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Digital Retro
Digital Retro is about personal-use (though not necessarily home-use) machines: there are no PDP11's or mainframes represented, nor devices like the DECWriter, which gave computer access to individuals but required a mainframe or minicomputer in the background. The book covers hardware that was sold at retail (barring the Altair and a few other mail-order-only kit machines), at prices householders could afford for their hobby use, including gaming, or that businesses could afford for their executives and other knowledge workers. All the same, the prices are sure to make you calculate every so often things like how many BogoMIPS could be had today for the $3,250 that a 613KHz HP-85 cost in 1980 -- and those are 1980 dollars. Early adoption has its risks as well as its rewards.
From iconic to obscure
Too many computer makers (and even more computers) came and went in the decade-plus spanned by this book for it to cover all of them; Laing's list of chosen machines is representative rather than comprehensive. More than 30 of the machines came from the The Museum of Computing in Swindon, and despite their age most look like they just popped out of their delivery boxes.
Digital Retro's central section starts out with a MITS Altair, the machine generally considered the first computer practical for a hobbyist to buy. (And the buyer had to be a dedicated hobbyist; the Altair was sold in kit form for home-assembly, and its display was a series of winking lights, its input facilities a row of toggle switches.) "Practical" in the case of the Altair meant affordable and accessible -- there wasn't much of a practical nature for the solder-weary user to actually do with an Altair once it was assembled; the chicken and the egg of availability and usefulness were still fighting it out at this point in computer history. The Altair also has another interesting spot in personal computer history: it provided the first platform for an operating system from Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
(There's an Apple I in homemade wooden raiment snuck into the book's introduction -- an Apple I proved too difficult to find for a full writeup and photoshoot, however, and no Apple II clones made the cut.)
From the Altair to the NeXT cube which caps off the Digital Retro's collection, the 38 machines (and in some cases machine families, such as the MSX computers mentioned below) are presented in order of appearance. The book presents too many interesting machines to give each a proper summary, but here are a few to whet your appetite:
- The Sharp MZ-80K (December, 1978) -- with its 10" screen and built-in drive (tape drive, though -- the 3.5" diskette wasn't invented yet), the MZ-80K seems ahead of its time; the choice of a Zilog Z80 processor didn't do much for its longevity as a business system, though; Z80 systems were soon eclipsed by other choices.
- The GCE/MB Vectrex (June, 1982) -- the only video game system I really wanted as a kid, and one of the seeming few I've never encountered used in thrift stores. Bright vector graphics, built-in screen and a quality joystick gave it the same kind of appeal that the arcade-console versions of Asteroids and Battlezone had for me.
- The Jupiter ACE (September, 1982) -- an impossibly simply looking machine, a terraced slab of white plastic with a minimalist typewriter layout (just 40 grey keys). The ACE was aimed at programmer-hobbyists, though, like the similar-looking Sinclair ZX-80, but the ACE ran a version of FORTH and had raised keys rather than the Sinclair's flat membrane.
- The Sinclair QL (January, 1984) -- one of which, Laing notes, was Linus Torvalds' machine (between a VIC-20 and the 386 with which Torvalds started a quaint Unix-like operating system).
Game consoles are also well represented; six dedicated game machines, starting with the Atari VCS (1977) are included; a whole book could be devoted to consoles, but the ones chosen for Digital Retro (besides Atari and the Vectrex mentioned above, the others come from Colleco, Mattel, Nintendo, Sega) are an eclectic bunch, and a good use of space.
Because Laing is based in the UK, the book features quite a few machines that most Americans have probably never encountered in person, like the Acorn Atom, the Dragon 32 (a Welsh-made near-clone of the Tandy TRS-80) and the Grundy NewBrain. If this book had been an American production, many of these UK-made machines might have gone overlooked.
No incentive to work together
In the wilder days of the personal computer's adolescence, the quest for compatibility and standardization among machines was anything but a top priority -- and when it was a factor at all, it was usually about software compatibility between sibling computers (like the TI 99/4 and its 99/4A successor) or at most within a single model line.
As the book's back cover points out, "Compatibility? Forget it! Each of these computers was its own machine and had no intention of talking to anything else." An overstatement, but not much of one.
Laing covers an intriguing exception to this one-off philosophy, a multi-manufacturer line of machines that appeared in 1983 (starting a 5-year run), sharing a Zilog processor and adherence to an early Microsoft attempt at standardization called MSX. Mostly-compatible machines were launched by JVC, Hitachi, Sony (a name that didn't pop up in the American computer market for quite a few more years) and 18 other Japanese manufacturers as well as SpectraVideo, the only non-Japanese maker. Each manufacturer tweaked their entries in the line to distinguish themselves, adding features like (in Pioneer's case) control of laser-disc players. The differences soon rendered the attempt at standardization moot, and the MSX standard fell from grace. And if you're wondering what MSX stands for, you'll have to choose from the three possibilities listed: I prefer "Matsushita Sony X, where X could stand for any other company."
