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IMSAI Series Two
Dino writes "You can actually pre-order a new IMSAI here. These folks bought the rights to produce the IMSAI in the late seventies, and provided the unit used in Wargames. It has a genuine S100 bus, but also has modern features as well, the most interesting being a driver that will allow you to access an ATX motherboard via the parallel port as a disk drive."
I don't really get this, but I suppose some people might be into it.
Let me know when they port Linux to it.
- Have a picture
I like the fact that they give you an emulator to play with until you can ever afford the real thing!
"I think you know what I'm talkin' about, Mr. President; We're gonna kill us a mummy!" - Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley
Where is the obligatory Linux port?
The revolution will be televised. Blackout restrictions apply.
Can you make a Beowulf cluster of them???
how long until an emulator is out for this thing?
Me email iz skyewalkerluke at microsoft's free email service.
But I'd probably buy one anyway, just for das blinkenlights. =]
but, why would I want to attach an ATX motherboard through the parallel port and use it as a disk drive?
I mean, what kind of crazy disk would a motherboard be?
OK... Maybe I'm just not nerdy enough... but... what would you actually do with one of these? There's surely not all that much you can do with an old 8080 these days... especially not anything that would warrent spending almost $1K on it anyways.
I fully appreciate the cool factor... being the machine used in Wargames doesn't get much better... (On a flight between the US and Australia recently they were playing the movie in flight... fine movie, damn fine movie) but I just can't see why anyone would actually pay for anything but the original as used in the movie...
If you're trying for authenticity, stick with the original design. If you're trying for something that runs the old software, you're better off just running a Z80 emulator on your modern PC. Performance will be much higher than the original, etc. And if you're trying to make something that looks cool (front panel with switches and blinky lights), that's fine too, but why not put a modern computer inside instead of bothering with the Z80 innards?
It all makes no sense to me.
controll my battlebot guard dog while chowning my neighbors' cat?
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
leave your dogs alone
See, you're one of those proverbial "whippersnappers" that I've had occasion to grumble about.
cat
From the website:
*$995 base model gets you the IMSAI SERIES TWO Classic cabinet; newly designed advanced IEEE-696 compatible Programmer's Front Panel; ZiLOG 20 MHz. Z8S180 processor; 1 Meg battery-backed static ram; 32K Flash memory (mapped into 1 meg directly-addressable memory space); battery-backed Real-time Clock; PS/2 keyboard interface; IMSAI-to-PC parallel interface; 10-slot actively-terminated S-100 Bus interface with four sockets (additional sockets extra); IDE Drive interface for up to four hard drives, CD-ROM drives, etc.; dual 5 1/4" & 8" Floppy Disk controller; two RS-232 Serial ports and two TTL/RS-232 Serial Ports; one Centronics parallel printer port; system monitor firmware with Assembly Language source code; 350 watt switching power supply (standard, 500 watt optional); Owner's manual; DOS software development utilities disk, and upgrade offers that will ensure value for years to come!
One meg of RAM. That may run about 4 services in Windows. Maybe.
I remember being really impressed when the dude broke out with the 8-inch floppies in WarGames. I even remember that they were Elephant brand on the sleeve. Most of the stuff he did on the computer was possible too. The war dialer, the awful speech synthesis (although for some reason it improved halfway through the movie as if the dude learned how to talk correctly), the acoustic modem, etc. Even the trick he used on the door to the infirmary seems like it would be possible but I'm not an EE so I wouldn't know for sure. Definately a great movie.
Sorry but what is a Beowulf Cluster? (genuine inquiry)
Yeah.. Umm... I recently upgraded my computer for less than the 995 bucks for this 20mhz z80 computer, and I get far greater Bogomips than this thing will ever get.
Seems that you can mount an ATX motherboard in these things. Kinda neat, be the envy of other geeks at the next lan party.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
In College we had a class that featured a topic just like this, its so intresting and Fun. I am glad they added a ATX option really makes it better! Man I sure do Love IMSAI, hopefully they will also add Usb support so I can use my wireless Nic.
keanmarine.com
I see that they're offering it for a kilobuck...remember when that was the price of a 64K Ithaca Intersystems S100 bus RAM card kit?
yeah, but Jehovah bought me a cool retro computer, so suck on it!
