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Vintage Computer Festival Shows Off Ancient PCs
Markgor writes "Just finished looking through some pictures from the recent Vintage Computer Festival in Marlboro, Massachussetts, the first time that it's been held on the East coast. The best pic has to be the one of the Sol-20. Here in Ottawa, we have a bunch of vintage computers sitting in one of our museums, including an Altair, but I haven't seen an intact Sol-20 in a long long time"
So when is there going to be a "VCF Central" for Texas? :-)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Wanna Bet?
Not only can a lot of us do that and breadboard it, but we can write the Boolean expressions, as well.
You have to remember, you're hangin with a bright crowd.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
My favorite is the vacuum-tube unit they use to store ONE decimal digit of data...
So did it get replaced once a system came onto the market that was powerful enough to generate the smoke in a virtual environment?
old computers suck
like the golden leaves of Fall
let them rot in peace
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
After reading the other replies I'm glad my highschool wasn't like that. Sure we had teachers who were computer illiterate, but the computer course teachers knew their stuff. Hell the sysadmin was also on top of things. The sysadmin and programming teacher let me and a few friends do independent study of C++, while the rest of the class was clunking on QBasic. Granted, QBasic was/is old, the teacher knew C/C++ but taught the students the basics of structured programming with QBasic. "Goto is a bad thing, most of the time."
Someone said something about tech teams, well at my old high school there were two guys, me and one of my friends. The sysadmin had to not only cover the highschool but every other school in our district, so he pretty much left the highschool in our hands. We computer techs pretty much had a pass out of every class if we wanted it. We were also given pretty much free reign over the highschool webserver. We had the only linux based web server(for educational purposes) within 50 miles. Those were the good old days when we could play frisbee with cds down the main hall, and the principal would just say hi.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
512! Bah! Big deal I got a Mac 128K that I bought new in 1984. When the 512's came out I upgraded, when the SE's came out I upgraded again. Today the little beastie runs 65Mghz with 16 Megs of ram. It still works and makes a great answering machine! I still have all the original parts to make it a 128 again, however there is a new hole in the case for an Fast and Wide SCSI port, and the faster proc had to be soldered on due to earlier vibration problems. It was so fast back in it's prime that you had to step it down a notch during the boot sequence to run Dark Castle.
I'm still using one, although I have the 'mouse' (rats in the cellar) upgrade.
Wayne
So there's at least one person here who could draw it, and I'm willing to be there are others. Just because there are a decent number of MS Visual Basic "programmers" out there doesn't mean that the real kind have vanished.
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
How did Wired get the story the following day and yet all of us locals that obviously keep up with the industry totally missed it?
My first! A Poly88, from Polymorphic Systems. Orange, with a white front and a yellow reset button. It's remains are around here someplace...
I bought an old 386 box at a swapmeet a few years back that had Coherent on it when I powered it up.
The people selling the box to me referred to it as a 'cheap case' not even considering the hardware inside worth mentioning.
I moved the 30 MB drive out of it into my Altos 586 machine (called a 586 because it ran an 8086 processor and supported five users simultaneously on it's five serial ports). Made it into a real powerhouse box for Xenix. Microsoft Xenix (before they divested and sold it off to SCO) supported five users simultaneously on that hardware, with only 512K of RAM.
You want the SE/30.
Anything less than that and you can't run NetBSD on it.
Who would ever want to run Apple's crappy OS?
Incidentally, I was using ARCNet cards and scavenged TV coax cable back then. Boy, 100mbps ethernet is sure an improvement!
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
very close I'll be 40 this month
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
Ahhhh, you've managed to consistently misspell "Acorn" too.
As for that list, it doens't mean shit. I started on a 48k ZX Spectrum, then a C= C16, then moved onto a Spectrum +2A (As well as basically being the computer admin for the BBC B's & Masters at my school).
I don't consider any of those old school enough to count. The newest "old" you can sensibly claim is probably an Osborne, possibly the Apple ][ or Atari 400/800
You'd be better off starting with a tube of Z-80 chips and a lot of wire wrap. The Sinclair architecture was extremely sub-optimal, stunting the power of the Z-80 chip immensely.
That Plus is new compared to my 512K. The plastic is even yellow on mine.
Good thing too, Linux needs an MMU.
;) Multics on an i086. Without an MMU. Now thats a hack i'd like to see ;)
;)
There were/are versions of Linux that don't. Specifically for the 68k. I should imagine the versions that run on 086/286's don't require an MMU either.
Multics might go though.
Anyone got a General Electrics mainframe spare?
I'll stop being so pedantic now
I remember the strange looks I'd get in the in the NYC Subway with my early Compaq as some people thought I was bringing a sowing machine along. Or how about that steel encased Kaypro ... mine had 2 floppy drives & 64k !
Still, the best example of showing my grey hairs is a working Heath-Zenith portable I've got in the basement. So much fun going through airport security with a device that took 10 AA batteries!
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Rich did the software, it had a little editor that you'd enter strings like:
0.......
.0......
..0.....
...0....
.0...0..
0...0...
to show the time sequence of which light strings you wanted lit.
OK, it's not exactly rocket science, but we thought it was pretty cool :)
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Just like these guys.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The way I heard about it was in a mailing from an old friend of mine who used to be my ISP. The way the letter came in, I thought he was organizing it and showed up to give him support. :)
This was a relatively quiet event. Now that we know it'll work, I expect that a ton of us locals will do our best to get the word out next time. I know I will.
the old disable interrupts and get the hell out of r0 before a dma request comes along routine...
i did some cool stuff with the 1802, i built a repeater controller with 3-second hang-time and 3 minute time-out-timer with a morse code transmitter identifier that would go off after 10 minutes of inactivity. i squeezed the code to fit in 256 bytes of the rom so i didn't have to decode the high address lines. the sense lines hooked in to the ef lines, the output used the n lines to hit the set/reset lines on a 4013, the other half divided the colorburst crystal to 1802-useable frequencies, the interrupt line aborted the morse code and reset the timing, the morse code (20 wpm with proper fcc-spec dot/dash timing) was generated using the q line. and it scares me that i can remember all this, including most of the op-codes.[00] 71 30 - disable interrupts, x=r3 pc=r0
[02] 90 B3 - get hi r0, set hi r3 (r3 = 00xxh)
[04] F8 08 A3 - load immediate "08", set lo r3 (r3 = 0008h)
[07] D3 - set program counter to r3 (0008h)
I have some old computers. But they don't work anymore. So now I decorate my house with old computer parts. Some people call me weird.
Ooooh good to know you. You made a great page! :)
You must be thinking of something else. The only way to reprogram the character set imagery on the Sol was to re-blow the PROM that was part of the VDM circuitry. Besides, the amount of RAM it would have taken to store the character imagery would have been ruinously expensive at the time.
I don't remember the model of the video card (S100), but it DID allow you to program the characters.
And "ruinously" expensive? Assuming 8x8 characters, 256 of them will only take up 2k, or 8 2112 chips. Even 8x16 chars would take up "only" 4k.
A dingo ate my sig...
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
I converted most of my files over from my Xerox-820 clone (a Bigboard, actually) using a three wire null-modem cable when I got my first IBM-PC and (eventually) a Serial card. Running MODEM7 on the CP/M side and Procomm 2.4.2 on the PC side.
I remember how sucky it was, because the CP/M machine had 8" double density disks that held 720K whereas the crappy PC only had the 5-1/4" 360K floppies.
I live in Marlborough. I work at a large company in Marlborough. Plenty of engineer/geeks who would have gone, had we known. How the hell did they advertise this show, the newspaper???
Print is dead.
The top won't dry out if you store the PC on its side.
I started in grade 9 in high school with HP2100A-based system built by GEAC. Now, 29 years later, I program a block away from GEAC HQ.
