Old Computers [PREV] Not your conventional cassette player..

That is doing things the hard way. One of the main reasons I bought my Atari ST back in 1990 was to use it as a Word Processor to produce things like the Amateur Radio Clubs newsletter. Hopefully you will find a club doing Radio Amateur courses. The Club I belong to does the Foundation Course and exam over one weekend as it only takes about 15 hours of tuition.

There is an interesting thread about old processors here:

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/b...-language-straw-poll-2017-09/#comment-1017249

I just added my experiences to it (about Z80 assembler and FPGAs).

If you are interested in Radio and Software the current trend, which is undoubtedly will get bigger in the future for is Software Defined Radio (SDR) where all the demodulation and other clever bits are done using software. In the future it will allow you to do things like upgrade a mobile phone base station to 5G or 6G just with a software upgrade. However, it currently reminds me of the days of 8 bit computers where there is not any defined hardware standards or accepted ways of doing things.

SDR can be very cheap (for a university project ?) with some people using the Realtek Digital TV dongles which cost about £15 to do interesting things like this.

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-for-budget-radio-astronomy/

Doing clever stuff for Radio Comms using computers (like receiving signals so weak no person could ever hear them) only really became feasible with processors like the Pentium.

 

My old piano teacher had two STs in his studio for legacy recordings, fascinating machines. I'll look into finding a local HAM club.

Nice thread, lots of nostalgia I guess!

Yes, I'm familiar with SDR. Interesting stuff, there's a lot of potential for this kind of technology. I get the feeling it will come up in my signal processing lectures. Either way, it's on my list of things to tinker with in the future!

Henry

 

My first good computer. Still use it today. Love my C64

 

Apple IIs were really rare here in the UK as they were outside of most peoples price range.

An expanded Apple II system would have been comparable in price to a TRS80 one.
Since Tandy (Radio Shack) had numerous shops in the UK their equipment was easier to obtain
(if you could afford it). In 1981 the department I spent some time working in had a fully expanded
TRS80 system with twin discs printer etc for keeping quality data. I worked out the system had
cost about £3000 when (as an apprentice) I wasn't earning much more than that a year.

The Spectrum, VIC20 and C64 were sensible prices and consequently very popular here.

Since I like a bargain my second computer was a Texas TI99-4A followed shortly by a Toshiba MSX.
In both cases they were being sold of cheaply for about half the price of a Spectrum having failed
to sell well. When buying the MSX I resisted the temptation to buy a Commodore Plus 4 which was
being sold new for £30 (about 1/4 of the price of the Spectrum) complete with a bundle of all five
games that had been written for it.

A colleague did buy a Sinclair QL when they were reduced. That was a 16 bit computer released just days
before the Apple Mac, but the design was rushed leading to various problems including people waiting months
for their machines.

Shortly after buying the MSX I bought the matching Toshiba Music Keyboard for it when it was reduced from
£250 down to £100. The Keyboard is a nicely made full size four octave one and came with an an
FM synthesis cartridge (although the software is far more toy like Yamaha's similar MSX offering).

 

I'm glad you enjoyed it. There is loads of interesting computer stuff on Youtube. This is the first programme in the TV series that Sinclair and Acorn were so keen to get their computer featured in.



I think Commodore gets more airtime than either of them, although the small computer he picks up by the Cray is a ZX81.
By the 1990s just about every travel agent in the UK was using Prestel to book peoples holidays.
When he went to the airport check in I couldn't help but think of the famous "Computer Says No" sketches.

That happened time and time again in different fields. As an apprentice at a large Aerospace site I went round lots of the departments. In 1979 I went to Technical Publications where the Manager showed me round on the first day. He was extremely proud of the word processor system he had just bought which had cost hundreds of Thousand of pounds for about 8 terminals. Because it was so expensive only the trained typists were allowed to use it and the Technical Authors still had to write their documents in longhand. I would guess the whole thing was obsolete in just a couple of years.

Later on another department I worked in was Test where they had a couple of these HP computers which were very highly specified for the time

http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=149

As there was just one young guy who knew how to program them whenever I had any spare time I would mess around programming things like a "Management Jargon Generator" on the other

 

Thanks Longman for the link to this thread !
Back in the 80's there's two computer that made me spend a huuuuuge time on basic prog and games !
My Spectrum 48ko bought in late 1983 (that I still own with all of tapes, and it works perfectly) and my Amiga (nov 1988 till 1990.. still own this one too but 2 years ago I replaced the floppy by a Gotec floppy emulator and a ton of .adf games on a USB key ! Welcome in the modern days )
Sometime I find old things on the flea market, my son even found some stuf in the garbage (TO7-70, Siemens Simatic, IBM LT5400...)
I try to keep those oldies working... like the walkman, with a little care it seems they don't want to rest in peace !

Some pictures...

If it's good for music, it's good for Speccy games ! ZX/G09 combo !



Sabre Wulf, Knight Lore, School daze, Moon alert, Chucky eggs 2, etc.. period...
Here's some originals but the most of the games where copies (the good old days of the double deck easy copy" home industry )





Guess what... my old Quickshot II (bottom right) still works fine after almost 35 years and killer sessions of Decathlon/Winter games & co !!)



The Gotec floppy emulator



some of my "computosaures"








And for the fun, an old 1989 picture of an Amiga prehistoric "lan"/copy party (my Amiga is the one with a Robert Smith on the side of the screen )

 

Two interesting web pages about two of Tenfifteen's computers

The Amstrad CPC

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/archaeologic_amstrad_cpc_464/

Lord Alan Sugar is now the main man on the UK version of The Apprentice.
For years the prize was working for him at Amstrad.

