Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

PC Trivia

Commentary By Ron Beasley


A little break from politics.  Who manufactured one of the first personnel computers?  Hint - it wasn't IBM or Apple.


In the 70s and early 80s I worked at Tektronix as a manufacturing engineer in the CRT division. At the time Hiro Moriyasu developed the digital oscilloscope and the 4051 computer the best microprocessors were 8 bit which meant only 64K of memory could be addressed. As a result there was little or no memory for video. The solution was the Tektronix direct view storage tube. The CRT itself was a storage device. Early computer graphics was built around the DVST (direct view storage tube).


4051 The Tektronix 4051 was the first desk top computer, although it was best if you had two desks since the 4051 nearly filled one of them. Programming was in TEK Basic and programs were stored on a tape drive. The cost in 1975 was $6,000 with 8K of memory.
If Tektronix had chosen to further develop the 4051 it might have been the IBM of today. I believe that one reason they didn't was IBM was our largest customer for the DVST graphic displays.



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  1. jim SchimpfNovember 11, 2010 at 3:20 AM

    Here was your competition at the time: IBM 5100 Portable Computer. I remember seeing one of those at the home of I think someone from Brookhaven Labs in NY. This puppy didn't have the beautiful graphics of the TEK (I used just terminal version and it was spectacular) but did run APL which was a revelation to me. (Link to IBM article: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_2.html)

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