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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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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'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.
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
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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
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).
> 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.
Hit the nail on the head. The primary difference between what we had then and what we have now is that modern software makes use of the more advanced hardware. i.e. AmigaDOS had a small set of black and white icons for its GUI. This greatly helped in keeping the memory requirements down. Now we have machines that can display 16 million colors and memory enough to keep a different bitmap for every program in memory.
Also, software development tends to be a bit more grandiose in the scale of features due to fewer restrictions on writing tight code. Back in the day, you had to carefully juggle memory and disk in order to keep programs running in their rather constrained environments. These days, Virtual Memory means that I can completely load files into memory and if I run out, the OS will take care of the problem for me.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade