@jbartus Back when I bought my Apple ][ there was a company with a promotion ‘Buy our 10MB Winchester Hard Drive for $35xx and we’ll thrown in an Apple ][ and controller!’.
@jbartus around here they still have parts drawers, electronics basics, basic stamp kits, arduinos, make kits, etc… but it is getting smaller every month I will admit. Many markets just switched to a dual branding… some they switched outright to sprint and some even stayed radioshack only.
@FroodyFrog Way back when Radio Shacks were kind of hardware stores for electronics, I enjoyed going to them. Got watch batteries replaced, splitters for our landline phones (before cells), splitters for the cable box, cables for the cable box…
Then they started upscaling and I remember going to one to get a replacement vga cable for my monitor. And the kids working there said “PCs are on the way out, all anybody will have is laptops”.
Yeah, look how that worked out, you little whippersnapper.
@lisaviolet They used to get great ‘surplus’ deals too. I used to watch the nearby ones and would get keyboards, specialty fans, Votrax chips, etc. It was pretty cool. Plus after college when I lost all time to do hobby stuff, I still had two sealed in package keyboards that turned out to be for the Coleco Adam computer, and they got a good price on Ebay
A couple of years back, I was going camping in an area where I knew there was no cell phone/wireless coverage and was looking for a replacement for my old AM/FM radio (that had just died) so I could listen to the World Series. I didn’t have time to order one online for delivery, so I tried Radio Shack. Long story short, I couldn’t make the 20-something clerk understand what I wanted. He kept trying to sell me a pair of 2-way radios (walkie-talkies) and assuring me it was what I needed.
@DrWorm LOL…amateurs. I worked at my Radio Shack one year during the holidays. I was getting married so needed extra for that and for Christmas. We had some of the coolest stuff. I’d say 75% of my gifts were from there. They begged me to stay on…not only am I friendly but I’m an old timer with a small knowledge of electronics. Heck compared to a couple of the whipper snappers, I was a down right genius. It closed recently and that made me so sad. It was a great small town business where the manager knew most of the customers by name.
@mehbee I worked for RS for 8 years. Actually enjoyed my job there. I believed in the products that were sold. They were high quality products.
The company changed after I left and started to sell name brand electronics that you could buy elsewhere for a lot less. They stopped manufacturing their own stuff and began going downhill from there. At the time, they had brands like Realistic, Archer, Micronta, Optimus, etc.
The only thing I really hated about the job was having to ask customers for their names and addresses when they made a simple purchase. Many of the customers refused and we got yelled at by the district office if we had a low percentage of addresses. Our jobs were threatened daily if we didn’t meet our name and address quotas.
Customers used to laugh at us for manually hand writing receipts when we sold computers. It was such a common question about why we didn’t have registers like most other companies and we even sold that stuff. I didn’t have any answer I could give them.
@cengland0 I would have been one of the customers wondering why a companing who sold tech didn’t at least have registers, but I would NEVER have laughed at you.
My first PC… Had a 3.5 Floppy, 1 MB Ram… and a whopping 50 MB hard drive! It barely ran windows 3.1… I think we had to put in an expansion ram cartridge (yes it was weird…) I think my mother may have done one of these on it too…
@sohmageek My first computer didn’t have any floppy drives, I had to use a cassette tape. It didn’t run windows at all because there were no IBM PCs at the time. It had 8K of ram, expandable to 48K max. I did eventually expand to the full 48K.
@cengland0@sohmageek 48K Apple ][+, using a $200 16k upgrade kit from 32K. 1.023MHz 6502. I could not afford the $650 floppy drive for about a year so used a Panasonic cassette recorder. Happy to say it did not run windows; thats a good thing.
Still have it, it still works, though the floppy drive is getting a little flaky.
@duodec Here’s a photo of a couple of my older processors.
My first one was the Z80 which is the 3rd chip from the top. I upgraded it to a Z80a later and that’s why I pulled this one from my production system.
In that set, I also have the 6809 (used in the Commodore SuperPET and the TRS-80 COCO). The 6502 was used in the Apple 2, Atari 2600, Nintendo, and the Commodore PET.
The one I’m holding is a floppy controller chip from Zilog. I cannot remember the rest of them but I’m sure I could look them up if someone cares.
Something I didn’t realize until now (or I forgot because I’m old and probably have Alzheimers), is why is a Zilog Z80 chip has a Sharp brand name on it? Hmm…
@cengland0 Zilog licensed the Z80 to a handful of chip manufacturers (including Sharp). I still have a soft spot for the Z80 myself. My favorite Z80-based device is probably the portable Cambridge Z88.
(Edit - if memory serves, the one on the bottom is a similar situation: a MOS design (6532 RIOT) under license to Rockwell)
@brhfl Z-80 assembler was the second language I learned back in high school (third, if you count an Olivetti Programma 101 as a computer); HP-2000e BASIC was the 1st (or 2nd).
The first computer I owned had a Z-80 as well (it was an S-100 card cage). I sold it after a while, but still have the IMSAI 8080 (albeit with a Z-80 processor board) that I picked up secondhand around 1985.
I put myself through the firs two years of college writing Z-80 assembler code.
Sinclair 1000 and TRS-80 were what I grew up on. In 7th grade I got my first PC, an 8086 XT with an amber monochrome monitor, 5.25" floppy drive and maybe a 10mb hard drive (but maybe just two floppies, I fail to remember correctly right now), and it cost a smooth thousand dollars plus tax.
I remember when the utility company started sending out punch cards in the mail with your bill, and you had to sit and punch out the little tabs that would correspond to your account and amount with a pencil tip so their mainframe could process your payment.
My grandfather walked that bill downtown to their office every damn month with cash in hand and told them he wanted nothing to do with their newfangled technology. He’d occasionally loudly accuse them all of being Communists, which I never understood, as I was pretty sure back then that all Communists had to be Luddite.
My first computer was a pocket calculator, in the early 1970’s.
@Pavlov I actually sympathize with your grandfather on that. Having to do your own punch-outs, likely not a reversible process if you make a mistake, is really bad customer interactivity. People write. Its ok to presume on that capability. But an oddball crappy interface like punchcards? Did they include a template or shield or anything to aid in the process?
@duodec They provided instructions in a condensed form on the reverse of the bill. It was a nightmare, and they kept using the system for years - the utility in question was municipality owned and they were resistant to change once the punch cards were in place. With the first bill of the new calendar year they would send you a couple of extra blank cards in case you made a mistake at a future date. Whoever sold that system to the city was one hell of a salesman.
@Pavlov Quite a few punch systems Ive used treat a line of all punches as either a NOP or a skipped instruction for the sake of ignoring mistakes, was hopeful that was an option with your bill-paying system. Sounds like… no… though. What a mess.
@duodec @Pavlov
My mom didnt mind dealing with computerized systems, but hated “doing their work for them” and stapled every punch card she returned, on principle. I imagine she did not have many fans in accounts receivable.
My first code was done on paper tape. I was ok but not incredible or anything.
The first pc i messed with (but did not own) had instructions submitted by switches. You messed up, you started over. It was owned by an a friend’s dad, an aerospace engineer, who built stuff as a hobby.
My first coding job was batched on punch cards. The most obsessed coders used to pace back and forth in front of the computer room windows, cursing the operators for not running their code immediately. The operators found ways to torment the coders who got hostile.
My first real computer was an Apple IIc (which I still have in working condition). I remember this particular ad.
I always loved the design, especially vs the boring-looking IBM PC. I loved the original Mac as well but it was way too expensive.
@awk I like how frank the Apple ad was about how the kids knew more than the parents. ‘Or talk to your own computer experts. As soon as they get home from school.’
Radio Shack went to crap a long time ago. They reduced stock to just phones & batteries. Why would someone drive to Radio Shack to buy a damn battery.
Their stocks of electronic parts and cool items slowly reduced to nothing.
@daveinwarsh I still have a Radio Shack with electronic parts. Their stock dwindled right after all the other stores closed down, but the manager told me it was because they were changing all the sku’s. Sure enough the next time I went in they had restocked with items in new silver and black ziplock packaging instead of the old red and black on white bags. So apparently there is some kind of secret radshack holdout that’s going to spend more money trying and still fail because the stores still suck.
When that happens I’ll be sad that I have to plan ahead when I need some sort of random part or capacitor, because there will be nowhere local to get it.
@daveinwarsh My Dad had an adding machine very similar to Magic Brain shown. It was an architectural version; I think it had a slot for inches & another for fractions
@cengland0 I mentioned here once before that if I ever have a ‘gold watch’ celebratory sort of moment, I’m getting myself a Curta. Lot of neat simulators on the internet, it’s… a pretty insane device.
