Vintage / Retro Computing

[denverpilot]

With all the “retro” computing and gaming YouTube channels and such, I thought it might be fun to post up photos or mentions of old stuff you either OWNED or were issued for work.

It’d be weird to discuss mainframes and dumb terminals though, and yes I know a bunch of us did that.

More thinking from the “luggable” or laptop era and beyond ... and perhaps a favorite machine or theme in your personal preferences.

So I’ll start. I’ve been poking at the idea that it’s almost time for a new personal laptop. As I really looked hard at what I *actually* bought or wanted to use that was issued by work, I’m a dyed in the wool “small and light” laptop guy.

The laptop I probably used and loved the longest was a Toshiba Portege’ 3015CT. This is a photo of the 3010. Was just a software load difference.

Notice another formative thing. No trackpad and a track point type mouse. I love em. Nowadays that means Lenovo. Dell had something until recently but they killed it.

That Toshiba had raw Debian on it for years toward the end of its life and was waaaaay ahead of its time for lightness and thickness. Nothing came close.

There was a big fat personal “eMachines” laptop for a short while. It was huge. It didn’t last long as a regular driver for me.

Then another long stint with a company IBM Thinkpad T43. Freaking indestructible tank and again, track point. Oh and that traditional thinkpad keyboard that was real and not the total garbage modern keyboards, even Lenovo’s. Typists dream.

Still have these two kicking around. The time for fat and heavy is for rugged. Panasonic Toughbook. It’s here to program ancient radios that need real DOS. LOL.

And this was dad’s old Thinkpad X22. Still has XP and some dodgy ham radio software on it. Well almost all ham software is beyond dodgy. LOL.

Even have the docking station for that little guy.

Current work laptop is a boring Dell 15” with an 8th gen i5, bunch of RAM, and decent screen. Yawn. Works. Hate the touchpad.

And of course there’s an original black MacBook sitting in the closet and a very old but still occasionally used MacBook Pro with an early generation i7 kicking around. It’s honestly the fattest porker since the “eMachines” laptop.

Currently kinda lusting after the brand new HP Envy 13 with the new gen Ryzen 4000 series processor and of course, numerous Lenovos, just for the keyboard and “nipple mouse”. LOL.

Always liked anything with the old ThinkLight or backlit keyboards, too. Guess I turn lights off and tap away at night.

The X1 Carbon lineup at Lenovo is really tempting but the smaller X series also calls. And no AMD yet on the Carbon.

The downside of Ryzen for a little bit in laptops is even though Thunderbolt isn’t Intel proprietary anymore, it’ll take a bit to get it on AMD boxen. “USB 3.FiveMillion SuperSpeed+ Power Distribution from on board nuke plant” (oh what a stupid naming convention the USB people created...) has to do for now.

Of course NVMe and PCI speed SSDs are amazing these days along with DDR4 RAM and such. Quite a large number of machines with those being soldered on, with no upgrade path, for better or worse.

What were/are your favorite form factors in laptops?

By the way my penchant for the tiny ones includes a mandate that they dock or otherwise are useable with a “real” monitor, keyboard, and mouse at home. Sometimes I have a true desktop system at home and the lappie gets ignored, sometimes it’s the Swiss Army knife.

Not a huge “gamer” nor massive video editor, so not often using a monster home build desktop with a screaming GPU in it. But even the laptops need to be able to run a virtual machine or two.

 

[DaleB]

Whippersnapper.

I still have my very first working computer, a Timex Sinclair 1000. Was too poor (junior enlisted with a wife and kids to afford a REAL computer, which would have been an S100 system. There was an earlier 8080 computer that I scratch built, but it was “liberated” by a dirtbag when I was coming home from the ROK before I had a chance to get a BIOS adapted for it so I could run CP/M. Hand assembling on paper was tedious and I didn’t have an EPROM programmer...

Wish I still had the PDP11-34 in the garage. Or the PDP11-05 I scored when we lived in Cleveland. About the only thing I actually miss about vintage hardware would be sitting in front of an ADM-3A terminal playing Adventure on a RSTS/E machine.