(wooo... karma to burn...)
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Did these people just crawl out of a luddite cave?
$1000 for this honking piece of shit?
$1000 for something with less processing power than a Nintendo?
I'd pay $1000 for a WOPR, but not for this.
I'd be interested if they upgraded to something bleeding edge - like a Z80, for instance.
How does the megahertz myth apply to this?
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Being a Nevada City native, my first thought on getting to the web page was "My God! Somebody listens to KVMR enough to post it on their web site!" My second thought was "My God! KVMR has a webcast!"
Anyway, check it out if you want to listen to a seriously strange mix of radio. Don't get discouraged if you hear a show you like and can't find it next week, as their schedule is pretty bizzare. "Every third Wednesday, 4-7AM" is par for the course.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Well have you seen what Imsai's are currently going for on Ebay? This one is cheap. Of course where are you going to find any S100 cards?
rolflmao
A couple of years ago I saw a nice, wood case NorthStar S100 system sitting on a surplus table for a very modest amount. I was tempted, but had to admit that there was nothing I would do with it. Would have had to use a PC as a terminal into the NorthStar, and even an old 386 could emulate the S100 machine faster than the S100. So what's to be gained by running an S100 system?
Of course the IMSIA would at least have the nice Blinkin' Lights, the NorthStar was one of the S100 PC's that avoided them and went right to a ROM monitor, but beyond that I can't see anything I would enjoy about an old S100 system.
By the way, Bil Gates didn't have an S100 system when he wrote MS Basic. He used an Emulator. The way I heard it from another student there at the time, as a student he got caught at Harvard running the emulator for commercial gain (developing a commercial product, MS Basic). He was instructed to cease immidately, or he would be thrown out of the university. He elected to leave. (Can anyone confirm that this is how it went down?) Lets just all be glad that he doesn't do such questionable things anymore. ;-)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
But then i saw the slashdot ad when i started reading the comments. It made me want to buy from penquin computing. For around $1,700 i can get an AMD server from penquin computing.
My uncle had built the thing from a kit, and then we inheritted it. We didn't quite have to key in binary code on the front panel (although it was a good exercise), but I DO remember being excited about getting a used 32K S-100 memory card up at the Trenton Computer Festival (do they still have those?). We started off with a cassette interface and a 64x16 character monochrome display. Eventually added two 'hard-sector' 5-1/4 inch floppies (about 100K each). The processor got upgraded from the original 8080 to an 8085 and later a Z-80. We also built a TMS9918A-based video card (that was a pretty neet chip - wasn't it used in the Colecovision or something?) and I later built a MIDI interface for it. This was all back in the early/mid-eighties. A BSEE, MSEE, and 15 years of experience later, I still learned a lot of what I use on a regular basis on that machine.
Under the new licensing scheme, upgrading your 1977 version will cost you $36k, or about $9/byte.
Seriously though, if you're interested in the history of this machine and the dawn of the pc era in general, check out a book called "Once Upon a Time in Computerland".
Funny how for a machine that is supposed to ship in about a month that all the "pictures" they have of it are just computer drawings. I personally would find it interesting if they did ship this thing (though I'd never buy one), but I have to wonder though. It's too bad they decided up "upgrade" it, thereby losing any sales to those wanting something much closer to the original. It's kinda like reproductions of antique stuff (like phonographs say). Many people would buy repro's just because they like the look of the old phonographs and they probably won't ever even play it. But in the case of phonographs, these repros are significantly cheaper than purchasing an original. Here the price is almost even and I don't know of too many people who would purchase the thing to have it look good in their office (at least now post-web collapse).
Does it play "Global Thermonuclear War"? That looked like a great game.
IDE disks? IDE disks? What the bloody hell are IDE disks?
When I were a lad, we 'ad to use 8 inch floppies.