@compunaut Dad also purchased one of the early Texas Instruments SR-50 scientific calculators. I know he paid way over $100 (there was a bit of a family ‘discussion’). That would be about 700 of today’s $$ damn; can’t get that image to work right
@dashcloud Fun video. I will admit to owning way too many classic HPs (there are three on my desk at work, gulp!). The video briefly touched on the 4-function Sinclairs, but skipped one of their (well, Nigel Searle’s) biggest accomplishments, the Sinclair Scientific. The HP 35 used multiple chips to quickly compute trig functions with the accurate CORDIC algorithms. Because of that, it cost around $800. Clive Sinclair (using Searle’s algorithms) opted for the opposite approach, slow, inaccurate, but running on a single TI chip designed for a simple four-function calculator. It cost $120 at launch. There was no space in ROM for constants, so some useful ones were printed on the front (unfortunately these are worn off on my copy). The constants necessary for trig functions were computed every time they ran, decreasing speed even further. I mention this for two reasons — I think it’s an awesome, quirky, bizarre machine; and to link to something any self-respecting nerd would appreciate… a JavaScript emulation of the Sinclair Scientific by some crazy dude who managed to reverse-engineer the thing. cc: @daveinwarsh@cengland0@jbartus@compunaut
@dashcloud I suspect you mean Ken Shirriff (the fact that a complete emulation of the Sinclair Scientific constitutes a mere blog post on his site is proof of that fact), but the statement holds true of Searle and Sinclair as well. Well, Sinclair was kind of a master of cutting too many corners, and a master of flops, but his successes have such a dirty elegance to them…
@dashcloud the followup addendum about Texas Instruments graphing calculators and how they achieved such dominance in the market was actually pretty fascinating.
@jbartus Sums up Sinclair pretty well, I think! That video mentioned the slim executive. It was slim because they were able to use button cells by running the ALU way out of spec to save power. Instead of running it all the time, power was provided in pulses, relying on the internal capacitance of the chip. If that’s not a dirty hack in the name of elegance, I don’t know what is!
@daveinwarsh I remember my mom having a Magic Brain calculator, although I didn’t realize that’s what it was called. Mom has never thrown away anything. I bet I’ll come across it while I’m cleaning out her house for the estate sale.
@Barney Addiator was one of the big names in those devices. Faber-Castell made a few slide rules with Addiators attached to the back, and they actually still have some NOS for sale!
@daveinwarsh actually batteries have been a radio shack staple since the beginning… I remember as a kid they had “free battery” club They would do anything to get you on the mailing list…
The first version of Excel was made for the Apple Macintosh. I used the crap out of it from 1986-89. The MS-DOS version looked a lot like 1-2-3. The first Mac version looks almost exactly like today’s Excel.
@Officemonkey Multiplan was before Excel and was technically the first 3rd party software available for the Apple. It lasted for about a year and then was replaced by Excel.
@jbartus Yes, that’s right. I knew there was one that Microsoft copied and I thought it was multiplan but when I looked it up, I saw they wrote that too.
Bah! Children! The first computer I worked on (back in the 1960’s) was an IBM 7040 mainframe. We had to load the punch cards (student programs) into the hopper, run the program, then bundle the cards with the printout (on the green and white striped printout paper) to go back to them. Programs tape reels had to be loaded and threaded by hand. And this was in a room kept at 50 degrees to keep the computer banks from overheating. Long sleeve shirts allowed, but no sweaters, because any stray fuzz could get into a computer bank and cause problems.
My first “calculator” was a slide rule, which I think I still have somewhere in a drawer. The first personal computer I owned was an Apple ][ that only had uppercase letters. No shift key.
And I got really tired of people asking: “Why are you wasting so much time with those machines? Shouldn’t you be spending it learning something useful? Like shorthand and taking dictation so you can get a good job as a secretary?”
@rockblossom Somewhere in this office, I still have the circular slide rule with the slide out card with tables on it that I got when I attended Desert High School on Edwards Air Force Base, California. Probably under an inch of dust, but now I want to find it. There goes my day.
@rockblossom In college my first classes were on a CDC Cyber 70 Model 73 running Kronos. 110-baud TTY, 300 baud TTY, and a small selection of 300 baud ADM-3A glass TTY terminals. And punch cards were mandatory for a few of the assignments also.
I have fond memories of that system. I got to see it a few times because my friend was a sysop. Impressive hardware, with the coolest dual green round screen console…
@duodec I didn’t mind the punch cards so much until we started having to run subroutines in binary code. Having to type a hundred or so lines of binary code onto punch cards is the most mind-numbing task I ever remember doing. And each one had to be carefully hand numbered with a pencil, because if you dropped the stack -
@rockblossom We just had class assignments. Mostly that was Fortran source code. The punches just punched and didn’t print the text on the top of the card. The facility had the ability to “interpret” the cards (take the un-printed but punched cards and print the text on top and also print a sequence number on the card) but that was an extra step; you could not hand in your deck and request interpret and run. Do one first, get your deck back and resubmit for the other. With too many students, not enough punches, and sysops falling behind on busy days there wasn’t time for the luxury…
Fun times to recall. I’m glad its no longer necessary.
@rockblossom I think the TTYs had ‘RUBOUT’. It would print a special character, then the character you had previously typed. If you kept hitting the rubout key it would print the next previous typed character, and so on until you pressed another key or had 'RUBOUT’ed the entire line you entered.
@rockblossom Our high school (late 70s) had a large Burroughs machine (mini-computer) that used the half-sized punch cards. The system was purchased to take care of the district’s payroll, HR, & other admin tasks, but there was plenty of excess capacity to teach FORTRAN to nerdy students with an elective to burn
I taught myself FORTRAN in college (late 00s) to help my aviation related major friends do their homework. It was an interesting experience, nearly every time I went looking for and equivalent function for something that’s a native part of Java or other more modern languages it was like “nope, doesn’t exist”. I think I learned more about programming having to invent my own equivalents for those functions within the extremely basic confines offered by FORTRAN than I did in any programming class I took.
@jbartus A common issue. More modern languages have expanded on the concept of standard libraries that are part of the language and expected to be available on any system that language was provided on. Fortran predates that for the most part. C was the earliest language I used that had a standard library that was common across systems; Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and others have hugely expanded standard and common optional libraries.
More than likely the code you needed was available somewhere but as a package of source code modules that you would have had to compile to use. Especially mathematically inclined packages, but Fortran was used for so many technical purposes that aviation, medical, engineering, etc source libraries used to be very common. But I don;t know how easy it would be to find them on the internet any more. A lot of stuff has been fading out, and the old repository sites have gone offline.
Congrats! Your dive into the lower levels has probably made you a better programmer than many of the up and comers who have never worked in an older language with a limited library, and so had to figure out how to do certain things themselves.
@duodec yeah that’s what I was saying, it also gave me a huge appreciation for how much easier my life is with more modern languages, I don’t take as many things for granted now as I once did.
Our first computer was a PC compatible 80286 someone at my dad’s company built for us. I don’t know how much RAM it had or how big the hard drive was, but it had both a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive. I’m pretty sure now that all the software on it was pirated WAREZ except for the stuff my parents bought after we got it, which wasn’t much, mostly the occasional game from The Learning Company.
my first computer (not counting the commodore 64) was a gateway p5-60 (or p5-90) pentium processor with 128MB of ram and a 500MB hard drive. It was a MONSTER in 1993-1994 with that much ram.
I got started programming BASIC on a C64 in elem school. Tired of it quickly and moved on to a handful of other languages on the thing before just deciding to learn its assembler. In the meantime, I had been given an HP-41CX (still have that one) which taught me more about programming than C64 BASIC ever could (fortunately I got out before the Dijkstra effect set in). Eventually dabbled in 8080 asm as well. I guess HP had a lot of formative effect on me — I got started with FORTH (which I still use) on the 71B, and I learned UNIX (HP-UX) on an HP-9000.
@duodec It’s a wonderful language (IMO), and all the moreso for someone brought up thinking about stacks (RPN). Probably my favorite language. I will admit to using my HP-42S far more than the real HP-41, just because of those damn N batteries! I also have the HP-41CV emulator card pretty much permanently installed in my 48GX.
We still have the first computer I ever used in our attic, I don’t know the specifics sadly. 286 or 386 I’m sure. I do, however, know the oldest computer I ever used, my dad had an old Zenith Z-110 when I was a kid. Gotta love those old dual floppy drives.
It was a pretty capable computer for the early 80s too, check out the neat graphics it was capable of:
@brhfl yes indeed, very cool. My dad even upgraded it at one point to color capability but because it was pre-IBM PC and everything had eventually become aligned to IBM PC compatibility we never did find a monitor for it. It was a casualty of our 2003 move, sadly.
@jbartus That is sad! If memory serves, they ran a sort-of-kind-of compatible DOS, but the BIOS calls were absolutely incompatible (collateral damage from parallelizing two different processors, I suppose).
1st - Sinclair Z80 kit built that ran at an amazing 1mhz. 1 kb ram, cassette for storage and a TV for video. Color too if you consider both black and white as colors.
2nd - TI99. The first 16 bit processor, the TI9900. To get it to market it was dummied down to run as an 8 bit. 5 1/4" floppies as an add on.
