to tell you to get on route 93 and travel north on 93 until you cross route 128 at this point continue on 93 for 2.1 miles and then take a right turn under route 111 continue down 111 for one mile and take a rather button hook curve to the left and look for a little store on the corner and then proceed up a street called grove street for a mile and then look for an island in the middle of the road and so on and so on having a very clear picture of how to get to your house right now see what happens is you're going to call me back and say why don't you drop a little map in the mail so i'll know how to get there and here you have an example of a man needing to use graphic communication to tell another man what he wants another example that sort of thing well yeah let's suppose that i wanted to tell you how to draw an american flag now you know what i'm going to tell you because you're familiar with an american flag but if we were going to uh discuss this over the telephone i would have this problem of saying well why don't you pick up a pencil and go to the left lower hand corner of the screen and start drawing a horizontal line and then let's say draw it eight inches and then go up a quarter of an inch and draw a horizontal line in the other direction and i tell you these detailed instructions as you go up through the flag and where the stars were and so on and eventually you'd be able to draw american flag from my instructions because you sort of know what you were doing so you'd fill in the things i forgot to tell you now just for fun we actually coded up this instruction and gave it to a computer to tell it to draw an american flag i see and here i have a list of the instructions that it took to draw a simple thing like an american flag all of this all of this for heaven's sakes pages and pages yes you see of course just numbers which is the kind of yeah information that the computer can understand yeah and so i think this gives you an example of a man-machine barrier you see we want to do a thing like draw an american flag we have to go through all this rigmarole to do it and then was the machine able to draw an american flag from there as a matter of fact here's a picture of what the machine produced as a result of having these instructions given to it in the in the usual binary way i'm not sure that everyone is familiar with the fact that uh computers nowadays can actually draw pictures as an as an output uh we think in terms of a computer usually typing out a lot of numbers such as we saw yes this has been the usual output however in the last few years both the plotting machines and cathode ray scopes have been hooked onto computers and if they're in so instructed they can exactly make pictures of this sort as an output medium well this is all very well to draw american flags or maps but surely uh you developed this for some other purpose yes now as we start to think about engineering problems in a more broad sense uh we find that a typical example of a graphic communication is a a wiring diagram of this sort now here you see if i were to change as to how to draw this over telephone if you will i would really have trouble because in the first place you would have no idea what i was trying to tell you about and each one of these lines is now a curved and it goes to specific place so the number of instructions necessary to tell a computer how to do this become rather large one thing that i don't understand really mr taylor is why would you want to communicate a diagram like this to a computer in the first place well now you're getting to the heart of the matter this is a very good question because obviously it seems easier to just draw the thing and be done with it yeah but a computer has certain manipulative powers that are very interesting to people in the designing area are in the area of uh well we want to be quantitative about what we want to do for instance on this diagram it might be very interesting to know how long each one of these lines is after we have it drawn how what the spacing is between the wires what the tolerance factors are and once these problems become quite quantitative and the computer is a peculiarly good device for for helping you along with this kind of information i suppose once it is stored inside the computer you could enlarge it or uh reduce it in size too oh yes or maybe even take out wires or it's very flexible the manipulative power is very useful here we can compare this drawing with other drawings or call drawings from file that we've made before and make modifications on them you see with a great deal of flexibility and uh i suppose also it's a convenient way to store information very much so well now you've given me a good reason for wanting to communicate with the machine in this way but i don't really see quite how you're going to do it as i understand it we have uh you can talk in terms of numbers or digits that's what the machine understands in a few english words perhaps but what about lines and things like that well in order to answer this question i think we better go to the basic ingredients that are used in making up a drawing like this if we uh approach a drafting table we find that there are three basic tools that a draftsman uses to make any kind of drawing yeah you're familiar with the t-square and you're familiar with the compass and the french curve for making curves and it turns out i'm thinking about the matter that any kind of diagram whether it's a drafting or a graphic chart of any sort is made up of these three basic building blocks now if we look at this chart here we find that each of these building blocks t-square the compass and the french curve is related in a very simple way to a very simple equation which as you mentioned before is the language of the computer yes but it seems to me now you're right back where you started from you're going to use mathematical equations then you've got to have mathematicians to interpret these diagrams to the machine very true and now we come to the part which is new and different which allows us to overcome this problem well i'll be happy to have you explain that well here we have a tv set now we're we're not going to talk about using cathode ray tubes in the usual way because that isn't the way the computer uses cathode ray tubes we're going to start talking about cathode ray tubes in a rather new way now you remember at night when you turn off your tv set there's a little bright spot appears in the middle of the scope yeah now this particular spot is a very useful device to us because we if we can capture this spot with a thing called a light pen we may be able to exercise some control over where that spot is located this is a light pen that's a light pen it looks very much like an ordinary pen well you've probably not been used to a light pen it isn't a new device but it's a very useful one instead of having a ball point or an ink source in the tip we have a photoelectric cell and by attaching the photoelectric cell through the light pen to a computer and then we are then in a position to capture the light spot the same one in fact that you see at night when you turn off the tv set and then by capturing it we can it'll follow the light pen with the aid of a computer on a cathode ray tube so you actually move the spot around the face of the scope and then that automatically puts the information into the computer