First portable? I borrowed an Osborne 1 a few times, but the first one I owned (aside from the KSR-43, not an actual computer but a dumb terminal that worked for BBS and CompuServe) was an original Compaq Portable. Bought a pallet load of them from a scrapper, plus a pallet of original first model HP Laserjets. The kind that didn’t have the memory to print graphics, text only. Spent weeks cleaning them up, testing them and selling them off as a Christmas special deal one year. Kept one or two for the family of course... the kids still remember playing Oregon Trail on that.

Oddly enough I’ve never owned my own laptop. My employer gives me a new one every few years, but they’re locked down to the point of being totally useless for anything outside of work, and I do mean anything. I’ve bought several for the kids and still have a couple old ones on a shelf (why I don’t know). If I ever do get away from my “desktop” I kind of like the MacBook, but I doubt I’ll ever own one. I like their direction with the switch to ARM, but If it can’t run my existing copies of Eagle, my PIC C cross-compiler, and SolidWorks... on two monitors... then I really have no use for it. Apple hardware seems to be the gift that keeps on taking, and my little Android tablet does fine for portable use.

 

[Hang 4]

Your Toshiba reminded me of my work laptop that I got in 2001. It was a Portege that had the battery doubling as a handle. It ran the long length of the hinge and was about a foot long. It made it easy to carry a spare. After 9/11, that battery was my contribution to I'm not going to just sit there if the plane gets hijacked. I was flying weekly for work and made sure the spare was in my seat in easy reach. Nothing technical to contribute, but that was the laptop I most remember.

 

[TCABM]

I had one of these for a while.

 

[denverpilot]

Whippersnapper.

I still have my very first working computer, a Timex Sinclair 1000.

Oh yeah I had one of those also, and Rat Shack stuff before that. Was just keeping it to form factors for portable that “survived” until today, since I’m poking at getting a new machine. Or used.

Can’t really decide if I want to build a desktop and just use the work boring machine for portability or buy a laptop. Been eyeballing there couple gen old thinkpads on the used market that either already have the upgrades done or are so cheap you can buy the upgrade parts on eBay and DIY... but also looking at the truly modern stuff.

Kinda convinced if I wait too much longer the keyboards will tout less than a mm of key travel and be absolutely shyte in another year... besides the trackpoint maybe dying. A number of the budget plastic junk Lenovos are missing the good keyboard and trackpoInt now.

But that little HP maybe paired with the re-released Lenovo wireless keyboard with trackpoint might be a long term option. Buy two of those keyboards, one for the office and one for home. Too bad they don’t make a number pad version...

Just mulling over what I *really* bought over the years vs what looks tempting online. I mean a nice Lenovo P73 maxed out is a complete monster but you need a mountaineer backpack to actually move it somewhere else. LOL

 

[rtk11]

I had one of these for a while.

Oooh, that looks like an updated Osborne computer as it has a color screen. I remember them as monochromatic (choice of orange or green) and dual 5.25" floppy drives, a real luxury for the time...

 

[TCABM]

Oooh, that looks like an updated Osborne computer as it has a color screen. I remember them as monochromatic (choice of orange or green) and dual 5.25" floppy drives, a real luxury for the time...

TI PPC. Mine was monochromatic

 

[Pilawt]

This was the first computer I used for business. Took it everywhere, and built up some biceps in the process.



But the first computer I worked with was back in 1963 or so. I was one of five students selected for a school project, to build and demonstrate a computer -- a Heathkit analog computer, like this one. One of the other guys went on to become a bigwig at Texas Instruments with several patents to his name. Suffice to say, I didn't.

 

[MooneyDriver78]

You guys with your fancy computers ;-)

I used
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisanbop

 

[Arrow76R]

Attached is a photo I just took of my Apple IIe. It controls the lighting outside my house, driveway detector, etc. It has been running 24X7 since 1984. The Apple "Basic" programming language is the only one I know!!!

 

[DaleB]

Kinda convinced if I wait too much longer the keyboards will tout less than a mm of key travel and be absolutely shyte in another year... besides the trackpoint maybe dying. A number of the budget plastic junk Lenovos are missing the good keyboard and trackpoInt now.

