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UVA Computer Science Museum
Cryptographrix writes "Just came across this site, thought slashdot users should check it out, definately worth a read, has everything from the original Osborne portable computer to such memorables as the Altair...supposedly from the UVA staff's personal collection. Even has old (1950's and another board that looks like ESS3, maybe) telephone switching equipment."
I haven't been to the actual museum, so this is simply an observation about the website.
The grouping in the article is all wrong. It clumps pictures and articles together by manufacturer. This is great for something like a research document, but for a museum it is terrible. By the time the reader gets acquainted with the devices made by Altair, he gets thrown back in time to get acquainted with the Osborne, and so on.
A better system would be to simply line up the pictures and articles in a timeline where each device can be compared to each other device in a logical manner. The reader can get a feel for how computers evolved from large breadboards to the tiny microchips of today.
I have been pwned because my
...that we'd be so happy to see things we never want to have to use again. :-)
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
Just imagine high school science-class field trips laughing at the very system you're using now...
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Destiny-land.
The happiest blog on earth.
http://www.google.com/search?q=punch+card+sorter
I have been pwned because my
There are no Quadras... where are all the Quadras?
Seriously - nice to see an online museum that ISN'T merely a collection of 80s personal computers. The more information about the common machines from the 50s and 60s the better - 70s boxies are well known relatively...
a grrl & her server
"Hey, my SOL quit working !"
"Well, I guess you're just S.O.L."
Does it have an Abicus?!?
They were the first true computers!
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Pick up the cards and put them in the bin. That's called garbage collection, isn't it?
Geddit? Geddit?!
*sigh*
---
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Wow, every time I see a punch card I'm simply amazed that people used to do anything useful with them.. I find punch cards more amazing that any new technology.
I tried to write a program using punch cards once, but instead of a nice sort routine, I accidentally voted for Pat Buchannen.
Jeez!
Cool idea for a product (and probably a patent): a stored dictionary, which one could use to check spelling before posting anything on the Internet.
"Son, at that time, they hadn't yet convinced the government how horrible it is to allow PC's without copy protection to exist. And the people who invented those computers were really communists, intent on destroying America."
"Well, we know better now, right, daddy?"
"Yes, son... of course. The MPAA always knew what was best for us. Bless their wisdom. Let's go listen to your new best of Britney Spears album."
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
>I can't get Linux to install.
:-)
HTH!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Hell yes!. Thank you.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
go to Russian Computer Museum
...was that they made portable solar arrays to take with you to power the thing (they were *huge*) and that Infocom produced games for it. :)
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I wonder if they need a wonderfully kept Tandy TRs-80 color computer in mint condition with all the bells and whistles. Anbody else got these around?
~~Some people never go crazy what truly horrible lives they must lead.~~ Charles Bukowski
...can I get Debian to install on any of these bad boys? ;P
nt
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
You guys notice the cray 3 GaAs chip as part of the "cray gift", and how it says they wanted to bond the chip directly to the board instead of packing it first?
it never worked -- not because of the lack of money either -- a problem people rarely thinks about is that silicon and PCB material (FR4, for example) has different thermal characteristics -- so when the chip heats up, it heats up the board under it, and then "snap" -- especially considering the small dimension of the contact pad on the chips are (and they are getting smaller and smaller -- making probing (wafer testing) a REALLY exact science) in relationship to the difference in length from the thermal expansion.
it's not until recently, where advances in material sciences (it would actually have to be considered a breakthrough) enabled flip-chip mounts
FYI
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Leave it to UVA to put all that information on one long page with lots of graphics. It's really great for modem users. GO HOKIES!!!!!!!
I'm sure my first PC had an AST SixPak at one time or another. I also remember it taking two and a half minutes to load Win3.0 (from the C: prompt, not from switch-on) on my 19MHz XT with 512k of disk cache in Expanded memory. How things have changed. Now it takes ten minutes to load Windows XP on my 1+GHz P3.
you think to yourself: "Why the Hell did they put that in the museum? I remember running one of those things when I was a teenager..."
The Osbourne-1 shown does have at least a bell, if not the complement of bells and whistles. That modem in its drive storage slot was not standard issue. And I know ... the first computer I ever touched was my father's Osbourne 1.
Ah, the memories. Z80 processor with an 8 bit bus. The OS was CP/M80. The word processing pack
age was Wordstar 1 (yes, Wordstar version One). The 'graphics support' was a seperate codepage of characters with block-drawing characters. It was text or block graphics, one mode at a time only!. The computer game of choice was adventur (our copy was corrupted when it gave the description of the mirror over the chasm -- you know, where you look out of the window over the chasm, and see a lit window with a person in it who is trying to get your attention...)