...
It had ASR-33 teletype (with paper tape punch for "persistence"), HP card reader, DICOM cassette tape (3 bays), Centronics Loud and Unreliable printer. And a whopping 8K of core (on a board the size of today's Intel motherboards).
I wrote BASIC games on punch cards for awhile then started machine language programming directly on the HP using the front buttons for bit input.
Standalone dump was the first useful program I wrote there I think.
When the Altair came out later, it blew my mind to think that an individual could own their own computer
I have a nice photo of the system as a momento (sitting at the office) plus the original HP manuals sent to me by Dr. Sweet of GEAC.
We used to call him long distance and heckle him for info. So one day he got fed up and mailed me all docs for the HP. What a great guy!
Repeat After ...... Me RT11 is not a basic like operating system.
also unlike wine (www.winehq.com)... it still can't run half the apps i want it to! arggh! =)
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Apple Mac SE ?? That ain't shit.
:)
Hey, did I say listed are shit?
If you do think that way, you are insulting the rest of them too.(j/k)
In fact they were remarkable computers at time. Many are still working well. My ATARI 400 is still running very smooth.
I had 3 cromemco's from 1979,1982 and 1985 (Ok they arent as cool as that Altair 8800 I had and after reading what people would pay for one... I cry that I threw it out 10 years ago)
Granted they weren't home computers but labeled as minicomputers but they ran Cromix (a really lame version of Unix) the 79 and 82 versions ran on Z80 processors (Yes processors... you could put multiple processor cards in the card cage and run up to 4 at one time) but used that damned 8" floppy for storage. or had a 12" platter hard drive at a whopping 2.5 meg (The 1982 unit)
The 1985 Unit was coolest of all, it used a 68000 processor (DIP packaging just like the TI-994a!) and had a funky RLL/MFM drive. I doubt it was origional though, as the drive controller card had a 1987 dat stamp on it... so it might have been a retrofit.
I hated to leave them behind in 1992 but I couldnt physically get them out of the basement (All but the 1985 unit weighed about 250-300 pounds, and that didn't include the 8"floppy drive caursel changer drive... My first taste of Unix was Cromemco+Cromix, no wonder I have always despised DOS/Windows...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> And "ruinously" expensive? Assuming 8x8 characters, 256 of them will only take up 2k, or 8 2112 chips. Even 8x16 chars would take up "only" 4k.
Didn't many of the original Sols only have 4k of memory? I remember when ours got its first 16k memory card - we were in fat city!
Yes. I find it annoying when a bunch of kids come into this sort of discussion and start carrying on about machines made in the millions in the 80's that were available at places like K-Mart.
Not at all in the same class as my SYM-1 singleboards. Not even close to an Apple 1 or a BigBoard.
Go sit at the kid's table, Apple ][ fans.
I've got an Apple Mac Plus, and another in the mail (through ebay). It's amazing how flexible those babies still are. (tcp/ip over ppp to access www, etc)
I am running ELKS on an 8088 laptop. Can't run much as of yet but it does carry a major coolness factor.
Being a young geek myself I remember my first computer....I was too young to remember it all but it ran win 3.1, I used to play with dos all the time, I was the only kid in school with an e-mail address. Good old days.
It's not much different than the computers you're all calling obsolete, aside from the fact that I don't have to worry about a display or keyboard (or even storage devices). My I/O are the sensors and actuators of the Navistar-International 7.3L Turbo Diesel "Powerstroke" engine. The current production version will attain 275 HP and 520 ft/lbs of torque in a Ford F350 with a manual transmission.
How's that for an output device?
So... is anyone else still making a living programming these "obsolete" computers?
Help find a cure for Gidget.
There was also a popular compiled basic called CBASIC. See http://pilot.ucdavis.edu/davidk/documentation/26-2 217.htm
Did you notice the stuffed TUX the penguin doll sitting on his desk?
>Rt-128 and I-495
:)
You mean 128 and 95
From about 1989 to 1992 I used a hacked-up box with an original IBM PC-XT board, 640k, and a 40 meg hard drive. I'd run Desqview so I could have a terminal emulator window, a text editor, and Turbo C all running at once.
Ahhh yes. Kinda brings a tear to my eye thinking about the old systems. I can still remember when my father brought home a Northstar Horizon kit computer ... spent the next few weeks on the kitchen table with his soldering iron putting it together (yes, resistor by resistor, capacitor by capacitor, chip by chip). The kit came complete with a wooden outer case ... very shiek. We had a full height 5.25" hard sector floppy drive and a teletype terminal. CP/M hummed along pretty well on that old box.
... a green screen CRT! That was some serious technology for the '70s.
... just to boot. *sigh*
Later upgrades included 32k of RAM (which is, incidentally, half of what the lunar lander had), an additional half height 5.25" hard sector floppy drive, a 8" hard sector floppy drive, a 9-pin dot matrix printer, and
Nowdays, MS recommends 128MB of RAM
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
Yeah, I've had to put up with people like those too. People don't realize that everything is just a skill. Unless you are 'trained' and a 'professional computer programmer', it's very hard to get people to believe what you're doing is real, and not just another kids fantasy. Of course, today, trying to explain to them the concept of programming from scratch is not even worth it sometimes... They're too used to RPGMAKER 2000 doing all the work, and l33t 45535 making Quake Levels and calling it a game, that the concept of telling the computer how to do something at every step of the way seems unbelieveably alien.
Small minded people only trust people that the government/buisiness tells them are important. Otherwise, everybody is equal, (satire) And equality's for commies! Everybody *CANNOT* do whatever they put their minds to! Only people ordained by GOD to have skills on these magic boxes can do anything, and that only takes effect when they're 25.(End satire)
and don't get me started on how The education system demands people to think the way their teacher tells them, and follow not the rules set in place, but the "don't piss off the teacher -- he/she is *ABOVE THE LAW*" rule...
I've gotta stop writing, or I'll be here all night ranting about how bad school is for intelligent people.......
speaking strictly from experience, of course...
It's been a long time.
If I was your dad I would've gone to the school and told that bitch off.
Addendum...
Of course, even before that ('74-'77), I was programming really minimal computers, more like programmable calculators... CompuCorp and Litton/Monroe desktop programmable calculators. I could make those things sit up and beg!
And of course, we had the IBM "bubblecards" (not punch cards) that we sent to the school districts UNIVAC.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Subject says it all, you can often pick up an old classic mac for as low as $5. Go and find a decent fullscreen clock program or screen saver and shove the thing in a corner of your office.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
A friend of mine has got a couple of (I think) RL02's and an RK05... .5hp snailshell blower used to drop the air pressure in the drive chamber, to lower the air resistance on the head(?).
The drives themselves aren't noisy (nice quite belt drives, IIRC). What is noisy is the
One of them (I forget which) has a 1hp electric motor (yes, I know how big a motor that powerful is - definitely 1hp, about 1.3kW) which drives a huge blower and a hydraulic pump. Seems to pump stuff resembling Citroen LHM fluid through an oil cooler (cooled by the blower, among other things) and into the mysterious bowels of the unit...
Wow, the memories just keep flooding back! I remember the day I recieved my server from VALinux like it was yesterday. They had recently decided to exit the hardware business and were offering great deals on cute little 1U servers that I just could not pass up. Some of you youngsters will laugh now, but I was amazed upon reciept of my new box! This thing had 2 750Mhz processors, 512MB RAM, 72 GBs of screaming 10KRPM SCSI drives, and three NICs as well! All this in 1U (I know, this is huge by todays standards but back in the day...)of space! That thing booted up VA's version of RH 6.2 like nothing I have ever seen! It was hard to run more than few dozen progs at once with only 512MB (again, those are MegaBytes, not Terabytes!) but I was amazed at the performance back then. I still have it too, maybe I will fire it up one day for a trip down memory lane.
