Comments

Coursedesign wrote on 10/22/2009, 12:14 PM
The Kaypro was nice, but the Amiga was so far ahead of its time, time didn't catch up with it until it was too late.

Many features that were jaw-dropping for its day. They were Apple before Apple, but didn’t have a strong enough visionary at the helm.

The oldest, um, "computing system" that I wrote a software replacement for was a particular type of "needle card." This looked like a regular IBM punch card, but the top edge had about a dozen positions that could be cut out to indicate that the artifact (archeological object) described on the handwritten card had one or more of the qualities indicated by each possible cutout.

So if the archeologist wanted to pick a particular selection of artifacts, say "Eastern Wall" AND "5 to 6 meters down" and "bowl fragment," they would pick up the stack of card, insert long needles in these three positions, and shake the stack, which would make all cards that had cutouts in all three positions fall out for further processing.

No wonder they were happy when I developed computer-based systems to input and process this...
Coursedesign wrote on 10/22/2009, 12:46 PM
Oh, I almost forgot the RCA Spectra 70/15 4-bit mainframe begged for a Computer Society I co-founded in the 1970s.

It was old already back then, but a major advantage according to the manufacturer was the prevention of waste when say one of the transistors making up a gate or flip-flop failed, the discrete logic allowed replacement of just the transistor instead of needing to throw away the whole gate as required with the integrated circuit type computers...

Like other mainframes at the time, it had 7 MB disc drives that took up only the space of a medium size office refrigerator, and could pump out data at a massive 156,000 bytes/second.

Each of these bytes was then crunched in only two operations of the 4-bit ALU (Arithmetic Logic unit).

And an instruction or data word could be read from the 4,096 byte Random Access Memory in only 1/500th of a second. That was as fast as the shortest exposure time on many cameras at the time! :O)





The RCA Spectra 70 brochure from 1965

[HEALTH WARNING: MAY CAUSE SEVERE PAROXYSMS OF LAUGHTER AND/OR NOSTALGIA.
READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.]

jrazz wrote on 10/22/2009, 1:31 PM
This was my first computer. I had it back when I was around 5 or so. I still do all of my video editing on it today :)



Seriously though, I had forgotten about this thing until I started reading this thread. As a child, it was my favorite toy- I could even play hangman on it and it helped with spelling and math. Who needed windows?!

j razz
apit34356 wrote on 10/22/2009, 5:17 PM
"it was old already back then, but a major advantage according to the manufacturer was the prevention of waste when say one of the transistors making up a gate or flip-flop failed, the discrete logic allowed replacement of just the transistor instead of needing to throw away the whole gate as required with the integrated circuit type computers..." Thanks for the laughs Coursedesign! ;-) By the mid 60's discrete logic only real use was in hi speed bus circuits and interfaces because of "I-current" demand for then-current ics. discrete logic still play a role in some math FP units to the mid 70's( in some specialized designs for "harden" circuits).

Anyway, thanks for the old RCA reference!
DGates wrote on 10/22/2009, 5:49 PM
Is that a Timex-Sinclair?

I knew a friend that had one. We thought it was the coolest thing back then.
apit34356 wrote on 10/22/2009, 5:53 PM
"Is that a Timex-Sinclair?"

Looks more like a Mac ProBook..... I think............ ;-)
Coursedesign wrote on 10/22/2009, 6:01 PM
That looks like a shrunken version of my first Compaq 12 lb. laptop.

I later got a Mac PowerBook 140, with a black-and-white LCD and a huge trackball. It served me very well until I left it overnight in the trunk of my car when it was 20 below. The next morning the screen was totally cracked. Beautiful as an art object....

Apple replaced it for free, which was pretty nice under the circumstances.
K-Decisive wrote on 5/28/2010, 10:11 AM
We had these crazy Unix Lundy machines at work in the mid-90s. They had a vector screen and used a light pen, plus a paper terminal to start and log on to the machine. We used to see how far back we could shoot the light pen at the screen and still hit the target.
richard-amirault wrote on 5/28/2010, 3:04 PM
1979 - Apple II (not a II+, just a II)
TEN YEARS later (and a LOT of upgrades) I finally got an
Amigia 500
Kept that for a while and then went with various (so called) PC clones ... I think most that I built myself
My last three computers are a Dell P4 for use at work.
An inexpensive HP laptop (because my home built desktop died) and finally (about 6 months ago) a new Dell i7 with 12 gig and 24" 16x9 display.
gpsmikey wrote on 5/28/2010, 6:51 PM
OK folks, lets go back to my early days ... everybody talks gigabytes of memory these days. Here is a memory card that is 256 nibbles of memory ( 4 * 16 *16 cores ). I'm an old geezer -- I'll be 60 tomorrow !! (and still alive) I actually have this card on my desk next to my computer (just in case Vegas needs some extra RAM)

[IMG=http://i275.photobucket.com/albums/jj298/gpsmikey/DC_100528_1829_12__Mikey2_1024px.jpg]

and a close up shot (yeah, a bit blurry - what I get for hand held with a long lens)
[IMG=http://i275.photobucket.com/albums/jj298/gpsmikey/DC_100528_1829_36__Mikey2-01_1024px.jpg]

mikey