[Almost 3rd - S100 bus. Decided too much $$$]
3rd - Trash80 (TRS for Tandy Radio Shack and 80 for Zilog Z80 running at 1.774 MHz). It was given to me. I never used it. All I remember about it was it made the TV buzz. It interfered with everything electronic.
4th - C64. Fun machine. COLOR and Music!
5th - C128. Twice the fun! First computer I had with the
3 1/2" floppies.
6th - PC. The TV station was upgrading so I went dumpster diving. Got a pretty good 8086 system out of it. And running an archive on the 10 MB HD almost doubled it to a 20 MB
7th to current - Macs! (still have an operating lime clamshell)
@Mehrocco_Mole HP managed to royally screw up what the 9825 series was while marketing it, but upon reflection it’s hard not to see it as an earlier 16-bit desktop computer. Admittedly, the readily-available TV output, the boot into BASIC, and the cartridge slot just waiting for Parsec made the TI 99 series much more consumer-oriented, so there’s a case for that. I still have two of them in storage, and a copy of Parsec. Those machines always left me rather cold, though.
Tandy/Radio Shack made some… interesting machines, that’s for sure. I have a few of their ‘laptops’.
Ah memories… In 1979 (still in high school) I started working for a computer store in Manhattan (Digibyte Computer Center at 31 E 31st Street). We were Cromemco, Atari, TI and HP dealers, as well as a bunch of other things and one of the only shops in the city for repairing dual 8" Persci floppy drives. We also sold a shit ton of 16K RAM upgrades for TRS-80’s, and Timex Sinclairs and had a computer book library and sold many other things. If you bought software mail order from Software City in the early 80’s, you bought it from me (was our mail order business… soooo many Scott Adams Adventures…)
By 1984 (when I decided to quit and get my GED and kill a few years in college), we’d opened three other retail stores in Manhattan as well as corporate offices on West 35th Street. Lou Reed was a customer at 480 Lexington Ave and Robin Williams was a regular at 351 (? shit, I should remember the frakking address!) W 57th Street. Williams was a really nice guy; Reed less so.
@brhfl lol… oh yes. I don’t recall what Radio Shack charged, but we sold hundreds of the 16K upgrades for $99 (significantly less than the Shack) and made a decent profit on each one.
This website does list about 30 or so of the old computers I sold, used and repaired: http://www.oldcomputers.net/ tho it is missing several others that I used and owned.
@baqui63 My more well off friends had a couple of machines visible on that site; a Northstar Horizon S100 bus machine, and a CompuColor 2 system. I had to make do with library systems until I scraped together enough money for my Apple ][+ in 1981.
Then got it signed by the Woz when he visited Las Vegas for CES in the early 1980s.
@duodec That’s awesome! Do you still have the signed machine? And if so, does it still run?
One of my best friends in high school had a Northstar Horizon (he is one of the best coders I’ve ever known). I couldn’t afford one, though I did build a couple for customers (building computers in those days meant soldering parts onto boards, testing them and writing your own device drivers, among other things).
I sold the S-100 bus system I cobbled together for a decent profit and since I had plenty of access to various Cromemco and other “real” computers at work, I decided to get an Atari 800 along with an 810 disk drive and 815 interface for home. Later I got an Atari 400 for my sisters and mother (mom loved Miner 2049er!) and also a Commodore 64. I sold the Commodore to a friend but still have all of the Atari gear (which should still work, tho I only have a single working power brick for them).
After that, I got a Cromemco C-10 with two floppy drives (still works) and an IMSAI 8080 (still works). Those machines were used to write process control code (and burn it to EPROMs) for a Z-80-based single board computer system. That work paid for much of my first two years of college (which started in Fall 1984).
I got my first PC in 1987, a 286 running at 10Mhz with 1MB of true zero wait state RAM, a pair of 5-1/4" drives (one each of 360K and 1.2MB) and a 40MB hard disk, with a NEC Multisync 14" monitor, for a total of $3997 (including shipping). My second machine was a 386 based one in about 1991, that had 3.5" drives and 4GB SCSI hard drives. I still have it and it should work.
Since then, I’ve had dozens of assorted IBM and clone computers and Apple machines, most of which were provided by work (I’ve only purchased two laptops for myself, a Thinkpad in 2000 and a Chromebook last year). I do buy external hard drives, video cards and other gear, but work supplies my computers for free.
@baqui63 It worked the last time I plugged it in about 5 years ago, but the floppy drive was getting flakey. The //GS works fine (its 3.5" floppies and massive 60MB SCSI disk drive even still work great)
I highly recommend watching BBS: The Documentary.
It’s a wonderful look at a mostly bygone age now.
There’s also hundreds of hours of extra footage, bonus materials, and large tangents on other relevant items of the time, in the BBS collection on archive.org.
@dashcloud I ran my own BBS first using Telegard and then later Renegade. Had 6 phone lines piped into the house and dedicated an entire bedroom to run all the computers.
All the computers were networked together using Novell Netware. Didn’t even use the TCP/IP protocol back then.
@cengland0 @dashcloud
My BBS only ran at night, so that my Dad didn’t realized i’d highjacked a rarely used biz phone line and hidden a small machine for that purpose.
I used Binkleyterm. (Did not configure myself, a friend did it and i never needed to modify.). Damned if i can remember what BBS package. Not Frontdoor, something else.
You could log in conventionally, but that was all minimized, nothing to see there; i was the only one using the forums, and just to talk w other sysops. The main thing was files. Got my hands on PGP as soon as i could and publicized it everywhere. Every night the logs showed dial-in file requests from all over the world, constantly busy.
One friend - while in high school and college - had 14 phone lines running to his bedroom in his parents’ house. I dont know what was on his BBS thaf made it so popular. He got perfect grades, paid for college, car, and phones, had a job, was incredibly sober and respectful…so his parents were happy enough. His neighbors saw the wires running from the pole and some of them thought he was a drug dealer or something. He later, as an adult, ran a server farm. He’s now back in school getting a MS in SW engineering.
A big local BBS had a nice customized internet mail gateway. Another friend, HS student, used it to email himself just about everything on sunsite, and MIT file storage despite the sysop trying non-stop to close the hole. My friend finally sent the sysop some bux and calmed him down. That friend is now writing code that writes code, more or less.
I worked as a coder for a bit, and admin for a bit, but never made a career.
The local sysops were a great group, except for the ones that went to jail later for various reasons. I miss the cameraderie. Some of us could call each other at 3am for help about any part of life. Flat tire, bad diagnosis, whatever.
@f00l When the internet became more popular, I stopped running the BBS since there wasn’t a need for it afterwards. I was on the nodelist and almost all places that sold computers would hand people a printed copy that contained at least one of my phone numbers.
I remember when I upgraded to 2400 baud modems. Wow, that cost a fortune. At around $300 per phone line, I could only upgrade one every few months. Many years later, I got them all upgraded to 56k.
I met a bunch of my friends this way. We have BBS meet and greets at strange people’s houses.
I had an extensive upload and download area. Can’t say too much about that except yEnc/yydecode and uudecode/ueencode let the same files appear on a global level on usenet so that was the deciding factor to stop my BBS system. I got all the files without all the necessary hardware and all those phone bills using usenet. I still get them through usenet today.
It seems rather unlikely that any of you actually got to work on a Cray supercomputer, but these two sets of stories are fascinating nonetheless: Cray-1 Digital Archeology
and the followup: COS Recovery
Building on that work, we get into very technical but still interesting (and amazing) work done by Andras Tantos on actually bringing a Cray emulator to life: The Cray Files
@jbartus Back when I worked for a .GOV contractor in Las Vegas we had a computer room with raised floors, two large A/C units pumping cold air down into the floor, two VAX 11/785s, two VAX 8000s, and a VAX 6300 in a cluster. I think there were three storage controllers with a bunch of drive cabinets full of 14" drives (~480MB and ~622MB each?) along with a few of the brand new 9 inch 1.2GB drives. We had a total of 26.1GB of mass storage available to the cluster (don’t recall how many drives it took to provide that). That was huge storage back then.
There were five separate printing consoles; we were required to maintain printed console logs.
Networking was 10Mbps “thickwire” ethernet (10Base-5) snaking under the floor, connected to the various systems with vampire taps - you actually drilled a hole in the nearly 1/2" thick cable, through the shielding layer and touching the core. The tap clamped on to the cable, making connection to the shielding and with a thin probe connecting the core. Then a heavy AUI connector cable ran from the tap to a 15 pin port on the network interface for the system.
The 8000 and 11/785 systems took power from all three phases coming in to the building (but were not three phase). There was a 480V transformer/power controller in the room, and care had to be taken to keep the load balanced between the three phases as equipment was brought in or retired. By each of the two doors there was a big red button with a shield over it. Pressing the button was like a reactor SCRAM… hit that and the power was cut to all three phases at the input to the transformer/controller.
We were clients in a large bank building, and had (I think) 6 floors of it.
