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Vintage Computer Festival Revisits The PC Past
OaklyBonn writes "The Vintage Computer Festival West is happening today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I've been to several of these, and they're always a blast. It is always amazing to see the things that our current sotware practices treat as not currently possible on todays machines (like, why is my 1ghz XP box sooo slooow?) Did the Beagle Brothers have a pact with Satan? Are we better off today than in the past?"
If you want to buy my Apple //c (with matching monitor, mouse and modem) please reply and make an offer...
Amazing magic tricks
The Beagle Brothers had some amazing software! I remember using their programs to do such wonderful things as concatenate all of my AppleSoft BASIC programs into humongous lines, so they took up less space. They had some wonderful stuff. Ah, the memories...
Because they walked around asking "But, can it run linux?"
Probably everybody and his brother will mention this, but software bloat is a big reason for slow "Fast" machines. Even something like a word processor can be bloated if you put in all kinds of dynamic spellchecking, OLE, libraries to support 100 different kinds of documents, and so on. When I get a new, fast, box, I use the opportunity to run all kinds of new, fast software, which makes the machine seem slower by comparison. Not that I'm going to abandon spiffy new software, but I realize that there is going to be a speed tradeoff.
like, why is my 1ghz XP box sooo slooow? :P
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
My first computer was an Atari 400. Man was that a crappy computer but at the time it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I could play Zaxxon after loading it up from my cassette player. It would only take about 12 minutes to load it up and then I would play about 15 minutes and be bored to death with it. But still it was cool because I load up computer games with the cassette player AND play my music (though not at the same time...too bad).
The other thing about that computer was the hard keyboard. Trying to type in a program from Compute! magazine was brutal. I think I got a repetitive stress injury from typing on thing...but don't get me wrong, it was cool and fun.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
Computer History indeed.
LISP workstations represent the past as little as patching IE represents the present. I think this is a horrible example, but does fit in with the Slashdot collective delusion (which is why we see it posted here). As I think back, I have no longing for the past. We have many cool new toys to play with now. If your argument is that we haven't advanced as far as we should, I think there are better examples than the ones provided. While I don't long for the past, I sometimes wonder if golden oldies like AmigaDOS or HP openview are any less productive or reliable than what we have now.
... almost everyone would upload their images in .bmp format, and their pages in flakey xml. The same thing has happened with CPUs. Because there're so fast, programmers don't learn / don't care about efficient practices because they're not forced to notice & use them.
My first computer was purchased after mowing lawns for two summers and was an Apple ][+ with 48k and a 16k language card with a modem and dot matrix printer. It also came with that phosphor green screen. That system in many ways was and still is pretty effective. It was on instantly, had built in BASIC, had color support, introduced me to word processing, programming and spreadsheets (with Visicalc), and maintained a productive lifespan for me from 12 years old until my second undergrad year at college.
Thinking back to the pre-internet computer days, it is interesting to see how many of us got information back and forth and this was just as much a revelation to me as the first modem in my Apple ][+ was. My first online experience was with that same Apple ][+ hacking into phone companies after the ma-bell split up to get long distance codes so I could communicate via term with people all over the world. That was pretty heady stuff for a 12 year old back in 1982. I realize now that was stealing, and I make no excuses, but times *were* different back then and hacking was not malicious (at least not from me). There were lots of BBS's around that you could also go to like the Crystal Caverns, and the Pirates Cove where everybody was talking about stuff like the Beagle Bros. I think that is when I permanently set my circadian rhythm to that of nocturnal preference by dialing in to these services late at night when my parents were either at the lab or going back to school.
My first exposure to what we now call the web was with one of the coolest looking computers ever made, the NeXT cube. I remember thinking that just as when I saw my first GUI on an Apple Lisa, that the "web" was going to change life forever. This was the way that information would be handled, thus making it easy for people to find and access data and learn. Unbelievable, but I would now be completely lost without the Internet. I perform journal research over the web whereas previously one had to go to libraries and look through card catalogues. Remember those? One can now cover so much more information using proper tools on the web in an afternoon that you could previously in an entire week at the library.