Trackpoint? That's the little rubber keyboard nipple, right? I've had to disable those on every corporate laptop I've had that was so equipped. I keep hitting the stupid thing while I type, resulting in unintended mouse movement and clicks. I just pack a cheap Logitech wireless mouse and leave the transceiver plugged in.

I like the idea of a laptop, but for my personal use... it would spend its entire life like my corporate machine does now. Tucked out of the way, closed up, connected to a real keyboard, a real mouse, and two big-ass monitors so I can actually get some work done. It gets un-docked only when I have to travel for work. I can tolerate crappy keyboards and a small screen for a few days when I have to. The current one is a Dell something-or-other, it's pretty fast with 8 GB of RAM and a solid-state drive.

 

[Ghery]

All this new stuff you talk about. The first computer I used was an IBM 360/67 mainframe in 1969. We either dialed in using a teletype terminal in the high school basement or went over to the computer center on campus (Washington State University) and punched cards on the keypunch machines. PCs are so new.

That reminds me of a trivia deck they were handing out at Wescon in 1983. It had one question where their answer was just plain wrong. "What was the IBM 360/67?" Their answer was "A machine that never saw the light of day." Gee, the first machine I programmed was one of those at WSU and my boss at Tandem had used one getting his PhD at Stanford. So we knew of two installations. BTW, what was the 360/67 claim to fame? It was the first time shared version of the System 360.

I remember the IBM T43. I had one for a while when I worked for Intel. It was bulletproof. Nice laptop, but it would be way too slow today.

 

[bflynn]

My mother gave away my Apple ][ plus, but it still ran when she did. I learned assembly by poking around with that machine. PR#6

Today, the “oldest” thing I have is an IBM pentium desktop that is running Linux.

 

[Van Johnston]

My first personally owned PC was an Amiga 500, and it is still in the garage. I think it was last powered on in the mid-90s.

 

[Velocity173]

64K Atari 800XL. Since I couldn’t afford any additional cartridges, disk drive or printer, it basically became a paper weight. I remember spending all day typing in code only to create some crappy pixilated picture.

http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/XL/800xl/800xl.htm

 

[denverpilot]

This went poorly due to the aged demographic here!!!! LOL!!!! (Me included, I just left the long dead machines out!!!!)

Modern features! Modern!!!!!

Hahahaha!

Ah well. I bought a brand new washer and dryer instead for the moment. Posted a photo of wifey posing with it and 60+ people like it.

Cracks me up. Old farts and friends farts like appliances more than anything else I posted this week.

Of course wife and I, mostly her, used that first week of new appliance excitement to wash stuff that hadn’t been washed in years like homemade quilts and afghans and marveled at how much freaking dog hair was trapped in everything and released by the magic of a new dryer pounding them all on a motorized rock.

Also snagged a deal on Ryobi 4Ah One+ batteries and free tools tossed in from the Home Despot. Friend noticed the sale for the 4th and saved me enough money, I’m giving him the extra charger and battery as a finders fee. Ha.

Plus I didn’t have a cordless angle grinder. Now I can really damage some chit.

Tim Taylor time later this week. Too busy Mon/Tues.

 

[kayoh190]

I used to be a huge vintage computer guy - usually collecting machines that I lusted over as a kid but could never afford. I owned a large number of SGI workstations and even an Onyx2 IR3 rack (3 phase 220V baby!) over the years, but here in NYC space is at a premium and I'm down to one box - a POWER Indigo2. I held onto this one specifically because it's still a ton of fun to tinker with, but it's also pretty rare in its own right with a MIPS R8000 under the hood:



I first learned assembly with 68k and still dabble from time to time, so I also keep an old Powerbook 185c in the closet for that purpose. Most of my vintage tinkering happens with the Indigo2, however. MIPS assembly is more fun anyway IMO, and every time I get all p!ssed off with the state of today's Linux it's nice to fiddle with a proper UNIX machine.