One Sunday I got an automated call from the alarm system saying the power was out. When I got there the building was in chaos. One phase of the incoming three phase power had cut off to the entire building. Another was fluctuating and going overvoltage. There was a guy screaming at the security guard that their radio station was off the air and where was the backup power, the lights in the lobby were flickering and flashing, and the elevators were locked down…
I ran up to the computer room; the VAXen were howling, alarms were going off, all of the systems were already offline, some because their card cages lost power, others had blowers down, a third of the disks and one of the storage controllers were down, the transformer was getting hot and alarming because of the phase imbalance, the A/C units (which were three-phase units) were offline with alarms blaring, and the room was already hot. Half the running system blowers were speeding and slowing as the second phase voltage wavered. The room lights were flashing and flickering because they were on the phase doing voltage jitterbugs. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie.
So I had to press the SCRAM button. No cellphones, no time to try and reach a manager.
There was a great winding down as the remaining disks and blowers spun down. Good bearings, American made… it took a while. Just as they did, the floor power went off as the second phase died.
I went around the room with a flashlight, hit the individual breakers and switches on the transformer and all the different cabinets; systems, A/Cs, storage controllers, drive cabinets, comm racks…
Called and left voice messages with all the managers (fancy that, being unavailable on a weekend).
Then went around the floors and turned off the big 40ppm laser printers and copiers. The main monster copier was behind a locked door and my IT department keys didn’t open it.
Finally got the company building/maintenance manager on the phone, who called in more help. He also couldn’t get to the monster copier but had access to all the electrical closets and building control areas.
We ended up being there about 16 hours. Power was restored about 6 hours after I got in, but the electricians wanted to go over things (and the transformer turned out to have a picky startup sequence). And restarting a big cluster from scratch (including getting A/Cs back up and running, bringing up all the drives, rebooting the storage controllers which were minicomputers in their own right, restarting the backbone ethernet repeaters…) and then testing everything wasn’t nearly as fast as it would be now.
In the end, the monster copier had to have major surgery, and some of the terminal servers out in the individual floor wiring closets died.
The VAX systems had no problems. No data loss, no equipment loss. Everything came back online and “just worked”. A few batch processing jobs had to be rolled back and restarted. Thats how DEC and VAX/VMS were, and what we expected of them.
@duodec I dunno if it was VAX or what but a friend who’s worked IT for quite a while told me a story once about being on a service call where the computer room had literally formed clouds. I forget the specifics… A/C left on overnight or something? Anyhow, suffice to say that someone opened the door to the computer room and he spent a good long while drying everything out.
@jbartus That makes more sense. But I was deliberately trying to help you with “You’re costing me my week end!” since you seemed excited about it (“shakes his fist”)
And there’s something ineffably cool about being able to hit the big red STOP button at least once in your life so I waxed enthusiastic.
@jbartus Since you asked. Not sure about the rain part; VAXen were not waterproof but we never had a sprinkler release (or halon). We did once have the A/C drain pan drain clog up so one of them overflowed. The cables under the tiles were sitting in an inch of water; data cables, power cables, everything. No service issues but building maintenance freaked and forced everyone out until the water could be pumped out (they didn’t cut power or make us shut down the systems). It smelled like a cold swamp and the hallway carpets outside were soaked and had to be replaced but no other issues to us (the downstairs building tenants were impacted).
Yeah I don’t remember the exact details but suffice to say the humidity in the computer room was such that clouds formed and indoor rain ensued when the outside air was allowed in.
@dashcloud The water event? Meh. Just annoying being chased out of our offices and “my” computer room. The cables were in the water but all the actual connectors were above it; even the ethernet transceivers were big enough that their connections were above the water line, and it could not rise any higher because it was leaking out into the surrounding halls. This was just condensation from the A/C units, not a pipe leak. It happened in late July/early August which is the period when Las Vegas tends to get some muggy humid weather so there was a lot of condensation.
The power event? I did have a moment of ‘Do I really want to push the button that will shut down 7 figures worth of equipment instantly instead of doing it by the book?’ but I was later told I made the right choice. The transformer/power controller had overheat protection but the nature of this outage was such that might not have worked, or worked in time. If it had been damaged or failed most of the systems would have been down for several days waiting replacement and installation of the unit. Since mains power to the building would have to be turned off, it could have been a full week before that could happen. The systems were already hung/crashed and not able to be shut down normally. The only thing I could have done different was go around cabinet to cabinet turning off each breaker in turn, potentially further unbalancing the transformer (albeit reducing the load on it at the same time). But the second phase would have died before I got very far as things turned out. So the big red button that nobody was supposed to ever push on pain of great pain was the correct thing to do.
I got a commendation. I didn’t get a comp day for my lost Sunday though
@brhfl There were stories from the 1989? quake in Oakland about VAXen that dropped through the floor of a building, or were tipped over and crashed through a wall. Set them back up, reseat the cards and cables, get power to them and up they came.
DEC knew what they were doing with hardware and software, but mainly they gave a damn about their products. Unfortunately they never got around to doing proper marketing, they missed out on the importance of the PC market, and GQ Palmer later sold their soul and their internal organs out to compaq and microsoft, so they’re gone now.
Ond the old days…thru perhaps the mid 90s when Radio Shack lost its soul…their warehouse sales could be paradise. I once bought two floorstanding tube testers for $30 apiece, just cause they were so cool. (Later stolen from storage while I was temp elsewhere, the only items I really got angry about losing.)
@f00l Neat. My Dad used to manage a Thrifty Drug store, and I remember them having a tester like this (and a locked cabinet full of tubes) in the front of the store. We once took all the tubes out of our old B&W Packard Bell TV to test them, and got it working again with replacement tubes.
I have a 20MB hard drive around somewhere my dad bought for ~$3K back in the day
@jbartus Back when I bought my Apple ][ there was a company with a promotion ‘Buy our 10MB Winchester Hard Drive for $35xx and we’ll thrown in an Apple ][ and controller!’.
@duodec Make it an Apple ][c and we’ve got a deal.
Maaaaaybe.
What’s a “Radio Shack” ???
@FroodyFrog it’s a place they sell Sprint phones and soldering irons.
@thismyusername just Sprint phones now
@jbartus around here they still have parts drawers, electronics basics, basic stamp kits, arduinos, make kits, etc… but it is getting smaller every month I will admit. Many markets just switched to a dual branding… some they switched outright to sprint and some even stayed radioshack only.
@FroodyFrog We still have one in town. It’s still open and everything.
@thismyusername it’s a process. Wait for it.
@Thumperchick
@Thumperchick was it a franchise store or something?
@jbartus no idea, I’ve never been inside.
@Thumperchick And therein lies the problem…
If they had partnered up with ThinkGeek they’d still be a healthy retailer
@Thumperchick I work across the street from a Radio Shack! So there are at least two.
@FroodyFrog Way back when Radio Shacks were kind of hardware stores for electronics, I enjoyed going to them. Got watch batteries replaced, splitters for our landline phones (before cells), splitters for the cable box, cables for the cable box…
Then they started upscaling and I remember going to one to get a replacement vga cable for my monitor. And the kids working there said “PCs are on the way out, all anybody will have is laptops”.
Yeah, look how that worked out, you little whippersnapper.
@lisaviolet They used to get great ‘surplus’ deals too. I used to watch the nearby ones and would get keyboards, specialty fans, Votrax chips, etc. It was pretty cool. Plus after college when I lost all time to do hobby stuff, I still had two sealed in package keyboards that turned out to be for the Coleco Adam computer, and they got a good price on Ebay
I miss the old Radio Shack…
@duodec Somewhere, I still have some “battery of the month” cards.
@FroodyFrog I may have posted this recently:
A couple of years back, I was going camping in an area where I knew there was no cell phone/wireless coverage and was looking for a replacement for my old AM/FM radio (that had just died) so I could listen to the World Series. I didn’t have time to order one online for delivery, so I tried Radio Shack. Long story short, I couldn’t make the 20-something clerk understand what I wanted. He kept trying to sell me a pair of 2-way radios (walkie-talkies) and assuring me it was what I needed.
@DrWorm LOL…amateurs. I worked at my Radio Shack one year during the holidays. I was getting married so needed extra for that and for Christmas. We had some of the coolest stuff. I’d say 75% of my gifts were from there. They begged me to stay on…not only am I friendly but I’m an old timer with a small knowledge of electronics. Heck compared to a couple of the whipper snappers, I was a down right genius. It closed recently and that made me so sad. It was a great small town business where the manager knew most of the customers by name.
@mehbee I worked for RS for 8 years. Actually enjoyed my job there. I believed in the products that were sold. They were high quality products.
The company changed after I left and started to sell name brand electronics that you could buy elsewhere for a lot less. They stopped manufacturing their own stuff and began going downhill from there. At the time, they had brands like Realistic, Archer, Micronta, Optimus, etc.
The only thing I really hated about the job was having to ask customers for their names and addresses when they made a simple purchase. Many of the customers refused and we got yelled at by the district office if we had a low percentage of addresses. Our jobs were threatened daily if we didn’t meet our name and address quotas.