I wonder where they got the number of "200" for SOL's that are still alive. I've got one in my storage room, and nobody's bothered to ask me if I had one. {grin}
Oooh! Goody! Can anyone hook me up with a copy of the SSSD system disks (ie. 92k format)?
Mine "disappeared" many years ago, but I still have the big beasty itself...
I still miss being able to tell if the computer had crashed by the different hum of the CPU.
Was that Wine or wine?
*grin*
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
Fault finding was dead easy, going by the buzz...
If it dropped in pitch, and the screen came up with vertical stripes, one of the lower 16k chips had failed.
If it stopped altogether, the ZTX650 in the chopper PSU (provided +12v and -5v for the 4116 DRAM's) had gone, change it and all would be restored...
I made a (very) small fortune at school doing this. Either a 4116, the ULA, or the chopper tranny died. Or they bashed seven shades of excrement out of the keyboard membrane playing Hypersports or Daley Thompson's Decathlon...
ELKS doesn't need an mmu or fpu. It's not quite Linux though, as the name implies (Embedded Linux Kernel Subsystem)
I can hit Usenet on my TRS-80 Model 100, by dialing into my Freenet account (Twin Cities Freenet, not the thieves network thingie).
I could dial in there with a dumb terminal as long as it supported VT-100.
The IP stack is for the server, dude. The terminals connect to the server over serial cables and/or modems.
Get with it. Never heard of Unix (also known as the Time Sharing Operating System) huh?
*sigh* You've definitely come to the right place to find sympathy about THAT particular type of problem. The public schools, even today after technology is pervasive and it's generally known that kids are MUCH better at computers than most adults, you still end up with all the teachers (adults) assuming the kids are stupid and such. Case in point, one of the worst ones was our old computer lab "admin", although in those days administration was something done by a secretary. I think he was just "the guy who runs the computer labs". He, like so many other teachers, spent a lot of time and learned the first batch of computers pretty well (Apple IIe's for us) and then never moved on. That's where their skills died and still are to this day. Even when they brought in a lab of Macintoshes (wow they had real sound and graphics - amazing!) he almost didn't bother with them. Every maintainence that was done was by an Apple tech, which was pretty often since they were treated like IIe's :(
:P The reaction by the adults, who didn't understand what it was that we were doing and didn't WANT to, was to put on "security software" which basically hid the desktop. Well you can imagine how long THAT was effective. Then someone got smart (sort of) and decided to form a tech team of students to hep with the computers. Problem is, all of us geeks were now labeled as troublemakers and they didn't even allow us to take the "test" to get on the tech team. It was quite funny because I'm pretty sure they were worried we would show how really little they knew about what they were talking about, right after they got done convincing the schoolboard that they're extremely knowledgeable.
;)
The real problems came when they were getting computers decent enough for people to DO things with them. This led to kids like me and several friends of mine MUDding and other such tripe (ahh the glory days...when you could lag for 4 minutes and it was considered "normal")
And then we had a kid send a joke email threat letter to the president and all hell broke loose
Anyway that's my semi-amusing anecdote/rant for this week! Tune in next week for the same dose of crap!
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
I live a hop, skip and jump away in Brattleboro, VT, and didn't hear about this. I wish there was a central posting place about cool events like this.
Aaaah... The Sinclair ZX Spectrum... with the rubber keys, each one of them performing around 4 functions depending on what other key you held while pressing it (not allowed to actually type LOAD, you had to use the correct key combo!)... and 48K of RAM... yeah, we had the big boy... shat all over the 16K model... and then the 128K came out... and we were sad, cause the tapes (Good old audio tapes) would have extra stuff on them for 128K machines...
And it's fantastic way of colouring a screen... not by pixel, but by blocks of pixels...
And those tapes... oh the joy... the listening to the screaching, the waiting for minutes on end as the game loaded... the screaming as you got to the end, only to find out it didn't actually load properly... the pleasure of getting out your tiny phillip head screwdriver and adjusting the head of the tape drive while listening to the tape until you heard that it sounded the best, then trying again to load...
Oh damn that was fun...
And the games...
And yes, we still have it.
And a 16K one
Mmmmmm... so many tapes... so many games!
Sincerely,
Anyone in or near Austin who wants to see some vintage computers should check out the Goodwill Computer Store on US 183 at Ohlen. Lots of old micros there in the back room museum, plus a disk array frame (I think that's what it is) out of a Cray.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Apple II
Apple II+
Apple IIe
Apple III
Sinclair ZX-80
TI-99/4A
Laser 128EX (currently a game machine hooked up to a 27" TV and surround sound)
Unitron clone (Apple II/II+ functionality - heck, it's probably worth something now)
Yoink!
The coolest voice ever.
It's either way. In Ma, everything has two or more names. Marlboro, Marlborough, all the boroughs (boros). Mass Turnpike and I-90, Rt-128 and I-495 ... Main Street and Rte-20 (in almost every single town along 20).
Oh well, just follow the dunkin donuts directions and you'll be fine ...
Oh, absolutely you could tell the difference! The really flashy games even had their loading picture change, or fill in, as the game loaded (Or others had a timer counting down)... so not only were you sitting there, listening to the sound and saying "Oooh, that'd be the music loading ther", "Right... that's a big picture...", "Oooh, I wonder what that bit is", but also you were getting more and more pent up as the timer ran down/the picture filled in/you could just hear the program coming to the end of its load...
It was so damn good.
And then if the game actually loaded you had the fun of things like:
Renegade
Avenger
Dustin
Manic Miner
Cookie
Rastan
oh, and just so many, many more...... aaaah
I think I might have to get an emulator to be able to play all those games I have without having to fire up the old girl and battle with the tapes. (oooh, and it'd be actually legal too as I own them... WOW!)
The classic open source example is MESS, but there are lots of other emulators out there.
Windows and Unix users should check Retrogames and Zophar, and Mac users should check emulation.net.
http://www.themeparks.ie
You must be thinking of something else. The only way to reprogram the character set imagery on the Sol was to re-blow the PROM that was part of the VDM circuitry. Besides, the amount of RAM it would have taken to store the character imagery would have been ruinously expensive at the time.
Somewhere in my stack-o-$#!+, I have a pixel-perfect copy of the Sol-20 font bitmap I made for the Mac and the Amiga. If I could figure out how to port it to X and Windows, I would.
Thanks, but I'm still trying to forget their appalling BASIC.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Ahh, me to. It was the only computer our high school had. 8k RAM, cassette, and chicklet keyboard. When I graduated, they upgraded to a 32 k PET, but everyone figured there was no way anyone would need that much memory.
It's just a Python riff. I oughta slice you in two and dance hallelujah on your grave.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
G-d! It's been ages since I'd heard of that. We had an Axel (back in '80). I don't remember what it did with it, though... this was back before those namby-pamby "Computer Labs" you young whippersnappers have. We had an Axel (version unknown) and a TRS-80 Model I, on a couple of spare desks in the honors math room.
Those were the days...
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
In my basement, with the manuals. Haven't tried reading other than the first installation floppy, though.
I have a circular slide rule too.
I can scratch little marks in the dirt with a stick.
I have fingers and toes.
Beat that ya pussies!
Years ago we learned that you could over-clock a 6 Mhz IBM PC-AT to 8 Mhz. You just had to replace the timing crystal, which cost $2.00 at a local electronics shop. The chip speed was actually half the crystal speed, so we were actually replacing a 12Mhz clock with a 16 Mhz clock. sure enough, Norton Sysinfo showed a 25% performance gain.
