OT Old Tyme Computing For only $5995
Robert Freise
Posts: 4,616
For only $5995, you could buy the 10-Megabyte Computer System in 1977.
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That's only $24,216 now! What a deal!
10 Megabyte? ROFL! Just to put that in perspective, this ONE render of mine is 3.18 MB.
So that computer could hold like ..three? of my renders? lol
Too funny! :)
Wow, an 8-bit CPU! But you had the option of a 16-bit CPU. Ooh, fancy!
AND, it ran the CP/M operating system!!! How quaint!
I remember my first experience with CP/M. It was 1979. I had just left my job at the Kennedy Space Center where I'd been working for 5 years with multi-tasking OS's on real computers and had taken a position with a small private consulting firm who did programming for mostly business type situations. My first task was to modify a small 8-bit type computer to accept some special device. I asked where the listings were for the operating system and was told they didn't have one.
The CP/M operating system was totally core resident, and you had access to everything it could do, all in memory at the same time. So I sat down and printed out a core dump of the area of memory where the CP/M operating system resided and manually de-compiled it back into assembler language. The whole thing wasn't but a few hundred bytes. Now, knowing what the instructions were I then flowcharted the whole thing and found the places where I could insert jumps to my specialized driver code. Worked great as long as nobody ever changed the CP/M binary code. In fact that little company did several jobs where we used CP/M with bastardized jumps out to specialized code. I knew in my heart it was a piss poor way of doing things but I was being paid to make it work, not complain.
Back then running compiles were time consuming. So, sometimes when you wanted a quick patch it was just easier to write the assembler code on paper, then manually translate it to binary and enter the software patch into the memory through the front panel switches. When you got the patch to work properly then you punched cards and ran a proper complile. I remember one time when I had just finished entering a particularly large patch through the front panel switches and was about to test it and my boss came over and jokingly poked his finger at the "RESET" button while asking "Hey, what does this button do?" but his finger went just a millimeter too far and actually hit the reset button. I was
and he was 
. It was then that I realized that bosses are not gods.
...I feel just a little older now.
Where's that old Zygote ad where you could by the same figure that became Poser 3 Female for $499? And IBM delivering the first 5GB hard drive - using 4 guys to push it into a moving van.
Man, those were (not) the days.
First PC we had was an Atari 400XL. It had a tape drive for saving, and floppy disks that were actually floppy.
We also had a stack of Compute! magazines, one of which had an article about Microsoft's upcoming OS called "Windows". The author questioned the sanity of building an OS that relied so heavily on one core component, which MS called the "kernel". They were, however, excited about the new update to DOS 3.1.
They also had small programs you could enter manually in MLX. Then wait for next month's issue to publish the typos. We skipped a couple of months and so I learned how to debug the programs myself. It was only hexadecimal, after all.
Then there was the one issue dedicated to a spreadsheet program. I was not about to manually enter 20 pages of code by hand for free as a 12 year old lol
...yeah a whopping 5 MB and it required a forklift to load it it on a cargo plane.
Wow, thanks for posting that! I remember those old IMSAI's! I also remember saving up $400 to buy a 4KB (yes KB not MB) expansion card for my Atari. About 8-10 years ago, when they cleared out some stuff from one of the labs, they tried to give me an old 10 MB (yes MB) add-on drive from one of the old analyzers. It was literally a large coffee table on big heavy wheels, weighing hundreds of pounds.. Fake wood-grained top and everything. They also tried to pawn off a huge old PDP-8 with magnetic core plane memory. Even I am not that much of a hoarder. Still have one of the old core plane memory boards. You can literally see each bit, a little magnetic toroid.
As Spock would say, "Stone Knives and Bearskins!"
Some pics from my life in IT... 35 years in IT, woth the same company ... retired in 2006
Magnetic tape. Walk through there with a neodymium magnet and you can collapse an entire Government lol
Back before plastic monitors became "a thing", I worked at a place that had metal-housing monitors that everyone personalized with various fridge magnets. They were always complaining about the colors being skewed as compared to other monitors, and asked me to take a look. First thing I did was remove the magnets, and it straightened right up.
...City on The Edge of Forever (TOS).
Yeah, the Geek is strong in this one today.
Some more...
On mag tape and magnets,, we had a bulk tape eraser machine that used a rather nasty electromagnet to do,the deed.. two or three shots with it, and the tape was erased.. you learned rather quickly not to wear a watch around it when doing that job...
And the back room that supported all that was cool, too..
cooling plant - provided cold water for the mainframes (water cooled) and maoin cold air supply for the computer room..
I might have pics of our battery room and backup generator systems somewhere - we had two 2400HP diesels hooked to generators for emergency power..
I bet you can still hear the electrical hum.