Customers used to laugh at us for manually hand writing receipts when we sold computers. It was such a common question about why we didn’t have registers like most other companies and we even sold that stuff. I didn’t have any answer I could give them.
@cengland0 I would have been one of the customers wondering why a companing who sold tech didn’t at least have registers, but I would NEVER have laughed at you.
Get off my lawn!
My first PC… Had a 3.5 Floppy, 1 MB Ram… and a whopping 50 MB hard drive! It barely ran windows 3.1… I think we had to put in an expansion ram cartridge (yes it was weird…) I think my mother may have done one of these on it too…
@sohmageek Your mother? No wonder you’ve turned out this way
@sohmageek My first computer didn’t have any floppy drives, I had to use a cassette tape. It didn’t run windows at all because there were no IBM PCs at the time. It had 8K of ram, expandable to 48K max. I did eventually expand to the full 48K.
@cengland0 @sohmageek 48K Apple ][+, using a $200 16k upgrade kit from 32K. 1.023MHz 6502. I could not afford the $650 floppy drive for about a year so used a Panasonic cassette recorder. Happy to say it did not run windows; thats a good thing.
Still have it, it still works, though the floppy drive is getting a little flaky.
@duodec Here’s a photo of a couple of my older processors.
My first one was the Z80 which is the 3rd chip from the top. I upgraded it to a Z80a later and that’s why I pulled this one from my production system.
In that set, I also have the 6809 (used in the Commodore SuperPET and the TRS-80 COCO). The 6502 was used in the Apple 2, Atari 2600, Nintendo, and the Commodore PET.
The one I’m holding is a floppy controller chip from Zilog. I cannot remember the rest of them but I’m sure I could look them up if someone cares.
Something I didn’t realize until now (or I forgot because I’m old and probably have Alzheimers), is why is a Zilog Z80 chip has a Sharp brand name on it? Hmm…
@cengland0 Zilog licensed the Z80 to a handful of chip manufacturers (including Sharp). I still have a soft spot for the Z80 myself. My favorite Z80-based device is probably the portable Cambridge Z88.
(Edit - if memory serves, the one on the bottom is a similar situation: a MOS design (6532 RIOT) under license to Rockwell)
@cengland0 Didn’t the 2600 use a 6507, the crappified 28-pin edition of the 6502?
@brhfl Z-80 assembler was the second language I learned back in high school (third, if you count an Olivetti Programma 101 as a computer); HP-2000e BASIC was the 1st (or 2nd).
The first computer I owned had a Z-80 as well (it was an S-100 card cage). I sold it after a while, but still have the IMSAI 8080 (albeit with a Z-80 processor board) that I picked up secondhand around 1985.
I put myself through the firs two years of college writing Z-80 assembler code.
Some but not all. F’N Radio Shack…I’d like to kick them in the nuts
@somf69 Tandy was an important factor in the development of the modern PC.
My first pc was a 8088 with 64k of ram and 2 5.25" floppy drives.
@clonetek 64k, maybe not. 640k, more probable.
Back in the days, the chips were all individual. None of those fancy schmancy SIMMs or for a little while, SIPPs.
8+1 to a bank. For 640k, it was 2 banks of 256k + 2 banks of 64k.
Sinclair 1000 and TRS-80 were what I grew up on. In 7th grade I got my first PC, an 8086 XT with an amber monochrome monitor, 5.25" floppy drive and maybe a 10mb hard drive (but maybe just two floppies, I fail to remember correctly right now), and it cost a smooth thousand dollars plus tax.
I remember when the utility company started sending out punch cards in the mail with your bill, and you had to sit and punch out the little tabs that would correspond to your account and amount with a pencil tip so their mainframe could process your payment.
My grandfather walked that bill downtown to their office every damn month with cash in hand and told them he wanted nothing to do with their newfangled technology. He’d occasionally loudly accuse them all of being Communists, which I never understood, as I was pretty sure back then that all Communists had to be Luddite.
My first computer was a pocket calculator, in the early 1970’s.
@Pavlov I actually sympathize with your grandfather on that. Having to do your own punch-outs, likely not a reversible process if you make a mistake, is really bad customer interactivity. People write. Its ok to presume on that capability. But an oddball crappy interface like punchcards? Did they include a template or shield or anything to aid in the process?
@duodec They provided instructions in a condensed form on the reverse of the bill. It was a nightmare, and they kept using the system for years - the utility in question was municipality owned and they were resistant to change once the punch cards were in place. With the first bill of the new calendar year they would send you a couple of extra blank cards in case you made a mistake at a future date. Whoever sold that system to the city was one hell of a salesman.
@Pavlov Quite a few punch systems Ive used treat a line of all punches as either a NOP or a skipped instruction for the sake of ignoring mistakes, was hopeful that was an option with your bill-paying system. Sounds like… no… though. What a mess.
@duodec
@Pavlov
My mom didnt mind dealing with computerized systems, but hated “doing their work for them” and stapled every punch card she returned, on principle. I imagine she did not have many fans in accounts receivable.
My first code was done on paper tape. I was ok but not incredible or anything.
The first pc i messed with (but did not own) had instructions submitted by switches. You messed up, you started over. It was owned by an a friend’s dad, an aerospace engineer, who built stuff as a hobby.
My first coding job was batched on punch cards. The most obsessed coders used to pace back and forth in front of the computer room windows, cursing the operators for not running their code immediately. The operators found ways to torment the coders who got hostile.
My first real computer was an Apple IIc (which I still have in working condition). I remember this particular ad.
I always loved the design, especially vs the boring-looking IBM PC. I loved the original Mac as well but it was way too expensive.
@awk I like how frank the Apple ad was about how the kids knew more than the parents. ‘Or talk to your own computer experts. As soon as they get home from school.’
@jbartus Here’s another one from the same campaign, this time from the kid’s point of view:
They were really going after the education market.
@awk ‘There is still one thing more you can do. Get a paper route.’
With such winning proposals how did parents resist? xD
My first calculator
Radio Shack went to crap a long time ago. They reduced stock to just phones & batteries. Why would someone drive to Radio Shack to buy a damn battery.
Their stocks of electronic parts and cool items slowly reduced to nothing.
@daveinwarsh that’s what they’re all becoming.
To be fair the number of people who tinker with such things made the various electronic bits and bobs impractical as product lines.
@daveinwarsh I still have a Radio Shack with electronic parts. Their stock dwindled right after all the other stores closed down, but the manager told me it was because they were changing all the sku’s. Sure enough the next time I went in they had restocked with items in new silver and black ziplock packaging instead of the old red and black on white bags. So apparently there is some kind of secret radshack holdout that’s going to spend more money trying and still fail because the stores still suck.
When that happens I’ll be sad that I have to plan ahead when I need some sort of random part or capacitor, because there will be nowhere local to get it.
@djslack bookmark this for that eventuality: http://www.digikey.com/
@daveinwarsh My first calculator -
@mehtherfucker I actually had an abacus as a kid.
@daveinwarsh That reminds me of the Curta calculator. I really want one – even today. They are just too expensive.
They still go for about $1000 to $2000. I’d take a replica for $100.
@cengland0 I want one too. They’re so cool
They dip to the high hundreds on ebay.
@daveinwarsh My Dad had an adding machine very similar to Magic Brain shown. It was an architectural version; I think it had a slot for inches & another for fractions
@cengland0 I mentioned here once before that if I ever have a ‘gold watch’ celebratory sort of moment, I’m getting myself a Curta. Lot of neat simulators on the internet, it’s… a pretty insane device.
@brhfl I want to buy one too but it will have to wait until I win the lotto. Unfortunately I don’t play the lotto so I will never get one
@compunaut Dad also purchased one of the early Texas Instruments SR-50 scientific calculators. I know he paid way over $100 (there was a bit of a family ‘discussion’). That would be about 700 of today’s $$ damn; can’t get that image to work right
@daveinwarsh @compunaut @cengland0 @jbartus Thought you might enjoy this video on the pocket calculator wars:
@dashcloud Cool.
Here’s the calculator my parents used to do taxes.
@dashcloud Fun video. I will admit to owning way too many classic HPs (there are three on my desk at work, gulp!). The video briefly touched on the 4-function Sinclairs, but skipped one of their (well, Nigel Searle’s) biggest accomplishments, the Sinclair Scientific. The HP 35 used multiple chips to quickly compute trig functions with the accurate CORDIC algorithms. Because of that, it cost around $800. Clive Sinclair (using Searle’s algorithms) opted for the opposite approach, slow, inaccurate, but running on a single TI chip designed for a simple four-function calculator. It cost $120 at launch. There was no space in ROM for constants, so some useful ones were printed on the front (unfortunately these are worn off on my copy). The constants necessary for trig functions were computed every time they ran, decreasing speed even further. I mention this for two reasons — I think it’s an awesome, quirky, bizarre machine; and to link to something any self-respecting nerd would appreciate… a JavaScript emulation of the Sinclair Scientific by some crazy dude who managed to reverse-engineer the thing. cc: @daveinwarsh @cengland0 @jbartus @compunaut
@brhfl All of his stuff is absolutely amazing. He’s one of the best.
