I do not know what UNIX stands for.
JJK

According to "Ask Yahoo"

What does UNIX stand for?

1979
Apple II Plus with 64k and outboard floppy drive. Since it was too much like a toy than a real tool, I sold it after six months.

1980
Columbia Data Products Commander 964. This was serious computer for its time with dual Z-80 processors each with its own bank of 64k memory. One processor was used to handle character/graphics output to the screen while the other (which also had a floating point and trigonometric co-processor) was for program execution. There was a serial communication bridge between the two parts of the system. It ran under CP/M and had a Fortran compiler. It cost me over $4000 but I developed a CAD/CAM application on it within a year that I sold for $20k. [RIP]

1990
Zeos Computer with i486 processor with 16MB and S3 video card. By this time I was developing in C++ instead of Fortran. It ran under Windows 3.x. [RIP]

1995
Home-built Pentium 200 system with ASUS motherboard, SoundBlaster audio card, and 3D-FX graphics card. The system ran Windows 95 and then 98. [RIP]

2002
Home-built P4 2.4 GHz system with Intel motherboard, 1.5 GB memory, SoundBlaster audio card and ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics. It ran Windows 2000 and XP. [still have it]

2009
Home-built i7-950 system with ASUS Workstation motherboard, 12 GB memory and ATI HD-4870 graphics card with 2 GB memory. It is running Vista 64 and shortly will run Windows 7 64.

[i]According to "Ask Yahoo"
...


No, no, no!


UNIX stands for Truth, Justice, and the American Way!


[Remember that line from one of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies? :O)]

Unix/Linux people seem to have a slightly different view of the world (how some of their commands came to be named for example -- take a look at the origins of "awk", the pattern processor - awk is the initials of the three guys that wrote it). Somewhere in my collection of stuff, I also have a VIC-20, a couple of the little Sinclair keyboard/computer things that had a Z-80 in them - nice processor but had a few quirks from the design end ! ). Oh yeah, also had a "TC-71" thing I got surplus - basically a selectric typewriter in a desk with a serial interface controlled by a hard wired processor -- all TTL logic with the "microcode" in prom on about 4 mid sized PC boards with LOTS of IC's (all TTL). Maybe I should start my own museum ??

mikey

Seeing John's layout, I'm thinking of posting some of "film" layout of some sub assemblies cpu designs of my that where manufactured by TI, IBM, Amdhal and Hughes aircraft; of course, what's not limited by NDA and patent issues. Most of my earlier work deal with multi-cpus sharing a main bus and a lot of specialize auxiliary hardware. I regret now tossing out, a couple of years ago, some of old proto-typing boards that where wire wrapped by some old ladies because I was becoming cross-eye with my own designs! Plus ................

My favorite commercial design, non super computing, was for Coulter electronics(medical). It was a commercial chemistry analyzer with robotic arms( early 80's) . It contained 3 TI990 processors controlling 15 8051cpus, real-time data collection of 120 continuous reactions with 6 wavelengths with various stages of reagents being added.

My most frustrating job was helping TI "fixed" ATT-MA Bell use of magnetic bubbles in the Detroit's future super digital "switch station". ATT has some great engineers but totally digitally voice, with compression, was a computational-lag inducing monster, made worst because of limited storage by the bubble logic expense.

"Remember that line from one of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies?"

That line predates the Christopher Reeve movies by about 30 years, it was in the opening to every "Adventures of Superman" TV show starring George Reeves. It ran from 1952 to 1958.

"Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman! Yes it's Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for Truth! Justice! and the American Way!"

Sheesh - for a minute there John, I could see my old black and white TV (that doubled as a space heater with all those vacuum tubes in it ! )

mikey

"Adventures of Superman" TV show starring George Reeves

Oh yes, the old black & white Superman!

That guy looked so incredibly dowdy, but I guess it was all in the interest of disguise...

:O)

it was in the opening to every "Adventures of Superman" TV show starring George Reeves. It ran from 1952 to 1958.The B&W episodes were actually shot over 18 months before the series went onto television:

Superman TV Show History

This explains all the REALLY old cars you see, most of which still had split front windshields, something which disappeared from American cars starting in the 1953 models, and were gone by model year 1954. There were also much better production values in the first year, much of which is explained in the above link.

Finally, since this is a thread about old computers, there were actually quite a few episodes over the run of the show which included a computer, including one named "Mr. Kelso" which was able to plot when all the stop lights would change, thus helping bank robbers make a getaway, a concept used more recently in "The Italian Job."

