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

^ Disk, not disk drive.

Same with me and with most people in Eastern Europe I suppose, because clones could be obtained from other manufacturers, and there was abundance of software. Borland's were the tools of choice for many Russian devs in the early 1990s, first for DOS and then for Windows. Delphi was a magnificent product, which was just one year too late. This mistake was irreversible, Visual Basic stole the thunder.



Apples always have been a closed system, Apple allowed once to produce clones, but quickly reversed its decision.



I think I have advertised Halt and Catch Fire several times already

I got my own PC when 486 was out. It was a 486DX100 with 16MB RAM and 15-inch SVGA monitor and Windows 95, of course.

Anyway, 4-5 years ago I was handed a Macbook Pro at my new work, hated it for the first two weeks, but now... there are two MBPs in my home, both 3rd generation, which is arguably the best. Supposedly new Macs released this fall should fix all the wrongs or the 4th generation, so basically they will be like 3rd gen with M1 chip. But my 2013 and 2014 MBPs are still going strong, so don't feel like replacing them.

 

Too much competition from U.S. companies like Apple and Commodore. Anyway Japanese companies had almost the whole Japanese market to themselves. I have read the history of Commodore "One the Edge" and it said that the Commodore machines were selling well in Japan until NEC launched their own machine after which sales plummeted.
I wonder if you and @CDV realise that Microsoft had a big part in the creation of MSX.

I have to split mine into Computers I have owned, and Computers I have owned and regularly used.
After the MSX there was quite a gap before I got an Atari ST. After three years of using that for both fun and serious things like Word Processing I moved over to PCs.
However, I love my iPad Pro and do have a 2012 MacBook Pro (the last fully expandable one) fitted with an SSD waiting for me to get the hang of iMovie.

You have mentioned gathering up old audio gear when no one else was interested. Back in the 1990s I did the same with computers.
I still have a working Rubber Key Spectrum that I bought complete with a cassette recorder for £1 in the mid 1990s. I only bought it because
it was raining and was sat in a plastic tray that was gradually filling with water. If I hadn't the destination would have probably been the dustbin.
Other notable buys were another Toshiba HX10 for £3 and a working Atari ST for £3.

My misunderstanding.

In the computers I have used category, I could include CAD systems I have used at work like Racal Redac and Daisy which cost more than my house.
Where I worked in the 1980s was very into DEC equipment and considered the PC to be a toy. In the mid 1980s I ordered a 10MByte DEC disc cartridge which cost £100 which would have been a similar proportion of salary. However, that cartridge was big enough for all the departments electronic design work.

Back to Sinclair I recently read that the system for designing Ferranti ULAs like that used in the Spectrum, and which again was based on a DEC computer, cost £99999, which was four times the price of my house back then.

 

If you can scroll through all the pages of Ladies Underwear there are loads of old computer catalogue pages in this thread.
https://twitter.com/OldUKCatalogues/status/1438573554753318913/photo/1
Near the bottom VintageUKCatalogues also shows that they have a collection of just about every Sinclair Computer ever made.

 

I have just found another
https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=820
I never saw one or even an advert. OldComputers explains why these were such a flop. $10000 for a Machine that sounds to be worse in most ways than a Genuine IBM at half the price.

I just found some old prices to compare. None of these are actually surprising to me.
https://clickamericana.com/topics/science-technology/price-features-personal-computers-1980s

I think the problem the Japanese had, outside of Japan, was that by the time they got a product to market it was obsolete. By the 1980s two years didn't see much changes in Calculators or Watches but with computers it would be like comparing a Ford Model T to a Mustang.

p.s. There are some interesting other pages on that clickamericana site. I just looked at one all about 1970s and 1980s Digital Watches.

 

Well, here's some of my old computers. I have three BBC B Micros. The amazing thing is that despite being more than 40 years old, new software is still being written for them, and they're also being used for "demos." Bitshifters made this Bad Apple demo in mode 7 and runs on completely un-modified hardware -

- The pictures shown here are of one of my machines fitted with a raspberry Pi which not only mimicks the 6502 co processor, but other co-processors as well, plus the BBC Micro can use the Pi's ARM chip natively! There's also some extra chips fitted which, despite having only four ROM slots, this now has eight banks of sideways RAM and eight banks of EEPROM which can all be programmed in-situ. Something you can't see is underneath, plugged into the User port, which is a micro SD card with many disk images on it. Basically, it's a games juke box, and then some. In place of the standard floppy drive is a Gotek drive which uses USB media formatted to Fat32 ad holds SSD and DSD images. The images are edited using a PHP/MySQL editor system I created, as I use Linux and the Windows tools wouldn't work properly. The image comes out of the RGB port but uses a Pi Zero to convert it to HDMI. Sadly, not fast enough to handle sound as well. I didn't create the project to do this, although I had to get all the parts and put them together, including hand soldering the CPLD. You can see more on the various mods on my BBC web pages - http://msknight.com/bbc/