@dashcloud I suspect you mean Ken Shirriff (the fact that a complete emulation of the Sinclair Scientific constitutes a mere blog post on his site is proof of that fact), but the statement holds true of Searle and Sinclair as well. Well, Sinclair was kind of a master of cutting too many corners, and a master of flops, but his successes have such a dirty elegance to them…
@daveinwarsh you know they went into bankruptcy right? last time we needed 30 ft phone cords at work for something they were poof. gone.
@brhfl Had to break mine out for a minute…
@dashcloud the followup addendum about Texas Instruments graphing calculators and how they achieved such dominance in the market was actually pretty fascinating.
@brhfl you get a star for the use of the phrase ‘dirty elegance’
@jbartus Sums up Sinclair pretty well, I think! That video mentioned the slim executive. It was slim because they were able to use button cells by running the ALU way out of spec to save power. Instead of running it all the time, power was provided in pulses, relying on the internal capacitance of the chip. If that’s not a dirty hack in the name of elegance, I don’t know what is!
@daveinwarsh I remember my mom having a Magic Brain calculator, although I didn’t realize that’s what it was called. Mom has never thrown away anything. I bet I’ll come across it while I’m cleaning out her house for the estate sale.
@Barney Addiator was one of the big names in those devices. Faber-Castell made a few slide rules with Addiators attached to the back, and they actually still have some NOS for sale!
@brhfl so… calculator collector?
@jbartus Yep, I can admit that here
@djslack same, they keep stocking parts around here… ours are dual branded sprint+rad shack.
@daveinwarsh actually batteries have been a radio shack staple since the beginning… I remember as a kid they had “free battery” club
They would do anything to get you on the mailing list…
The first version of Excel was made for the Apple Macintosh. I used the crap out of it from 1986-89. The MS-DOS version looked a lot like 1-2-3. The first Mac version looks almost exactly like today’s Excel.
@Officemonkey Multiplan was before Excel and was technically the first 3rd party software available for the Apple. It lasted for about a year and then was replaced by Excel.
@cengland0 Used the crap out of that too.
@cengland0 VisiCalc was released years before Multiplan
@jbartus Yes, that’s right. I knew there was one that Microsoft copied and I thought it was multiplan but when I looked it up, I saw they wrote that too.
Bah! Children! The first computer I worked on (back in the 1960’s) was an IBM 7040 mainframe. We had to load the punch cards (student programs) into the hopper, run the program, then bundle the cards with the printout (on the green and white striped printout paper) to go back to them. Programs tape reels had to be loaded and threaded by hand. And this was in a room kept at 50 degrees to keep the computer banks from overheating. Long sleeve shirts allowed, but no sweaters, because any stray fuzz could get into a computer bank and cause problems.
My first “calculator” was a slide rule, which I think I still have somewhere in a drawer. The first personal computer I owned was an Apple ][ that only had uppercase letters. No shift key.
And I got really tired of people asking: “Why are you wasting so much time with those machines? Shouldn’t you be spending it learning something useful? Like shorthand and taking dictation so you can get a good job as a secretary?”
@rockblossom Somewhere in this office, I still have the circular slide rule with the slide out card with tables on it that I got when I attended Desert High School on Edwards Air Force Base, California. Probably under an inch of dust, but now I want to find it. There goes my day.
Thanks, @medz.
@rockblossom In college my first classes were on a CDC Cyber 70 Model 73 running Kronos. 110-baud TTY, 300 baud TTY, and a small selection of 300 baud ADM-3A glass TTY terminals. And punch cards were mandatory for a few of the assignments also.
I have fond memories of that system. I got to see it a few times because my friend was a sysop. Impressive hardware, with the coolest dual green round screen console…
@duodec I didn’t mind the punch cards so much until we started having to run subroutines in binary code. Having to type a hundred or so lines of binary code onto punch cards is the most mind-numbing task I ever remember doing. And each one had to be carefully hand numbered with a pencil, because if you dropped the stack -
@rockblossom We just had class assignments. Mostly that was Fortran source code. The punches just punched and didn’t print the text on the top of the card. The facility had the ability to “interpret” the cards (take the un-printed but punched cards and print the text on top and also print a sequence number on the card) but that was an extra step; you could not hand in your deck and request interpret and run. Do one first, get your deck back and resubmit for the other. With too many students, not enough punches, and sysops falling behind on busy days there wasn’t time for the luxury…
Fun times to recall. I’m glad its no longer necessary.
@duodec My absolute favorite thing about first office mini-computer: Backspace key!
My first programming language was Fortran IV.
@rockblossom I think the TTYs had ‘RUBOUT’. It would print a special character, then the character you had previously typed. If you kept hitting the rubout key it would print the next previous typed character, and so on until you pressed another key or had 'RUBOUT’ed the entire line you entered.
@rockblossom Our high school (late 70s) had a large Burroughs machine (mini-computer) that used the half-sized punch cards. The system was purchased to take care of the district’s payroll, HR, & other admin tasks, but there was plenty of excess capacity to teach FORTRAN to nerdy students with an elective to burn
@rockblossom @duodec @compunaut totally the young guy trying to relate but IDC.
I taught myself FORTRAN in college (late 00s) to help my aviation related major friends do their homework. It was an interesting experience, nearly every time I went looking for and equivalent function for something that’s a native part of Java or other more modern languages it was like “nope, doesn’t exist”. I think I learned more about programming having to invent my own equivalents for those functions within the extremely basic confines offered by FORTRAN than I did in any programming class I took.
@jbartus A common issue. More modern languages have expanded on the concept of standard libraries that are part of the language and expected to be available on any system that language was provided on. Fortran predates that for the most part. C was the earliest language I used that had a standard library that was common across systems; Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and others have hugely expanded standard and common optional libraries.
More than likely the code you needed was available somewhere but as a package of source code modules that you would have had to compile to use. Especially mathematically inclined packages, but Fortran was used for so many technical purposes that aviation, medical, engineering, etc source libraries used to be very common. But I don;t know how easy it would be to find them on the internet any more. A lot of stuff has been fading out, and the old repository sites have gone offline.
Congrats! Your dive into the lower levels has probably made you a better programmer than many of the up and comers who have never worked in an older language with a limited library, and so had to figure out how to do certain things themselves.
@duodec yeah that’s what I was saying, it also gave me a huge appreciation for how much easier my life is with more modern languages, I don’t take as many things for granted now as I once did.
For an entire year, I thought this was all a computer was good for.
@Nate311 Zork and the other Inform games was a darned good reason to have a computer
@duodec Stupid spellcheck… INFOCOM…
@Nate311 I played Apple Panic all the time.
Remember that game?
@Nate311 I was eaten by a grue.
@parodymandotcom it’s likely it was pitch black.
@Nate311 There was also Jumpman Jr.!
@duodec
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-game-30th-anniversary-edition
My first computer…
@lisaviolet Why, you’re just a babe! (I suppose you might have purchased it later in life; though that’s not the norm)
@compunaut Got it in the late 1980s. I used the software program “Framework” for spreadsheets. I still have the floppies.
Our first computer was a PC compatible 80286 someone at my dad’s company built for us. I don’t know how much RAM it had or how big the hard drive was, but it had both a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive. I’m pretty sure now that all the software on it was pirated WAREZ except for the stuff my parents bought after we got it, which wasn’t much, mostly the occasional game from The Learning Company.
my first computer (not counting the commodore 64) was a gateway p5-60 (or p5-90) pentium processor with 128MB of ram and a 500MB hard drive. It was a MONSTER in 1993-1994 with that much ram.
I got started programming BASIC on a C64 in elem school. Tired of it quickly and moved on to a handful of other languages on the thing before just deciding to learn its assembler. In the meantime, I had been given an HP-41CX (still have that one) which taught me more about programming than C64 BASIC ever could (fortunately I got out before the Dijkstra effect set in). Eventually dabbled in 8080 asm as well. I guess HP had a lot of formative effect on me — I got started with FORTH (which I still use) on the 71B, and I learned UNIX (HP-UX) on an HP-9000.
@brhfl Neat. I still have my HP-41CV and some of the memory packs for it. I miss needing it.
We used FORTH for a specialty application for .gov back in the late 1980s. Interesting language.
@duodec It’s a wonderful language (IMO), and all the moreso for someone brought up thinking about stacks (RPN). Probably my favorite language. I will admit to using my HP-42S far more than the real HP-41, just because of those damn N batteries! I also have the HP-41CV emulator card pretty much permanently installed in my 48GX.
@brhfl POKE 53281,1
@thismyusername POKE 53281,4 for @Barney
@brhfl Um, I only speak German as my second language. I can proudly say “The Rein river is long and wide.” Okay, I give up, why did you POKE me?
@Barney I POKEd you because if you were a Commodore 64, that command would make your screen PURPLE!!!
@brhfl Cool!
@Barney
@brhfl Hi! Oh, wow!
