What Classic Computer are All About - A Lovers View

From: Brett <danjo_at_xnet.com>
Date: Thu Jul 10 23:40:05 1997

On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Allison J Parent wrote:
> >From Brett <danjo_at_xnet.com> who doth spake:
>
> Collecting is!

Ya but did I get it right??

> > Things to remember - every community has a town drunk, a town clown,
> > a town cop, and a town fool. It wouldn'tbe a community without them.
>
> You forgot the town bag lady.... ;-)

Allison, I read everything I find from you in every newsgroup I read.
No joke. You are prolific 8-)

> Seriously I've put may posts here anout the history and lineages of many
> of the old machines. I collect, but I admit is has to make some sense to
> me as in useful or have some specific linkage to my place in this
> history.

But this is a collectors list 8-) We all collect from that which we know.

[snip]
> Another of the battles than and now are the OS wars and the church of the
> highest CPU. There is history in that. Todays machine are built on that.

But is that a *good Thing*? It seems with Wintel anyway - you gain in
speed with a horrendous memory loss. As someone stated - Loading WordStar
under CP/M is blazingly fast - compared to Word in Office under Win95 8-)

> Now from me, a woman that uses a Northstar* I souped up in in the very
> early 80s to this day, along with an ampro LB, SB180, kaypro and a PX-8
> to do real work. I have memory of porting CP/M-1.4 and 2.2 for my
> hardware. I also keep PDP-11s why? A personal thing about classicaly
> good archecture that still runs rings around dos boxen. I muck with
> PDP-8s too as there is a machine that is the minimalist design that
> proves it could be done in less, but makes you work hard to program it
> efficiently.

Well, that's true. I always wondered why DEC couldn't sell PDP-11's - but
then with that lousy chip set and poor software 8-) I still get pissed
thinking about how DEC Marketing has messed up every attempt to get into
the *home* market!

> History, I've met Gary, and George and the boys at Intersystems and a few
> others to boot. I wrote warm letters of annoyance to Gates, Allen and a
> few others too before they were to big to not want my money. I remember
> the guys that made claims and then ran with the cash never delivering.
> I watched MITS rise with a calculator

You mean the the 7440 I have on the desk next to me?

> and then get swallowed by Pertec
> when they out ran their cash, it was the story of the time.
                                                            ^ forgot an 's'

> I jumped on
> the UCSD Pascal P-system becuase it wasn't Basic in '79. I was using
> CP/M as it was a real OS for the systems as everything else was not yet.
> I started an 8086 design in 1979 that would in 81 eclipse the performance
> of the PC and later the XT! Amazing times, all history and mostly
> forgotten.

Not if you tell people about it!

> Like I said while on the boardwalk of atlantic sity in '76
> "crazy, who'd have thought I'd be pushing a asr33 down the boardwalk?".
> That was right after hearing Gary talk about v1.3 and the introduction to
> 1.4.... and think it was only 21 years ago. Something isn't it.

You must have been - what - 8 years old 8-) Great story! I think we all
have one of those - where everybody kinda stares at you - wondering -
What the Hell is THAT? What are you doing with that - THING?

BC
Received on Thu Jul 10 1997 - 23:40:05 BST