Yes, before there were "Trekkies" there were people like me (and, apparently, John) who memorized every line, and identified with the characters.

Great Caesar's Ghost!

I was born in 1953, so I really didn't become a Superman fan until probably the first round of syndication after the series ended.

I thought Hollywoodland, the 2006 Ben Affleck movie about George Reeves' death was pretty good. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427969/ Curiously, Hollywoodland was originally called "Truth, Justice And The American Way" but Warner Brothers threatened to sue.

Also, I always really liked Sterling Holloway, the character actor who played "Professor Oscar Quinn", the inventor of Mr. Kelso. I hadn't thought about him in years, thanks for bringing him up (indirectly.)

Well, I dug out my old TI994/A and it fired it up -- and it still works great!

I was startled at the fact that it instantly boots up (no "Windows Loading" here ;-) and is ready to go in less than a second. In no time I was flying over the landscape of Parsec, shooting bad guys out of the sky and navigating the tunnels along the surface. Sure, the graphics suck now, but back-in-the-day, it was like magic!

Geez, before computers became "my work" they really were fun...

My first real exposure to a pc started in the late 70's when our industrial electronics class had one of the Altair8800's. Every time it was powered up we had to load in the bootstrap program, which was 2 pages of hex codes (machine language), via the front panel switches, just so it could boot from the cassette. And some people complain about Linux not being user friendly...

Early 80's - Commodore 64.
Mid 80's - Commodore 128
Early 90's - 286DX.
After the 80286, the rest have been a blur and i don't remember them all.

One notable was an AMD 486/75 which only caused me grief. Intel only here please! YMMV

The proudest moment of my Intel life was when I built a video and audio workstation with the new Pentium Pro CPU that was hailed by Intel as their path forward to a glorious future. It was even presented as being pin-compatible with upcoming members of the Pentium Pro series of Illustrious CPUs, so you could upgrade right in the socket!

My workstation, in addition to having the best motherboard of the era, had the best PC Power & Cooling products to keep the blazing new 200 MHz CPU quiet without even a whisper of noise.

Well, that was the proudest moment of my Intel life.

The worst moment came a few months later, when Intel announced that the Pentium Pro wasn't the path forward after all.

In fact, it was a complete and utter dead end, with no upgrades coming. Ever.

RIP, thanks a lot....

:O)

Gotta laugh about it.

Well over 100 personal computers that I have either owned or been provided through work, starting with Atari, Commodore, TRS 80 model 1,2,3,4 and 100, Mac, IBM, Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.

Still have about 20 of the older ones.

Not including the mid-range and large-scale mainframes that I have worked with throughout my career.

Where I bought them? No way.. but a list, sure:

Exidy Sorcer, 16K
Commodore 64
Commodore 128 (I was one of the designers)
Amiga 1000
Amiga 2000 (I was the chief engineer)
Amiga 3000

I built all my PCs, 'cept for the laptops. I usually upgrade the existing PC, so
these are, in a sense, all different instances of the same PC, though over time,
all the parts change.

desktop PC: 16MHz 386SX or something like that
desktop PC: 40MHz AMD 386
desktop PC: 75MHz IBM-made CPU
desktop PC: 90MHz NexGen
desktop PC: 150MHz Pentium
desktop PC: 200MHz AMD K6
desktop PC: dual 300MHz Pentium II
desktop PC: 800MHz AMD Athlon, ATi graphics
desktop PC: 1GHz AMD Athlon XP, ATi graphics
desktop PC: 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64x2 4200+, nVidia 8600GTS, 4GB
desktop PC: 2.83GHz Intel Q9660, nVidia 9800GT, 4GB, 3TB HDD

laptop: 133MHz Compaq Pentium
laptop: 900MHz Fujitsu P2010 (Transmeta CPU)
laptop: 1.6GHz Acer (AMD Turion)
laptop: 2.4GHz Intel Core2 Duo, 4GB DRAM, 640GB HDD

Well over 100 personal computers that I have either owned or been provided through work, starting with Atari, Commodore, TRS 80 model 1,2,3,4 and 100, Mac, IBM, Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.

Same here, I was an unofficial IT "go to" guy in 1990-91 and amassed a huge collection of PCs. We shot, crushed, smashed and burned countless machines. I even used some to fill a hole when we were fourwheeling. We hated all those old machines pre 486.