@Barney Meh, you need to find a C64 computer (and compatible monitor) for Barney now.
@duodec Ha! I’ll just come back to this thread and watch this.
This video is a great walkthrough of the advances in soundcard technology:
Evolution of PC Audio - As Told by Secret of Monkey Island
We still have the first computer I ever used in our attic, I don’t know the specifics sadly. 286 or 386 I’m sure. I do, however, know the oldest computer I ever used, my dad had an old Zenith Z-110 when I was a kid. Gotta love those old dual floppy drives.
It was a pretty capable computer for the early 80s too, check out the neat graphics it was capable of:
@jbartus Those things were neat — not just dual floppies, but dual processors! Cutting edge!
@brhfl yes indeed, very cool. My dad even upgraded it at one point to color capability but because it was pre-IBM PC and everything had eventually become aligned to IBM PC compatibility we never did find a monitor for it. It was a casualty of our 2003 move, sadly.
@jbartus That is sad! If memory serves, they ran a sort-of-kind-of compatible DOS, but the BIOS calls were absolutely incompatible (collateral damage from parallelizing two different processors, I suppose).
@brhfl yeah I don’t know the specifics, I just know what we discussed.
1st - Sinclair Z80 kit built that ran at an amazing 1mhz. 1 kb ram, cassette for storage and a TV for video. Color too if you consider both black and white as colors.
2nd - TI99. The first 16 bit processor, the TI9900. To get it to market it was dummied down to run as an 8 bit. 5 1/4" floppies as an add on.
[Almost 3rd - S100 bus. Decided too much $$$]
3rd - Trash80 (TRS for Tandy Radio Shack and 80 for Zilog Z80 running at 1.774 MHz). It was given to me. I never used it. All I remember about it was it made the TV buzz. It interfered with everything electronic.
4th - C64. Fun machine. COLOR and Music!
5th - C128. Twice the fun! First computer I had with the
3 1/2" floppies.
6th - PC. The TV station was upgrading so I went dumpster diving. Got a pretty good 8086 system out of it. And running an archive on the 10 MB HD almost doubled it to a 20 MB
7th to current - Macs! (still have an operating lime clamshell)
@Mehrocco_Mole HP managed to royally screw up what the 9825 series was while marketing it, but upon reflection it’s hard not to see it as an earlier 16-bit desktop computer. Admittedly, the readily-available TV output, the boot into BASIC, and the cartridge slot just waiting for Parsec made the TI 99 series much more consumer-oriented, so there’s a case for that. I still have two of them in storage, and a copy of Parsec. Those machines always left me rather cold, though.
Tandy/Radio Shack made some… interesting machines, that’s for sure. I have a few of their ‘laptops’.
I miss Fidonet.
Ah memories… In 1979 (still in high school) I started working for a computer store in Manhattan (Digibyte Computer Center at 31 E 31st Street). We were Cromemco, Atari, TI and HP dealers, as well as a bunch of other things and one of the only shops in the city for repairing dual 8" Persci floppy drives. We also sold a shit ton of 16K RAM upgrades for TRS-80’s, and Timex Sinclairs and had a computer book library and sold many other things. If you bought software mail order from Software City in the early 80’s, you bought it from me (was our mail order business… soooo many Scott Adams Adventures…)
By 1984 (when I decided to quit and get my GED and kill a few years in college), we’d opened three other retail stores in Manhattan as well as corporate offices on West 35th Street. Lou Reed was a customer at 480 Lexington Ave and Robin Williams was a regular at 351 (? shit, I should remember the frakking address!) W 57th Street. Williams was a really nice guy; Reed less so.
@baqui63 TIL people upgraded TRS-80s instead of just tying a cinder block to them and throwing them in the river!
@brhfl what is this, Reddit?
@brhfl lol… oh yes. I don’t recall what Radio Shack charged, but we sold hundreds of the 16K upgrades for $99 (significantly less than the Shack) and made a decent profit on each one.
Edit… just found this, tho not sure of date; it has the 16K upgrade for $290: http://www.oldcomputers.net/trs80i.html
This website does list about 30 or so of the old computers I sold, used and repaired: http://www.oldcomputers.net/ tho it is missing several others that I used and owned.
@baqui63 yeah their images are all low-res too, I’ve referenced them in the past.
@baqui63 My more well off friends had a couple of machines visible on that site; a Northstar Horizon S100 bus machine, and a CompuColor 2 system. I had to make do with library systems until I scraped together enough money for my Apple ][+ in 1981.
Then got it signed by the Woz when he visited Las Vegas for CES in the early 1980s.
@duodec That’s awesome! Do you still have the signed machine? And if so, does it still run?
One of my best friends in high school had a Northstar Horizon (he is one of the best coders I’ve ever known). I couldn’t afford one, though I did build a couple for customers (building computers in those days meant soldering parts onto boards, testing them and writing your own device drivers, among other things).
I sold the S-100 bus system I cobbled together for a decent profit and since I had plenty of access to various Cromemco and other “real” computers at work, I decided to get an Atari 800 along with an 810 disk drive and 815 interface for home. Later I got an Atari 400 for my sisters and mother (mom loved Miner 2049er!) and also a Commodore 64. I sold the Commodore to a friend but still have all of the Atari gear (which should still work, tho I only have a single working power brick for them).
After that, I got a Cromemco C-10 with two floppy drives (still works) and an IMSAI 8080 (still works). Those machines were used to write process control code (and burn it to EPROMs) for a Z-80-based single board computer system. That work paid for much of my first two years of college (which started in Fall 1984).
I got my first PC in 1987, a 286 running at 10Mhz with 1MB of true zero wait state RAM, a pair of 5-1/4" drives (one each of 360K and 1.2MB) and a 40MB hard disk, with a NEC Multisync 14" monitor, for a total of $3997 (including shipping). My second machine was a 386 based one in about 1991, that had 3.5" drives and 4GB SCSI hard drives. I still have it and it should work.
Since then, I’ve had dozens of assorted IBM and clone computers and Apple machines, most of which were provided by work (I’ve only purchased two laptops for myself, a Thinkpad in 2000 and a Chromebook last year). I do buy external hard drives, video cards and other gear, but work supplies my computers for free.
@baqui63 It worked the last time I plugged it in about 5 years ago, but the floppy drive was getting flakey. The //GS works fine (its 3.5" floppies and massive 60MB SCSI disk drive even still work great)
I highly recommend watching BBS: The Documentary.
It’s a wonderful look at a mostly bygone age now.
There’s also hundreds of hours of extra footage, bonus materials, and large tangents on other relevant items of the time, in the BBS collection on archive.org.
@dashcloud
Thx!
Three of my best friends come from my Fido days, when my BBS funneled pgp to the universe. (It was our “thing”).
@dashcloud I ran my own BBS first using Telegard and then later Renegade. Had 6 phone lines piped into the house and dedicated an entire bedroom to run all the computers.
All the computers were networked together using Novell Netware. Didn’t even use the TCP/IP protocol back then.
@cengland0
@dashcloud
My BBS only ran at night, so that my Dad didn’t realized i’d highjacked a rarely used biz phone line and hidden a small machine for that purpose.
I used Binkleyterm. (Did not configure myself, a friend did it and i never needed to modify.). Damned if i can remember what BBS package. Not Frontdoor, something else.
You could log in conventionally, but that was all minimized, nothing to see there; i was the only one using the forums, and just to talk w other sysops. The main thing was files. Got my hands on PGP as soon as i could and publicized it everywhere. Every night the logs showed dial-in file requests from all over the world, constantly busy.
One friend - while in high school and college - had 14 phone lines running to his bedroom in his parents’ house. I dont know what was on his BBS thaf made it so popular. He got perfect grades, paid for college, car, and phones, had a job, was incredibly sober and respectful…so his parents were happy enough. His neighbors saw the wires running from the pole and some of them thought he was a drug dealer or something. He later, as an adult, ran a server farm. He’s now back in school getting a MS in SW engineering.
A big local BBS had a nice customized internet mail gateway. Another friend, HS student, used it to email himself just about everything on sunsite, and MIT file storage despite the sysop trying non-stop to close the hole. My friend finally sent the sysop some bux and calmed him down. That friend is now writing code that writes code, more or less.
I worked as a coder for a bit, and admin for a bit, but never made a career.
The local sysops were a great group, except for the ones that went to jail later for various reasons. I miss the cameraderie. Some of us could call each other at 3am for help about any part of life. Flat tire, bad diagnosis, whatever.
Is there still a nodelist?
@f00l When the internet became more popular, I stopped running the BBS since there wasn’t a need for it afterwards. I was on the nodelist and almost all places that sold computers would hand people a printed copy that contained at least one of my phone numbers.
I remember when I upgraded to 2400 baud modems. Wow, that cost a fortune. At around $300 per phone line, I could only upgrade one every few months. Many years later, I got them all upgraded to 56k.
I met a bunch of my friends this way. We have BBS meet and greets at strange people’s houses.