[backgroud music starts up quietly, building to a crescendo. The music is Barbera Streisand singing Memories. It is followed by automatic gunfire, then silence...]
Well, I was only 8 years old at the time!
And don't get me started about how we made 5 1/2" SSSD (Single Sided, Single Density) floppies into Double Sided by cutting another notch into the side so we could fit more pirated games on when we copied them on the Apple ][s at primary school (age 9).
Or how we...
sorry. I'll stop now.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of....
This
Dude..the machine has a 10 Mhz CPU and 640 K of RAM. It runs an old MS-DOS. It won't run 3.11, let alone XP. This is an assumption, as I don't feel like splitting up an XP install CD into a few hundred 720 K floppies and giving it a whirl.
Come to think of it, XP is larger than the available memory. Too bad. I just wanted to try something new.
PicoBSD didn't even fit.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Kharmacide.
Please, mods, look up overrated in the dictionary.
I know, a post can be overrated at 0, but that isn't why you did this.
You either disagreed with the point or you felt it was inflammatory - either way, you knew it had to be modded out of sight.
But you couldn't accept a negative metamod, so you took the safe route.
I know that karma is important - without it, what do you have? Nothing.
There is only that elusive 50, a goal that gives you hope.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Sure didn't.
I read the linked page then bookmarked it for the morning.
See, I'm really, really drunk right now, so I thought I'd hold off on installing software and stick to bitching about moderators that have more crack in their bloodstream than I do in my ass.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Of course it is not a great exhibit. But as something put together by donations from staff, I think it is darn nifty. In fact, I am jealous because my Alma matter Virginia Tech doesn't have a similar setup. I always felt VA Tech was more for the real geeks and UVA was more for the business minded people. UVA is way too greek to be true geek (coo! I just made that up). So I guess I'm going to have to campaign for a museum at VA Tech now. It might be hard because I live on other side of planet now, but it could be made easier by the fact they regularly auctioned off crap.. erh I mean exhibits... this old in auctions. At least they were doing so a few years ago. So how about it! I'm sure there are more than a few Hokies reading Slashdot. Get to work!
[news for me, stuff that doesn't matter]
"You've never experienced the Apple II until you've experienced it in it's original communist red..."
Read the label carefully on that verbatim floppy ... It says it's a l33t warez copy of Zork Text adventure
It's one of the few places of the world where most if not any of the old media (punch cards or wirings) can be converted to new media (floppy/cdrom).
It's quite impressive if you get a change to actually see it. I also liked the story where computers would actually blow up if not being used for a long time, this due to old moving parts that would dry out or expand during the years. Luckily they have a tool shop where they can rebuild certain parts.
Does your C64 actually work? I have two, but they no longer work. I kinda want to see what kind of stupid software I wrote back when I was ten.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
For those interested you should go check out The Computer Museum History Center (I find the timeline especially interesting). I stumbled upon it when I visited the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. Although the guys there were in a meeting they were kind enough to hand us three issues of Core magasine publication as well as giving us a quick look-see around the premises.
naah sig schmig
This has nothing to do with the current topic, but can someone please explain me why before login on, I just go an add for Visual Studio .NET??? I didn't know /. was advertising for microsoft...
*warning: sig* In space, nobody can hear you scream.
Only 26.2 POUNDS!! WOW!! maybe then I could get some exercise! And I'll have no problems calculating the circumference of a circle with that blazing fast 4MHZ!!!! That 60k sure will come in handy with the assembly I'd have to code too!!
heh.. I can't wait to see what my future kids will be saying about the laptops and desktops of today.. "Wow, Grandpa?? You really had to actually use *only* a Gigahertz!!??? With *only* 80 *giga*bytes of space? How did you ever get by???"
hahah
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Took me a while to realize that this was the University of Virgina instead of the University of Amsterdam (also abbreviated UVA), which has a computer museum as well.
As your punishment (I'm using the honour system here) you have to watch Dr Dolittle 1 & 2, Little Nicky, The Waterboy and Police Academies 3 through 6 back-to-back.
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Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Ah the joy of a decent manual!