I still have 15 or so Pentium II & III machines. Im going to make a video of their disposal soon.

hazydave wrote:
Amiga 2000 (I was the chief engineer)

Wow! Dave Haynie! How about that! I clicked through the DBV links but there wasn't anything to view...offline, or not yet ready?

Whoa, I can't remember all the computers I've been through. I got my first one at my office (didn't really want it, I was a mainframe guy), somewhere in the 70's. It was a Zenith 25 mhz., one of the "big ones", many others got the 16 mhz SX machines.
The first one I bought was custom built by Computer Warehouse, it was a 486 33, I ordered a HUGE amount of RAM, 5 MEGS! It set me back almost $3,000 with a printer.
What I really enjoyed (and kind of miss) is configuring the system for performance, autoexec.bat, config.sys, over-clocking, yeah, those were good days. I remember being so proud because I squeezed out over over 600 k of base memory.

It just makes our trips to the moon 40 years ago that much more impressive, considering we all own PC's that have much more computing power.

I try to remember that when I have computer issues. So much has been done with much less.

It all started for me in 1986 with the ...

Amiga 1000 / Videoscape 3d ( got to do my first 3d spot with this early version of Lightwave 3d for the Nashville International Airport...manually recorded to 1" video tape one-frame-at-a-time for a 10 spot aarrrgggg but it worked...., Elan's "Invision" card
Amiga 500
Amiga 2000 /V-lab capture card, Emplant Macintosh Emulator it would let me run Adobe Photoshop WOW!

Amiga 2000 Video Toaster
Amiga 4000 Toaster/Flyer

PC Dual Athlon with DPS Perception Video Capture
PC Dual 1.? XENON processors with Matrox Digisuite/Speed Razor edit software

...and today using
BOXX Dual 2.2g Opteron with VegasPro,CS4, Lightwave 3d (my main system)
MACPRO 2 3g Quad Core XENON with FC4 / Windows 7

Soon as Windows 7 is fully install and working on the MAC I hope to migrate to it for my main system....we'll see. What a long strange trip it's been... come a long way but still soooooo much to learn.

mp

gpsmikey:
I have a fishing tackle box full of punched tape that represents the programs I wrote in elementary school for the HP2000A basic language computer. I'd love to get them converted to files or even teletype printouts. My grand achievement was a program that could play monopoly, written when I was in 6th grade. It was good enough to beat most of my friends. And it fit on a roll of punched tape about 4" in diameter around a 1" core.

Is your punched tape reader working???


My brush with computing...
- My first computer was an HP2000A in a lab at HP accessed using a 110 baud acoustic coupler and a teletype. (4th grade) My dad's rule was that I had to spend 1 hour programming for each hour I played games (like Cubic, StarTrek, etc.)
- HP35 Calculator (sophomore HS)
- HP80 Calculator (senior HS)
- HP65 Programmable Calculator with mag card reader (frosh university)
- HP125 (CPM) machine with a Xebec 5MB "winchester" hard drive (formatted into four 1.2Mb volumes to look like four 8" floppy drives) 1981
- HP41CV (Still use it with synthetic programming) 1984?
- HP150 Touchscreen (MSDos) 11Mhz 8088, 40MB hard drive (formatted into two 20MB volumes because DOS couldn't handle more than 32Mbytes) I ran Windows on this. I still have the four 3.5" floppies that installed MSWindows. 10mb/s "ThinLAN" card and my first home network (connecting to my housemate's HP150 so we could share a ThinkJet printer) 1984
- HP Vectra 16Mhz 80286 with 80287 coprocessor, 80MB hard drive 1987?
- HP RS-25 25Mhz 80386, 200MB hard drive 1989
- HP 95LX Palmtop (just recently stopped working) -- 1992
- HP LM5/90 90Mhz Pentium, 512MB memory (8 64MB sticks) 5GB SCSI hard drive (1x1GB system drive plus 2 x 2GB raid 1) This thing was a bulletproof monster workhorse running NT3.51 server weighing 65 lbs. $16,000 with LaserJet 2000 and ScanJet IIsi scanner, my most expensive computer purchase. 1994
- A slew of HP Pavillion PCs from 1996 to 2005 (2 still in use)
- Compaq nw8440 laptop 2006 (still in use)
- A pair of home builds from NewEgg. (1 still in use)
- HP Mini 110 2009 (2 in use -- really great machines. They will even run VP8 if you connect an external monitor!)

Don't tell my wife how much I spent on the LM5/90...

John.