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Vintage Computer Festival 8.0
Sellam Ismail writes "The 8th annual Vintage Computer Festival is being held on November 5th & 6th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The highlight of this year's event is a Homebrew Computer Club retrospective featuring a panel of original members of the Club including Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, and others. VCF 8.0 also brings the return of the Nerd Trivia Challenge, a game show style trivia contest for hardcore computer history buffs, and for the first time is hosting the award presentation ceremony for the International Obfuscated C Code Competition."
I guess it should read 1991, not 1981?
Um, what model IBM PC had 1MB RAM and a 36MHz CPU in 1981?
Answer: NONE. The IBM PC-XT was released around that time, and had a 4.77 Mhz 8088 CPU. As I recall, it came with 64KB RAM.
You're probably thinking of an 808486/33 MHz CPU... and if you bought one in 1991, then you were a few years late, as they were first released in around 1989, as I recall... and 1MB RAM would have been on the low side by then - 4MB would have been standard, with 8 or 16 more common.
Eh? Could you please elaborate a bit on that? I've been using C64's since the mid-80's, and currently own about 20-22 of them in different revisions (plus 5 C128 and C128D), but I have to admit I've never heard of a C64 from 1980 with a "buggy rom chip". Also, the commodore techs didn't start working on what would become the C64 until January 1981. Are you confusing it with Basic 1.0 for the PET? There has never been anything but Basic 2.0 in any C64 revision.
80's????
Try 1977, Commodore PET 2001, 8K builtin Tape and 9" BW display. Chicklet Keyboard.
Now that's vintage.
It boot's in about 6 secs. Not bad for 1 Mhz. Runs Microsoft Basic.
I was one of the lucky ones and actually owned a 1000,1500, and then a 2068. I had an uncle that worked for Timex.
Those were the days....
TS-1000
http://www.brtb.com/articles/timexindex.shtml
TS-2068
http://www.timexsinclair.org/
4MB was still a lot of RAM in 1991, unless you were plonking down $4000 for a PC. Then you might get a capacious 8MB or 16MB system. My approx $2000 386SX25 system came with 4MB of RAM, and that was summer of '92. It also had a 1MB video card (ET4000 based).... Ah, the bad ol' days. It even briefly had an out-of-date 68MB ESDI drive in it, but that was quickly swapped out for a 120MB IDE drive. 486s didn't really become popular outside of servers until 1992 or so, and they were still rather expensive. I bet AMD made a lot of money selling 386DX40s in that time period.
I remember a couple years later paying $475 for 16MB of RAM for that system. (By then, it was upgraded to a 486DX33.) $475 was considered dirt cheap at the time, having come down from $600. Ah, 1994.
--Joe
Program Intellivision!
From Jim Brains Commodore Trivia:
Q $0E0) What is the difference(s) between the Newtronics 1541 and the 1541C? (only one difference is needed)
A $0E0) (George Page, a noted authority on CBM Drives, indicated that Commodore made this a tough question to answer.) By the time the 1541C was introduced, Commodore threw a number of drives together and called them 1541Cs. The theoretical 1541C exhibited the following features:
No head banging, and other problems fixed by modified ROMs.
Case color matches C64C and C128 computers.
But darn it, the machine could actually *do* something with a couple thousand bytes of code!
Actually, modern computers can actually do something with a couple thousand bytes of code too!
There are three main factors contributing to modern "bloat":
1) Error checking. It takes resources to detect error, and further resources to recover from them.
2) Abstraction. Programming in a high level language is not as efficient as programming hand tuned assembly. C is a good compromise, but even there you run across the next problem:
3) Common code. Common shared libraries, by necessity, always do more than you need them to do. Consider "printf" for example.
4) User Interface. Textual interfaces bloated software, but they were nothing compared to GUIs. I'm writing a piece of software now that is probably 95% GUI code. I can't see any way to trim it down without losing user friendliness and ease of use.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Probably more than likely, I myself have been there since the first one, and at times convert data and programs for folks who have the disks and not the computer. Though my forte is Commodore 8-bits (mainly the PETs) but I've ssen people demoing thier TRS-80s, and older CP/M units, etc. If there is any place you can find someone who knows how to do it (or can do it) VCF is the place to go.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Hi, I am Evan. My main qualification for moderating the VCF's Nerd Trivia Contest is that I am editor of a publication called "Computer Collector" which is a free, weekly, subscription-based newsletter for, well, vintage computer collectors. There is a relatively simple web site at http://news.computercollector.com/ if you would like to learn more about us.
Actually, you just missed VCF Midwest, check it out: http://www.vintage.org/2005/midwest/