I stumbled upon a link some time ago belonging to a
very bitter former owner of Sphere. The gist of his
article was that Byte Magazine destroyed Sphere with a
very bad review, and, that most computers of that era
took some hacking to work anyway (example: the "clock"
- and I use the term clock charitably - of the
original Altair 8800).
--- William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org> wrote:
> > Ah yeah. Good pick. That is definitely a rare
> beast. I've only ever
> > known one person who had one (I forgot his name,
> he used to be on the list
> > a few years ago). He sold it off to someone else
> and then got out of
> > collecting computers.
>
> Was that me? I have/had three, but they are promised
> to go out West. One of
> those deals that seems to be taking a very long
> time, mostly due to me
> trying to unearth it all and boxing the stuff up.
>
> Anyway, Sphere aparently was one of the early bad
> guys. The computers they
> sold (many as kits, I think) basically did not work.
> Unlike Altair, Sphere
> was trying to break into the business sector, so
> there really was not much
> of an excuse for the crapiness. They all needed a
> huge number of hacks to
> get them to function (my favorite is a a few-mH coil
> made of telephone
> wire kludged onto one of the oscillators, in order
> to keep the thing
> going. Basically, wrap some wire around a pencil,
> and tack solder it into
> place, and adjust accordingly).
>
> William Donzelli
> aw288_at_osfn.org
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Received on Sun Dec 16 2001 - 20:22:38 GMT