I had an extensive upload and download area. Can’t say too much about that except yEnc/yydecode and uudecode/ueencode let the same files appear on a global level on usenet so that was the deciding factor to stop my BBS system. I got all the files without all the necessary hardware and all those phone bills using usenet. I still get them through usenet today.
@cengland0 If you’re interested, people still run BBSs today, though through telnet rather than phones: http://vert.synchro.net/docs/index.htm
It seems rather unlikely that any of you actually got to work on a Cray supercomputer, but these two sets of stories are fascinating nonetheless:
Cray-1 Digital Archeology
and the followup:
COS Recovery
Building on that work, we get into very technical but still interesting (and amazing) work done by Andras Tantos on actually bringing a Cray emulator to life:
The Cray Files
@dashcloud Saw one once at a contractor site supporting the Nevada Test Site. Neat machine.
@dashcloud this stuff is fascinating and a total time suck to read. You’re costing me my week end!
shakes his fist
@jbartus Back when I worked for a .GOV contractor in Las Vegas we had a computer room with raised floors, two large A/C units pumping cold air down into the floor, two VAX 11/785s, two VAX 8000s, and a VAX 6300 in a cluster. I think there were three storage controllers with a bunch of drive cabinets full of 14" drives (~480MB and ~622MB each?) along with a few of the brand new 9 inch 1.2GB drives. We had a total of 26.1GB of mass storage available to the cluster (don’t recall how many drives it took to provide that). That was huge storage back then.
There were five separate printing consoles; we were required to maintain printed console logs.
Networking was 10Mbps “thickwire” ethernet (10Base-5) snaking under the floor, connected to the various systems with vampire taps - you actually drilled a hole in the nearly 1/2" thick cable, through the shielding layer and touching the core. The tap clamped on to the cable, making connection to the shielding and with a thin probe connecting the core. Then a heavy AUI connector cable ran from the tap to a 15 pin port on the network interface for the system.
The 8000 and 11/785 systems took power from all three phases coming in to the building (but were not three phase). There was a 480V transformer/power controller in the room, and care had to be taken to keep the load balanced between the three phases as equipment was brought in or retired. By each of the two doors there was a big red button with a shield over it. Pressing the button was like a reactor SCRAM… hit that and the power was cut to all three phases at the input to the transformer/controller.
We were clients in a large bank building, and had (I think) 6 floors of it.
One Sunday I got an automated call from the alarm system saying the power was out. When I got there the building was in chaos. One phase of the incoming three phase power had cut off to the entire building. Another was fluctuating and going overvoltage. There was a guy screaming at the security guard that their radio station was off the air and where was the backup power, the lights in the lobby were flickering and flashing, and the elevators were locked down…
I ran up to the computer room; the VAXen were howling, alarms were going off, all of the systems were already offline, some because their card cages lost power, others had blowers down, a third of the disks and one of the storage controllers were down, the transformer was getting hot and alarming because of the phase imbalance, the A/C units (which were three-phase units) were offline with alarms blaring, and the room was already hot. Half the running system blowers were speeding and slowing as the second phase voltage wavered. The room lights were flashing and flickering because they were on the phase doing voltage jitterbugs. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie.
So I had to press the SCRAM button. No cellphones, no time to try and reach a manager.
There was a great winding down as the remaining disks and blowers spun down. Good bearings, American made… it took a while. Just as they did, the floor power went off as the second phase died.
I went around the room with a flashlight, hit the individual breakers and switches on the transformer and all the different cabinets; systems, A/Cs, storage controllers, drive cabinets, comm racks…
Called and left voice messages with all the managers (fancy that, being unavailable on a weekend).
Then went around the floors and turned off the big 40ppm laser printers and copiers. The main monster copier was behind a locked door and my IT department keys didn’t open it.
Finally got the company building/maintenance manager on the phone, who called in more help. He also couldn’t get to the monster copier but had access to all the electrical closets and building control areas.
We ended up being there about 16 hours. Power was restored about 6 hours after I got in, but the electricians wanted to go over things (and the transformer turned out to have a picky startup sequence). And restarting a big cluster from scratch (including getting A/Cs back up and running, bringing up all the drives, rebooting the storage controllers which were minicomputers in their own right, restarting the backbone ethernet repeaters…) and then testing everything wasn’t nearly as fast as it would be now.
In the end, the monster copier had to have major surgery, and some of the terminal servers out in the individual floor wiring closets died.
The VAX systems had no problems. No data loss, no equipment loss. Everything came back online and “just worked”. A few batch processing jobs had to be rolled back and restarted. Thats how DEC and VAX/VMS were, and what we expected of them.
The end.
@duodec Are you sure you are not channeling @joelmw here?
@jbartus There’s another great VAX story Here
@duodec I dunno if it was VAX or what but a friend who’s worked IT for quite a while told me a story once about being on a service call where the computer room had literally formed clouds. I forget the specifics… A/C left on overnight or something? Anyhow, suffice to say that someone opened the door to the computer room and he spent a good long while drying everything out.
@mfladd Nyet. My stories are my own (and this one is true.
@duodec I believe he was alluding to the length of the tale.
@jbartus That makes more sense. But I was deliberately trying to help you with “You’re costing me my week end!” since you seemed excited about it (“shakes his fist”)
And there’s something ineffably cool about being able to hit the big red STOP button at least once in your life so I waxed enthusiastic.
@duodec haha. Heard any stories like the one my friend told me about it raining in the computer room?
@jbartus Since you asked. Not sure about the rain part; VAXen were not waterproof but we never had a sprinkler release (or halon). We did once have the A/C drain pan drain clog up so one of them overflowed. The cables under the tiles were sitting in an inch of water; data cables, power cables, everything. No service issues but building maintenance freaked and forced everyone out until the water could be pumped out (they didn’t cut power or make us shut down the systems). It smelled like a cold swamp and the hallway carpets outside were soaked and had to be replaced but no other issues to us (the downstairs building tenants were impacted).
@duodec
VMS, thanks for the story. DEC knew what they were doing.
@duodec Interesting. Surprised nothing shorted out.
Yeah I don’t remember the exact details but suffice to say the humidity in the computer room was such that clouds formed and indoor rain ensued when the outside air was allowed in.
@duodec That is absolutely amazing- it sounds like it must’ve been absolutely terrifying at the time.
@dashcloud The water event? Meh. Just annoying being chased out of our offices and “my” computer room. The cables were in the water but all the actual connectors were above it; even the ethernet transceivers were big enough that their connections were above the water line, and it could not rise any higher because it was leaking out into the surrounding halls. This was just condensation from the A/C units, not a pipe leak. It happened in late July/early August which is the period when Las Vegas tends to get some muggy humid weather so there was a lot of condensation.
The power event? I did have a moment of ‘Do I really want to push the button that will shut down 7 figures worth of equipment instantly instead of doing it by the book?’ but I was later told I made the right choice. The transformer/power controller had overheat protection but the nature of this outage was such that might not have worked, or worked in time. If it had been damaged or failed most of the systems would have been down for several days waiting replacement and installation of the unit. Since mains power to the building would have to be turned off, it could have been a full week before that could happen. The systems were already hung/crashed and not able to be shut down normally. The only thing I could have done different was go around cabinet to cabinet turning off each breaker in turn, potentially further unbalancing the transformer (albeit reducing the load on it at the same time). But the second phase would have died before I got very far as things turned out. So the big red button that nobody was supposed to ever push on pain of great pain was the correct thing to do.
I got a commendation. I didn’t get a comp day for my lost Sunday though
@brhfl There were stories from the 1989? quake in Oakland about VAXen that dropped through the floor of a building, or were tipped over and crashed through a wall. Set them back up, reseat the cards and cables, get power to them and up they came.
DEC knew what they were doing with hardware and software, but mainly they gave a damn about their products. Unfortunately they never got around to doing proper marketing, they missed out on the importance of the PC market, and GQ Palmer later sold their soul and their internal organs out to compaq and microsoft, so they’re gone now.
Ond the old days…thru perhaps the mid 90s when Radio Shack lost its soul…their warehouse sales could be paradise. I once bought two floorstanding tube testers for $30 apiece, just cause they were so cool. (Later stolen from storage while I was temp elsewhere, the only items I really got angry about losing.)
@f00l Neat. My Dad used to manage a Thrifty Drug store, and I remember them having a tester like this (and a locked cabinet full of tubes) in the front of the store. We once took all the tubes out of our old B&W Packard Bell TV to test them, and got it working again with replacement tubes.
Sorry about the loss…
@duodec
Might still hunt one down someday. Kinda compensated with one of these:
@f00l I remember those. What do you do with it?
@jbartus
Since i rarely need an ice cooler, its a hamper.
@f00l The gas station two doors down from where I worked had one of those. We’d go there for snacks during the day and get cokes from the R2 unit.
My router was dying, I got a new one, it shows up, I get it installed and wonderfully, my Roku media player now sees the data on the external disk.
I’m burning CDs like crazy. I look for a certain one, can’t find it. It dawns on me. I don’t have this on disk. It’s on vinyl. sigh