So, did we have any idea of the Internet back then? Apple apparently had some idea as they were the first company to include built in networking in their computers, but man. What a trip it has been. I can't wait for the next twenty years when I think back and say, Jeez, that dual 2Ghz G5 was sooooo slow. I could'nt even begin to model whole retinal circuits with that thing or even predict global weather patterns in less than two hours.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Just to pick a nit. They were called the Beagle Boys, not Brothers.
Anyway those were the days. Comenco, Altair, Commedore, Atari. We've lost so much. That's one of the reasons Linux is popular. Because it brings back some of the feelings of yore.
It seems... odd... to compare Windows to a Symbolics Lisp machine. Certainly, one can compare the two in terms of ease of programming, power of expression, elegance of execution, and on and on. (_The Unix Hater's Handbook_ repeatedly compared Unix boxen to Lisp machines.)
However, to compare the two on security is non-sensical. The designers of the Lisp Machine were anti-security. Anyone could create an account for themselves by logging on as a generic user and then adding themselves to the user list. While doing so, they could also delete other users, edit any file, and moreso, edit the operating system. The OS was written in Lisp and users were encouraged to modify the OS to their needs. Edits were immediately applied; anything could alter anything.
While Lisp machines were resistant to buffer overflows, a cracker had no need for such holes. Want to read the files? Go ahead -- there was no file security mechanism. Want to launch a DDOS? Edit the network system (in real-time) to send packets continuously.
However poor Windows security may be, it is present. Lisp machines were all about access and access is what they gave.
What Lisp machines reveal is a certain attitude toward empowerment that has disappeared as the playing field has become more hostile.
YOU BET! I've lived thru the evolution of computing from the time computers were these giant things tended by acolytes in air-conditioned rooms. There's nothing I'd go back for. I'm particularly looking forward to playing the new Half Life game. Think I'd want to go back for, say, Castle Wolfenstein? Or maybe Space War played at great expense on an oscilloscope attached to a PDP 11? Noooo.
I am on a 1 GHz Pentium III Win XP 512 Megabytes RAM machine at my Univ. library right now.
It took 8 minutes to boot up.
All I have open is Netscape and the Task Manager, but it has 37 processes running right now: all of the usual XP stuff, plus "Weatherscope", "UpdaterUI", "naPrdMgr", "WM", RealScheduler, Real One System Tray, McAfee, Remote Management, Task scheduler, Novell Application Launcher, "GMT", , "Mdm.exe", PCR-DIST, "Save.exe", (which I think is adware and it is taking up 25 megabytes of RAM).
A total of 200 Megabytes of RAM is being used.
I have this exact same computer at home and it boots up in about 40 seconds and uses half the RAM this thing does. Then again, I don't have any memory resident processes running to take up space in my system tray - such as RealOne Player or AOL Reminder.
I actually still play it on occasion. Now if you excuse me I got to go blow up hitler who is walking around in a mech suit in the next room.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
We are more aware of our computers and OS's now because it's become such a central issue these days. Back in the 1980's when here in the UK the Sinclair Spectrum vs Commodore 64 "wars" were at their height we were too busy bitching about other peoples machines to appreciate our own computers... the difference now is we bitch about our own computers and admire others! If this Yin Yang effect comes full circle again I feel we will be heading for a Mac OS X vs *nix wars.... or is that just me being hopeful?
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
I've wondered the same thing. Oh, it's nice having 24-bit color, and believe me we do things graphically in real time now that required a Cray-1 and a Dicomed film recorder (never mind; just read as "millions of dollars") to do as an overnight batch job when I got into this graphic madness.
But, as an experiment, I did up a wimpy little laptop with TECO, a couple of compilers, and a simple linux; it flat screams and it'd cost, oh, $100. EMACS runs well on it too -- and it should: the laptop has more power than the PDP 11/70 that was shared by 40 grad students when I was in grad school in 1983. What it can't do is massive bitblt operations to let me use some double-plus-ugly ransom-note font for my email.