8 inch floppies? You were lucky.
Cut to the Four Yorkshiremen sketch. Is there anyone else here who remembers Phoenix?
I think it is a pretty neat thing. Almost like the life size X-wings Neiman Marcus used to sell for 14 grand in their christmas catalog.
/.
Wargames was a pivotal moment in computer geek history. He got the girl changed, changed his grade, busted into SAC. Gave all of us geeks hope.
There was a time where us computer geeks had to play down our careers and hobbies if you wanted to get girls. Now it is cool, chicks did it, and Wargames had a fellow nerd who did it all.
Yeah I would buy one and put an ATX board in it. I think that would be much cooler than a wateer cooled case, mounting a motherboard in a fridge, and some of the other riduclous shit we see on
I went to the first Atari Computer camp in the early 80s. Yep, 400, 800, and early 1200 xls. We learned assembly by day and were regualr kids by night. But the best thing was the actor who played Doctor Falken in the movie visited the camp and signed autographs. It was an awesome experience for a 12 year old. Still got my 5/4 sleeve with the sig.
puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
1. Post first!
2. Read story, and maybe links.
3. Profit!!!!!
I don't know if you can find it, but SAM
on the commodore 64 did a good job with
that by default......
(Whoo I'm officially old now!) HEH
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
I wanted to make a processor board like this. Its real cheap components and would be great to program. I made a nice univrsal graphical debugger which can be used for any processor board and wanted to try it out with other architectures (other than ARM and MIPS).
If anyone has an old 8008 or anything simmilar please send it me and Ill make a board for it.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
The Geek Factor is high here but so is the smell of ageism, I mean, why? But if you were there and wanted a Spartan reminder of why the Bronze Age was the One Golden Age then maybe, whynot?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
wow...incredibly, the anonymous coward makes semi-sense with the "..a terrorist nation that'll try to bomb people for their oil and drop atomic bombs on surrendering nations..." stuff, but the whole "brothers and sisters" stuff and "Jehovah was a demon" stuff was waaaaay out in left field...sheesh...no gray..only black and white...wtf?!??! but anyways, the retrolooking computer is cool...i just wish i knew what to do with it...um..what DO you do with it? BASIC programing?? i used to do that stuff on my old TI-81 calc in Lit class in 10th grade...
I don't understand how someone can be so into this old stuff and played a part in it and then mistake "skittles" for "Reese's Pieces" in the movie E.T.? Thats just moronic.
You guys are LAME! This thing is HOT HOT HOT!!!.
Did anyone else click on the cheesy 70's photo where they are using the system? Yeah, a loud "Do you want to play a game?" from the movie came over my speakers and freaked the hell out of me.
Thanks, everyone at work knows I'm surfing now.
With a 20 MHz CPU and the expanded instruction set of the Z8 processor, it should also be able to spool hundreds of biorhythm charts out to my daisywheel in seconds and run Hunt the Wumpus really fast. This is nice!
I wonder if they're going to update CP/M to support all that RAM transparently. That would be sweet.
This goes back to the old questsion, just because you can do it, should you? I mean damn. Are these guys going to start rolling out Vic-20's with ide/scsi on them next? Some people are impressed with Das Blinkenlightes & switches, but I could go buy a commercial emulator, a big power supply, some relays a mounting board and about 10k LED's for alot less than they want for this POS, and I'd even have money left over for a buncha switches.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
(This post is certified by me, Anonymous Coward, to be a 100% authentic beowulf troll post. ALL OTHER BEOWULF POSTS TO THIS STORY ARE IMPOSTERS!! I have to include this disclaimer now, because all these beowulf imposters are suckin my style.)
I can faithfully say that the IMSAI 8080 was the first computer I ever used. That was in 1979.
The only specs I recall are that it had 16K of RAM, a cassette interface, and some kind of keyboard and CRT interface.
We had a tape with a version of BASIC that left about 7K available for programs.
It was built by a special class the year before I arrived at the school, and stored in the Chemistry/Physics lab.
No doubt the machine was a lethal instrument as the monitor was simply a bare chassis and tube, with no case at all.