P.S. the crystal on the IBM MoBos was plug-and-play, no soldering involved. The Morrow might be different, and the system might not handle the speed. But for $2.00 or so, it might be worth a try.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
I visited Boston for the first time at the end of last year. I had a few days spare, so the Boston Computer Museum was an obvious visit. Finding that it had been absorbed into the Museum of Science wasn't too bad, but what happened to all the exhibits ? Shipped out to storage in California and "... The Best Software for Kids Gallery(TM), now part of an expanded Cahners ComputerPlace". - Just as you describe, it had been reduced to a trivialised version of MSN.
I've a better computer museum in my own shed 8-(
OK, so the Virtual FishTank is excellent, but that's an exhibit on behaviours, not on computer history.
obkarmawhore: Not quite computers, but immensely cool electrical oddities.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
We are about to give you your score. Put on your peril-sensitive sunglasses now. (Hit RETURN or ENTER when ready.)
That's right... one, single punch card. One. We have millions, but we're only selling one.
================
Microsoft is not the answer, Microsoft is the question. The answer is "no".
Oh, wow, that takes me back.
I have two Sol-20s, a Helios drive, and (I think) a Shugart 5.25" floppy drive and controller board. The controller has some bad buffers, I think, as the board has to be just so or it won't read the disks.
Currently, all this hardware is sitting in my garage, rusting away from benign neglect. I haven't powered any of it up in over seven years.
Did you get the music interface board? This consisted of a small card that plugged into the S-100 bus, which tapped out exactly two lines: INTE and ground. Thus, by setting and clearing the interrupt disable bit in tight loops in the 8080, you generated a pulse-width modulated wave which was fed to an amp and resulted in music. For a 1MHz machine, it was damned impressive. I still have that program laying around somewhere.
What I'd really like to have is a copy of Steve Dompier's aside in the GamePak manual, concerning the "violent" nature of Target.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I was planning on clustering my collection of ZX81's. Now that would be a supercomputer...
On a clear disk you can seek forever
Bah, your m8 was an amateur. My mate could tell what type of loading encryption was used just by listening to the noise.
Then again, he was considered a bit of a 1337 in those days.
Ahh, the pages of assembler type in from magazines, the endless fun of swapping over tapes, rewinding etc. Those were the days.
Oh, and ps, SKoolDaze, anyone?
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
does this mean that the stuff on the chip in pi was actually smegma?
Katsuyo Mori
You ever think what your life would have been like had you never had to deal with people like that? Ugh. No public schools for any kid of mine, ever.
Sorry for the off topic rant.
If you're talking about QuickBasic 3 or higher, it was actually a threaded P-Code compiler. It didn't tack on the interpreter, it compiled to a series of two byte IL calls that pointed into a pre-compiled library of run-time routines.
Well, for what it's worth: My first computer was the commodore 64. And it was a beauty. Considering it had no hdd, and had 64k ram total, I'm still amazed at the programs this computer ran (and still did until last summer's house clean up). Plus, I remember my amazement at the totally unfriendly basic prompt it sported ( Ready. ) Didn't know what to do with it until after three days or so of typing crap and getting "command not found" (ahhh.... those were the days).
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
There was also a clone named Venix (from VenturCom), and something (Coherent?) from Mark Williams Company, although that may have required a 386...
Just junk food for thought...
I am a senior at Brandeis University and we do have a real turing machine there. Unfortunately, its not working, and though we still have the schematics, no one has gotten around to fixing it. We also have a big old lisp translator (i think thats what it is) that no one knows how to use.
You've got a Cray! Too cool!
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
64 K of ram
1050 Tape Cassette Drive
Weird Assed printers....
and what I think STILL are the best Joysticks...ATARI joysticks took a licking and kept on ticking (until you broke the ring off....then just go buy the internal stick in the store, open it up and replace it).
Gorkman
>Years later, I translated it into 8086 code, in >case anyone is interested :-)
This should run quite fast on todays machines ;-)
The reason it was so slow was that the 16K it used was the video chip RAM. This is esentially the same chip used in the ColecoVision (except Coleco for some bizarre reason used the RGB version and an RGB video to RF modulator!) In order to use this RAM, you have to tell the video chip the address, then you can read sequential data bytes from it. This is an I/O operation, rather than a normal memory operation. Everything must have been stored out there, including the program and variables.
I learned how slow it was one day when I saw one powered up in a store. I hit the RETURN key and the thing took a whole second of thinking before it did the nothing that I asked it to! That's right, it took a whole second just to do nothing!
When you had a PEB or sidecar RAM, that was in the 64K address space of the CPU, and I've heard that BASIC would know to use that instead. Of course TI discouraged any non-PEB expansion, so sidecar options were only used by the tech savvy. (And not many tech savvy folk went with the TI in the first place.)
The main units (and about two dozen different cartridges) were very common back in the mid 90's when I was collecting classic video game stuff. Except for the old non-A version with the chiclet keyboard, that is. It's the goodies that will set you back.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Back when I was a tot I remember going to an Atari Personal Computer store with my mom. She was scared away by the prices. The Apple's advanced graphics impressed me- all we had at the time was a Tandy TRS-80. A few years later we got our first "modern" PC: an IBM 286 10mhz with a whopping 1mb of RAM with a proprietary GUI menu system that resembled giant folders and notebook paper. The dern thing would only run on one version of MS-DOS- 3.3 I think. Galland
I ran Minix on a Tandy 1000 HD. It did have a 286 upgrade card in it, but all that did was make it a little faster. You still couldn't load a memory manager because there was no extended memory.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Maybe one of those dinosaurs carries some of Bill's first snippets. And after carefull analyses we could determine where and how exactly things went bad.
/* Useless code here */
I suppose it comes down to something like this
#define EVERYTHING ( MEM + SWAP)
int Main(){
bla; bla;
myfirstwinappsallocatedheap = malloc(EVERYTHING);
return(0);
}
hmm..... maybe up ahead.
I was looking through some storage cabinets at work last week. I found several DEC RL02 cartridge disks in one of the cabinets. These were removable disk packs, about the diameter of a pizza and several inches thick, that could store a whopping 10 megabytes. They were used in a top-loading DEC RL02 disk drive that was attached to a PDP-11/24. We used the PDP-11/24 as a multi-user software development system, with up to 8 programmers simultaneously writing, compiling and testing their code (FORTRAN and MACRO-11) on a system with 512KW (1MB) of RAM and 20MB of disk storage. The system was very responsive. The operating system (RSX-11M) was written in carefully tuned assembly language. The average Palm organizer of today has more RAM and a faster CPU.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Maybe someone has a TI up on eBay or whatever for not much...it'd be nice to have one again, just for the hell of it. If all the goodies (more RAM, the enhanced BASIC cartridge, etc.) are also available with it, that'd be a bonus.
Where are you located? E-mail me back.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
My dad got an XT in '84. Old man had me programming on it by the time I turned 6.
I wrote a screen saver for it, because my dad's other computer had one on it. I talked about it in class and my teacher thought I was lying about it, and made me write a note to my mom about how I lied to the teacher and shit. My parents got pretty pissed at her, because I hadn't been lying. She never did like me, though.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
There was an old version of Xenix that would run on an XT. Not sure where you could find a copy today.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Acron Atom
Acron BBC Micro
Acron Electron
ACT Apricot
Amstrad CPC464
Amstrad CPC6128
Amstrad CPC664
Apple II+
Apple Lisa 2
Apple Mac SE
Atari 2600
Atari 2600jr
Atari 400
Atari XE
Cambridge Computer Z88
Camputers Lynx
Casio PB-100
Commodore CBM 8032-SK
Commodore CBM 8096
Commodore Plus/4
Commodore VIC-20
Dragon 32
EACA Colour Genie
EACA Video Genie EG3003
Epson HX-20
Exidy Sorcerer
HP 9000/217
Jupiter Ace
Mattel Aquarius
Memotech MTX 512(internel)
Memotech MTX 512
Oric 1
Sage II
Sharp MZ-711
Sinclair QL
Sinclair Spectrum
Sinclair Spectrum+
Thanks Kevan!
