A Trip Down Computer Memory Lane

News.com has an interesting stroll down memory lane with a look at the "DigiBarn", a collection of technology from early mechanical calculators to modern web appliances. NASA contractor Bruce Damer and partner Alan Lundell run this "museum in transition" from a 19th-century farmhouse deep in the Santa Cruz mountains. In addition to notable success milestones, the company also includes some of the industry failures, like an Apple III Damer acquired from Apple's legal department.

Comments

wooo

[sepelester]

Could be called RAM Drive, but Computer Memory Lane is cool too

Handy link to TFA

[iaculus]

Post links to second page; first page at http://news.com.com/A+trip+down+computer+memory+la ne/2100-1042_3-6203311.html and almost-ad-free print version at http://news.com.com/2102-1042_3-6203311.html?tag=s t.util.print

Go on. Read the article. You know you want to. You'll find out why the museum has to be packed up every winter, and learn that Apple had a portable music player as far back as 1979. And more!

Accuracy

[spacefrog]

Articles like this do more harm then good when they are filled with inaccuracies.

Not everything in the collection is Apple, though. There's also an original 1979 Osborne I--one of the first computers my father ever owned--the giant suitcase-size portable computer, and a Kaypro II, which helped kill the Osborne due to its smaller, sleeker design.

The Osborne I was introduced in 1981. The Kaypo II (there was no Kaypro I) was slightly larger then the Osborne, and weighed 6 pounds more.

This article is crap.

Re:Accuracy

[garcia]

One room over, however, was my first computer, the Commodore Vic-20, a 2K masterpiece on which a friend of mine and I would sit and write incredible programs in BASIC to do things like ask you your name and then print it on the screen an infinite number of times.

He could be my twin brother, if I had one, as the Vic-20 was the first computer I used and I was programming in BASIC before I could knowingly spell or read (just imitating my father's keystrokes) and what I remember doing the most was printing my name over and over again.

My second computer was the C-64 (not the fat box with dark brown keys but instead the sleeker one built a few years later) and while we used cartridges almost solely with the Vic-20, we only had one cartridge for the C64 (Spyhunter!)

This article, while it may be filled with date inaccuracies, is still fitting my history nearly to the "T".

Re:Accuracy

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

The one he never said, you mean?

In case you didn't notice

[LordSnooty]

The link goes to page 2 of the article.

I'd be interested to learn more about the "iPod prototype" - described as a Mac in a briefcase - how was the music stored on this? If it were on separate medium such as cassette, disk or somesuch then is it really a prototype of anything? Would it not be a similar, more cumbersome version of the Walkman, which had already appeared by 1980. Since it's a Mac I'd like to say the files were in AIFF format, 'cept WP says that was developed in 1988. What was the state of audio compression at the turn of the eighties? Uncompressed audio seems unrealistic on yesterday's storage media.

Re:In case you didn't notice

[OakDragon]

My 2nd computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer II. Unfortunately, I could not afford the disk drive for it. Here are a couple of ways I used the tape drive to provide music for my programs.

The first was really a demo. I made a BASIC program to fill the screen with the James Bond "007" logo as the tape drive played "View to a Kill" (which I "downloaded" by holding the tape recorder up to the radio speaker). The program loaded, and started drawing to screen, while the sound played through the computer's hardware to the TV speaker.

The second program used the same technique to load a game (D-n-D type), play some mood music while the title screen was up, then some data was loaded from tape.

As for music produced by the computer, the CoCo was from the "beep-boop" school of sounds. Producing a note pretty much stopped all other processor functions too, if I remember.

I'm dissapointed to see...

[niceone]

...that this is a just another computer museum, rather than one dedicated to computer memory, I was getting excited by the thought of all those glass cases full of SIMMs, DIMMs and maybe even some magnetic core.

Why no link to the actual museum?

[ruiner13]

Is it that hard to put a link to the actual museum instead of to page 2 of an article that talks about said museum? Are the mods asleep today?

Re:Why no link to the actual museum?

[ruiner13]

s it that hard to put a link to the actual museum instead of to page 2 of an article that talks about said museum? Are the mods asleep today? There are no ads on the museum site, so no revenue to drive up by linking to it.

First post........to mention...

[3seas]

the article forgot Amiga....

OS Wars and Memory Lane.

[twitter]

Ah the irony, a computer museum filled with old M$ OS. Bill Gates once boasted that he would keep a copy of gnu/linux for his computer museum but would eliminate it otherwise. Yet nothing is more useless than an old copy of Windoze. They can be fun, but they are tied to a particular set of hardware and software that's all rotting away. Emulation is interesting but difficult thanks to all the built in traps. Still, it's nice someone is keeping these things around.

Roughly Drafted has a set of articles detailing the OS wars that would complement the physical collection. If you are looking for a trip down memory lane, here it is:

• 1980-1985: 8-bit Platforms
• SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1980s
• 1990-1995: The Race to Deliver The Next New Platform

They are all well written, entertaining and accurate.

