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"

Comments

You Whippersnappers

[oldzoot]

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