And the Amiga

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1/

I have posted the link to that before but can't remember which thread it was in.

I think I have had as many computers as you have had Walkman.
Ones that I had briefly and sold on include Research Machines 380Z, Sharp MZ700,
Dragon 32, and even A BT Tonto with built in phone.

 

To answer your question, no. Even if I wanted one I wouldn't have room for it as even the smallest were about the same size as a washing machine.

However, I did use them extensively at work during the 1980s.

You are correct with the names. DEC - Digital Equipment Corporation at one point were second only to IBM. Their two main product lines were VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) mainframes and PDP series minis.

However, it was their founder who came up with his famous prediction that "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” back in 1977, just as the TRS80, Apple II and PET were launched !

https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/top-10-bad-tech-predictions/7/

In contrast IBM saw what was happening at the bottom of the market and quickly set up a team to develop the PC. By 1998 DEC got bought out by Compaq who in turn got bought by HP.

Back in the 1980s the computer we had in our office for things like Word Processing was a PDP11/23. This picture gives an idea of the size.

http://www.physics.purdue.edu/~jones105/pdp-11/

The Hard Drive Platters are 15" across while the floppy drives were for 8" disks. Look at the specs and you will realise that something like an Amiga beats it.

Our Office machine ran with just just twin 8" floppies so was all in one cabinet. Every couple of months one of the floppys would throw off its drive belt, and one of my jobs as the Apprentice was to put it back on which involved sliding out the drives and then getting underneath and unscrewing from underneath a large metal cover which luckily stopped the belt from falling right into the machine.

The terminal you were thinking of might have been one of these; again a large piece of equipment.



It is what we used as a printer.

On the floor above us was the software development team where they always had loads of VAX computers which were sevral times the size but could easily support lots of remote users.

On the top floor were four Racal Redac CAD systems again based on DEC computers which I often used. Some of my fondest work memories are of going in on a Saturday and spending all morning doing the easy job of entering schematics while getting paid time and a half. In the afternoon I would go home via the record shops in town usually spending some of what I had earned that morning.

I have tried to find more about the Racal Redac systems. The closest I got was this.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lK4gBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=cad+yearbook+1985&source=bl&ots=meJFEEgCze&sig=HWQ4K8iVNfyUXRfUeuQ3NCP6_us&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjB5evNu8vWAhUCOxoKHX2oDT0Q6AEIMjAC#v=onepage&q=cad yearbook 1985&f=false

There isn't a picture of the actual Racal system but the ones from other manufacturers were similar, with a large (for the time) monitor, and a Graphics tablet for drawing with. When I started using a computer with a mouse it was quite difficult to get out of the habit of picking it up and putting it down where I wanted to go next. The system was based on Vector Graphics and had a really impressive zoom feature which no PC I used matched for at least ten years.

For printing Schematics we had an A0 Pen Plotter which was fascinating to watch but would take about ten minutes to draw a circuit.

CAD systems like that cost literally as much as a house. but did come with the desk etc designed for them. When we bought a 10MByte Hard Drive cartridge for our department to go in the RL02 drive it cost over £100. However, that was plenty for several peoples work.

In about 1986 I got a quote for a DEC VT220 terminal for a similar system and it was about £700. Even by the mid 1980s you could get an MSDOS compatible computer capable of emulating one and doing much more, for less money. That explains why Mini Computers went out of fashion by the 1990s, although the the next step for CAD systems were Sun Unix Workstations.

 

i've got 2 commodore c64 plus a floppy 1541 and some other accessories - don't really know if it works and don't want to hazzle around on the bay, if anybody is interested i'm willing to give it for the costs of shipping plus a donation to this board, please pm

 

In 1978 when I started College there were three similar terminals (complete with the Acoustic Coupler Modems) which could be used to dial into the main Polytechnics ICL mainframe - real name Maximop but all the students referred to it as Maxiflop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIMOP

Text based games that I remember on that system were:

Lunar Lander - Keep specifying how much fuel you want to burn until you either smash into the Moons surface or run out of Fuel leading to the same thing. It was months before someone actually managed a successful landing.

Drag Racing - A two player game where each contestant designed a Dragster specifying things like Power and Weight before racing the two. Again it was based on some kind of formula. Specify too much power and you would get "Car one is still burning rubber" while the other person raced ahead.

Star Trek - I believe this was in a 1970s book of Basic Computer Games. The game was based on a universe with 8 x 8 quadrants each containing 8 x 8 sectors where there could be Space Stations or Klingons etc. Entering a sector you didn't know what you were going to find. One or two Klingons could be dealt with by firing Photon Torpedos but if there were more you had a problem. In a real emergency you could warp out to a Random location which might be worse than the one you were leaving.

Update - The game has its own Wikipedia page !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(text_game)

At work we had Star Trek on a Nascom computer which was supposed to be being used to test systems for a real spacecraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft)

In between making an indicator panel for the test equipment I did extensive reliability testing of that computer by playing Star Trek.

 

That really look like my old Sharp PC 1251



I still have my old Casio fx 7000g and I'm looking for my Sharp PC 1430 when I was in school between 1986 and 87

 

Back when we had Tandy (Radio shack) in the UK it was fun to go through their catalogue playing Spot The Manufacturer".
For years everything they sold had one of their own brand names eg Realistic. However, the name was often the only difference from the AKA from Casio or Sharp.

p.s. There was a long discussion on the previous forum of the definition of AKA (also Known As). The conclusion was that the same service manual could be used for either unit as the PCBs etc would be the same.

 

We also had some Tandy shops in France, I remember buying some stuff there and watching the catalog during hours when I was really young...