Dawn of the Personal Computer (pictorial history)

[pokerfan]

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/dawn_personal_computer_altair_ibm_pc

A trip down the amnesia highway. My first 'computer' was the Kim-1. Paper tape was its storage. Then my roommate got a TRS-80. I was able to triple its memory from 16 to 48 KB and storage was a cassette recorder. But it played games (Hamurabi) and served as a terminal to campus mainframes and minicomputers at a time when most people had to walk to the labs.

[slackmaster]

1. Curse you for posting that - I can never resist looking through every page of such a link

But thanks!

[pokerfan]

4. And so began Bill's hatred of open-source

:rofl:

[hobbit709]

2. M.I.T.S. Altair 8800

Five minutes of flipping switches on the front so you could load the paper tape and then communicate in English on the screen.

[MercutioATC]

3. My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1.

4k of RAM that I upgraded to 16k, cassette storage, external 1200-baud modem (with the phone handset cups), b/w monitor with "pixels" the size of a grain of rice.

God, I loved that thing :)

[BlooInBloo]

6. My family's first was the Model III. My personal first was the C64. Now THAT was a computer.

EDIT: hahahaha! It's the best selling computer EVER!

"The Commodore 64 is one of the most recognized computers ever built. It should be; it holds the world record for the most units sold of any computer. What the C64 lacked in technology it made up for in popularity and price.
This machine helped cement the idea of a “home” computer when that concept was almost as alien as a personal aircraft carrier and it did so because the machine was both affordable and accessible.

While a few Commodores were used for productivity most ended up as game systems while an entire generation of software engineers got their programming start writing BASIC code on a C64."


I'm one of those computer geeks they're talking about *beam*!

Quibble about the article: Real men (and women) learned the simple assembly language that was available on the c64. Not possible to get acceptable performance thru interpreted code.

[VWolf]

9. Same here. Remember the Applications Sourcebook?

You could advertise your software in it. I wrote a version of Galaxian and sold 5 copies. It was my first (and last) foray into commercial software development.

They also offered the Technical Reference Manual, which included all the schematics and circuit descriptions of the Model I. I think I still have a copy in my attic.

[yowzayowzayowza]

17. ...and another...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z80

Basic suckt!!!!

[av8rdave]

5. I remember taking a computer science class in college...mid 70s

We used a Burroughs 6600 mainframe computer. The programming language was Algol. We submitted our projects in boxes of punch cards (hence the term "batch file").

Gawd, do I feel old!

[moggie]

10. Algol-60, or Algol-68?

I must still have my ICL Algol-60 manual somewhere...

[av8rdave]

12. Oh, you're really stretching my memory now!

I really can't recall. I was a C student at best in computer science!

[Nihil]

25. Algol-60 on an ICL? ... takes me back a bit ...

... one of my projects in the first company I worked for was
to port an ICL Algol-68 program to Coral-66 on a VAX!

:hi:

[moggie]

26. Would that have been at the CEGB?

They were big Coral users, back in the day.

[Nihil]

27. No, BAe Dynamics ...

(i.e., before it was re-labelled British Aerospace Air Weapons Division)

Coral-66 was mandated by the good old MoD for such things (pre-Ada) so
I had the pleasure of learning enough Algol & George III to understand
how to migrate their model from the ICL/Algol to VAX/Coral!

Another trip down (128kb) memory lane! :-)

[moggie]

28. Jeez, GEORGE-III

My first experience of computers (thanks to the schools' service) was on an ICL 1900.

Pre-privatisation, the CEGB was a good source of work-experience summer jobs for students, and I did a couple of stints with them, which introduced me to Coral-66: they had their own realtime OS largely written in the language, and I had some small involvement in porting it to new hardware. AFAICR, they had their own Coral compiler written in the hairy STAGE2 macro-processor language.

It seems a world away now. The idea of a large fraction of UK industry using a home-grown language pretty much unknown outside the UK seems as quaint as Ealing films and handlebar moustaches.

[Ezlivin]

7. The evolution of our cybernetic overlords

I, too, have to look at every image and read about computers I once dreamed of owning.

I started with a Timex Sinclair computer with 1K of memory and cassette tape storage. Learned BASIC on it before trading way, way up for an HP-150 touchscreen computer. That computer got me into Turbo Pascal and Lotus 1-2-3 and doing my own custom windowing programs. But when I saw the Mac Plus, I knew what I was getting next!

And I've been using Macs since 1985, making only one brief detour to try a Mac clone.'