I remember going from MS-DOS 3.2 to 6.2, and wondering why the hell they had removed all useful information from the manual. The 3.2 manual had detailed memory maps, irq listings, an ascii table, keyboard layouts, serial and parallel pinouts, etc. The 6.2 manual just glossed over some commands.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Although whining will get you nowhere, I have to agree that "Overrated" is a pussy mod -- as it is immune from MetaModeration. I think it should be done away from the system completely, but CmdrTaco mandates that "abuse of the Over/Underrated mods is actually not as much as people think it is." Although why intentionally you would create a hole in the system that could very easily be abused is beyond me.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
You know when your old when some of that stuff you used or have seen in person!
What no S50 bus computer? Just the S100 stuff?
Wonder why no pickett slide rules?
The Osbourne shown on the page is definitely a 1B. I still have one in mint condition.
> Ah, the memories. Z80 processor with an 8 bit bus. The OS was CP/M80.
Yes this is correct, although later on you can buy an 8080 co-proccessor daughter board to run ms-dos 1.
> That modem in its drive storage slot was not standard issue
Correct again and the modem is a 300 baud acoustic coupler.
> The computer game of choice was adventur
I think Zork 1 was more popular.
This is bringing back a lot of momories. The Osbourne 1B was my first computer.
Hey, nice to see the Osborne in there -- I wrote my first accounting suite in Pascal MT+ for the Osborne. Managed to get an entire invoicing, stock control and debtors ledger on a single floppy disk and ended up selling several thousand copies.
:-(
:-)
But what about the earlier machines that broke new ground:
The CompuColor. This was a great machine. It only had an 8080 processor but was one of the very first "off the shelf" machines to come with amazing (from memory) 128x128 8-color graphics. It also had the disk-drive built into the color screen with a whole 84Kbytes of formatted storage.
The Commodore Pet. Just as every movie ever made to day has an apple of some flavor in it, the Commodore Pet used to be the favorite choice of movie makers when they needed to show a microcomputer somewhere. It's very distinctive looks made it instantly recognizable -- but its lackuster performance and monochrome character-based graphics was a disappointment
The TRS80 model 1. This was the main competition to the Apple II in the late 1970's. I actually preferred it to the Apple as it had a much more powerful BASIC interpreter (double-precision math!) and could be easily converted to display proper lower-case characters. It also had a decidedly flakey expansion unit that could hold up to 32 or 48K of RAM and from which up to four floppy drives could be daisy chained. Add some double-sided, double-density 80-track drives plus a copy of NewDos80 and you could get up to 1.6MB per drive for a whopping total of 6.4MB of online storage!!! Woah, be still my beating heart.
The Intertec SuperBrain. This was a really odd box that looked just like a mainfraime terminal with keyboard, screen and drives all integrated into one whopping great case. It had two 4MHZ Z80 processors -- but only one was ever processing at a time because the second was dedicated solely to the task of polled disk I/O. Looking at the schematics and firmware it appears very much as if the designers used this method because they were too stupid to write good software for a single CPU. Its real claim to fame was that it was one of the first microcomputers with any real networking capability. If you bought one of their enormous 8MB server boxes (with a 8" hard drive) you could then connect up to 255 SuperBrain computers to it using a star topography network that ran over an inflexible and awkward 40-way ribbon cable.
There were numerous other very popular machines out there such as the Ohio Superboard -- a real hacker's delight. For your money you got a built-up circuit board with a full QWERTY keyboard right their on the PCB. You had to add your own power supply, case, monitor, etc -- but they were dirt cheap.
I used to love going to computer shows back in the late 1970's and early 1980s because there was always something *radically* different to see.
These days everything's just a slightly different flavor of IBM PC
Of course I'm a *real* hacker from way-back who built my first computer from scratch back in 1977 and then had to write and hand-assemble my own macro assembler before I could write a BASIC interpreter.
The processor was a Signetics 2650 CPU running at a whopping 1MHZ.
I started with just 1KB of of static ram and when I spent a small fortune to 4Kbytes I thought I was in heaven.
Believe it or not, I actually made some money from programming way back then. I'd hire out my computer to various shops where it would display a scrolling message I'd programmed (in my own BASIC) on a computer screen in the store Window.
In those days, the whole idea of a small computer and computer-generated scrolling text on a screen was so unusual that people would stop and look for many minutes. Great advertising for the stores which hired my little box and paid me to program in their message.
Geez I feel old
I always thought the UvA Computermuseum was over here.
I love old computers and over the years i've visited more than a few of these museum-site's.
These are my two favorites:
- old-computers.com : a fairly new, well maintained site. They already have a big database and it's growing day by day.
- obsolete computer museum: One of the first really good site's.