I come from that era

[kurt555gs]

I remember when I got my 1st Radio Shack Model 1. I remember when I bought a Kaypro II. ( I still have it ). I remember how much I loved writing Z80 Assembler on CP/M.

I started out fooling around with these computers, sharing information on CP/M bulletin boards, learning how computers worked from the ground up.

I also remember having the opportunity to meet industry leaders like George Morrow, and work for Takioshi Shiina of SORD computer of Japan. I got to travel, and live in Japan working for SORD.

I remember COMDEX when there were competing operating systems and unique hardware before Microsoft got a strangle hold on innovation and creative thinking.

I remember a time where software patents were unheard of and the thought that ideas for software not the software itself could be owned by some one.

I think of how lucky I have been being able to work on projects where the ideas of creative people not the lawyers and accountants counted the most.

I have been lucky to have grown up in that time.

Thank you Mr Shiina

Cheers

Re:Cassette tape? Where are the MP3s???

[TheRaven64]

I'm a little surprised that people haven't converted these old tapes to MP3s; I think there are probably better ways of doing this. There are emulators that can read the audio data, and so it would be simpler to just store a digital copy of the data; I doubt MP3 could get the data down to anything like the size of the original, which is likely to be well under 64KB (it must be smaller than the amount of RAM the machine has, or it couldn't have been loaded. Even big programs that had to be loaded in segments weren't more than 100KB or so).

A few emulators can read from WAV files of the tapes. MP3 should be okay bandwidth-wise, but the psycho-acoustic model throws away information humans can't hear, and I don't know if that is a problem for some data encodings. The WAV-reading only exists to load files from old tapes, it's not a sensible long-term storage mechanism.

Re:Cassette tape? Where are the MP3s???

[Novus]

With a little knowledge of the tape hardware and the way it's used to store data, you can store the data on a tape much more efficiently than an MP3 does (and get faster encoding and decoding to boot). Your average 8-bit with a tape deck (for example, a ZX Spectrum) essentially has a 1-bit ADC and DAC hooked up to the tape deck. Data is (mostly) stored on tape as a long series of pulses of two different lengths (each representing a 0 or 1). Therefore, to create a nice and small tape image file (even of data in a custom copy protected format), simply detect and store a description of these pulses in e.g. TZX format. Especially Spectrum emulation users often work with tape files like these.

Re:Cassette tape? Where are the MP3s???

[Alioth]

We have - certainly in the Sinclair Spectrum community. Nearly every piece of Spectrum software has been saved. Not in MP3 format, but in TZX format which gives a compact and accurate representation of the original tape. The World of Spectrum archive has several thousand programs for the Speccy stored in this way.

I was a packrat. Now I'm a technolgy archivist...

[dharmadove]

They should take some of the crap in my garage. My retirement investment. You never know when someone might want a Type 80 rectifier, CK722s, BC-348, RTL chips, JSR Model 15, 1401 core memory, bubble memory, 8080, etc... Not mention the magazines / books, LOTS of books. My wife loves it. Not...

Open PC BIOS.

[burnttoy]

The article states that the IBM PC was an open architecture. In fact it wasn't.

Whilst the OS, CPU, RAM, UARTs, DMAs etc could all be purchased from 3rd parties (Intel, Microsoft, Motorola and friends) they were not open in the OSS sense, the BIOS was proprietory. Compaq then Phoenix had to write clean room BIOS's to make a compatible machine. The same is true of the video BIOS.

Re:OS Machine Specific

[hawk]

PC-DOS assumed the ROMs of the IBM PC, but thi was a throwback.

MS basic (BASIC-80) used to come in three flavors,

ROM, the minimal level
Extended,which was in ROM
Disk Basic

In the early 16 bits, IBM had extended basic in ROM, and BASICA on floppy extended this to disk basic.

MS-DOS, not being able to rely on having those IBM ROMs (disk basic usually relied on extended basic being in ROM and extending it, rather than replacing it) has GW-BASIC ("Gee-Whiz BASIC"), which was the same thing (but for machine dependent variations).

Anyway, BASICA and GWBASIC, though on 16 bit machines, were for most purposes, MBASIC 5.0 from the 8 bit machines.

hawk

Re:Cassette tape? Where are the MP3s???

[jhalme]

At least on a ZX Spectrum, the psycho-acoustic models do damage the data enough to make it impossible to load. I exported a few .TZX files into .WAV, compressed them into MP3 and tried to load into my 48k Spectrum from a portable MP3 player. I didn't manage to load the program one single time as every attempt ended with an "R Tape load error". I also tried recording the .WAV onto a minidisc (old MZ-R90 portable) but still got similar results, so apparently ATRAC loses too much data as well. Burning the .WAV files onto CD as audio tracks worked flawlessly, though.

This 'computer museum' sucks

[DirtyFly]

I really dont know why do article come out pointing to an half baked computer museum,check this one out , http://www.homecomputer.de/ , and tell me wich one should be on the news ! Jorge Retro Review Magazine http://www.retroreview.com/

Re:Cassette tape? Where are the MP3s???

[Richy_T]

Old hardware, ZX Spectrums. Gotta be an opportunity to mention

heyhey16k

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