 

[Crashnburn]

My first home computer was the Original IBM PC MK II, as it had 386K of memory, rather than the MK I's 64K. It also had dual -dual sided floppy drives. I later added a 50 MB HDD, and thought I'd never fill it up. I now have more than 1TB on my C drive on my current PC!

 

[brcase]

1st computer I used was a Dec La36 terminal connected with a 300 baud modem to the local college. Probably and HP3000.


I used a commodore PET in High School at bit here was a grand total of one in the whole school.

1st I owned was a Commodore 64 with tape drive, later added a floppy disk drive and an old teletype for a printer





then I bought a Digitial Group Z80 Computer with 2 8” hard drives and 2 automatic tape drives (still cassettes).

 

[denverpilot]

You guys are no help at all. You know that right?

 

[atbroome]

The proper ones in the IBM Thinkpads were excellent when the sensitivity was set correctly. The imitation ones in Dells were awful. So bad on one of my work laptops in the mid 2000s that if I pushed lightly on the left side of the case, the pointer would move left. Push on the right side of the case? Pointer would move right. Due to the case flexing so much. So while typing the pointer was constantly moving all over the screen. I had to disable that.

It took me a long time to adjust to trackpads, especially the large "modern" ones. I miss the Trackpoint.

Trackpoint? That's the little rubber keyboard nipple, right? I've had to disable those on every corporate laptop I've had that was so equipped. I keep hitting the stupid thing while I type, resulting in unintended mouse movement and clicks. I just pack a cheap Logitech wireless mouse and leave the transceiver plugged in.

 

[timrb]

Retro to me means S100, although since I worked at IBM and my wife worked at Commodore and later Apple, we had (and still have) a wide array of collector's items gathering dust in our attic. I even have an IBM Portable PC that I haven't fired up in probably 20 years. Stand back--it has a full-on 20MB (yes, mega) hard drive. Don't get me started on punch cards.

Tim

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Don't make me dig out my Newton to take pics of it...

But I have a collection of old stuff. One of the more unusual items is probably the Mac IIFX (which, according to those of us who were Mac users back then, stood for "II F*cking Xpensive" ). $10K, with mouse. Keyboard, video card, and monitor not included.

 

[kayoh190]

But I have a collection of old stuff. One of the more unusual items is probably the Mac IIFX (which, according to those of us who were Mac users back then, stood for "II F*cking Xpensive" ). $10K, with mouse. Keyboard, video card, and monitor not included.

40MHz '030 *******!

Nice machine. I had one in the collection awhile back too.

 

[Eric Brunelle]

I learned on a Digital PDP-8i. People (not me of course) used to play Star Trek on it for hours. No mouse, no screen- just a terminal that printed everything you typed. After a night of game playing, we ended up with two inches of folding printer paper that went into the trash. No recycling then, either. We were the balls, though!

 

[DaleB]

You guys are no help at all. You know that right?

Dude, you titled the thread "Vintage/Retro Computing" and expected a different result? You do know there's at least a platoon of geezer geeks on this board, right?

 

[idahoflier]

The only portable worth keeping in my collection...

 

[DaleB]

I learned on a Digital PDP-8i. People (not me of course) used to play Star Trek on it for hours. No mouse, no screen- just a terminal that printed everything you typed. After a night of game playing, we ended up with two inches of folding printer paper that went into the trash. No recycling then, either. We were the balls, though!

My first time really having the run of a system -- more or less -- was at Ft. Sill. I had an ADM-3A and a Decwriter III connected to a remote PDP-11/70 across post; our building had a mux that handled the couple dozen terminals scattered in various classrooms. I was in the academic records department, so mine was a 1200 baud connection -- woohoo! Thank God for keyboard buffering.

I have thought about collecting over the years, but 1.) the ones I really want are priced out of the realm of reason, B.) I don't have the space, and iii.) I lack the time and patience any more to really play with them, so they'd mostly be just gathering dust.

 

[Stan Cooper]

I still have my original IBM 5150 PC and the 5151 green phosphor CRT monitor. My first "real" portable was my GRiDCASE II "luggable" laptop, which I still have (although it hasn't had power applied for 25 years).