Now I'm running a Mac Pro with 14GB of RAM, 2TB of disk space and a 30" monitor. That's a long way from 1K of RAM and a 12" B/W television monitor!

I suspect that my current computer will look as outdated as the Sinclair in just a few years. And cost less.

[mix]

8. very cool

i wish though they had included (more) dates...

[moggie]

11. Interesting seeing the Kenbak-1

Since that was so early that the CPU was built from standard TTL chips rather than a microprocessor. Back in the early to mid 1970s, I was in an amateur computing club, but my ownership ambitions had to wait until 1979 due to lack of money, so I mostly read the newsletters and yearned. Anyway, a number of the club enthusiasts who designed and built their own machines actually disliked the introduction of microprocessors, feeling that they made building a computer too easy and less creative!

I drooled over the MITS-Altair 8800, but it was way out of my range at the time. My first computer was the Acorn System 1, rather similar to the KIM-1: 6502, hex keypad, 7-segment LED display, cassette interface, 1 K memory (if I remember correctly). Great for learning machine code, provided you weren't too ambitious.

[byronius]

13. What a fricking cool post.

[hunter]

14. My first computer was a homebrew using an 1802 processor.

My first years in college I wrote programs in fortran on pre-printed coding forms, waited to get time on the keypunch, and left the cards on the shelf to be run overnight.

In the morning I'd pick up the printout and half the time there would be some stupid error, and I'd have to convince someone to let me cut into line to punch a card or two so I could leave the cards on the shelf to start all over again.

The end of the term was always a nightmare and the computer lab would be open 24-7 because that's the only way everyone would get time to finish their projects.

My first workhorse computer, something that was really useful for writing term papers and stuff, was an Atari 800 running AtariWriter and then PaperClip. But mostly I lived in the university computer labs and libraries, even during the times I wasn't actually a student for one reason or another...

:blush:

I got my first taste of the internet in 1979 and I've been here ever since.

These days all my old computers and software live on in a Debian virtual reality:

[pokerfan]

15. the processor that made its way onto Voyager and Viking

Very suited for space applications...

http://www.cosmacelf.com/docs.htm

[hunter]

16. It's a lovely little processor.

I did a bit of commercial work with it but my partner took it into the military and I didn't want to go there. I have no regrets at all, I escaped the clutches of the Military Industrial Complex!

It's funny now how protective everyone was of small bits of code then. That letter by Bill Gates is almost hilarious in retrospect because the BASIC he was all in a snit about was an astonishingly inelegant and ugly little 8K program with very limited capabilities.

It's funny to see Tom Pittman's name on the cosmacelf page too. He's a nut. The intersection between religion and computing is full of them. Orson Scott Card is another, he was an Atari guy, which is where I first heard of him.

[pokerfan]

18. Gates/Microsoft has never been about innovation

Their big breakthrough came from buying an OS from someone else (Seattle Computer Products) and then reselling it to IBM. They use IP law to stifle competition rather than encourage innovation and competition. It's primarily a law firm.

[struggle4progress]

19. Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 Replica

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBBwscIJXgM&feature=related

Difference Engine 2 Demo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfGEba5YhkU&feature=related

[pokerfan]

21. and the Antikythera mechanism

Twenty-two centuries ago...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

It's almost as if there was some kind of gap or dark age in our science from the Greeks to the Renaissance.

[struggle4progress]

24. Antikythera mechanism working model

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eUibFQKJqI

[gtar100]

30. That's exactly what it was. The Renaissance came about by a renewed exploration of Greek ideas.

Of course there's more to it, but the 'Cosmos' series by Carl Sagan describes this elegantly. European and Middle Eastern history unfortunately got side-tracked by the growth of major religions after the time of Alexander. Slowly we fell into a deep sleep and slowly we are waking up. I hope we don't go back again.

[BlooInBloo]

20. They shoulda closed with Lego computers...

http://acarol.woz.org/

http://legocomputer.com/

http://tfvlrue.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/lego-computer/

[pokerfan]

22. nice!

Then there are nekkid computers:

[BlooInBloo]

23. hahah!

[hunter]

29. Here's a nekkid computer living in the closet...

[krispos42]

31. I still have "DOS for Dummies"

First computer was a Texas Instruments computer you hooked up to your TV set. It used cartridges, which we never had, so we did everything in BASIC.


Then a Commodore 64 with floppy drive.


Then a PC XT (I think) with DUAL floppy drives AND a 20-meg hard drive. DOS 3.11, baby! :woohoo:


Then a Packard-Bell Pentium with 850 meg hard drive and a 14.4 modem.


Badass...