Beagle Bros made possibly some of the best software ever produced for the Apple II. Some of their stuff was truly stellar: Pronto Dos, Beagle Basic, and their Appleworks extensions made Apples do things that seemed impossible. Plus, the packaging included the finest goodies and swag (with the exception of Infocom) in computer history. I still have my "apple peek and poke chart" and some Beagle Bros stickers. The "newsletters" included really cool apple hacks that would give those Obscurcated C and Perl folks pause. Such as the infamous Call -768 which would make the computer moo "Sometimes once, sometimes twice, and sometimes not at all."
Imagine where we would be today if even 10% of the software companies had half the creativity and the flabbergasting technical mastery of Beagle Bros.
"YOU BET! I've lived thru the evolution of computing from the time computers were these giant things tended by acolytes in air-conditioned rooms. There's nothing I'd go back for."
Then I guess you're going to hate thin clients and blade servers then.
Anyone else own an Imsai PCS-80/30? There are only a couple references to this machine on the web, with sparse information.
The Bonehead Computer Museum is Still looking for entries! Sent photos and stories of your own most boneheaded digital and analog designs for exhibition. The Bonehead Computer museum was featured prominently in John Sundman's award winning Acts of the Apostles
As seen on Wired: Get a free desktop PC
I remember MS Works version 1.0 when everything was keyboard commands, no mouse support. THen we got version 2 with spell check and mouse "point and click" and that is how I wrote papers 1st - 7th grade.
I mean MS Works 2 today would do just about everything I need in a word processor. As memory becomes cheaper every day, there is no longer any need for programmers to uptimize code, thus we get the bloated crap out there.
One perfect example is the size of Lightwave or 3Dstudio Max (which is about 100 MB) compaired to Blender, which is about 3MB.
Oh yeah, and how many Jumpman fans are there still out there?
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I owe much of what I have today to having been able to learn on 8-bit machines with a few 10's of K or RAM, built-in BASIC and cassette recorders for loading and saving programs.
The single memory space and easy access to machine code (just dump some bytes into ram and execute) made things so simple. You could turn on your machine, type in a 10-line hex loader and start banging in op-codes. If it crashed, and trashed the machine, just power-cycle and be back there instantly.
Programs were small, games were cheap, coding was easy but BASIC, machine code and FORTH were all you had, Graphics were poor, sound was scratchy, loading and saving to tape was so slowwwwww...
Now when my multi-GHz machine slices like a hot knife through SETI work units and I can do complex 3D and not even stress the CPU I find incredible.
What I find sad is that current generations will find it much harder to become intimate with their machines without much more study, and at a much later age.
Stick Men
Let's see, in 1983 I had to wait several minutes for my programs/games/OS to load into my Sinclair ZX-80 (or my Ohio Scientific C2-4P) from cassette tape.
Now in 2003 I wait hours for the latest version of OpenOffice to download (OK, I've still got a dial-up connection, can't afford $50/mo for cable|DSL).
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Our vintage computing shirts are just the ticket for all you old computer nerds. See below.
I was wondering if there would be more Vintage computer Events round the world. As I have grown up in the C64/MSX age I would like to see some of those old memories re-awakened!
And as I'm an european I was wondering if there would be any over here ?
-- Cliff Albert
I picked up a bunch of cool stuff. Like an Apple II+ and a IIc. Pretty neat.
i love slashbay or is it Edot ??? ? ? ? ?
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
I didn't have a lot of time to stay and see the museum - will go back another day I guess. Here are some photos I took at the afternoon exhibit.
before everyone noticed SGI was totally irrelevant.
When "Bug's Life" came out, Ed Catmull gave a talk in one of the SGI buildings. The place was packed. At the end, they passed around the microphone for people to ask questions. I had the strongest temptation in the world to ask him, "So what kinds of SGI computers was 'Bug's Life' rendered on?", knowing full well the answer was "Sun". (Now Sun itself is in trouble!)
I kept my mouth shut.
Do they have an Interact computer?