 

[flyingron]

I started on a HP2000 system that ran basic. It was shared between the other schools in our county via Bell 103 Datasets. We had a few teletyles and ADM 1 terminals until HP donated some of their fancier terminals. We eventually moved up to the HP3000 (which did Fortran, Basic, and Cobol). Prior to that we punched cards and sent our Cobol jobs to the Board of Ed IBM 360 computer in Upper Marlboro.

I took one summer course on the Univac 1106 and 1108 at the UofMd.

At Hopkins I was introduced to a PDP-11/45 and this oddball operating system called UNIX where I'd sent the next twenty years, doing everything from PC's up to supercomputers.

My first computer was a PC/AT however. I never had much reason to do anything before that when I always had access to larger stuff. I had a 68000 for a while, an NS (Fairchild Clipper) system, Various PC's and MACs, MultibusII 386 systems one with a full up 9-track tape drive in my living room, and so forth. I had a model 37 teletype in the kitchen for years.
Part of my jobs at two employers was to get rid of the card processing equipment. A program drum from a keypunch was a paperweight on my desk for years. Scant people knew what it was.


Going back to my roots I have a little scale model of a PDP-11/70 front panel with a raspberry pi inside it emulating the 11/70. I run 2.11 BSD on it (I hacked the idle loop to make it appear to run my old BRL/JHU unix). The pi has a gigabyte of ram in it, we couldn't even dream aboug ta gigabyte of disk when I got started.

When I worked for the Army, I had a Grid Compass as well. You could use the back side of it to iron your pants or keep your coffee warm.

 

[gkainz]

I think I had been in computing for a decade before I came across anything even closely resembling something "luggable" - a Compaq Portable 386

I lugged that one from Denver to St. Louis for nearly a year to run Oracle Designer ... well, actually, used it to remote into a microVAX in the Denver office to run Oracle Designer, while building a system for Army Transcom.

A co-worker had an Osborne 1 laptop on his shelf some years before that, but our Wyse terminals were sufficient to remote to the PDP-11 and VAX-11/780 to write and manage the C code used to push through the compiler (de-compiler?) to create the assembler code for the Litton L-304 for back end processing in the E-2 Hawkeye. The sim lab was full of Burroughs and Sperry-Rand systems that booted manually via front panel toggle switches while the operator read from a multi-page set of instructions and hope you didn't miss a step.

Someone up above this thread talked about "collecting" vintage compute equipment ... I used to lie to myself about that same thing. My closet finally reached the tipping point of collectables/old junk with an Apple IIfx, Sun SPARC pizza boxes, boxes of SCSI cables, stacks of 9 track tapes, etc and I purged deeply.

 

[Ted]

Being born in the first half of the 80s, my stuff was all new by comparison. The school I went to had a lab filled with Apple IIe machines. A friend of my mom's gave me a Tandy TRS 80 Model 100 portable computer:

It was fairly useless but I knew enough BASIC that I could make some dumb programs in it. Thing was that mom didn't like buying batteries so I needed a plug, which decreased the portable use of it.

I was given the good old IBM PC with 8088 processor and green and black screen at some point:

The screen had very significant burn-in...

My first computer was a Mac LC II with the "Apple Basic Color Monitor":

I remember having to manually switch it from 256 colors to 16 colors for some of the more primitive games.

I bought into the brief period of Apple clones for my next computer, getting a PowerComputing machine that I now forget the specs of, but it looked like this:

and that pretty much got me through the rest of school. At some point in high school I was allowed to upgrade. And, just like I do now, I started doing my buy-the-older-version-and-pimp-it-out, so I got a PowerMac 9500:

And then upgraded it with more RAM, a new/bigger hard drive, painted it black, put a Jaguar leaper on it that I had sitting around from one of the Jags I bought, and of course upgraded the processor to... I want to say it was a G3? At some point there I was running two monitors as well, which was unusual back then. Being a luddite I rejected that USB thing as a fad that wouldn't last.

That takes me to a bit after 2000 when I started college and we all got Compaq laptops as part of our standard issue beginning of Freshman year. Since then things have certainly gotten better and faster, but I feel like less so.

