Vintage Computers on the New York Times

tomreagan writes "The New York Times has a good article on vintage computers. It talks about a wide variety of the old beasts and is quite exhaustive. It makes me proud to admit that my favorite computer is still my first, a trusty Apple IIc. " Free login required, natch.

Comments

Re:Nice article, though no mention of Atari...

[Sun Tzu]

My first two machines were an Atari 400 and 800. I paid $400 for the 400 and $1300 for that 800 (with 40 column printer, external disk drive, 40K RAM -- used). I even wrote a video game for it. Sometimes I remember that first 400 and get a little nostalgic -- then I remember that Fred still has it ... he paid me $250 for the bare Atari 400 and maybe a Star Raiders cartridge. If I ever get too sad I can always buy it back. ;)

BTW, Star Raiders rULeS!!

Re:Reporters...feh.

[IntlHarvester]

The Apple //e was on Apple's price list until 92 or 93. (I remember seeing that it had a strange model name like "//e+ enhanced" and had grown a keypad on the case and had 3.5" disk drives!) Apparently schools and the like were still buying them.

In any case, it was only officially cancelled when Apple released a //e card for Mac LC models.
--

Neet

[drwiii]

I still have my C64 and 1541s hooked up at home (the 1541s having self-added toggle switches to let me switch them between device 8 and 9) and still power it up on a regular basis. I was heavily into BBSing until I started getting into the internet, and I remember staying up late reading RFCs and other tidbits through an 80-column(!) terminal program on my C64 (I think it was NovaTerm..) This was before the whole WWW thing hit and people will still using Gopher to pass stuff around. You haven't lived until you've used Gopher at 1200 baud. (:

I started out at the age of 4 with a VIC 20 (ding! a whole 4K of ram!) and haven't looked back since.

Whoops. Broken link.

[jfunk]

Here's the link:

http://www.ny times.com/library/tech/99/07/circuits/articles/22b itt.html

Re:login??

[rjreb]

I thought was cypherpunk:cypherpunk

Here comes the holy war to end all Linux/NT wars..

[xrayspx]

Oh no... Started with a TI4/a, then got into Atari 8-bits, with an 800 that I paid $600 for (I was like 11). I had 3 more 8-bits, made my own joysticks too. Then the ST's, 2 of those, RAM upgraded through days of hard labor. Now my PC's video card has more RAM than my first 8 machines combined, and what do I do? EMULATE MY FIRST 7 MACHINES. Atari ruled, get over it. 8 bit Atari had 256 colors onscreen and stereo sound, 16 bit Atari's had Midi ports and through those 32 machine networked video games! Atari's are STILL used by many Midi musicians, how many post production guys still use a Toaster that isn't a PC addon?

Flame ON! Just kidding...

Apple II

[cje]

I know how you feel, dude. My Apple IIe is still my favorite computer, too.

Home computers were just more fun to use back in their infancy. Today they've become so common and mundane that there's no element of exhilaration when you flip the power switch. Back then, the technology was new and so was the experience. Back then, home computer users and hackers were digital conquistadors, exploring a brave new world. Today, we're all suburban commuters, plodding forlornly from one destination to the next.

The Apple II series was a helluva lot of fun to hack around on. I remember writing raw machine language code (bare hex bytes) in the early 80's because I had no assembler; manually calculating the number of bytes for the destination of a relative branch was a pain in the ass, though. I suppose for that period of time, writing raw machine language was the technological equivalent of punch cards. Every Apple II hacker worth his/her salt will remember what 20 ED FD did (just as every respectable hacker will remember that CALL -151 got you into the machine language monitor. :-))

Virtually no Apple II hackers thought much of Wozniak's memory-mapping "scheme" for the text/low-resolution and high-resolution screen memory (the old "venetian blinds" effect.) At one time, I had memorized the sequence of hex bytes that implemented the lookup table generator so that you could translate screen lines into memory addresses. This didn't slow things down too much, if you were careful about it, but it was still a bitch.

I can't be the only one who wistfully misses the days of doing long division and multiplication on an 8-bit processor with no division or multiplication instructions. Oh, and remember all of the undocumented 6502 opcodes? What a great way to make it a bitch for people to disassemble your code and get at the guts. :-)

Then there was the Disk II. I was once writing a game where fast disk access was absolutely required, and I ended up implementing what amounted to my own operating system (though this was not exactly new; some games like Broderbund's Karateka did exactly this, using spiral tracks to make the disk almost impossible to copy.) Direct access to the Disk II was maddening, painful fun. You had to litter your code with NOP instructions to get the timings on the write exactly right; a microsecond off in either direction and your data is corrupt.