I fondly recall a program called "Sub Hunt" that was written for it that got me interested in programming. The teacher showed me one day how to use the BASIC, and then left. I flailed completely for the next 4 hours forgetting something truly simple (like how math worked, or INPUT). After he showed me the next day, I took off from there and never looked back.
In my high school days I ditched only two classes. One was Senior German, and we had managed to convince the entire class to ditch that day. One went back, spoiling the entire plan.
The other class was Drivers Ed. I ditched it so I could sneak in to play with the new found wonder in the blue box.
The box had a large hand printed sign in BLOCK letter "DO NOT TURN OFF!". This sign was necessary because the only way to load the BASIC was to get into the machine monitor, and type roughly 100 bytes of hex, which happened to be a bootstrap tape loader. You typed it in, hit RUN, and turned the tape to PLAY.
A friend and I once tried to load this monitor with the front panel, but that was a nightmare and didn't work, so we gave up.
I discovered this machine late in my sophmore year, and that summer someone donated several Commadore PET computers, so next year we jumped on those without ever looking back.
It was interesting at the time, and I'm indebted to that fact that this thing opened my eyes to the wonders of computers, but I don't actually miss the machine itself.
Dude, find that person from your childhood who
smacked you in the head with a mallet and sue
'em -- you'll be set for life!
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
do you need to be wearing an onion in your belt, as was the fashion of the time?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Thank you kind sir. You see, us ACs can sometimes be more effective than the direct methods of the CLIT. Surely if Fecal Troll Matter, say, had asked this question it would have been modded down immediately.
This troll goes out to all my AC homies worldwide - you know who you are!!
You guys are HOT! This thing is LAME LAME LAME!!!.
...I'd rather have an old PDP 8E.
Basil
I still have a S-100 blank wire wrap board.
Maybe I can sell it on Ebay for $50 now...
All true geeks lust for a machine like this one that still allows you to program it and examine its state via the front panel, but this is an absolute requirement for all sincere geeks-in-training! Flush VB down the toilet if you haven't already; forget Perl, OOL, Linux and anything with an API that places 5 or 6 layers of insulation between you and the bare metal! If you really want to understand how a computer does it's job on a fundamental level, if you want to actually learn what the thing's doing, then you cannot do without a good basic machine like this. You will never be able to stand among the Great Geeks of History if you lack this kind of experience.
And the brethren went away edified.
The Series Two is a powerful microcomputer that more than fulfills most users' needs, but people should know that there are less expensive computers available that often feature satisfactory performance along with popular accessories such as a keyboard and monitor.
This is an important question! (genuine request)
Make the thing into a laptop. Try getting one of those puppies thru security at an airport.
Seriously though, it appears that this computer would really only be useful for embedded systems development.
However, the traditional emulator system running on a host PC would be far easier to use and also much more flexible.
This machine appears to be little more than a retro curiousity--a simple conversation piece with little practical use.
...I think Z-System, a CP/M-compatible operating system for Z80's that was made in the '80s, could indeed handle as much RAM as you'd managed to make the system address. I ran it on a TRS-80 Model 4 that had a processor upgrade card on it that used a HD64180, a relative of the Z180, and 384K of RAM. Hey, you laugh, but for a while I ran a BBS on it--since I could load the entire OS, BBS software and database indexes for 800+ messages into RAM, it ran faster than a lot of the PC BBS's of the day.
The "new IMSAI" looks like a machine I'd have loved about a decade ago, back when some ex-CP/M hackers had designed a Z180-based Z-System machine on a Baby-AT motherboard that used the XT bus. As I recall the official name was the "PC-Z" but they referred to it informally as the "Grudge." (Which of course led to someone suggest they should make a portable version and call it the "Pet Peeve.")
No, as fond as I am of reminiscing, I don't think I'll buy a new IMSAI, in case anyone asks. If I ever miss the old days, I break out a TRS-80 emulator, play a few rounds of an arcade game in its glorious 128x48 resolution, and remember that even if people pushed hardware to the limit those days in a way that they don't now, that doesn't mean it'd be much fun to go back.
