RANT Re: PDP-8 on e-bay

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_freegate.com>
Date: Wed Jan 20 18:50:15 1999

At 06:38 PM 1/20/99 -0500, Doug wrote:
>Neither Suns nor Teraks are worth much because they never penetrated the
>personal space the way many micros did.

And the PDP-8 penetrated the personal space? How about the KL-10? The point
I'm trying to make is that while much collecting is driven by nostalgia for
the computers we could have owned when we were younger, many of us forgo
trying to own the computer we learned to program on if it was a mainframe.
However the people who came after me had Sun workstations at college (at
least at my alma mater USC where the Sun's were replacing the KL as I was
leaving). Anyway, those people will be reaching their earning/disposable
income zeniths in about 5 years. That will spike the value of older Sun
machines.

> However, since Chuck said that
>Apollo produced the first workstations and Sun produced the second batch,
>I'm really curious to find where he positions the Terak, PERQ, Star, Alto,
>etc.

I'm not familar with the Terak and PERQ but I am intimately familiar with
the Star and the Alto. My wife was the Network Services Architect for
Xeroxes Office Systems Business Unit during the Star's heyday. The fact was
that the Star was sold as a dedicated word processor. A visual typewriter
if you will on the same price sheet as the memory writers I believe. Now
tahoe (later named the Xerox Development Environment (XDE)) ran on
Dandelions (aka the 8010 series) but it wasn't sold to third parties. Later
during the Daybreak years Mesa (waayy cool language BTW) was ported to Suns
and Intel architectures. I don't believe the Alto ever escaped PARC as more
than a research tool for some folks.

The "PERQ page" asserts the claim to first graphics workstation, I'm sure
Tony has some feelings about this. In the US at least Apollo was always
claiming to have "invented" the graphics workstation (defined as a general
purpose computer whose "console" consisted of a bitmapped display.) At
about the same time CMU defined something called a "3M" machine which was 1
million pixels, 1 million instructions/sec, and 1 million words (bytes) of
memory.

--Chuck
Received on Wed Jan 20 1999 - 18:50:15 GMT