If you had full-blown MS QuickBasic, it would compile. You could even link shared libraries into it.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
http://goodwillcomputerworks.net/museum/index.html
free ipod and free gmail!
http://goodwillcomputerworks.net/museum/index.html
The Comadore PET is where I started.
free ipod and free gmail!
Oh yeah, I still have my Sol-20, it's sitting about 4 feet from me right now. I built it from a kit in 1975, it took me months to get it running. I learned programming and assembler in college on this machine, and did some of my first professional programming jobs with it's assistance. I recently fired it up and it still works but the keyboard contacts have rotted away so no kbd input. I contacted a guy who sells keyboard refurbishment kits for the Sol, I've got to order one and get this darn keyboard working again and then it will be 100% operational. I've been reading some experiments done by old vintage PC users that stored programs on audio tape. One of them recorded the data tapes to CD and burned audio CDRs of the programs. Now you can just hit play on a CD and load the programs like you used to load them from tape. Very convenient. I've got to get the old SOL running and get my old tape library verified and archived on CDs.
Really? Where do you keep the infinitely-long paper tape? ;-)
Anyone who is nostalgic about the early days of personal computing will probably enjoy reading "Once Upon a Time in Computerland". Altair, Imsai, the birth of the IBM PC. Money, greed, exotic places, fascinating people, and even a murder made it a great read. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-fo rm/102-8338959-5229744
Go to the Science and Technolgy museum in London (okay, so it's a long walk). They're building a full Babbage Difference Engine there. I was there back in May, and they were building a brass printer for the output. Really cool steampunk tech, but I can't help thinking the machine would working better in binary than decimal. maybe that was Babbage's problem.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
I went on Saturday (got wrapped up in stuff and couldn't go back on Sunday). I took lots of pictures; they're here:
http://www.cow.net/album/VCF
I had a great time, guys! You bet I'll be there next year!
Yeah, I remember when disks were made of granite slabs with pieces of lodestone arranged in a grid on the top. What was really annoying was when cats would jump on the disk drives and scramble the data.
36?
The first computer I used at school (I think it was around 85 or 86) was an Axel AX-25 computer. We used that with a monochrome monitor. I remember learning BASIC on this machine.
When the teacher wanted to teach us about colour, he used to hookup another computer (can't rememeber what) to a TV, and also hook a tape recorder to it to retrieve stored programs from standard cassette tapes.
After we started learning programming, some of my rich friends bought Ataris that hook up to their TV. We used to play heaps of games on them.
Another thing I remember about my computer studies at school, was my computing teacher actually brought in his university thesis to show us what computer paper looks like. I remember ho amazed we were that you could put rolls of paper and then you rip them apart and they look typed!
> > I am a senior at Brandeis University and we do have a real turing machine there.
;-)
> Really? Where do you keep the infinitely-long paper tape?
This sort of problem is easily solved by one of these paper machines, a small army with chainsaws and a large forest.
Correct key combo my ass...
It was much simpler than that. Just press "" and watch the border flip red/cyan, red/cyan, about once a second, until you hit the leader tone.
Another Speccy-owning friend of mine was commenting on how you could *tell* different data by the noise it made loading in. Screen bitmaps had a particularly distinctive sound.
I imagine there are people who had Spectrums from when they were new who could be snapped out of a coma by playing a Manic Miner tape instead of music...
hrm...like launching a nuke? ;)
DevPlanet.org
I can't believe I missed it... I know so many others who would love to have been there, too.
noah
Aye, ye call that vintage, do ye boy. Well ye never worked on an analog machine, have ye boy? Analog, now that's classic computing fer ye. Patch cords n' plugs, none of dis sissy software stuff. Software, eh, sounds like underware !! Analog computers, aye, they were the stuff. Capt'n, she kenna do warp 5, she's an analog !!
As for that list, it doens't mean shit. I started on a 48k ZX Spectrum, then a C= C16,
You traitor!!! ! You shall be summarily thwoked.
THWOK!
No one who had a speccy would even dare look at, let alone BUY a commy 16.. shame on you!
Ahem. Saying that, speccy owners who bought Amigas, I take it back.. they rocked! (and they still do!)- but not if you bought the one that looked like a door stop...
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
Technically all it did was tack on a version of the QuickBasic interpreter to your code. That's why it was still slow and the EXE's were HUGE no matter what your program did.
Hell, I have a full Symbolics 3640 upstairs (former employee) as well as a DEC Rainbow and a few TI 99/4As and a bunch of other stuff. I would have loved seeing all this stuff. There's a guiy somewhere local that's trying to put a museum together for the stuff and my wife keeps threatening to send all my "clutter" to him.
In the Boston computer museum there was a simple calculator built out of tinker toys(do you remember them?) and you could add numbers together on it. I haven't been there in years, I'm sure microshaft had a hand in ruining a lot of computer museums.
You might want to start pounding on Google -- I purchased some Osborne program disks from someone that offered that service a few years ago. Or ask around in the CP/M usenet groups.
And you mean to tell me that, in all of your experience, you still don't know how to format a paragraph?
*nod*
I work fifteen minutes away in Southboro, and would have cheerfully blown off at least half a day of work to see some of those suckers. Prolly could have dragged a couple of other folks form work along, too...
*sigh*
Do you remember the TV advert they used to have? There was a kid and his mom playing with that logic gate rig.
I was that kid.
I don't remember any of it, I was, like, nine years old at the time. Just about the only thing I remember, which may or may not be from that exhibit, was an old Apple II running Eliza. It absolutely, fundamentally blew my socks off. I was beyond astonished by it. It's too bad they've gutted the good old truly educational and interesting exhibits in favour of crufty Microsoft propoganda.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r/computer_simula tors.htm
COSMAC Elf, IMSAI, Altair simulators & manuals.
PLUS the HTMLized version of the Popular Electronics articles for the COSMAC Elf (c.1975).
Compatible with Windows 3.1, 95, and NT, as well as WABI (Sun), WINE (X-windows),
SoftWindows (Mac), and other Windows emulators.
Are there even any binary copies left in existence? I know only the partial source is around any more, the whole thing was written in PL/I.
It's too bad they don't make machines like the GE-465 any more. Computing has been totally gutted by people like Microsoft. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who knows anything about logic gates any more. I'd be willing to bet there's hardly a person here who can even draw the schematic for a shift register. The soul has gone out of the machine, it lays now as a mere carcass of it's former splendor.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
These are pictures from my collection. Some of these (HP + ACT) I no longer have, and some are labeled wrong like the Acorn Atom (should be the Acorn Cambridge Workstation) and the Casio PB-100 (which refers to a picture of a pocket calculator)
That was the COSMAC ELF and the chip was the RCA 1702, right? You could get 'toy' ones with a hex keypad and an LED display and maybe 1K of RAM?
Jeez, I remember learning 'indexed-indirect' and 'indirect-indexed' but senility has kicked in and I can't remember what the hell they mean :)
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
I have an original copy (with manual, etc.) of IBM's Basic Compiler V1.0 for the PC. It compiles the code to .COM files, they are small, and it is NOT an interpreter hidden under the hood. It builds binaries that can run on PC-DOS 1.0. I also have IBM's Pascal Compiler V1.0, and (of course) a boxed copy of PC-DOS 1.0.
If you have an IBM-PC with 16K of RAM or so it's all usable on it. You'll need two floppy drives to do any reasonable work with the compilers.
See http://www.threedee.com/jcm for more info.
Yes, we still have the XT. No, I haven't tried to get Linux running on it.