The kids don't know what they got. Back when I was their age I had no computer anything to deal with, and when I got the LC II at age 10 the only game I had on it for a long time was a puzzle - one of those things where you would slide the squares around to make the icon look like an Apple. Yeah, hours, hours, and hours spent playing that.

 

[Bill]

I still have a TRS-80 pocket computer around somewhere, just like this one:

http://www.trs-80.org/pocket-computer-1/

 

[flyingron]

I still have a TRS-80 pocket computer around somewhere, just like this one:

http://www.trs-80.org/pocket-computer-1/

I have one of these somewhere. Abysmally slow. I wrote some software for my roommate to compute the air distance between two lat/lons so he could price out charter flights (this was way before we had any sort of automatic flight planning software available). 1982 or so.

 

[Ghery]

OK, as long as we're talking about new computers...

The first one we bought for use in the house was a Commodore 64. Probably the first one sold for less than $595, got it for $570 as the store had to tape the box shut. Started out with a tape drive for mass storage and used the TV for a monitor. Later on we got the floppy drive, a monitor and a printer. It's still in a box out in the garage, along with my wife's Apple IIe, both of which probably still work, even though I haven't seen them in 25 years.

I remember the VAX 11/780. I used one at Martin Marietta Denver Aerospace back in the early 1980s. VT-100 terminals. Did you know that rubbing your hand across the air vents on a VT-100 sounds just like a head crash on one of the removeable pack disk drives? We nailed the DEC service engineer one day with that trick. I loved the VMS operating system. Beat the heck out of the NOS operating system on the Cyber 176 mainframe that we also had access to. And people said that MS-DOS was "user hostile". Not even close.

I was one of the early users of the HP 9000 Model 500 desktop machine. It had HP's 32 bit processor chip, the one they claimed was the first one made. It used a run time compiled version of BASIC. It compiled a line of code the first time it came to it, and ran the compiled version from then on. Soft keys across the bottom of the display and used 3 1/2 inch floppies. $60 for a box of 10 back then. Took three signatures on a PO to get them at Martin back then. And it had a huge 10 MByte hard drive. HP wanted me to come to work for them in Colorado when I was leaving Martin Marietta as I had more experience with that machine than anyone in the company, but I needed to return to the west coast for family reasons, so I went to work for Tandem Computers. Probably a good move. But that thing was fast. We used the HP 9836 at Tandem to run the equipment in the EMC lab and the I never could get them to spring for the HP 9000 Model 500 which was much faster. Oh well...

I knew people who worked for Wyse (we called them the wise guys for some reason), SGI, Sun, HP, and MIPS. And I worked for Tandem Computers. Silicon Valley in the 1980s and early 1990s was an interesting place to live and work.

When it comes to computers, these are the "good old days".

 

[flyingron]

I was at Martin at the same time. We had these tempest VT-100s which looked like a regular VT100 except the keyboards weighed a ton. The system they were connected to was set of dual pdp-11/70s running RSX. Amusingly we found that when building the systems in one lab, the RSX sysgen script told us "This will take a while, go have a cup of coffee." In the other lab, it told us to have a cup of tea. We dug through the script and found out it was conditional on the configured line frequency (one system was being set up to be deployed in Europe).

The 9000/500's indeed were the first single chip fully 32-bit microprocessors (came out in 1982). Prior to that the 9000s used 68000 family processors. Later they switched to PA/RISC. We had a several prerelease PA/RISC machines (snakes).
This led to a series of goofy machine names. Since the project was code named Snake, our first few machines were called things like Cobra and Rattler. The next one was King ( after the king snake), but the next one after that got named Ace, then we had Deuce, and Joker, which led to various Batman related hostnames.

The 9000's and 3000's converged on PA/RISC. The major difference is the 9000 ran UNIX (HP/UX, usually pronounced H-Pucks) and the 3000 ran the HP proprietary MPE (Mighty Poor Excuse).

The Army let me touch their 7600 mainframe and attached processors just once. They regretted it. I did play extensively with the Cray X/MP and put my signature to the $25MM Cray II procurement.