 

I'm not surprised. Are you aware of what "The 8 Bit Guy" on Youtube is doing, writing new games for computers like the Commodore 64 ?
A whole generation of programmers learnt their skills pushing 8 bit computers to their limits. Computers with modern graphics cars probably don't have any practical limits although I suspect most modern games are written in such a high level that they are completely divorced from the actual hardware. I have read that Apples 1984 Mac might have been the last computer where one person fully understood everything that was going on in it. However, I guess these guys had a good understanding on how to push a Pentium 1 to the limit with a demo that runs from a single 1.44MByte floppy
I do think parts of this should come with an epilepsy warning but the music is amazing.


What is more surprising is that after the PC version came out it got re-written for the Commodore 64.

 

Terminator 2, John Connor uses one to get money from an ATM. I'd love one of these, but they seem to fetch decent money these days. Closest I've got is an Apple Newton, as used by Casey Ryback in Under Seige 2....

 

Well, in amongst a load of grief at work, I've been taking it out on a ZX81. It now has internal 16k, mechanical keyboard, talks HDMI and under the keyboard has local storage with wifi.

The ultimate goal will be to have one in a wood case with sloping keyboard like the Commodore C64C. I'll get there. And once I've finished the projects, I'll be able to get back into the clear case where the walkmans are, to continue working on them.

 

You have certainly put a lot of effort into that.
Are you aware that the original prototype Commodore Pet was in a painted wood case. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1279.98

When it came to production Commodore realised that it would be cheaper to get their Filing Cabinet factory to knock out metal cases than to get plastic ones made.

To show contrasts in technology I received and built my ZX81 kit the same month in 1981 that the space shuttle made its first flight.
At the start of December I took it into work to show the guy I was working for. He was so impressed that he decided that was what his kids were getting for Christmas, so he tracked down a WH Smith that had built ones in stock, took the afternoon off and went and bought one, He then tracked down the circuit of a 16K RAM pack, which I recall used 16 ICs) so gave me (the apprentice) the job of building one on stripboard ! So a week before Christmas I was there building part of his kids Christmas present.

I never did expand mine to 16K but did spend about £15 buying a 2KByte SRAM and fitting that in place of the two 1K x 4 chips the kit came with. That allowed me to write programs longer than the screen. I guess you have used a 32K Byte SRAM. They cost a lot less these days.

 

No, I wasn't aware about the Pet prototype. Mind you, it seems that much was done in that era which is a marvel today. People were much more solution orientated than now.

Yes, I'm using a 32K byte Sram. There are a number of options but I chose to go with an SMD chip that someone mounted on a board, rather than use vintage memory. I've put a record of all my learnings on my BBC micro page. The ZX81 is about half way down. I think the only thing left now is to sort out an eprom programmer that works on Linux, so I can burn out roms that last longer than the 10 years-ish on EEPROMs. https://msknight.com/bbc/

 

I wasn't aware that EEPROMS lost their programming so quickly. It always used to amuse be when manufacturers quoted data retention times of 100 years on products that had only been on the market a year or two. At work we got given sample of the first Altera In Circuit Programmable CPLDs. We had to report back that the data retention times on those was less than one weekend .

Have you looked for a BBC based EPROM programmer ? They used to be popular. I have two old and as yet untested PC based programmers. However I suspect I would have to dig out a PC running Windows 3.1 to use them.

Another alternative would be to look for a stand-alone programmer like a Data I/O. I cherish this mug because back in the early 1990s programming sets of EPROMs for our software team (and buying 128K SRAMs for system upgrades by the hundred) literally kept me in work for a year or two.


For anyone wondering what I am talking about here is a Data I/O programmer that back in the 1990s cost over ten times the £299 this sold for recently.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/395095231496 In the department it was always referred to as "the Enterprise programmer".

 

I was reading up on things and apparently they heat components to increase atom agitation and thus simulate faster lifetime wear - https://hackaday.com/2023/12/21/how-do-you-test-if-an-eeprom-can-hold-data-for-100-years/ - it's still a heck of a finger in the air thing though.

There are eeproms that are rated to 100 years in DIP, but they cost a small fortune because the minimum order is so high.

I want to keep things as Linux based as I can, so I've got to wait until I've saved up some more cash and then ask on the Ubuntu forums for advice, because it does look like the software is the key achillies heel on this. Some people do use emulation for Windows software, and some software is out there but needs compiling which can get messy with libraries... but the idea of using the BBC for eprom programming is a good call. I'll add that to the possibility list.

 

First result on eBay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/176180872564
I was wondering where the software for it was then realised it is on an EPROM plugged into the programming socket.

 

Mmmm... £95. I guess I'll ask on the StarDot forums first.