Good thing too, Linux needs an MMU. Multics might go though.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
>VCF East has a bright future ahead of it. Just give it a year or two.
No doubt, once you consider the rate at which this industry generates "vintage" machines. Back in my day, we were happy to hit the kilo/mega/giga/tera byte/hertz/pixel mark.
Dancing Demon!!
one transistor.
A transistor? A transistor? You LUCKY BASTARD. When I were a lad we had to switch currents with our teeth, and only when a wire marked "gate", which was shoved up me arse, went live with over a kilowatt.
took up half your backyard.
Half your back yard? You LUCKY LUCKY BASTARD. Ours took over t'town, and town next door. And it were so heavy that people making tide tables used to have to come to me mothers' door and ask where t'computer would be on such and such a date.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
It's a man with a mustache
I just got back from seeing "The Score." I enjoyed it quite a bit. One fun bit: the uber-hacker in his Mom's basement is trying to affirm his skills, and says something along the lines of "Get me Kaypro 2 and a modem, and I'll get what you want." I was amused by that. I used to be pretty amazed at those Osborne's back in the day...
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
This is a serious question. My dad is a Morrow fan from back in the old days. He still uses an MD-3 machine to store all his business records, etc and he telnets into his ISP looking through a WYSE terminal.
But now he wants to get with the times as it were and over clock his 4mhz Morrow to a bitchin' 8mhz...
Does anyone know how to do that? I mean, this isn't the sort of information that makes it on the internet. But it is very likely hidden away in old computer user group journals, etc.
It's too bad Slashdot doesn't announce things like this. That would have given it tons of publicity.
Nevertheless, I'd like to see one of the replica analytical engines, or a Turing machine on display at one of these shows... Now that would be worth the price of admission!
I'm not sure you'll _ever_ see a RL turing machine, although you can dig up a simulation on-line somewhere. Try google. (It's the infinite tape thing that does it every time...)
If you want to see replica difference & analytical engines though, all you have to do is get yourself over to London and find the Science Museum. They've got a great display there sponsered, I think, by one of the universities.
Cheers
Chris
I used to have a TI-99/4A...first computer I had at home. TI pulled out of the computer business about six months after we got it, though, so it never got beyond 16K and the hideously slow (double-interpreted?) built-in BASIC. I wonder if things would've taken a different track if we had gotten the expansion box and all the goodies for it...but we bought an Apple IIe (with 128K, a DuoDisk, and an Imagewriter) two years later and I ended up shifting most of my activity to that machine.
Maybe someone has a TI up on eBay or whatever for not much...it'd be nice to have one again, just for the hell of it. If all the goodies (more RAM, the enhanced BASIC cartridge, etc.) are also available with it, that'd be a bonus.
Getting somewhat back on-topic, that expansion box is an impressive beast...makes even my Apple II stuff look somewhat wimpy by comparison. Definitely from a time when men were men and sheep were scared...or something like that. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
And when you are 10 years old with one of those things(PEB), they are a royal bitch to carry around.
Tell me about it. I was the buffest ten-year-old on the playground, with bigger biceps and triceps than most of the bullies, and I thank Texas Instruments for that.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I still have my early code and my Master's thesis on Northstar floppies.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
And when you are 10 years old with one of those things(PEB), they are a royal bitch to carry around.
Oh yeah, I've also got 4 1981-era Electrohome/Mitsubishi 13" RGB color monitors. There are two color demodulators (for CGA use, or with Apple IIs or TI-99/4As or whatever), and I put together a sync inverter to make them run with Amiga 500/1000/2000 machines. Matching set of 4, and as I recall, three of them work. They're not at the curb yet, but if you want them, e-mail me. FOB Toronto, Canada.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
my old sol... ah, nostalgia. I had a piggyback card (plugged into one of the chip sockets) that let you reprogram the graphics. I think it might have replaced the prom and I'm guessing (?) intercepted some subset of translation requests for its own evil purposes?
I used an RCA Recomp III back in '74. Paper tape punch... You didn't program in assembler, you hand-assembled it and punched in the octal code onto paper tape!
And when I was about 8 (1970), I had one of those plastic 3-bit mechanical digital computers... anyone else remember the DigiComp?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I had the occasion recently to visit the "computer museum" (or whatever it is that MS calls it) at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. This is the one adjacent to Microsoft Studios.
... enlightening experience. On the one hand, they had all the new MS-compatible gadgets (next-gen phones and PDAs), as well as a cool X-box presentation (no X-box yet).
Anyway, I must say that it was an
On the other hand, this was really history according to Microsoft. They have a couple of long walls with computer history displays and online presentations. The facts though are really slanted toward the aggrandizing of Microsoft. I'm not really anti-Microsoft, but these guys were pushing some other reality that I don't remember living through.
Add to that the fully interactive wiz-bang displays and computer setups for the kids to play with - allowing Microsoft to really indoctrinate the next generation. It really reminded me of the old adage - "The winner writes history".
I still recommend it to anyone in the area, but don't forget your anti-brainwashing shades.
BTW, gotta post this anonymously, since MS was paying me a lot to be there...
From Memory..
;-)
71 Disable
30 90 BRANCH PC+90
F8 08 Load Immediate 08 Put Low R3
A3 Set P = Reg 3 (I think)
Never heard of it
I wire wrapped my first 1802 from the Popular Electronic's article in (1976-7??). Debugged it by replacing the xtal with a switch and stepped it one machine state at a time..
I bought an OSI "Super Board" (no case of course) for $279.00 from a local vendor and made a channel 3 modulator from a 7504 a coil and a variable cap.. Screwed up every tv the entire apt. complex..
I wanted a comadore PET at the time but the darn price was too high.
I did port microchess from the KIM-2 listings and used the OSI character set to create a "visual" chess (that was fun)
My first real computer job was doing 8008 assembler using a asr 33 teletype to papertape and burning the code into 1702 EEPROM's (256 bytes ea.) but was able to leverage my 1802 knowledge to change jobs and work on an real "blue and white" COSMAC. I still have the COSMAC with dual 8" drives in the attic somewhere..
Some kids have no idea about the joy of figuring out the difference between indexed-indirect and indirect-indexed on a 6502.
chuck
I have an old Leading Edge 8088 box sitting on a shelf that is full of promises and predictions for the future. Some day I'll crank it up and compare the predictions with reality.
Ask me about my vow of silence!
I remember when I had to walk 18 miles through the snow in flip-flops to flip the reset switch on my altair. you whippersnappers have it so easy with your candy-ass protected memory operating systems. Back in the day, we felt lucky to have a rom monitor that we did not have to toggle a tape bootloader in with the front panel. You want to use a keyboard and video display??? better plan on writing your own BIOS assembly language links. I worked my way through 1976-77 building Sol computers for the Computer Store of San Francisco. The owner would buy the kits for like $700, then pay me a few hundred to assemble the kit. He would then sell it for the assembled price of $1299, with more profit than buying the thing from proc tech assembled for like $1050. My own rig was an Altair 8800-A with an Imsai power supply on an external rack-mount panel attached by a big cable. I had a proc-tech 3P+S with a keyboard ( no case ) attached by a six foot ribbon cable. I also had an ASR33 tty on the serial port for a printer and paper tape reader/punch. I had a processor VDM-1 video display and a CUTS tape interface board for a casette recorder. I was most happy when I got a GPM module which had the SOLOS monitor in ROM, so I did not have to toggle the tape boot loader. I loved to play trek80 and target. Target was a very cool shootem down arcade style game that featured sound effects radiated from the computer to a nearby AM radio! ( actually TREK80 sounded pretty cool on the radio too ). My system eventually evolved into having 3 16K ( yes, K! ) dynabyte memory cards and the seminal North Star micro disk system. I also added a 24X 80 video card ( Also dynabyte I think ) because only wimps used 16X64 ! OVer the years I added a morrow M16 16 Megabyte hard disk and of course a Z80 processor. Godbout static memory boards replaced the dynabytes when the ceramic capacitors aged ( or absorbed moisture was the rumor I heard ) and the tuned transmission lines for the refresh signals became untuned and the boards quit working. I worked at various computer stores and got to play with stuff like Cromemco Z-2 computers, the cute little 5 slot S-100 system that looked like a toaster ( what was the name of that thing ??? seems like it started with a P ) as well as the IMSAIs both the big S-100 boxes and the VDP-80s. There was such diversity back then. Probably a dozen viable processor types - everything from the 8 bit up to 12 and 16 bit systems. Several manufactureers for each type of processor and each with their own operating system, or if you were lucky, CPM so you could actually buy commercial software. I had kept my Altair till about 1989, when I decided to give it away - I figured that I would not want to saddle my kids with such an esoteric and useless piece of junk. /me dodges flying fruit Oh welll.. so much for foresight! not that my pile would have been worth much- it was too non-standard to be collectable except perhaps as a bad example.
