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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.
Pick up the cards and put them in the bin. That's called garbage collection, isn't it?
Geddit? Geddit?!
*sigh*
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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.
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
nt
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
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
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.
Just sold a TRS-80 Color Computer III with 512k, 20MB bootable hard drive, RS-232 port and 720k floppy on eBay with OS-9 pre-installed and a pile of software.
It's been sitting in my garage since the early '90s, when I switched first to a Sun 3/80 and then to Linux on a 386DX/25.
I've also got a TRS-80 Model I system with monitor, expansion unit and floppy drive sitting in the garage, but I don't think I'll part with that one yet...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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 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.
How the heck do you get OS9 running on a TRS-80? It won't even run on my Mac LC III!
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); }
(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.
- 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.
I'm starting my third year as a CpE major at UVA (though I'm more of a CS major, and most of my friends are CS majors). I really haven't had much exposure to the greek system here. I mean, yeah, I know where the frat houses are mostly located, and could probably find a few hundred drunk fratboys on a friday night, but I know and associate with very few of them. There really aren't all that many in the engineering school either, they're mainly in the college of arts and sciences.
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.
Obviously you don't remember those computers. I remember clearly programs that timed how long if took to seek from one sector to anouther. (MULE only loaded 1 time out of 7 on my comptuer because my disk drive was 1 RPM faster than standard). I remember several programs where they took a laser to the disk at the factory, and then tried to write to that spot, easy to copy, but the program wouldn't run if it could write to where the laser hole was. And then there were programs with weak secotrs (read 5 times get 5 different results), dongoles, look up something on page n.
I think in every case someone hacked the program. I know a few people who bought the real version, and never opened the box, they copied the hacked version so they didn't have to deal with copy protection, which didn't consistently let the honest people in.
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. . . .
Heh, actually, I sometimes miss the portable version of the Model 4 that Radio Shack made for a while. (It was the Model 4P.) Probably just about as big an item to lug around as the Osborne computer was - but it seemed to be a generation or two more advanced, at least.
Been years since I messed with one of those things, but I recall thinking the Orchestra-90 music add-on board was really neat. I remember owning the Orch-90 cartridge on a Tandy Color Computer and exchanging music files for it with Model 4/4P owners who had their version of the same board. (You had to do some sort of data conversion to make them play between systems, but it wasn't a big deal.)
You know, there are *still* a few people out there supporting the Tandy Color Computers - but mostly, it's become possible to use them through emulation. That's primarily why I don't mind having sold all my old "CoCo" stuff.
m
http://www.burgins.com/emulators.html
http://discover-net.net/%7Edmkeil/coco/index.ht
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!!!!
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