You get a nice built in keyboard, an lcd display,
and it'll sync up to your real computer.
From there you can program your Z80 in assy, C, or basic. Heck, you can even download a basic interpretter onto your little palm-top/pda.
Experience the joys of accessing memory, indirectly indexing, and jumping back and forth.
And save $900 in the process!
So yeah, this is cute, but as dumb as a box of rocks. You can get those microprocessor notebook-style trainers for a couple of hundred bucks (check mouser.com ), not 9!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
What? Nobody suggested making a beowulf
cluster of these? If you networked about
a million of them, you could maybe emulate
a Pentium.
www.sjbaker.org
and program microcontrollers in Java.
J av elin_Stamp/javelin_stamp.asp
http://www.parallaxinc.com/
http://www.parallaxinc.com/html_files/products/
I remember when I first saw Wargames in the theatre with my friend Ken, when he broke into the WOPR (how's that spelled again? horrible memory for proper names) we busted out laughing, and got "shusshhhed" by everyone, as no one else saw anything remotely funny in the very serious scene onscreen.
We were junior high school 6502 machine coders, and the WOPR was an Apple IIe ROM monitor dump.
I still laugh my ass off every time I've seen that movie, the WOPR is an Apple II!! Oooohhhhhh,
the power!
I bet you've been waiting YEARS to use that!
What does the IMSAI have to do any PDP computer? Are you new to computers?
Why a S100 bus junk? Should have gone with a better designed SS50 board layout. It took half of the cabinet just to put enough board to make it some what usfull and the rest of it for a non swithcing PS to just power the wreck!
If he want can ship him a few Soroc terminals. One or to may still be alive! His cost.
With this and the Vacumn Tube amp MB did some one switch the wayback machine in reverse? ^_^
It was a great computer. I never owned one, but a friend did. He let me hack on it a bit. He was quite a sharp guy who knew how to toggle in the bootstrap loader. If I remember correctly, it was one of the last machines with a front panel. The Sol-20 I built soon afterwards managed without a panel.
I also just got a retro Mattel football game as a gift. What a wonderful era. It was cheaper than the original too!
Someone needs to remind these guys what year it is. Had something like this come out in 1977 or so it would have been a competitive product. The problem is that it is 25 years later now and while Star Wars might not look too dated this thing sure does. S-100 systems and CP/M have been dead since before a good majority of the slashdot community were even born. Is there some reason why I should now shell out a thousand dollars for an S-100 system? For that kind of money I could get a Sun Blade 100, build myself a pretty decent Athlon system, or get my car's transmission fixed.
This product surely belongs in the more dollars than sense catagory.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Yea ,me and the IMSAI go waaaaay back. I have a story about the IMSAI and me, it's not really interesting as it is long.
God is real unless declared integer.
Please try to explain WTF it is you're talking about in your summary of your news article. Slashdot just passes lots of this stuff through without adding any useful commentary, and I know you think you're being cool and all by using acronyms that only you and a few of your friends are familiar with, but please do the rest of us a favor by making your submissions easier to read.
... where it looks like the poster has just wanted to sound cool by not bothering to explain to the 99% of the population that isn't familiar with their pet little hobby, WTF they are talking about.
"IMSAI Series 2"? WTF is that??? And then the rest of the caption goes on to spew more unintelligable stuff about this IMSAI thing? It has an S100 bus? Great! What does that mean?!?!
I've just seen too many of these stories posted on Slashdot lately
How about this:
"KLV Chip Gets MOD4 Scoping"
F-Wad writes "Dysgen Inc. has begun shipping a new KLV chip with MOD4 scoping, allowing a bandwidth increase of over 50% in many cases. This should allow those of us without an interswitch to copy G6-level data nearly as fast as a real TTI-Mark IX!"
This could have come right off of the front page of Slashdot, I swear.
The hit counters have been going nuts and the e-mail has suddenly taken a huge jump! I don't know what's happening yet..
