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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."
...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.
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.
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