Get a good look
The photographs dominate; they give external views of each machine from several angles, over two two-page spreads apiece. (The pictures are well-chosen, but not exhaustive: there are no shots from the underside, and in only a few cases are internals exposed. Don't expect to replicate the innards of an Altair from the photographs.) You can make out what sort of ports each device provided, see what kind of display it used in most cases, and look at the included input peripherals. (Many of these machines, though, were hooked to televisions, and only the main unit and its input devices are pictured.)Speaking of peripherals, one of the nice things about a photo book like this is for the mugshots it provides of unique physical arrangements tried by computer manufacturers: the integrated tape drive of the black-clad Amstrad CPC-464 (which sits to the right of the keyboard) makes it one of the most interesting to me; it sure is a lot neater arrangement than the cassette drive linked messily to the family C64 in the early '80s.
Besides the photographs, though, the spreads devoted to each computer provide a compact history of the machine, list its country of origin, and give a rundown of the most important specs (processor type and available I/O ports).
Practical Upshot
Digital Retro is a coffee-table book which happens to have quite a bit of interesting history, not a deep historical text. For each machine displayed, though, a chunk of text titled "What happened next" gives an idea of what developments each one led to (or prevented); some of these are only a paragraph or two, others are mini-essays in themselves. If you crave more technical and historical details, Laing's book makes an excellent companion volume to narrative-centric books which cover the same period of computer history though, like Fire in the Valley and Steven Levy's Hackers. It's a perfect way to appreciate the aesthetic appeal (and exuberant variety) of personal computers from the mid '70s to the late '80s.
You can purchase Digital Retro from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
MITS Altair 8800
Commodore PET 2001
Apple II
Atari VCS
Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80
NASCOM 1
Sharp MZ-80K
Atari 400/800
Texas Instruments TI-99/4
Mattel IntelliVision
Tangerine Microtan 65
HP-85
Sinclair ZX80
Acom Atom
Commodore VIC-20
Sinclair ZX81
Osborne 1
IBM PC
BBC Micro
Commodore 64
Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Coleco Vision
GCE / MB Vectrex
Grundy NewBrain
Dragon 32
Jupiter ACE
Compaq Portable
Apple Lisa
Oric-1
Mattel Aquarius
Nintendo Famicom
Sony MSX
Apple Macintosh
Sinclair QL
Amstrad CPC-464
IBM PC AT
Tatung Einstein
Atari ST
Commodore Amiga
Amstrad PCW
Sega Master System
Acorn Archimedes
NeXT Cube
I've used 21 of these machines during my lifetime. Some for only a few minutes of course, like the Lisa at a computer show.
Fun times.
Computers: An illustrated History by Christian Wurster is another picture book, but this also covers the old mainframes, as well as some of the modern PDAs.
Here
The book has a site at http://www.digitalretro.co.uk.
...the Dragon 32 (a Welsh-made near-clone of the Tandy TRS-80)...
The Tano Dragon was not a near-clone of the Z-80-based TRS-80; it was a near-clone of the Tandy Color Computer which used the Motorola 6809, the best microprocessor of its era.
Co-incidence? They do look similar in physical design to me (I'm purely thinking of a physical resemblance, not actual hardware).
Cheers,
Ian
I reviewed (http://dpnow.com/1299.html) this book on my site a couple of days ago and submitted a summary here but had no idea Timothy was on the case already. Gordon Laing, the author, and I meet up quite frequently and I was able to gain some fascinating insights into his research. One thing that rather depressed me was that some of the icons he spoke to, like Chuck Peddle and Sir Clive Sinclair are now, apparently, getting on a bit and are rather forgetful of the times they made into the golden age of personal computing. The book is, as Timothy says, a marvelous piece of work. It's meticulously researched and extremely well written. Timothy mentions the pictures - it's rather like having a book of old brochures, but much better, though I observed in my review that there are no pictures or direct quotes from the personalities of the period (1974-1988). I've been using and writing about micros since the late 70s and I still learned a whole bunch of interesting and fascinating anecdotes. One of the nice touches Gordon lends to the end of the book is the reminder that while the hardware might eventually die, the souls of some of these computers live on in the form of software emulators that run on contemporary hardware. Gordon deserves all the success this book appears to be enjoying. Anyway, I'm off to find my BBC Micro emulator for a spot of Elite - Right on Commander! Ian
Also, it is generally thought that MSX was the brainchild of Kay Nishi, a japanese businessman sometimes called "the Japanese Bill Gates". The only influence Microsoft had on the machines were that they created some of the built-in software, such as the BIOS, BASIC, and DOS (called, appropriately, "MSX-DOS"). The rest - the hardware, the compatibility concept, etc. - was in no way their idea.
The MSX standard specifies what an MSX machine is in terms of minimal requirements, and adding extra features was considered appropriate at the time (indeed, it was one of the charms of the system). And while there were some compatibility issues with software (mostly related to different memory layouts - MSX used bank switching extensively, and RAM could not be relied on to be in a specific bank), mostly all MSX software did indeed run on all MSX machines. Instead, the reason for their eventual disappearance is related to MSX being underpowered compared to newer machines that appeared in that era (MSX2 appeared in 1985, same as the Amiga. The Amiga absolutely blew it away in terms of performance and capabilities).
At the time, everyone I knew (and every book I bought) told me that MSX stood for "MicroSoft eXtended". Only recently did I hear about the Sony-Matsushita-X story, while attending a talk by Kay Nishi, whose word obviously carries a lot of weight in this matter.
Finally, MSX was a fun system that had some great software. If you have the chance, there are lots of great games available for emulation.