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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"
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
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.
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.
Subject says it all, you can often pick up an old classic mac for as low as $5. Go and find a decent fullscreen clock program or screen saver and shove the thing in a corner of your office.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I wonder where they got the number of "200" for SOL's that are still alive. I've got one in my storage room, and nobody's bothered to ask me if I had one. {grin}
ELKS doesn't need an mmu or fpu. It's not quite Linux though, as the name implies (Embedded Linux Kernel Subsystem)
Anyone in or near Austin who wants to see some vintage computers should check out the Goodwill Computer Store on US 183 at Ohlen. Lots of old micros there in the back room museum, plus a disk array frame (I think that's what it is) out of a Cray.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
You must be thinking of something else. The only way to reprogram the character set imagery on the Sol was to re-blow the PROM that was part of the VDM circuitry. Besides, the amount of RAM it would have taken to store the character imagery would have been ruinously expensive at the time.
Somewhere in my stack-o-$#!+, 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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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? ;-)
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
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...
And you mean to tell me that, in all of your experience, you still don't know how to format a paragraph?
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Unlike wine, computers do not get more potent with age.
If you want your PC company to survive, don't name your computer SOL.
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
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.
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.
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
I subscribe to a mailing list with some of the people that made it to the show (I wish the picture of the DEC lappy had managed to show the sticker that said "Digital Prototype #6"), and an Apple IIC is nothing to them in terms of age. A recent 'dicksize war' had most of them ponying up machines made in the sixties, or mechanicals made in the forties, or punchcard machines back to the early teens..
BTW, RT-11 is *not* BASIC-like..
.sig: Now legally binding!
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
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.
Not to be cruel, but you need a refresher..
BASIC, as you knew it, was an interpreted language.. You were LOAD".."'ing, were you not?
Oh, and the 386 never hit 66.. That was a 486.
If you ever want to try your hand at Linux on it, might drop me a line. I've done it a couple times..
.sig: Now legally binding!
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.