Z
enough is too much
Or is this guy look a little bit upset at having his picture taken?
Nevertheless, I'd like to see one of the replica analytical engines, or a Turing machine on display at one of these shows... Now that would be worth the price of admission!
There is no spork.
We've got a TRS-80 Model I. Sits about three or four meters from my 1GHz Athlon machine. We don't use it quite so much now that we've got decent emulators for the PC, and a few hundred 5.25" disks' worth of stuff stored on the hard drive as disk images too, thanks to the wonders of a small Level 2 BASIC program and an RS-232 cable. We've got TRSDOS, LDOS, CP/M and MULTIDOS for it, but NEWDOS-80 was always the one we used day in and day out.
Crush, Crumble and Chomp, Dancing Demon, Dunzhin, Hellfire Warrior, Voyage of the Valkyrie, Scott Adams Adventures... those were indeed the days.
</nostalgia>
I agree, I live one town west of marlboro and work one town south of marlboro and never heard of the show.
Feh, come back when they've got an IP stack. Then come back when they can hit USENET. :)
Anybody remember that machine? I think that's the name of it. IIRC, it was orange and kindof looked like a toaster. The kid's dad down the street had to buy one for work. I believe it had about 4K of ram, cassette drive, and cost about $2k. This would've been around '80 or so when I first saw it.
I never thought about even using cd's to store the tape backup and then play them back. I just had loaded them through the cassete player and then loaded those into an emulator. Another thing can you post the guys address who sells the refurb tools.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
Unlike wine, computers do not get more potent with age.
I beg to differ! In the early 70s, toggling in a boot loader on the front panel switches of your PDP-11 was considered mundane and detestable. Today, many collectos live for that very activity. I know because I'm one of them; I'm currently restoring a PDP-11/20 (ca. 1970) so I can do exactly that.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I went to the NMSTC recently with my brother-in-law who's all of 11 years old. As we breezed by the computing section, the only thing that we found at all interesting was the vintage computer section. He wasn't at all interested in the silly kids section where they had a bunch of PCs with crap software and limited Internet access. Nope, this kid loved seeing the Altair, the USAF comp, and an old DEC. Hell, the old Mac Plus that they had would have been vintage to him.
You're so right about how poorly done the computing section is at the NMSTC. For a museum that purports to be all about science and technology, it's rather slow in getting anything up to date...I still see things there that I saw when I was 11 (and that was a long long time ago).
A blue and white Cosmac in your attic... That sounds like a RCA Dev System 4 Cosmac, one of my favorite machines. I have one with the 8" drives and Micromonitor too. I wish I could get into your attic! Think you might still have some software for it? (Mine can be seen at) http://personal.lig.bellsouth.net/lig/d/o/dogas/co smac/ ;)
- Mike: dogas@bellsouth.net
Unlike wine, computers do not get more potent with age.
Nope, guess not. Oh well, too late to add something relevant...
Is your company running tools written by ma
I have an apple IIc in my mom's basement. It still works, too.
Last time I was there I played space quarks and wilderness.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
It doesn't really have to be said...
but....
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
~zero
sig?
they ferment & improve with with age, providing the cork hasn't crumbled into the hard drive.
If you want your PC company to survive, don't name your computer SOL.
how Digital made the best stuff then and today? It's too bad Compaq bought them and ran them into the ground. Oh well.
Massachusetts. Albuquerque. There. Their. They're. Its. It's. Then. Than. Hemos. Homos. Taco. Tacky.
have a Teletype ASR-33 console and magnetic core memory. We may laugh now, but in their time, many of the old machines were wonders of engineering and technology. Older teletypes actually encoded and decoded ASCII mechanically. UNIX actually ran on machines with 128KB of RAM. A 5MB removable platter hard drive was HUGE! If only our software matured as fast as the hardware.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
...if it were better publicized.
;)
//e from my parents' house and waste my days playing AutoDuel again...or loading AppleWorks into the 1mb RamWorks III board (with the CGA extension card). The nostalgia almost gets me teary-eyed!
Marlboro is in a good location, particularly since eastern Massachusetts is largely considered to be the Silicon Valley of the east coast. Being a resident of MA and working in the industry, I would have expected someone at the company I work at to have heard about it and reported it.
That particular hotel is a nice little joint too...and it's a stone's throw off I-495.
It almost makes me want to recover the Apple
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Yup, that was pretty much my first computer. Dad brought it home in 1985 and showed me how to run pinball. Then he showed me how to play some games written in Basic. Then he showed me how to change the games written in Basic by using the Basic compiler. That was how I first learned to program.
We kept that XT for a long time. I remember spending long hours on it after school trying to beat every campaign for Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War. Swapping all those 5.25" floppies to play King/Police/Space Quest.
With that CGA monitor displaying those 4 colors at an amazing 25382859299230 fps, I was unstoppable in Ultima 3 and Bard's Tale. Those were the days. Then my parents stopped being so cheap and upgraded to a 386-DX 66Mhz with a HARD DRIVE and VGA monitor.
Yes, we still have the XT. No, I haven't tried to get Linux running on it.
rk
Rangers Lead the Way!
let's see, i have about 4-5 z80 s-100s, some with 5.25s, some 8s, a couple cp/m 68k machines, a old osborne, some kind of "pascal engine", a wierd z80 notebook, and an altair 8800 w/ the cool paddles.
i sold junk at a swap meet while working through college -- some guy saw an old pc i was selling and gave me the altair.
i hope to someday get them running again, each was running when retired, plus i have most of the manuals.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Heh. Back in my freshman year in college (1995-96), I had an Apple IIGS in my dorm room. Read my email by dialing in at 1200bps and using an old terminal emulator. (Hey, it even had ZModem!) Some of the students would come by to pay homage to my old box, and its industrial-strength ImageWriter II printer.
:)
Meanwhile my roommates had Pentiums and were playing networked Doom and Doom 2.
That old GS was fun -- even if I couldn't run around shooting Imps with shotguns.
The SOL was quite a computer :-) I first learned 8080 assembly language on one.
:-) I still have my paper copy somewhere... Years later, I translated it into 8086 code, in case anyone is interested :-)
:-)
Correction, machine language... I didn't have an assembler at the time, so I photocopied the 8080 instruction set page (note singlular) and went from there. One side of the page had the opcodes and the hex values, the other had the inverse so you could look up an opcode by hex value.
In the time when everyone was selling their $100 to $500 BASIC, Processor Tech gave away their "5k basic" in source code form. Imagine that
Yep, that was a beauty and a beast. The video card had 1k of RAM, mapped as 64x16. What's interesting about the video is that you could reprogram the character bitmaps so that you could get custom "graphics" on that screen, and a clever programmer could do FAST graphics by changing some critical character definitions at the right time.
