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

In this thread http://www.stereo2go.com/forums/threads/beer-and-boomboxes.2111/page-13

I had never even heard of that machine. It sounds as if it predated the Amiga.

A strange, but true fact, was that the Amiga was designed by ex Atari engineers; a team headed up by Jay Miner who had designed the Atari 2600 console then the 400 & 800 computers.,
while the Atari ST was designed by ex Commodore engineers headed up by former Commodore founder and boss Jack Tramiel.

I guess they might have thought that the Amiga had better prospects. Something mentioned in an article on the Video toaster was that the local TV access @Mister X was what Waynes World was based on.

Something his comments prove is how different things were in different counties. I think I have only seen one Apple II outside of a museum and that was in the early 1980s at work where they would happily spend £30000 on a CAD (Computer Aided Design) system so there was no problem spending £900 on a computer to evaluate.

In the UK ARM designer Acorn computers owed most of their success to be chosen for the BBC computer contract and consequently that computer and it's follow ons ending up in 90% of schools. I am sure I have posted it before, but this is an amusing Docudrame of how they won the contract.



As Clive Sinclair says looking at American machines "Why so expensive". Only Commodore broke that rule and was very successful in the UK.

Fast forwarding to 1990 lets see what was in the Gratten Catalogue with its easy repayments


Leading the pack the Amiga 500. This is what every game playing kid wanted for Christmas.
If you were skint maybe a Commodore 64 with a pack of games would do.

On to two entirely different offerings from Amstrad. The Spectrum was such a success in the home market they bought the design from Sinclair and enhanced it with the built in cassette, proper keyboard, and in this pack a light gun. Below that their own, earlier offering. Alan Sugar came up with the idea of including the monitor so the package contained everything you needed. No interrupting Mum watching Coronation Street so you could play a game. If you got fed up with the computer you could buy a TV tuner to turn the monitor into a TV.


Finally for the small business owner or author, Europe's best selling PC also from Amstrad (branded Schneider in Germany).
Can't afford that? The Amstrad Word Processor package includes everything you need for desktop publishing including the printer.
Running CPM it can do lots of other business type stuff like spreadsheets and even play games in Black and Green.

Apple Macintosh ? Back in 1990 the top managers at work had them on their desks to show their status. That was the only place I saw them.
I recall seeing in a computer magazine that an HD floppy drive upgrade for a Mac was about £360 while the equivalent drive for a PC was about £60!
£300 extra so you could eject a floppy without having to press a button !
The engineers had to make do with HP PCs.
I have no idea what happened to all the Management Macs. By the late nineties they were being switched to PCs and whinging about them.
At least one of the original HP 286 PCs is still in a colleagues lab in case they ever need to update some CPLDs that were designed using it.

 

here's a link to the Wiki- records of the C900:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_900

 

Back then lots of companies were after the lucrative Workstation market.

This was Atari's offering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation

In the early 1990s they bought some HP Apollo Workstations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer , at work only for Mentor Graphics (whose PCB design software we were using on them) to drop support for that platform about a year later. Maybe a good thing as they had the dimmest displays I have ever seen on a computer.

Then it was over to Sun Workstations which they kept for many years.

Nowadays a standard PC is adequate while a mid range gaming PC would be overkill.
Engineers design things like aircraft using PCs. Gamers complain that the explosion isn't realistic when they crash the plane in their flight sim.

 

the crazy thing is longman a ps5 is just as powerful as a high end pc....the pc i sold a few weeks ago cost 8 grand about 4 years ago and now would only just about run games, in a way im glad im finished with pc's there obsolete before you buy them or build them in my case lad

 

What you have to realise with Games consoles is that they are sold at cost, or even a loss, since the profit is made on the games (the console manufacturer gets a cut even if a different company writes a game). While development costs are high a system lasts far longer than a PC, and consoles like the Playstations sell millions.

In the early 1990s I bought three of these Control Data drives at work, except they were labelled Seagate, who had just taken over Control Data.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/discs/brochures/CDC_9715_FSD_Brochure_Feb86.pdf
The brochure has the Control Data address as Minneapolis on the back.
The ones I bought cost about £3000 (about 3 months wages) each back then and we had a next day repair contract on them costing about £1000 a year. As I pointed out in a customer presentation if you were lucky enough to have a 40MByte drive in your PC you would have to partition it into two drives as the maximum drive size supported by DOS was 32MBytes. These were cutting edge back in the 1980s.

You got your moneys worth weight wise at 36KG (81lb) including the power supply. A colleague once decided he could carry one from one building to another. He managed but had to sit down for ten minutes to recover having done so.

 

In addition to the 9715 drives I bought there were already four 9766 units that I also arranged the maintenance contracts for
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/discs/brochures/CDC_976x_Brochure_Mar77.pdf We nicknamed those "Tumble Dryers" as they were about the same size and used a similar amount of power. We always ran them off 240V 13A sockets (the standard here in the UK) so I was rather surprised looking at a specification to see "start up current 16A". I guess the 16A was only for the first half second or so. The maintenance contract on those was used more often. At the bottom or the drive there was a brake to stop the (removable) platters spinning for tens of minutes when you wound down the drive. On two occasions the brake didn't release properly resulting in the large motor driving against the brake and smoke pouring out of the drive when someone tried to spin it up !

In everyday use, one software engineer who could tell where his software had got to just by watching the vibrations on the drive. The head assembly must have weighed several lbs so at it moved back and forth the drive would move slightly on its castors.

The 9766 drives were 300MBytes. A different project was using 80MByte drives from the same family. The last I saw of those was the site maintenance guy, pushing them one by one into a skip when that project ended. I think the same happened to the 9766s a few years later as the project started using these https://www.arraid.com/data-storage-products/product/aem-1.html
made in Arizona and about the same price as the 9715s.

 

Retrocomputing has been a hobby since the mid-2000s.
It's a cheaper hobby rather than Hi-Fi collecting, or at least it was...
I have a significant collection, and logistics are growing to the occasion - at least storage wise.
Here are some of my devices.

 

Rest In Peace (or busy doing calculations) Clive Sinclair, the man behind the first computer in this thread (although I realise that one was made by Amstrad)
https://www.aol.co.uk/news/home-computer-pioneer-sir-clive-194114560.html

I was surprised to read he was only 81. Even back in the early 1970s he was a household name with all his gadgets (like stereo amplifiers and calculator kits) being advertised in hobbyist electronics magazines.

 

Don’t tell me you haven’t watched Colin’s last video about vintage Apple computers yet?
Just a quick one, it means 18 minutes of nostalgia.

 

MSX was a relatively popular standard around the world in 1980s. This is a Yamaha YIS-503.



Sometime around 1985, Soviet Ministry of Education ordered several thousand of them for school computer classes. The machines had built-in network adapter and could be connected in a network with 5-pin DIN cables. One computer in every set was the "main" teacher's computer with color monitor, all pupils' computers had monochrome monitors. Only the teacher's computer had a floppy drive connected. It was possible to send a program from one computer to another: you switch receiving computer(s) in LOAD mode, and do SEND on the originating computer. This is how a teacher would send a particular program to all of the pupils simultaneously. This is also how a teacher would receive a program from students' computers one by one. It was a nice, very well designed system. This was the first personal computer I've seen, and a 3.5-in floppy was the first floppy I've seen. This is when I started learning assembly language. We got xeroxed copies of Z80 ASM as well of Basic and Pascal. Of course, no one made a game anywhere near the quality of Konami game.

Z80 CPU, three audio channels plus an audio effects channel. Great machines for music and for gaming. A 16KB game was richer than a 200K PC game, in particular thanks for hardware sprite support.

Feel free to run Google Translate on a Russian Wikipedia page about these machines The wiki page says there were 9 pupil machines per set, but I bet there were 15 of them, with a teacher's computer that would make 16. I think, network ID was a 4-bit number, this is why.

Good memories. Thanks, Yamaha!



I think the black version looks better than a silver one. I especially liked the arrow key arrangement, great for gaming, when you need to press two arrows simultaneously for moving diagonally. After this, seeing a standard PC keyboard with inverse "T" was like, what kind of crap is that? Apple re-designed keys to have the same arrangement for its 4th get MBP, but I think they are moving to inverse "T" again. Too bad.

 

A Toshiba HX10 MSX was my third computer, the first being a ZX81 and the second a TI99/4A which I didn't keep long. MSX was just about popular enough to support one magazine and a range of games that were mainly Spectrum ports. Toshiba even advertised them on TV.

The price at the end was very good value compared to the Spectrum or C64 but they had the momentum with Games and Accessories.
I am envious of your (?) floppy drive. In 1986 those were over twice the price of an MSX computer.

Sony sold their MSX computers for a while in their Sony Centres. The Yamaha MSX was only really sold by music shops in the form of the CX5M which would be bundled with the SFG01 (DX9 in a cartridge) and music applications like their DX7 editor.

Seeing you had commented on the thread I was expecting you to have commented on Clive Sincliar's Spectrum which was cloned and taken further by Soviet companies/enthusiasts than either he or Alan Sugar took it.

IMHO one of RMCs best videos.

 

Rest in peace indeed.

 

No, this is someone selling it on a Russian auction. As I said, only the teacher's machine had an attached floppy drive and a larger color monitor. A single 3.5-inch floppy disk would cost about 1/6 of an average monthly salary; I had one.

I don't know anything on the topic. Embarrasement of the riches of sorts. My school received the Yamahas when I was in 9th grade, but I first saw them and did some programming a year earlier in a computer club. These seemed to me much better designed than Spectrum clones. I could have access to them pretty much anytime I wanted, so I did not want to get my own Spectrum clone. Also, I saw my first IBM PC at that time, and clearly this was the future for business-oriented computers, and they were developing much faster.

I saw the schematics in the Radio magazine, but I don't know jack about electronics (aside of conceptual level of registers and logic gates), and the standard school physics course did not include electronics, only E&M came the closest. And I haven't studied electronics in college.

 

In the U.K. the standard computer bought by schools was the BBC Micro which could similarly be connected via a computer specific network. However,
the computers started at about £400 which we have determined was a bit more than a JVC M90. I have joked on Youtube that the only people who bought them privately were people like my boss who seemed to think that doing so would guarantee his children a place at Oxbridge (Oxford or Cambridge University).

As Neil said, while widely acknowledged as being a bit rubbish, the Spectrum was the right computer at the right price at the time in the U.K. costing 1/3rd of the price of the BBC and about the same as the portable colour TV most people would end up buying to use it with. The Sinclair ZX81 from a year earlier was even worse, but significantly cheaper. When The 8 Bit Guy started criticising it in one of his videos, the famous Video Game Designer, Jeff Minter came in to the comments to explain the difference between a computer you were lucky to get an hour a week on at school, and your own computer (no matter how limited) which you could play with for as long as you wanted to.

Having bought it I must watch this one day

It wasn't much different in the U.K. Going through some old minutes of the Ham Radio Club I was once secretary of, I found that in the mid-1980s that years project had been to use both the companies discount and a bulk buy discount to get the price of bare 5 1/4" Floppy Drive mechanisms down to about £130 each, which would have bought you a Spectrum back then.