P.
http://www.google.de/search?q=definately
/. editors should check articles for typos.
peace, love, respect
There is some pictures of equipment in that articles. More in Russian part, actually...
Sorry.
The Computer Science department of the K.U.Leuven also has a museum online, although the computers in there are not as old as the ones in the UVA computer museum.
is it just me, or do you also find that the B5000 kinda turns you on?
Let us know when they get a real antique personal computer like the Simon, circa 1950.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
i worked as a grunt in the archives of the library at the College of William & Mary (how's that for a crappy sentence?), and i ran into some really coooooool stuff, including boxes full of people's personal effects (professor's glasses, medals, etc.), and boxes full of student records, complete with pictures of them holding _PUNCH CARDS_!
my memory is a little hazy here, but they were holding them a la mugshot style, they were maybe 12"x6", and i believe they had their name written on them as well. but the really interesting thing that i noticed was that these were photos of students holding punch cards into the 80s (again, my memory is not great, but i think it was til '83).
(It's been discussed in a previous /. thread, I know)
In 1999, the late and lamented Boston Computer Museum closed its doors and moved organizationally to the Museum of Science, while its artifacts moved to The Computer Museum History Center in Moffett Field, California.
Here's a last-gasp look at its virtual existance, thanks to archive.org.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Back in 1996, I worked about 15 feet from the computer museum as a modeler/texture-mapper for the alice project, which is now at carnegie mellon but at that time was still at the UVa CS dept. I spent much of the summer sleeping in a couch in the lab, and would walk past many of the old computer display cases when I would wake up and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. I have to say, it was easy to spend hours wandering along those display cases; but what always struck me was that modern computers not only look the same, but they *continue* to look the same. Were I to dissasemble the circe 1994/5 SGI I used in the alice lab, it would probably not look much different from the circa 2000 SGI desktop I'm typing this at right now.
I guess bland homogeneity is what we pay for standardization and progress, but it seems like there is no concept of unique technologies anymore, or at least unique technologies that can be observed without a microscope.
Well, that's all, I just got a pang of nostalgia seeing the museum mentioned.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Gee, and I thought they might have a shot of one of those VAX assembler code manuals with all 340+ instruction codes. :-> Now, that's fun programming.
~ kjrose
Remember the first Tandy Manuals?....my guess is, once they figured out how to put the info in the command line itself(either in man pages, or the classic -h /h -? or --help), it became "more profitable" not to put it in the actual manuals.....giving Windoze the easy catch of the customers....
I picked one of these up in the hallway outside some university faculty member's office with a note on it that said "TRASH". Their trash my treasure.
It's got a modem, and the 4 inch amber display is to die for. I'm yet to use a portable with as nice of a keyboard. It's the only portable I have that weighs over 20 lbs.
I'm glad they've found a use for the stuff they used to just stack in dumpsters. Several years ago I picked up 5 or six old ps/2s, an oscilloscope, and a rack mounted 100-node Transputer array from a UVA dumpster.
oh? that is quite interesting. it is been a while since i rummaged through the various computer requirements for the different majors. i used to work at the pamplin computer lab (what a sweeet job that was...nothing but hot chicks not knowing jack about computers... lol) but i know the requirements for a business major was so overblown that if u had a decent video card, it would be a gaming boxen. slackers... :-)
You would be surprised how much punch cards are still used today. A lot of old factory/assembly line automation is controlled via punch cards. And it probably will stay in use as long as they continue to do the job. Why spend $ on expensive computer automation upgrades, when the old tech gets the job done.
I had an Osborne 1; as a matter o' fact, I had two of 'em. The second one had a *hard drive* - an external device the size of a shoebox, containing a bottomless pit into which one could pour data without ever filling it up. 11 MB, $1400 - eat yer hearts out! I had the external monitor adapter, too, a handy device that gave you a composite video out so you didn't die from eyestrain.
;)
It's not entirely true that you had to use a particular manufacturer's disks - CP/M warez for the DEC Z80 micros (Rainbow?) worked great in the Osborne, and often cost less. Does anyone remember "CP/M Power", with the original undelete?
The jar of punch card chad brought back a few memories, too . . . my roomdog and I collected the stuff for a month by surreptitiously emptying the university's card punches until we had a garbage can full, which was used to inundate the front seat of an enemy's car one night . . . heh heh heh. I wish I still had a jug; you could also make dandy simulated bird poop from a mixture of chad (called Numer-Bits by us), flour, and water.
