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Dell finds "Oldest PC"
Alowishus writes "Dell's contest to find the oldest PC still in use has found a winner. It's a MITS Altair 8800b, being used by a lawyer, who has had it for 22 years. Dell's submitting it to a museum and giving the lawyer a bunch of modern hardware. "
I wonder what kind of programs are on there
Well, there was a version of BASIC written by billg; they were Microsoft's first big customer, afaik. Check out the Virtual Altair Museum.
How do you think he proved it? I want to believe the guy, but I can't figure out how you make a machine with 256bytes of memory churns out wills and other documents.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
In 1996, here at Oxford Brookes University, the Computer Services Helpdesk got a weird call.
Nobody recognised the error message (BDOS error on A:) but eventually they got the user to describe her machine: dark green, with an integral 3" disk drive. The manufacturer's logo said Amstrad. At this point they passed the call over to me.
When I had recovered sufficiently (I swear the whole of St Elmo's Fire passed before my eyes) I established that:
The user had received the computer in 1986 - it cost about 400 British pounds at the time.
She had undergone three hours training at that time.
She had done useful word processing in Protext on CP/M for ten years.
After ten years she had had her first ever error message, and correctly called the helpdesk. Who eventually referred her to someone old and sad enough to be able to help her, i.e. me.
I found this whole episode very encouraging, though it put my head in a serious 80's timewarp for a while...
george
btw, the Altair was not even close to being the first personal computer.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
Get a bunch of 'em and make a Beowulf cluster. :)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
As to trading a working Altair for $15K worth of Dell crap; I wouldn't even think of it. It's easily worth that much on eBay -- and you could buy a bunch of really good stuff for a lot less and pocket the change.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
I'm starting to agree with the overheated poster above...
NOT 256k. 256 bytes.
In 1977, if you wanted a computer with 256k ram, you started by asking the architect how much it would cost for the raised floor and the air-conditioning.
256 bytes.
Though perhaps you've confused bytes and 'k', as 256k is plenty for your post. Hell, my first computer only had 16k. I wrote a book on a 64k computer.
(damn kids)
The cake is a pie
Does he have any idea what that Altair is worth???? Those things are going on Ebay for serious money
...
Serious money == $2500. A little short of what he got in return, I'd say
he should be thinking about how to maintain and restore and it to pristine shape!
Presumably the folks at the computer museum will take care of that.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Well, long before there was a paperclip in Office, there was the Paperclip Computer ....
Click on PC milestones & search
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
It wasn't the first 8800, it was a slightly improved model available later. This one could be upgraded as far as 64K memory.
...
Altair 8800b Photo and Specs
There's also links to a whole bunch of other neat-o Altair stuff, like full-color images of some of the print ads (Napoleon?!), chronology of the various models, accessory prices
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
So he was using a 22 year-old computer to do his day-to-day work, now he gets a server, a desktop, and a laptop??? What the hell? He obviously doesn't need all of that. But you know what? I DO! My mom is pretty old, I'll give her to a museum for $15,000 dollars worth of computer love. Just send those computers to...
Ben Garrison, a mindless idiot who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
He'll be begging for his Altair back within a week.
I can see the fnords!
They packed the Altair in styrofoam and bubble-wrap and gingerly loaded it onto a Dell truck. The winner smiled as he looked around at his $15,000 in new hardware....
...then ran out of the office after the truck, screaming, "Wait! I've still got to get my data off that thing! WAIT!"
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
The C-128D wasn't exactly a predecessor to the IBM PC, though. The C64, however, was, and although the system didn't say "personal computer" on it, I am fairly certain that the box it came in did.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
the guy was still *using* the computer
Why not? There's very little that could be done in Office 97 that couldn't be done in, say, Wordstar (which still holds a place in my heart, tucked inside the left ventricle). The main difference -- unless your OLEing all over the place -- is that in Wordstar you had to know how to spell. Of course, you needed to know a bit about grammar, but not as much as you do nowadays so you can contradict Office's[1] view of the English language.
[1]Not just Office, of course; they're all shite. But who can resist an opportunity to pick on Microsoft?
Does he have any idea what that Altair is worth???? Those things are going on Ebay for serious money, and will only continue increasing in value as a collectors item. Never mind getting his data off that machine, he should be thinking about how to maintain and restore and it to pristine shape!
I never considered that the doc would fit into 256 bytes. I did, however, wonder how he would write enough code to read the external data source, somehow display the result, handle I/O for editing of the doc...and still fit into those 256 bytes. It would still be a hell of a trick.
And, hey look! Turns out that he had upgraded the machine to 48K. So I guess he couldn't do it in 256bytes after all. Who's the fucking moron now, you fucking moron?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Geez, you kids.
I got my first job programming very similar systems. The problem is that the 8080 had an 16 bit address space, so the most you could theoretically address was 64K, which very few people had (kind of like having 4GB of RAM now, it could be done but most people don't). You had to be efficient, and think in terms of saving bytes. I remember hacking TurboDos (a CP/M derivative) to put the time of day on my Wyse terminal; what a blast; maybe 30-50 lines of assembly.
Back in those days you really communed directly with the bare machine; some other guy's cruft almost never came between you and the computer. Sweet Jesus, what a time we had. Back then, you could no practically everything there was to know about everything. Nobodody cared if you had a degree, and nobody was handing out "certifications" in other people's crufty systems (e.g., MSCE). You just swaggered up to the job interview with someone who had no more idea of what it took to program a computer than what it took to build a time machine. Well, I guess some things don't change.
Of course the machines I worked on had a princely amount of RAM -- 16K. When we eventually got 32 the era of 32K or even 64K, we thought we had the world by the balls. By then, we started to have Winchesters too -- 5MB capacity with 10 inch platters.
256 bytes is a little slim even for that era, though, unless you were just loading machine code through the front panel switches (no ROM -- god that was fun; we used to be able load the bootstrap program faster than we could have typed the assembly; I really miss the blinking lights, which were way cooler than translucent cases IMO; besides, my case is never on my computer). Certainly this guy didn't have CP/M with that little RAM. Even if you did all your work in machine language, you'd still be hard pressed to do much in 256 bytes of memory, I'll admit, but you'd be surprised at what you could do with 2K. At 16K and with floppy disks, runing on a 5MHz 8 bit processor, we did tons of useful stuff: word processing, spreadsheets, databases, accounting, and games (text based, of course).
As far as 2MHz concerned -- these babies did much less per clock tick than a modern processor; no superscalar execution here. Also remember this was with an eight bit word and instruction set; the S100 data bus was only 8 bits wide too. If you had a 16bit operand (very common since 8 bit ints aren't too useful), you had to fetch the operand in two cycles. Even the higher end computers those days weren't any great shakes; I used to start compiling a thousand line C program on our mini and I'd have time to go for a walk in the park, and if it compiled OK, I'd go out for a cup of coffee because linking would take almost as long.
Around the same time, we did a lot of work on System III Unix (on minis, of course). I remember being excited about Sys V because it had this new fangled thing called a symbolic debugger that would actually allow you to look at the values of variables instead of having to scheme it out from a stack pointer offset.
The amazing thing was despite the crude tools (with the exception of Emacs, of course) and hardware, System III was way more stable and a greater pleasure to program in than Windows is today.
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