Speaking of Spock and ST, I think it was the old Star Trek Technical Manual that illustrated how things like phase pistols and communicators were made: there was a microverse that was similar to ours, except everything was really really tiny. They built phase pistols in an orbital space dock where they were the size of starships and had nuclear reactors in them, then beamed them here, where they were palm-sized to us.
Seems legit.
Yes, I used to have the invoice for a Compaq 286 that I had purchased for around $3500 back when. And that was without a monitor. I can also remember paying about $500 for a hard drive. I have a longstanding habit of keeping my old computers, but a few years ago I got rid of the ones that were all Pentiums or older. Every once in a while I have a little regret about that, but the practical side usually wins out. After all, I would rarely fire them up, even for nostalgia's sake, and I certainly wasn't going to open a museum. Plus, I still have a fair collection of processors, drives, RAM, etc. from the era in my collection of hardware. What is really mind-boggling is the collection of old software that I still have. I shudder to think what I have paid for all of that over the years. I have boxes of it. For the kids out there, as an example of what you used to get when you bought a computer program, I have a copy of Ashton-Tate's DBase III+ that came in a box of its own that weighed about ten pounds. Most of that was manuals, of course. Anybody remember manuals? Actual documentation?
Wow... what a noob I am... My computer experience started in the 80's with an Apple II at the hotel management school I went to and a Commodore 64 at home. I bought that one to help me start using BASIC but ended up playing games on it...
I've read a story about those crazy IT folks somewhere getting their washing machine sized HDs to do races, by writing code that did reads in a fashion, that the constant starting and stopping made the HDs go schwiiiiing and start to slide around... until one got stuck in a doorframe. Probably pure fantasy, I'd say, right?
...raises hand.
I have a steamer trunk full of manuals and software boxes. Mostly Poser, Bryce, Truespace 4, Painter 3D, Infini-D, Ray Dream Studio, Paint Shop Pro, and some Visual Basic and Visual C++ books.
And in this corner, 3 similar trunks full of guitar magazines with tablature LOL
I bet kids today don't even know we could actually buy games on CDs (or even floppys!) rather than spend $60 for a DVD with a Steam Key on it.
Remember having to swap CDs for a game to continue? And kids cry about minor graphical quirks that break immersion. Pfft. Try ejecting a CD and hoping WIndows 95 didn't crash corrupting your save and your registry just because of a buggy CD-ROM driver.
How about swapping the 5.25 floppy disks to play a game
My first computer was a commodore 64, it hooked up to my Color tube TV via an antenna port and it was awsome! It had cartridge games and a tape deck to save my programs on. When the 5.25 floppy disks came out that was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Computer sure have come a long way. I hopeing to see a quantum home computer and nerve grear before I kick the bucket.
My first computer was a Dick Smith VZ 200, that used a tape deck for loading in games. Then an Amstrad CPC 464 with tape drive, then a Amstrad CPC 6128 that had a 3 inch disk drive.. Later I bought an Atari 520 ST that I got modified to add in 1 meg of ram and a double sided drive and from there I went to a PC..
Learned Fortran 4 in college. Not an organized person, so wasn't great at programming. Bought the first version of the TRS-80, 16kb of memory (pre-PC). Tape recorder for storage, converted B&W TV for monitor. Around $1500. First PC was a PS-2 with DOS 2.0. Anyone complaining about Windows should be forced to experience DOS. So much has changed.
I first attempted to build a very simple computer in the late '60's out of surplus telephone switching relays. It might have worked, but they were 60 volt relays (60 volt half-wave rectified AC). I was working on a power supply, but my parents then told me they would not allow me to run any projects off the house 110vac, due to previous incident (hey, the burns did heal eventually).
Also learned Fortran 4 and PL/C in college, and took the first course offered in microprocessor system design and programming, based around the Motorolla M6800. Ran the compiler and emulator on an IBM 360.
I later went with one of the Sinclair/Timex Z80 kits, that used a cassette tape to load programs (sometimes). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81
By that time (early 70's) I was working in DOW R&D as a chemist, and they had cutting-edge DEC PDP/11's with dumb terminals and paper tape readers.
My first "real" computer was a Commodore VIC-20. Still got it in the shop.
Started building PC's in the late '80's, never stopped since.
Good times. Good times. : )
Ahhhhh.....not really. The ones we had at work could have really done some dancin', particularly if you would have unlocked the big caster wheels, and if the cables had been longer.... : )
BIg hard drives also make lovely gyroscopes!
There was something even more absurd. I never worked with one but there was the IBM "Noodle Picker".
A bank of many short magnetic tape strips hanging on a rack. Along comes a "beak" that grabs the top end of the "noodle" and sucks it up past its read/write head then drops it back into position. 
Ta da! random access.