- Very poorly put together (I worked in a computer store at the time, and clearly recall the owner/technician/salesman cursing the unreliability of the thing. It was hard to keep the display model working, let alone the one's he'd sold...
- You had to buy pre-formatted floppies from the manufacturer. The "format floppy" command was really justan "erase" command. The OS couldn't (wouldn't) format floppies on its own.
- The pixel-addresssible graphics mode was really broken up into little regions that (coincidentally?) were about the same size/shape as a character cell (my recollection: 384x256, which would be 64x32 character cells at 6x8 pixels each, but I may be wrong). You could only have two colors in any one cell: foreground and background. If you drew two lines that crossed in a cell, the color of the pixels from the first line would coerce the pixels from the first line into the new color. So, while you could individually address all those pixels, you couldn't really control the colors properly.
On the plus side, it had a really cool color Star Trek game, that used the limited graphics in ingenious ways. I think it had a very flexible character generator, and the game was all done by creating a custom character set that had little enterprises, klingons and romulans...I'm not even going to get started on the NorthStar Horizon (64K of RAM!, dual floppies!, case made of WOOD!), or I'll start showing my age.
Whoops, too late.
No thanks, our main lab was nicely furnished with brand new Dell computers this past semester.
GO HOKIES!!!!!!!!
I've got an old Toshiba T1000EX, which I plan to stick Minix on. I'll let you know how I get on with it.
I still use my 386-25, and it still works great, booting off that 80 mb harddrive (we got the extra large size because 40 we knew someone who filled a 40 mb drive) Runing slockware 3.0, with some sort of upgrade. Last year I finially put it behind a firewall when I got sick of wondering what all that activity in syslog was about.
See, your laughing already. Actually considering the pace of technology you would laugh at my after server too, a dual ppro overclocked to 200. I find that both systems are plenty fast, though I don't run x on the 386.
I love the colsole with the ash tray on it. Some old IBM consoles had built-in ash trays.
Back then people used to smoke in grocery stores, drop the butt on the isle floor and stomp it out. The employees would later sweep it up.
My how things have changed. . . .
I'm a CS major at UVA. The reason for the page's linear setup is because that's apparently the trademark of Professor Gabe Robins. Go ahead, click on his Images page. This guy is a genius at everything he does, except for making picture pages. Like most decent colleges, we have a t3 with good rates, and even that gets clogged up by his images page. Dr. Robins did work with the military, so I used to joke that the page was created to take down enemy machines. I pass the museum every time I go to Olsson (CS building), but haven't been to its site and thought it was funny that the connection-killer layout is back. Oh, and the Tech vs. UVA retards: enough is enough. Go Hockeys. Durrrr! School rivalries are gay, both schools their shares of bright people. Rather, than fight over non-existent entities like school pride, the intelligent folks everywhere need to band against rampant idiocy, or we'll get swallowed by the morons.
That is why columns 72 through 80 were reserved for sequence numbers for several languages. A quick wizz of the deck through a card sorter and it was all back in business.
it's about as close to a geek house of horrors you can get...
No, this line is:
Power triode. Similar in size to power tubes used on the early computers, but this particular tube type is brand-new. It can be compared with a power transistor of comparable power rating.The image of the tube in question shows an Eimac transmitting triode.
Computer equipment? Only if ENIAC had an early 50MHz wireless trans-Atlantic LAN that we don't know about.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Take some time reading about the B5000. Please note that it did multiprocessing, compilers into machine language, system reconfiguration without reprogramming resource defines, etc.
And all of it written in ALGOL, the great grandfather of C and the first machine-portable language.
Then consider the B6700, which among other things brought us virtual memory and the aforementioned resource stacks. Add in CANDE, WFL and a system that can restart it's jobs in recovery mode right after a Halt/Load (reboot/IPL), a database that could do online backups in the 1980s, and you have THE mainframe. This stuff was so far ahead of IBM that IBM kind of caught up somewhere in 1989, after Burroughs was busy shooting itself in the foot becoming Unisys.
Alas, the same magnificent engineers created an I/O bottleneck monster with their design that they never quite got fixed. That, and Burroughs never built a sales force like IBM. So IBM continued to whack them even though Burroughs had an utterly superior product. Then the Unisys merger disaster occurred, and Burroughs never recovered. Now they sell A-series MCP emulators running on souped-up superservers, but really sell those 20-way NT boxes.
And so like the Amiga, we must salute a superior design that never dominated like it should have.
Bow to MCP!!!!
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________