I love my Commodore, but good l0rd was that thing slow. I just benched it with a sin(sqr()) function plotter, and it took 7 hours. Tabulating the sin(sqr()) function got that down to 74 minutes, but it's still sad.
You can see the picture and slow source code here: please slashdot me
I'll update with the fast code shortly.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
4 of SGI's most funky buildings are now being used by Google. Pretty fitting color- and design-wise.
These days SGI lives in its newest buildings (better design overall, but not as "cool looking") as well as some of its older but specialized buildings (RF testing chambers, etc).
of all the "old" computers i've ever worked with, my all time favorite was the apple /// because of its operating system, "sos" ("sophisticated operating system" if you liked it, "...---..." if you didn't). it was the first hardware abstraction layer implemention i'd ever seen on a personal computer and it was sheer love to program 6502 on that machine, despite apple's shitty assembler.
sigh...
Anyway, my wife came by and I excitedly pointed out the printer. She, um, didn't share my enthusiasm.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
I saw this post in the morning and knowing I'd be down that way, I went!
I expected it to be interesting. It was much more interesting than I thought. There were some items there that were amazing historical objects.
Lisas, PDP-11s, a restored PDP-5, the orinal Xerox machines with the first GUI, and a great collection of every PDA going back into history.
That was just the Vintage Computer Festival. Then, there was the museum!
The Computer History Museum is just incredible. It HAS to be seen. It's really great that they're doing this, it won't be until after we're all dead that people realize how absolutely important this history is. They're still trying to get it off the ground, so help 'em out any way you can, even if it's just going and bringing all your friends.
The collection goes back through all types of calculating tools, but if you just look at the items from the last fifty years, it's as if you're looking at a thousands of years of human achievement. The pace of change is so far accellerated in computers as compared to most other forms of technology that we're losing very important history.
It goes through a cycle where it's useful, then it's junk, then it's nostalgic junk, and eventually it's recognized as historically important. Most items are discarded long before that. The items are extemely rare now. Many others have already been lost forever. There is a real risk that we could lose this history before its importance is widely recognized. There's still so much out there, and it's going fast.
If you're nearby or if you're vising the bay area you should really go see it.
=Rich
I bet you they cost ten times more and are 40 times more latent, and they run Windows CE which is even LESS clusterable than a slow copy of XP HOME.
OH WAIT IT'S NOT FUCKING FUNNY!! SO WHY BOTHER?
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
it's this:
When I see the absolutely AMAZING things that people have done with older technology (TCP/IP stack on a C=64?!?!), the industry's collusion with Planned Obsolesence becomes mightily apparent.
We were all told our machines were old news and we had to get the latest and greatest. Now we're saddled with more complexity and more problems than ever before. Meanwhile, people are happily taking 486s and creating modern desktops (Linux) out of them.
I can't completely blame the industry. We all bought the latest and greatest exactly when the industry said we needed to do so.
(Yes, I am typing this on a snow iBook. Guilty as CHARGED.)
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
I read somewhere that one of the arguments (back in the 80's) against Lisp machines was their slowness (a similar problem with smalltalk machines IIRC). IIRC the whole LISP machine was implemented in hardware and I think that today a Lisp machine could probabaly be an amazing tool given that even Java, the mother of all slow languages runs ok on any PIII from about 600MHz upwards. With a set of hardware encoded security permission sets, it would be fantastic to use, wouldn't it?
" Are we better off today than in the past?"
I am. When I started with PCs back in the 286 days, I had to play with jumpers, it was hard to get support when I had problems, I had to have just the right hardware that most games could play, and I could do only one thing at a time. Today, jumpers are pretty much gone except for 1-time adjustments. Technical Support is as close as Google Groups. Hardware compatibility with games is much broader than it was in the olden days.
On top of all that, problems with my computer don't seem catastrophic. I have plenty of hard drive space, so I'm not constantly downloading to floppies. Hard drive failure isn't such a BFD because I have a CD/DVD burner. Plus, I can always go to a friend's computer as now they are virtually in every home.