Don't forget the Northstar floppy disk system. The disks were hard-sectored, so you couldn't just get the ones from Radio Shack to work. I had to drive to the next town to buy one - and they were $5 each at the time...
(Four Yorkshiremen can start any time now
A dingo ate my sig...
- one transistor.
- one bit of memory.
- no hertz.
- a keypad with no keys - just a sharp point that would prick your finger each time.
- a 4dpi video display with one pixel (black) that was fixed to the keypad (underneath).
It cost $80,000, would generate smoke, and took up half your backyard.Yep, those were the days.
My first job in 1977 at age 16 was programming inventory applications on an Altair 8800b. I was used to my dad's mainframe at the time (Honeywell 6000 - he worked for them) and, to me, the Altair was a total dog. You had to memorize flipping a pattern of switches on the front to get it going. I complained the whole summer that it didn't run a decent OS (Multics! - HA!) Little did I realize I was working on a bit of history. Then again, I guess Multics was a bit of history too...
too cool... I wish I had heard too. I'd have jumped on 20 been there in a heartbeat, Apple ][ in tow. What boggles my mind about the whole thing is that I've got more processing power and memory on a smart card now than on some of the computing hardware that was on display and cost 100000x more in its heysay :-)
] call -171
* 1F 2A 16 37 FF 4C BA
.sig: file not found
a old osborne,
Cool, one of my former co-workers still has an original Osborne that boots and runs.
I got a working C1P with 8K RAM, ROM BASIC, and a 300-baud cassette interface. And a C4P-DF, 48K RAM, and 2 8" floppies. The 8" floppies did 270K storage, which beat the hell out of the flaky 5-1/4" drives that would do 80 K on a good day. And 65U was one kick-ass OS, on the bigger machines it would do multi-user, not a bad trick for an 8-bit 6502, way ahead of its time. But my baby is still my Quest SuperElf single-board - RCA 1802 CMOS processor (weird but elegant architecture), hex keypad for loading the machine language programs, on-board 64x128 pixel bit-mapped video controller, damn. And I got the expansion card with 4K RAM, and the blazing 1200 baud cassette interface. Machine language, now that was real programming...
71 30
90 B3
F8 08 A3
D3
Stop the oppression! Free the Mallocs!
How this stuff brings back memories of computers were fun and M$ didnt really count. I still have my old KayproII (but im missing the disks to boot it) and i was privalaged enough to work for a company called SORD Computer (Japan) that actually sold the 1st 8080 computer (No , it wasnt Altair). In my job i got to meet industry greats like George Morrow , and Bill Godbout, and my employer Takayoshi Shiina. But all good things must be eventually controlled by giant corperations, and creativity stifled. I am glad to have been there at the start though. Now if i can find a KayproII boot disk ill get to see a computer with a 4Mhz Z80 boot 10 times faster than a 1.7 Ghz machine running Windoze Go Figure
* Carthago Delenda Est *
It was a great deal of fun sitting down with the manual and a copy of creative computing typing in the programs and learning at the same time. My favorite games that came with it were Trek-80 and target (a shooting gallery type game).
For some links to PT stuff try out the following:h Sol20.htm c =344
http://www.geocities.com/~compcloset/ProcessorTec
http://www.corestack.com/machines/sol.html
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?
and for an SOL-20 emulator: http://thebattles.net/sol20/sol.html
I also learned to program in 8080 assember, and played with focal and anything else I could find included with it.
The one we had had a dual drive Helios II 8" floppy drive. ... you slide the disk most the way in and it would "suck it in", and you would push a button and it would whirr and eject the disk. A bad think to do with these was to was to grab the disk as it was still being ejected ... would as often as not cause the drive to jamb. ... the drives sounded like somebody bouncing on an old bed when they were busy seeking.
These things were the oddest drives I've seen. They had motorized eject and loading
The other odd thing about the drives is that both drives had their heads mounted to a single voice-coil positioner
Enough reminicing from an old fart computer geek!
- subsolar
Hey .. I wrote more than my share of 1802 code the hard way too. But then its kind of like plowing a field with an ox & plow in the age of tractors. 10 points for trying but why would you attempt it in the first place ?
. waterwingz
This goes to show the value of computing technology, no matter what era the computer was made in. I believe that computing hardware will, over time, be seen to be as important an invention as the pen. Those of you who joke about vintage hardware should stop and think about when you were first exposed to computers. Don't you have fond memories of that? Well others do too, and now, they know that the power lies not so much in megahertz and megabytes, but in pressing a button and watching something good happen.
No data, no cry
I used to work in Ottawa at the museum of science and tech, during the time where they were shifting their computer structure around. We used to have a hall of computers, and there were displays and booths that taught kids about electronics and circuitry through hands on information... kids could manipulate magnetic core memory, and see the information being changed in real time, and have it read back off the core... Ping pong balls and pinball plungers were arranged in such a way that gates were represented in a way which they could wrap their heads around... Oh, and best of all, EVERY computer on display was functional, including the Crown 'micros' from the 60s... every kid got their name or a phrase given to them on a small piece of punch tape printed by devices older than their parents... but it was also kept current, all the way up to the PCs and Macs of the day (this was around 1995). Then the museum got a huge cash infusion from Microsoft and Intel, and suddenly all of the vintage historical machines either got put into storage (some were lucky enough to make it onto display, such as the right arithmetic wing of an old USAF computer) but not in a functional state... hands on became kids sitting in front of twenty pcs playing the latest microsoft educational software and browsing a very limited intranet... as well as easy access to hotmail. I quit my job at the museum after this, and never looked back. I'm throughly disappointed in the computing section that exists at the NMSTC now... it's still in the same state it was in 1995.
Urban Detail
Unlike wine, computers do not get more potent with age.
I beg to differ. Here's a picture of the 32K RAM expansion card (and a few other cards) in a 1981 Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Peripheral Expansion Box. Yes, they're clad in cast aluminum. Yes, the steel chassis is stamped of far thicker metal than the unibody of a Toyota Tercel.
On the other hand, I could beat someone over the head with a stick of SDRAM, but it would be more memorable to the DIMM than to the individual requiring the physical behavior modification.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Man, I was wondering why Philip Morris' website was down...
Hey! Two of those Zenith Data Systems monitors are sitting in my garbage right now. They both work!
Want 'em? Come scoop 'em, they're at the curb. 1352 Victoria Park Avenue, Toronto, halfway between Eglinton and St. Clair on the west (southbound) side of the road.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I work in Marlborough, Mass at a large helio-centric computer company, and nobody heard any mention of this vintage computer show. Given that 50% of tech employees in Mass are ex-DECies, and at least 25% of them have a VAX or PDP in their basement, I'm surprised there wasn't as many exhibitors or attendees. If only it had been advertised....something of this nature usually spreads pretty quickly by word of mouth, but I still didn't hear anything. Very odd.
:-) Hmm...maybe I could have found someone at the show that has a use for a case of 8" floppies...I've got to get rid of these darn things. Heh.
If I had known about the show, I would have dragged along some of my old equipment, and some other stuff that people have around work. I've got a fully functional Atari ST, with mouse, external scsi drive, monitor, and all kinds of MIDI software...hook it up to my synths and I could have put on quite a show! Maybe I would have found someone there with a copy of Epoch UNIX too....a co-worker of mine has an old Epoch server board, that just needs a copy of the OS to run. Anyone here know where I can find a copy of Epoch UNIX?
man tunefs | grep fish
Back before they invented the wheel, the platters were square, and man those were noisy. Not to mention slow. Of course, the iron age was another great milestone in hard drive technology.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.