Computers I have known

http://jacquesmattheij.com/computers-I-have-known

by jacquesm • 13 years ago

56 17 13 years ago

jgrahamc2• 13 years ago

Interesting to see the KIM-1 in there. Some time around 1984 I used one of those to build a prototype replacement for the large electromechanical controls on a machine that placed labels on bottles (shampoo etc.).

To program it I wrote the control program (which used the I/O ports to interface with the machine to read the speed bottles were moving and adjust the labeler appropriately) on paper in assembly language, debugged it there by hand and then converted it to machine code and entered it on the KIM-1 keyboard.

The display was enough to output information about the program's operation and using a microprocessor meant that the machine could get new functionality quickly (such as spotting that there was a missing label on the spool of labels and accelerating the labeler so that it skipped the missing label and didn't skip a bottle).

jacquesm3• 13 years ago

I bought my KIM off the doorman of the bank where I worked (in the mailroom). He mentioned he had a computer for sale on the message board in the hallway and I went with him (on the back of a rickety old motorcycle, scariest thing I've ever done) to his house in Almere, came back home by train with a bag full of bits.

This particular KIM-1 was sold as a kit which had been partially completed and some of the parts were installed the wrong way. So I got to practice double sided PCB parts extraction for a while before being able to program it.

The FSK chip eventually got cannibalized to do duty in a home-brew modem for the BBC (which had a dedicated serial port).

jgrahamc2• 13 years ago

You can rekindle those 8-bit days when you knew _everything_ about how your machine's software and hardware worked with a microcontroller such as Arduino.

http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/just-give-me-simple-cpu-and-few-...

aerique• 13 years ago

Programming the PC (after the ST with its linear memory space) really felt like a step back in many ways.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. It actively put me off from programming for a good while (that and Doom) because it was such a hassle, it felt so needless. Why make things harder than they should be, or why fail so bad at making hardware? (Remember this was an arrogant 16-year old thinking.)

Needless to say, I came across such situations a lot more once confronted with the real world.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

People don't understand just how expensive computing used to be.

Here are some old issues of infoworld from the '80s.

(http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aj4EAAAAMBAJ&printsec...)

Dot matrix printer, 63 lines per minute, 80 columns == $740 (cable an extra $35). ($750 adjusted to today is $2,000)

"Tape Solves Winchester Backup Crunch" - talks about the trouble of backup up 10 million bytes; about the drop from $20,000 to $3,000 making winchester technology available to the 'average advanced individual businessman". (1980 $3,000 = $8,300 in 2013).

(http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0DAEAAAAMBAJ&printsec...)

jacquesm3• 13 years ago

There is nothing sadder than old computer hardware and what you paid for it.

I shudder to think what I paid for my first portable PC (the size of a very large toaster), my first laptop and my first > 100 MB hard drive.

64Kbit of ram, cost $50/chip (bits, not bytes) and it needed an awful lot of them to populate a motherboard, cache chips were even more expensive.

For one project I hacked together a memory expansion that held a full page of data to be sent to a laser printer as a bitmap at 300 dpi, weeks of wire wrapping and a bill for the memory that you could easily buy a very nice car for. (But it did give me the ability to do grayscale printing when everybody else was still stuck with dithering :) ). Operating on an in-warranty $10K or so laser printer to be able to modulate the laser in real time as it lights up the drum is lots of fun.

387s, Weiteks, DSP boards, now FPGAs and GPUs and an endless lists of expensive goodies at the bleeding edge of computing (bleeding edge as far as ordinary mortals were concerned). I still have a bunch of Indys laying in the basement that I paid ~$10K a piece for, they're worth next to nothing now. The funnies bit about those computers is that today - a good 15 years later - I still use their keyboards, through a ps/2 to USB dongle. Those keyboards are both fantastic to type on and practically indestructible.

We bought a PDP-11 off NikHef for scrap in the 80's and used it to design electronics and route PCBs, it had cost a small fortune new.

arethuza• 13 years ago

I shudder to think what my employer (a University as part of an EU funded project) paid for what was pretty much a fully loaded Sun 4/330 for me to use around 1990 - when the RAM upgrade arrived a guy actually flew from London to Edinburgh with the RAM and installed it for us!

I'm pretty sure that machine cost the best part of £50K and that was without the hardware accelerated 3D option that some partners in the project used.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

Old computers have an odd mix of brilliant and awful keyboards.

Proper hardware switches (the IBM keyboard is well known) were reasonably common.

But the membrane keyboard of the Sinclair ZX 81; the rubber squidgy buttons of the Sinclair Spectrum; the square layout and keycaps of the Sharp MZ80k; there were many terrible keyboards.

ZX81 : (http://www.nightfallcrew.com/27/11/2012/sinclair-zx81-person...) -- The awful keyboard meant you had to push hard, which would wobble the machine, which would case the attached RAMPack to wobble and thus need the machine to be rebooted.

Sharp MZ80K: (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=174&s...)

heja2009• 13 years ago

Yep, my first own computer was an Atari ST plus 20MB hard disk (probably the same setup as described in the article). IIRC it was 1800 DM for the computer and the disk each, i.e. ˜1800 Euro total in todays money or ˜3600 Euro total when adjusted for inflation. The positive side is: I can justify that it is reasonable to still spend that amount today.

kylec• 13 years ago

48T of attached storage for your current computer? Why so much?

jacquesm3• 13 years ago

Large dataset addiction :)

pjmlp2• 13 years ago

The ones I have worked so far:

Timex 2068 (My first computer)

ZX Spectrum 48+ (2nd computer)

ZX Spectrum +2A and +3 (at friend's place)

Amstrad PC1512 (at school)

Amiga 500 (at friend's place)

PC Compatible 386SX, P75, P166 MMX, AMD K-7, ...

AS/400, Aix, HP-UX, Solaris Workstations (At work)

draegtun2• 13 years ago

I previously left a nostalgic list of the computers I owned on a HN comment last year - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4052679

One thing I didn't previously mention is that the first computer I saw & used was a Sinclair ZX-81. It was my best friends but he couldn't make head and tail of it. So when I visited he left it mainly for me to use and that started my addiction to programming :)

pjmlp2• 13 years ago

Nice list.

If I am not mistaken, we started with the same Linux distribution.

bhauer• 13 years ago

Fun read. Though, at least here in the US, the 520 was the first ST and the 260ST was a very limited run that came after the 520. I think the 260 was intended for the European market, but I still believe it was released after the 520 as a lower-cost alternative.

I personally had a 520STFM and then a 1040STE. Fantastic computers for their time.

whileonebegin• 13 years ago

Nice nostalgia. Now, where is my 100-core CPU?

Computers I have known

Related Stories