"Shall we play a game?"
"How about G-l-o-b-a-l N-u-cl-e-a-r Sl-a-s-h-d-o-t-t-i-n-g."
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Anyone remember the Polymorphic Systems 'Poly-88' S100 bus system? Originally released as the "Micro-Altair".
Man I miss my old Poly-88.
8" Floppies??? Ha! I had to use an old audio casette deck to save my programs. I was finally able to upgrade to 5 1/4" floppies (skipped the 8" for the higher density 5 1/4").
I remember finishing typing in 'Hunt the Wumpus' and playing it for hours. Next came 'Lunar Lander' in text mode! It took me a month of work to rewrite it to have some basic block graphics. All of this in BASIC!
I learned a valuable lesson about EMF with my Poly-88 right after I bought the RAM. Stero speakers and the Poly-88 don't play together well. I had my stereo on, with my Poly-88 on a shelf below my speaker. Fired up the Poly-88, BBBBZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTT. Fried the Poly-88.
64k of RAM cost me around $1,000.00 at the time. Never did get to install the RAM, fried the system the night I was going to put it in.
It took me a LONG time delivering newspapers to save up for this box and the extras. Did I mention that I was 12 or 13 at the time? I had to borrow the money from my parent for the RAM. I think I still need to pay them back for it.
Its one thing to be slashdotted, but its another thing entirely to have no clue that it is happening, and wonder at the sudden popularity of your website.
Once I met someone with a P-Code card for their TI-99/4A.
I had read that if you held down a certain key while the computer started up (I don't remember which one now, this was half-a-lifetime-ago) that the P-Code card would be damaged and stop working.
I can vouch that indeed, if you held down the magic key, the P-Code card went to the big bit-bucket in the sky.
Some time later he commented to me that his P-Code card had stopped working. I told him I had no clue why. ;-)
But the question is: can you run Linux on it?
Wherever you go, there you are!
Tell me when I can buy the WOPR.
word.
I read thru all the arguments and analysis here about why this is or is not a good thing to buy. Sounds like few of you were around in 1975 when the original of this came out. This one was built to LOOK exactly liek the original for one reason: Thousands of geeks back then lusted to own one of these things. Having ANY kind of computer in your home was just a DREAM back then and well out of most peoples price range. Two machines I considered were the IMSAI and a similar box by Altair. I never had quite the loose cash to do it though and didn't wind up able to buy my own PC until the IBM/AT came out. Had to take something like a car load out to do that too. So the real reason is nostalgia. Same reason people drive arout 50 year old cars. Very easy to understand.
Does anyone else see the irony in "pre-ordering" a product form a company that almost invented vapor-ware and floated their busines for months without delivering product? :-)
Johann
Your geek and nerd cards are revoked immediately. Someone who doesn't know what an IMSAI or S-100 bus is just cannot be a geek or nerd.
If you're interested in Wargames, my very poor Wargames simulation, written in java years ago, is here.
(Warning: rest of the site also old, has frames, and cheesy windows like buttons. I wouldn't bother looking unless you like Sharp computers or old Psions.)
What was this news piece all about? Computers from the 70's? Did they even have computers back then? I thought the only thing that they had in the 70's was polyester pants and disco.
I can get Athlon XP for this amount! Why buy a Hz computer when you can get GHz for the same price.
There's nothing inherently wrong with playing with obsolete technology: by examining the systems of the past, you give yourself a chance to learn from history. Not only that, but it has all the normal benefits of a counterculture: the return of ancient systems to viability (by those who are freakish enough to take an interest) necessarily works against the tendency of mainstream society to damage itself by producing a monoculture.
One thing that interests me, though, is that people who resuscitate ancient hardware get kudos, whereas doing the same with ancient protocols is a "pretty crazy idea".
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
WRONG! Don't you remember...
:)
The only way to win is to NOT PLAY THE GAME.
Joshua figured it out...
And he wasn't even a Cray...
LR
Forget about the guts of the thing, how could would it be to have an IMSAI 8080 chassis as your case?