 

[Jim_R]

My first "real" portable was my GRiDCASE II "luggable" laptop, which I still have (although it hasn't had power applied for 25 years).
View attachment 87394

GRiDs were the first laptops chosen to fly on the Shuttle (I don't remember the specific model, but it was more "modern" than what you posted--full 80x40 character LCD screen running DOS). GRiDs were eventually replaced by IBM ThinkPads. Both were chosen in large part because of their physical ruggedness and good resistance to cosmic ray hits. (They were never used for safety-critical applications, but they were used to support ops overnight when the crew was asleep and couldn't perform a reboot, and also used for safety-enhancing situational awareness, so being rad-tolerant was still important.)

First computer I owned was a C-64, with the 1541 floppy and a 300-baud modem. Later I got a 1200-baud modem and an SFD-1001 1-MB floppy drive--that was awesome storage for a 64K computer! I ran a BBS with that rig--only at night--for a couple of years. In college, I picked up a used IBM clone with a 4.77MHz processor and a 30MB hard card, and ran with that for way longer than it really deserved. Once I got a job and was making a little money, I ordered a custom-configured Dell and stepped up to Windows95. That's the last factory-built desktop I purchased; I've assembled 5-10 since then myself (hard to count since several times it was a mobo+CPU replacement here, a case+new drives there, etc.).

 

[flyingron]

The shuttle used Grid Compass laptops, and I'm not sure what 80x40 dimensions you're talking about. They certainly were nowhere near that in character rendition. It was the CGA-rish 320x240 pixels (though only monochrome orange with the el display it had). The text was 40x25 if I recall. It certainly didn't get anywhere near 80x24 except by scrolling. The thing had it's own dos-ish operating system. It was not MS/DOS. The cute thing is that it had bubble memory for the main memory. The power to drive the EL display was so significant that the entire rear end of the thing was one large heat sink (as I said, it would keep your coffee warm or iron your pants).

I spent a few days down in Las Cruces, NM in a Super 8 with one of those blasted things doing security penetrations at the White Sands Missle Range (officially, I was the lead techie on the Army's Security Enhancement Initiative).

 

[flyingron]

If you really want to get retro, I worked for years in a room that was designated the BRLESC (Ballistic Research Laboratory Executor of Symbolic Code) Room. The BRLESC was long gone when I got there, but some of the old guys were still around. They talked about the language the labs had developed called FORAST (and griped about later having to change to FORTRAN). It may have been the first machine-independent language as it ran on both the lab's computer's the BRLESC and the ORDVAC. I still have pieces of the BRLESC power supply, big rectifier tubes, volt and amp meters about eight inches across. There was still a circuit breaker there marked "FILAMENTS." I can't say when the last time we had a computer with filaments (at least not in the CPU).

What it took me months to realize is that the room was even more historical than that. The original computer installed there was the ENIAC. There was a small plaque comparing the ENIAC with the (then popular) HP-65 calculator. One of my office mates was actually on the team that disassembled the ENIAC and took it to the Smithsonian. They actually powered the thing up upon delivery but the SI left it powered off ever since. Probably not a bad idea as the next computer they installed there for interactive demos caught on fire and destroyed half of the third floor of History and Technology (now the Museum of American History, which has a lot poorer in my opinion collection on display).

What was sitting in that room (other than a lot of desks as it had been mostly redeveloped into office space. They carpeted over what is probably one of the earliest raised computer room floors), was the original Aberdeen ARPANET IMP (a Honeywell militarized thing). This IMP didn't have an embedded TIP. The BRL had a PDP-11/40 running software from UI called "ANTS" (ArpaNet Terminal Server). When the ARPANET went to long leaders, the ANTS software was obsoleted. We replaced it with an 11/34 running UNIX. That ran for two more years until the ARPANet switched over to TCP/IP.

 

[Arnold]

I learned on a Digital PDP-8i. People (not me of course) used to play Star Trek on it for hours. No mouse, no screen- just a terminal that printed everything you typed. After a night of game playing, we ended up with two inches of folding printer paper that went into the trash. No recycling then, either. We were the balls, though!

PDP-8S for me.