right so now we're using uh in the past we've or in the recent past we've had the cathode ray tube as a means of displaying what was in the computer now we're using it to actually put the information into the computer yes and that is the important thing to remember that we not only have an input device or an output device but we also have an input device and now we have a way of getting a two-way communication with a computer and putting graphic symbols i mean lines and curves and uh circles putting them in directly instead of having to put them into mathematical terms first yes and none of this punch paper taper and that business anymore well i think we're about in a position now to uh see the actual machine itself i'm kind of excited about it and i hope we can see it well miss pat gordon is standing by one of our staff and let's go in the computer room and see her good we're in the computer room now i'd like to show you around back here way back and back is is the computer which we use to perform all the operations of the drafting machine and over here is the cathode ray scope on which we draw with a light pen to communicate with the computer this is the light pen itself alongside here is the plotter on which we make a permanent record of what we've drawn on the scope for our demonstration today my colleague frank fredericks will operate the drafting machine well thank you very much pat now can we actually see how the graphing machine works yes i thought we'd show you the simple elements first before we move on to the others first frank is going to draw a line a horizontal line [Music] you notice that he can move the pen around almost anywhere and yet he gets a horizontal line why is that this is because he has asked for horizontal line by depressing the function button marked horizontal well with his left hand i see yes with his left hand you notice also that the line continually varies its length is variable and the line is not fixed until he releases the button at which point the line is permanently recorded on the scope until it is erased and within the computer memory all right similarly you can draw a vertical line [Music] i noticed that the uh computer waits a second or so to make sure that he stopped before it actually draws the line that's right with the slant line however there's another option he can change the angle as well as the length at will after he's paused then the system draws a line to the place that he stopped that's right i might point out an interesting fact at this time that the scope is used then really to communicate with the machine and that it's used for both entering the information and then displaying what you've decided on that's right we've just drawn lines and we don't know how long they are but the computer for instance can tell us how long they are all right let's ask it there yes the computer will now tell us how long the line is this line the one that frank just pointed to oh i see it actually prints out the length of the line in inches to uh three decimal places that's right and draws a conventional arrows just as though that's right well that's very interesting because that uh information is in there stored more or less incidental to drawing the line but it's uh you can print it out and have it there displayed available to you well if you've drawn a diagram and then are curious about what you've done it's very handy well imagine we can also draw circles in the way we drew lines first specify your center point and indicate that you want a circle the radius is defined by the degree to which by the place to which you've you've drawn your pen yes again it waits just a second to make sure you've paused and that's where you want the circle that's right circles can be modified as well as all output can be modified suppose frank doesn't want the circle and decides he wants an arc he indicates with his light pen the endpoints of the arc as you can see him doing now [Music] and and tells the computer that he wants an arc and the circle is modified to give an r it's really quite simple when you say simple uh maybe for somebody like frank do you mean that i could learn how to operate yes i think you could learn how to operate right right i can't resist the challenge like that i see i've got a clean magic slate to work with yeah i'm going to do both hands that's right you'll hold it microphone now what do i do now just take your pen and draw while keeping the light or the ink with you all right i've got it captured i guess all right now just draw you get the feel of it in a minute or two all right now suppose i wanted to draw a horizontal line from here well you choose your end point and if you've chosen that as your point depress the button marked horizontal line okay and now you can start to draw i can't seem to draw a very horizontal one but well how about that oh there it is there it is and releasing the button that line is recorded in the computer uh-huh how about a vertical line draw a vertical line this is the vertical button all right oops i lost the all right that's not very vertical but there it is there it is in a circle pick your center point okay there's a good one and you depress this button smart compass all right now pull out don't let go until you've got your circle that you want all right there it is i'll make it a little smaller i think okay well that's fascinating frank you better come back in here and take over again that really is uh fairly simple even for me what about some of the more complicated things well we have some very powerful functions which which we will show you right now for instance um drafting work can be very tedious and repetitive and you you may have to draw something four or five or six times but we have um a function called reflect in which you can reflect copies of what you've drawn this saves your drawing for instance all four parts of a wheel i see or all four parts of a particular diagram which is symmetrical about two axes and frank is now going to draw several lines and reflect so to make a mirror image uh that's right i see this this is what he's drawn then it's just a quarter of what uh he wants as a finished product well then this is one of the what you call the manipulative functions of this system which makes it so much more than just a means of drawing straight lines and circles that's right he's now going to reflect a copy of that little area about that particular line and now he will reflect this whole drawing about this this line that he's now pointing to i see over the horizontal axis so now he'll have uh there it is now he's drawn for instance he's drawn some sort of mechanical diagram and it's complete but it's lacking many details and you may be curious about the details we want to see them well there's a way that we can blow up magnify certain parts of the drawing to fit in various details and um this is done we're going to magnify this drawing a section of it eight times and this is done by reducing the frame this these lines eight times oh i see the frame is getting smaller and smaller right all right what is he doing now now he's moving the frame to the area of the drawing in which he wants to draw his detail in oh it's it's much like an inset on a map that's right and i mean what's inside that frame now he's going to magnify that's right well that's interesting that might be very useful now that i think about it for a