Show of hands: Who's still got the old Beagle Brothers' "PEEKS and POKES Chart" handy?

A lot of folks who are new to the whole computing scene don't understand people like us when we so fondly reminisce about the days when computers were slower, bulkier, and harder to use. But it's because they don't understand a very basic concept that so many Slashdotters do:

Just because it's easier doesn't mean it's more fun.

Thanks for the memories, Apple.

Re:Apple II

[cje]

You sped up your disk, eh?

Yeah. What I did was scrap the whole DOS 3.3/ProDOS idea of using 16-sector tracks and just wrote everything on a track in just one long "swoop." Of course, this meant that if you had a tiny file that was only a few bytes long, you'd waste an entire track by writing it. But for my application, each of the "files" I was storing fit pretty conveniently on a track.

I also used 4 & 4 encoding, instead of the 6 & 2 encoding used by DOS 3.3/ProDOS/Pascal and the 5 & 3 encoding used by DOS 3.2. For those not familiar with the encoding required by the Disk II, there were only certain bit patterns that could be reliably read back by the hardware, so all data had to be "encoded" before the raw bits could be written to the media. "6 & 2" encoding meant that each "byte" written on the media contained six actual "data bits" and two "filler bits" that guaranteed that the bit pattern could be reliably read. The 4 & 4 encoding that I used was (again) a waste of disk space, but it was faster and much simpler to decode.

Whatta fun time to be a geek. :-)

Back in the days...

[Kiaser Zohsay]

One of my college roomates has TRaSh-80 Color, and I was an Apple ][ man all the way. My roomie once stated that he would know that he was a real programmer when he could write code that would draw the "Hyperspace Jump" effect from Star Wars. I started thinking out loud about random points on the screen, extrapolating from the origin, rate of change, etc.... He immediately started shooting ideas down-- "You can't do it that way, the coordinate system of the graphics screen is all wrong."

About a week later, I handed him a printout of about 15-20 line of BASIC and said "Look at this and tell me what it does." He wound up keying it in (I did help him translate all the magic numbers having to do with screen width, etc. from Apple to TRS-80--portability!) and running it to find out. "This can't work!" he practically shouted, as the stars streaked out of his monitor...

Doing something cool for the sake of coolness... those WERE the days.

kz

Re:Apple II & Beagle Bros

[imac.usr]

Good God, yes! I've still got my old PEEKs and POKEs chart, the one with the 16 hi-res colors on the back. I also have the Extra K and Pro[Filer|Byter] (can't remember the exact name) disks somewhere for my //c.

Ahhh, Beagle Bros. Some of the sickest, most twisted AppleSoft code I'd ever seen, from ttheir utilities to their demos to their throwaway extras on the disks. Of course, I had to use it wherever I could. I certainly hope they're all still coding somewhere today. Software should be creative, unusual or just plain funny sometimes. Besides, they were into one-liners almost as hairy as those of the Obfuscated C contests....


Like another poster, I also had a DecMate for a while courtesy of my dad, a 20+ year DEC employee. RSTS/E, baby. I stayed up all night writing programs to generate TRON-esque printouts on an LA36, the loudest line printer available at the time.

Of course, now that I'm 28, I'm too old for that sort of nonsense. Why, I can barely stay awake long enough to take my Metamucil and creak my way out onto the front porch rocking chair, where I sit and tell stories about how we didn't have this fancy-schmancy OOP stuff. Why, we were lucky to have a copy of Merlin 8/16... :-]

]PR#6

Re:whatchu talking about?

[cje]

Huh? The 6502 had multiplication & division instructions.. they were just multiplication & division by two. (ASL & ASR)

Well, I'm specifically thinking of instructions like MUL and DIV on "modern" processors that "fully implement" the operations. I won't argue that bit-shifting operations can, at the basic level, be considered basic vehicles for multiplication and division (obviously, they're what you had to use!) But they're certainly not general-purpose multiplication and division instructions.

You know as well as I do that assembly language programmers who are only familiar with "modern" assembly languages would be completely lost. :-)