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
While i love old stuff as much as the next guy..( or even more looking at my collection of 70's and 80's pcs in my garage )...
They cant be serious.. selling this ( copyrighted stuff to boot ) for 1k$?
Could build it out of spare parts for 50 bucks, and some patience with a paint can..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Todd Fischer is the "Fischer" in Fischer-Frietas, Inc. F-F purchased the assets (with his wife, Frietas, I believe. I don't remember her first name) of IMSAI when it went belly-up. Both worked at IMSAI; he in the serice department. Not too much later, F-F also closed (1983 I think). In 1999, Todd started-up Imsai again to capitalize on the growing wave of nostaliga surrounding the early S100 machines, particularly the Altair. This wave was fanned by the increasing awareness of the general public of the history of early personal computing, particularly as a result of books like "Gates" and documentaries about the Valley starring "Robert Cringley". These machines were showing up on eBay, with owners raking in mega-bucks...paying for vacations to the Bahamas with the proceeds from the sales of their formerly closet-bound computers to people with too much disposable income who saw an old Altair or IMSAI as a new investment vehicle. It seems like he's recently made the leap to production, with July delivery. I still can't justify spending $1000 for a machine that's not even the "real thing." It seems like an excellent re-implementation of the original, but it's just not the same. To get my fix of early computing, I've focused my efforts on running the Altair32 Emulation project. The project also has an IMSAI mode. The URL is http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/Alta ir32.htm
Ever had to enter the IPL by entering the boot instructionsn on the front paned?
Back in the days when you'd be able to make sense of the pattern of flashing lights. Now fuggedaboutdid.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Imagine a beowulf.... eehh...
do they have NICs?
can I put them in clusters?
:)
If far I as I can recall, both the TI 99/4A and the Coleco/Adam sported a TMS9918A graphics cpu. That chip natively handled 32 z-levels, each one hosting a sprite of your design. Ah the memories, coding in Logo, booting up CP/M...
I guess some people just like old tech...
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered bourgeoisie when
Das Kapital confirmed that the rate of profit tends to fall
leading to crisis, war and the ultimate destruction of the capitalism
system. Coming on the heels of the latest economic data showing that
the US is entering a deep recession, this news serves to reinforce
what we've know all along. Capitalism is collapsing in complete disarray,
as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Economist comprehensive survey.
You don't need to be a Lenin to predict capitalism's future. The hand
writing is on the wall: capitalism faces a bleak future. In fact there
won't be any future at for capitalism because capitalism is dying. Things
are looking very bad for capitalism. As many of us are already aware
surplus value (S) is redistributed among individual capitals by
competition leading to an average rate of profit (r) relative to the
organic composition of capital. In order to improve their position
individual capitalism must increase their production of surplus value;
either by increasing the length of working day, but this has
physiological limits or by increasing the constant capital used but
this leads to a fall in the average rate of profit.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Capitalist leader George W Bush states that there 7000 capitalists.
How about members of the proletariat are there? Let's see. The number
of proletariats in America is roughly 200 million. Therefore
there are about 100000 workers which for each person with an
interest in capitalism. A recent article put the petty bourgeoisie at
a rapidly declining proportion of the population. This is consistent
with the predictions of the communist manifesto.
Due to the troubles of British imperialism, two world wars and so on,
European capitalism went out of business and was taken over by Yankee
imperialism who were also in trouble. Now US imperialism is also dead,
its venality and corruption exposed by its own creation, radical
Islam.
All major surveys show that capitalism has steadily declined in credibility.
Capitalism is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very
dim. If capitalism is to survive at all it will be as a fascist
dictatorship. Capitalism continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could
save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, capitalism is
dead.
Fact : Capitalism is dying.
I remember playing with these things before I was 10 years old. And they could do some pretty nifty things in the 32K to 64K they had in them then. I just remember them as fun things where you could debug the entire machine to perfection in a couple weeks! (Try that with Windows!) And if you want to jump back and forth a quarter century, you can put an ATX board in the back decked out with the newest stuff and run Linux on it. :-)