I think the biggest difference between then and now is that I actually feel like I've got more than enough to do what I want to do.
"Derp de derp."
The first computer I owned was a Timex-Sinclair Z100. No monitor (it attached to an old portable BW portable TV I wasn't using. I typed in programs from the magazines all night long so my kids could fight over who would try them out the next morning. Programs were stored on audio cassetes on a portable cassette player. God forbid I typed one number wrong and had to go over the whole thing to debug. Wasn't it great though?
This parrot has ceased to be!
If you guys like this, you might also be interested in MAGFest, a convention I run. It's more of a gaming con than anything else, but we plan on having a lot of classic hardware there, including a guy that's bringing tons of C64 stuff.
Then I could read about porn.
Now I can watch porn.
Now is clearly the winner.
I think it's a lot like anything else. Things are always more fun when they are simpler, less regulated, and more elite (even if that elite is only cool to you and 2 other people in your hick town).
I mean, I still think it would be cool to be back there when people were just inventing the cars, roads were minimal, and you just kind of drove where you wanted how you wanted. But, although I'd like to see it, I certainly wouldn't want to give up my V6, my air conditioning, cd player, shocks, safety glass windshield, and (occasionally) decent roads.
So, things are always cooler when they are more simple and easier to learn. They are always cooler when it's something that just your small circle of friends are in on in your town, but still makes you part of a larger community. I can't get over how when I was a kid I got picked on for being into computers and today even the bullies want the fastest machine with IM'ing software and running hacks and so on. I miss the days when I was very uncool by the standards of the day, but still kind of cutting edge in my hick town, even if only me and a few friends knew it.
Hey, I've got an Athlon 2400+... Runs like a dream. I think you just have to know how to take care of a computer in order for it to run fast. I had a pentium 233 until 2000, ran everything i needed it to. The reason comps like the C64 ran so fast is because there was nothing on it, 64k of ram, no hd, of course it's gonna run faster. Stop being lazy and your computer will run much faster.
The company I used to work at (a mailing house) to this day still uses DBase III+ and the DOS based Clipper language (no they haven't moved to XBase) for all their list maintenance functions. They claim all other data packages have too much overhead to use efficiently. I agree that Access would for their flat databases and cleaning up of client lists, but I would have thought using something more up-to-date would have prevented the predictable once every 2 hours crash!
Well, I STILL have my old Atari 400, 800, and 800xl in a box in my closet... with 3 floppy drives, acoustic modem (300 baud of course), pen plotter, etc... The 800xl still works, and I boot it up from time to time, mostly to play M.U.L.E. Those were the days...
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
Yepp. That was my first Computer. A true handheld. I bought it when everybody else had a C64. The reason I bought it was that it would run 120 hours on batteries minimum and it had everthing a computer needed back then. You can fit the thing into every pocket. I even got myself a datasette interface and could load and save stuff on tape. Really cool. There where a whole load of books on Sharp PC machinecoding and all that. You could control single LCD display Pixels and do little grafics with them. I remember one guy squeezing a chess programm into 1,2k(!!). THAT was a cool computer back then and it still is now. I bought the PC 1403 with 32 KB RAM in the early 90s and that one got me into the whole PC and Web craze. I've still got it, with 'cash register roll printer' interface and all in a nice and neat custom wooden suitcase. It's way cool and still beats my Palm in batterytime. Infact, I've lost data on my Palm due to power shortage twice allready, but I never lost data on a Sharp PC.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've got an old one. A Radio Shack PC-2 pocket computer! It still works well!
I built an Ace 2000 in 1982. This was a Z80 based computer that was a clone od the Sinclair computer.
I brought in into school one day and someone bought it off me to install in their car.
My C64. I still play games regularly on that thing. I've had it since I was three (1985) and believe me, it's gotten ALOT of use. Some how I still have the origional disk drive working, however a few friends and I decided to adapt an old Leading Edge (also still working) floppy drive to the c64. It works much faster then the origional drive. Have a ton of carts for it too.
I am full of goo... black evil goo