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Good Vintage Computers?

Posted by Cliff on from the hardware-with-a-place-in-computing-history dept.

The Crooked Elf asks: "I'm going to be running an event dedicated to vintage computers and game consoles in a month for the computer science department at the University of Southern Maine. My current arsenal includes a TRS-80 Color Computer 3 and an old NES (with Zelda, Mario, etc), but I feel I need a few more items to display. I have a budget of around $600 for this event. Slashdot, what do you feel are other decent vintage systems that would be the most valuable and educational to present?"

5 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Pointers by faedle · · Score: 4, Informative

    You might try asking on the Classic Computers mailing list: classiccmp.org. You might get people to loan you systems of interest.

    For my money, you'd probably be in good if you got a Commodore 64 (for obvious reasons) and a machine like a IMSAI 8080. Perhaps an Apple 2.

    In the grand scheme of things, the Tandy Color Computer 3 was largely irrelevant by the time it came to market...

  2. Anything NeXT you can get your hands on by istewart · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This would be particularly interesting, since you can point out to the Mac users in your audience (and there's bound to be more than a few) that most of the basic concepts behind OS X were laid down in 1989. The downside is that a NeXT machine is likely to eat up your entire $600 budget and more.

  3. Apple I by tie_guy_matt · · Score: 5, Informative

    You will never be able to afford a real Apple I. However if you want to let people play with a vintage computer (and a very important one at that) without risking a real classic you can by the Replica I for about $200. It is a replica of the Apple I (since Woz still owns the rights to the apple I and not Apple he has the rights to let others make replica's and clones) but it uses more modern parts. Here is the website: http://www.brielcomputers.com/

  4. Suggestions and Questions by martyb · · Score: 4, Interesting
    More info? Maybe you were thinking of sending out a notice, later, but could you please reply with the date/time and which campus it will be held on? I could make it to the Portland campus, depending on when it was scheduled. Or, better yet, set up a web page and give us the link so we can stay up-to-date and continue to contribute.

    Suggestions:

    1. IMSAI 8080 "War Games" aside, I actually worked on one back in 1977 or '78. Front-panel toggle switches; separate LEDs for EACH BIT of the ALU (and IIRC the current address, too). Ran CP/M. I think it had an S-100 bus for expansion. Storage was on an 8-inch floppy.
    2. Atari 400/800 running Star Raiders - 8 bit (6502 processor) at maybe 2MHz with maybe 8 KB of memory. Incredible game play and graphics for that day. (Aside: in 1981 while setting up for a concert at my college's student union, I saw a TV projector wheeled in for testing on the 15-foot diagonal screen. Within 15 minutes I had my Atari 800 hooked up to BOTH the audio system (300W: Bass; 150W Horn; 80W Tweeter - on EACH SIDE) and this projector and fired up star raiders. Going into hyperspace sounded as if a 747 jet was taking off!)
    3. Commodore 64 At a fraction of the price of an IBM PC, it had superior graphics, catridges, tape storage, and floppy storage available, too.

    But seriously, if you post the location, date, and time here - I expect a few people would be willing to show up with their oldie-but-goodie systems. Mine got junked for my last move, otherwise I'd certainly bring mine in! Good Luck!

  5. SGI, NOVA, or Cray, oh my! by Frumious+Wombat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The old SGI, such as a personal Iris, an original Indigo (when they were indigo), or an Indy (with its jazz-riff startup sound) would all be good choices. Even the screensavers such as Electropaint are a sight, when you realize that they were running when PC's shipped with 4 unreadable colors or glowing green.

    I recently saved the memory from a DataGeneral NOVA-II; 16K of genuine Cores. You should look for some older core memory from an old IBM mainframe, or a Nicolet 1080, as those cores are big enough to see without a magnifier.

    I'm still fond of the VAX, but that's a conniseur's architecture. Nobody is going to casually understand the significance of a washing machine with blue trim.

    Just to be odd, you could try to get a full-sized picture of a Cray-1 or Cray-2, some add from the era touting their work in high-end computational science, and then put a Palm-pilot or some such down with its speed in Crays next to it. I had this discussion with my students the other day that I did most of the calcs for my thesis (not so long ago, either) on a machine that had less memory than a standard graphics card. It was a lot bigger too. It's good to show. Maybe just a big sketch showing size of machine at constant performance, starting with a Cray or IBM-360, and going to the modern equivalent.

    --
    the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken