Computers I Have Known...
IBM ????
In the Old Days all IBM equipment was known by it's 4-digit number. The most ancient computer I've worked with was either a 1620 or 1401. It was relegated to controlling a bunch of tape drives when I worked with it the University of Canterbury in 1975.Burroughs B6700
The BIG machine - literally. If you picture the rows of cabinets you see in the movies, then you're close to knowing what this looked like. In time I may be able to dig up some photos of the machine itself, but here is a picture of one from another site.
Cost about a million dollars in the early 1970's, when a million was a lot of money. Ferrite core memory, 80 column cards and a handful of CANDE interactive terminals.
Digital pdp-11
One of those with the lovely multicoloured switch panels controlled a Calcomp drum plotter. My job was to bootstrap this thing by:- Keying in the Octal addresses and opcodes in binary on the front panel panel
- After a few dozen of these instructions it "knew" enough to begin reading a paper tape
- The paper tape program told it how to talk to the B6700...
Great stuff, except for re-winding the paper tape! (The University Computer Centre still has the hand-driven grindstone used to do the re-winding with - preserved in a glass case in their foyer...)
The IBM System 3
First in the line that begat the System 32, 34, 36 and 38, and then became the AS/400 (and now the "iSeries"!), this came out in 1969. I wrote payroll, debtors and banking application on one of these in RPGII - the programming language from hell (IMHO!)The Sinclair ZX80
The first computer I personally owned, the ZX80 was a wonder with a massive 1K of RAM! Cost me about $500 in about 1981 - second hand!
The later Sinclair machines, the ZX81 and the Spectrum were pretty popular in their day, but the ZX80 was just too minimal for just about everyone, so was never really popular.
The BBC Model B
Now this was a real computer. Cost me $2,000 in about 1982, for a machine without monitor, or disk drive. We're talking storage on your own audio tape, like most of the early micros. Technically a lovely machine. The version of BASIC included was vastly superiour to that available on the other machines of the same era such as the Commodore 64. I was a founder member of the local Christchurch BBC Users Group, though I don't recall going to more than a very few meetings. The BBC (and the later Archimedes) did well in secondary schools for many years.The original IBM PC
Although this was launched in 1981, the demand was such that it wasn't until April 1983 that they hit NZ - and even later for Australia. At the time the key intersesting things about them were:For home or recreation they wre an expensive joke, and for business they really didn't add anything that hadn't been available for a long time on the CP/M based business micros. Despite that, we all knew that Point 1 above was worth a lot!1 - They made "micros" respectable
2 - Good quality monochrome displays
3 - "Open" architecture
Digital (DEC) Rainbow
In retrospect the first of many bad moves that took Digital from the third-biggest computer company in the world to being taken over by Compaq. This machine was Digital's PC - it was in many ways far better engineered tha the IBM, could run all the new IBM MS-DOS software - and also the older CP/M applications.However, it came out late and was slow. Also, at about the same time the first "killer app" for the PC came out - Lotus 123. Rather than being written to run on MS-DOS, this application went direct to the BIOS or even the underlying hardware to get every ounce of performance. Overnight this forced all PC-compatibles to be compatible in almost every degree - and killed off any real hardware innovation for a long time.