A similar but simpler version of this technology was employed in the early Mellotron keyboard music instruments famously used by the Moody Blues 
Noodle Picker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell
Mellotron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellotron
Add a decimal and make it 59.95 but it is still too expensive for my taste. My current computer is not worth $5,995 and is better than the op’s computer.
I wonder how powerful a $5995 computer would be today. (But how long would that last being a super computer?)
In the early '70s while I was working in the college computer room we had a Xerox Sigma5 computer system. Xerox had bought out a company I think called SDS (Scientific Data Systems) and inherited an old Random Access Device called a RAD (not very inventive with their names
) with a large heavy disk mounted with the axis horzontally pointed at the user. It spun at some ungodly speed and had "flying heads" that would crash and scratch the disk surface if the platter slowed down too slowly. The engineer's "brilliant" solution was to stop the disk platter instantly within one-quarter turn with large automotive type brakes on the disk hub. At the end of the day when you turned off the computer you pushed the power button and the six foot tall rack that was the RAD would make a loud THUNK and jerked the whole cabinet top sideways enough to knock over the cute little toys that the computer room boys would place up there to measure the jerk factor.
And speaking of gyroscopes... While working at the Space Center I had a late '70s Raytheon system with big old large diameter multi-platter disk drives mounted in 5 foot racks. A decision was made to move some of the computer racks to accomodate new equipment and we called in the guys who did the heavy lifting work for the Space Center to explain what we wanted to do so they could make sure they were prepared to handle the weight of the equipment when they came to do the job. While the system was still running I had just finished explaining which racks needed to be moved when this bodybuilding monster with arms the size of melons said "No problem, I'll just move it myself" and proceeded to put his meaty hands on the top front edge of the disk drive rack and instantly tilt it backward about 30 degrees! ARGHHHHHH
My heart stopped, a scream came from my throat and I cried out STOP, STOP, LOWER IT GENTLY and SLOWLY. A confused look came over his face but I didn't have the composure to explain my fear of crashing disk heads or stressed bearings and just went into a controlled panic verifying that everything was still working. Amazingly the drive was tougher than I thought. But from that point on I stood between the monster and my precious machines.
Ooh, ooh, another story about gyroscopes and angular momentum. One of the people I worked with sometime told me a story of how they were working in an industrial plant somewhere and were using big electric motors. They needed to be able to stop the motor relatively quickly but the mechanical brakes that they had for the monster motor weren't adequate. So they either invented or purchased or jury-rigged an electronic brake system for the motor. They mount this huge motor by bolting it into the concrete floor, turn it on and test their new electronic brake which worked all too well. He said the angular momentum of instanteously stopping the thousand pound motor ripped it out of the floor and it crashed through the wall and rolled down the length of the factory scattering equipment and freaking out people all the way
.
remember the sound of a dot matrix printer?
the squelsh of 1200 baud
the smell of carbon paper
the paper cuts of greenbar paper
Nope, I've 'walked' those old DEC RP05 & RP06 hard drives ( http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/rp06.html ). They looked almost identical to a top-load washing machine. To protect the platters, there were built-in commands to PARK the heads (huge solenoid on the head arm pivot) and to increase speed, there was a SEEKTOCENTER command built in as well. When you executed these the machine would make a loud THUNK noise, and it would jolt the whole frame of the drive.
So you write a little program/script to send the right commands depending on which direction you wanted to 'walk' the drive (forward or backward)......To walk it forward, you'd do a SEEKTOCENTER, followed by a set of seeks further outward on the platter, then repeat. To go backward, you simply would do regular seeks from the outer part of the platter inward, then send a PARK command, then repeat. With the right timing, it would literally cause the drive to edge forward/backward unless it was bolted down.
I had a couple of PDP-8s long ago. An 8a and an 8f. One had a Paper-tape reader, the other had a DECtape drive. Each tape could store a whopping 78KB of data! Of course, to boot the machine you still had to toggle in the RIM loader on the front panel switches...... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8
Yep, Core Memory. The PDP-8f had (IIRC) 4KB of core memory. And it ran EDUSystem/10, a multi-user timesharing OS. That's right, with only 4k of memory, it would support up to 10 simultaneous users.
And PaperTape storage.....this was on the PDP-11/70 at the university I used: http://retrocmp.com/stories/dec-pc05-papertape/239-dec-pc05-paper-tape-reader-puncher
Dot matrix? Try a DRUM Printer. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/lp20.html ; Sounded like a machine-gun being fired when printing. Had a daisy-wheel for each of 132 columns, which would rotate and all of them would then smack through a ribbon on the paper at once. And my first modem was a Hayes 300 Smartmodem External. Carbon Paper? Remember mimeograph machines? The smelly purple ink and the stained fingers?
When I left the hospital over a year ago, the lab was still using one.