grasping oh there's that just that little section of the h or whatever it was that i call that that might be a mechanical part like a hinge or something like that that's right and uh this might be some small detail in it what are you drawing there across uh yes well that might be for drilling a hole all right now it's much easier to draw something small like that in this enlarged version i suppose it would be very difficult if you had to work in the actual full normal scale size that's right now you see it's restored to the way it was before but with that this is a very powerful function i should certainly say so similarly suppose he wanted to draw for instance a second copy of this particular um mechanical object and he wouldn't want to go through this whole process again well all he has to do is just move a copy of it oh i see and it's reproduced exactly there's a second one there's our second copy maybe if he hadn't drawn it so big he might have been able to fit it right in next to it or something like that that's right now that would certainly eliminate what uh one thing that i mentioned earlier in the program which when looking at a one of the printed circuit diagrams the fact that so much of it was repetitive this eliminates it you just have the amount of work that's right in half that's right by repeating that's right [Music] well can you make that uh remove that one well this is another you can add a second copy and you can take it away that's right and now for instance we have this mechanical mechanical diagram here but we want to send say a copy to the machine shop to have it made up here is where we use our x our plotter to record exactly what we've done on the scope and we can send as many copies as we want to the machine room or to conference rooms however we want and we always have this hard copy well then i'll move over here a little bit and get out of the way and there goes the plotter [Music] rolling up some fresh paper first [Music] [Music] um [Music] now i think you can see on your screen that we are showing the uh oscilloscope pattern the original on the left hand side and on the right hand side of your screen you see the plotter making this exact copy uh sort of rotated 190 degrees here it's sideways but at any rate it is an exact copy of what is shown on the uh oscilloscope and frank can you move it a little bit yes there's even the little uh cross in that corner and we now have a permanent record of the original pattern that we had on the oscilloscope well i suppose if you made one copy that you could make as many as you want that's right it could go on for as many as you want it and this also provides a very nice uh permanent storage of a given pattern so that you could uh use it or yes call for it later very very very interesting well thank you both very much pat frank appreciate it most interesting demonstration in the few minutes we have left i'd like to talk to mr taylor once again this is i understand it rather informal setup is still an early stage of the development of the drafting machine how long will it be before you'll have a machine that an engineer or a draftsman can actually use well of course we've learned an awful lot going this far with this engineering model and we're starting to design the production model of this machine now in fact we have a mock-up right here of the console that the draftsman will use or anyone who wants to use it for any other application and we expect to have this working model available in about 14 months complete your system well will it be uh fairly complicated in other words the fact that frank was able to use it quite simply but uh the world seemed to me a lot of little buttons and holes and special things that he was doing well we feel the complication of using this machine is very similar to that one faces when learning to use a typewriter you have about the same number of buttons and the facility with which you can learn to use it will be comparable to that used in learning the typewriter business so so an engineer or a draftsman should be able to learn well yes in fact we're quite sure that because of the skill uh needed to teach it takes quite a while to teach a draftsman to be an artist you see and none of the much of the artistry will be removed in other words one will be able to be a draftsman with less artistry well will the system handle all of the different problems and that are involved in the engineering drawing drafting well when you say all of course you encompass quite a lot we do feel that it'll handle many of the problems that we now know about and some of the things that draftsman is most confused about will be added to his capability for instance well when he wants to find a part which he has to add to his drawing we can have this part stored as a part of the catalog of drawings which the computer has access to and he can call these parts up and he won't have to draw them they will have have been drawn previously and call them on his scope and add them to his drawing so in many ways we'll save him time by just not having to make the drawing at all it seems to me that a system that's as fundamentally new as this is certainly going to have applications outside the field of mechanical drawing well i wanted to mention that to you because we're finding that this machine has got so many applications that it's even hard to talk about them in the few minutes we have but one of the more interesting ones is in the area of city planning or road planning i have here a picture an era airplane picture of an airport this is bedford airport which is just around the corner i believe and if one of the problems in such a development is to plan roads draw roads and study the buildings that are associated with such a development as you can see here on these pictures yeah now if we made uh a copy of this uh a negative so such as this sort of thing yeah so we could see through it and put it over overlaid it on our scope we could then uh take our light pen here and i think if you you can see that you can easily copy there the peripheral outline of a building or a road then you see we have been able to insert this graphics and get the information into the machine well thank you very much mr taylor for this opportunity to visit itech and to see this fascinating machine the magic slave thank you again certainly a most interesting machine and one that's going to open up a whole new field of communication with a computer in an age when the computer is of such paramount importance now next week we're going to take a look at the night sky at the harvard observatory our guest will be patrick moore a man who has his own program television program on astronomy on the british broadcasting corporation and he's going to help us take a look at some of the tools of the astronomers trade and we'll also take a look at the stars themselves this is john fitch your mit science reporter i hope you'll be with us then you
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Channel: From the Vault of MIT
Views: 30,090
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Keywords: Sceince Reporter, Science Reporter TV Series, MIT, Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (College/University), 1962
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Length: 29min 15sec (1755 seconds)
Published: Wed Jan 20 2016
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