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Vintage Computer Festival Revisits The PC Past

Posted by timothy on Sat Oct 11, 2003 01:08 PM
from the first-under-new-management dept.
Announcements Hardware Technology
OaklyBonn writes "The Vintage Computer Festival West is happening today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I've been to several of these, and they're always a blast. It is always amazing to see the things that our current sotware practices treat as not currently possible on todays machines (like, why is my 1ghz XP box sooo slooow?) Did the Beagle Brothers have a pact with Satan? Are we better off today than in the past?"
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  • If you want to buy my Apple //c (with matching monitor, mouse and modem) please reply and make an offer...
    • Ill trade you my Timex Sinclair 1000 with 16k RAM expansion pack (the one that crashes the computer if you bump it too hard.) The membrane keyboard wasnt working at first, but I managed to fix it by cutting the last 1/4 inch off the ribbon cables and reconnecting them to the motherboard. It works great now. Ill even throw in my radio shack RCA to F connector adapter that I bought so I could hook it up to my TV.

  • You know why they banned linux users? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Because they walked around asking "But, can it run linux?"

  • Why is my 1Ghz box so slow? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 16977 (525687) on Saturday October 11 2003, @01:24PM (#7190637)
    Probably everybody and his brother will mention this, but software bloat is a big reason for slow "Fast" machines. Even something like a word processor can be bloated if you put in all kinds of dynamic spellchecking, OLE, libraries to support 100 different kinds of documents, and so on. When I get a new, fast, box, I use the opportunity to run all kinds of new, fast software, which makes the machine seem slower by comparison. Not that I'm going to abandon spiffy new software, but I realize that there is going to be a speed tradeoff.
    • This might not persist, however. I can now officially buy more disk storage than I can use, something that was impossible in the past. I suspect that, at some point, I'm going to be officially able to buy more computing speed than I can use too. That's my hope anyway.

      • I can now officially buy more disk storage than I can use

        Then let me recommend you install MythTV [mythtv.org]. I bought an 80Gb drive from Best Buy last week (60 dollars after rebate - wow!), and it's already full.

        • I think it would depend on whether I continue to run the same apps as in the past. If I were still running Wordstar on today's hardware, it would be going lickety-split. Word does more than I want now, so I see no compelling reason to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft bloatware in the future. Therefore, I have to think that there's at least the possibility that I'll eventually find the speed adequate. That excludes gaming, though. I can see that chewing up whatever whizzbang improvements come along
          • Actually, if you install Wordstar 3.3 for MS-DOS on current hardware, or even, say, a 386-20 MHz machine, it's unusable.

            The reason it's unusable? Because there isn't keyboard slowdown in the code. You cursor up, and you're at the top of your 80 page document before you can blink. You cursor down, and you're down at the bottom.

            WordStar 3.3 is just too damned fast to run on current hardware. heh.
    • And if your box ever gets too fast you can always enable all the animations to make it appear slow.

      Everything will run "slow" if you just put enough delays in it.

      Maybe that's why Microsoft hasn't wanted anyone to see their code. Every other line is:

      for i = 1 to Godzillion; next i;

      KFG
      • I know a developer who did the same sort of thing in an initialization routine for a program he was writing for a customer. The first draft of the software that he showed them took around a minute to initialize all of the data tables /etc.

        When he was done writing the application, he removed the delay loop from the code and the system now initialized within 15-20 seconds.

        His reasoning was that it gave the customer something concrete to complain about during development... hopefully reducing the number o
    • I have a new 2500+ here, and it's just too fast for me. I *never* use 100% CPU (except in UT and when doing computations). With my gig of RAM, it's kind of a waste of my computer to use xfce4 and emacs as opposed to KDE and OpenOffice. I'm so used to my old 233MHz box that I don't need bloated software anymore. Oh well :)
    • Most feature bloat doesn't slow a program down. It adds unnecessary functions often. But those are typically accessed only rarely. Background spellchecking certainly will slow things down. But damn if I'd want to be without it. That's one of the nice things of Safari as a web browser -- integrated background spellchecking for editing windows. I can definitely tell the difference between posts here I write at work on Windows and those I write at home on my Mac.

      Some programs are slower not because the

      • My XT has a 30 meg hard drive. I dont even know if the MFM interface card in it will work with a 200 meg drive.
        • > My XT has a 30 meg hard drive. I dont even know if
          > the MFM interface card in it will work with a 200
          > meg drive.

          Quick answer is: No. It may simply be a DOS limitation (FAT 12) and not a hardware limitation, but my XT had a whopping 40 meg (!!!) drive in it. At the time, it was so huge that it had to be split into 2 partitions (a rather unheard of idea at the time). One partition was 30 megs and one was 10. Of course, since the primary applications of the computer were running BASIC, PrintShop,
  • My first computer was an Atari 400. Man was that a crappy computer but at the time it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I could play Zaxxon after loading it up from my cassette player. It would only take about 12 minutes to load it up and then I would play about 15 minutes and be bored to death with it. But still it was cool because I load up computer games with the cassette player AND play my music (though not at the same time...too bad).

    The other thing about that computer was the hard keyboard. Tryi

    • Man, that brings back memories... about 1/3rd of the guys in my class back then (early eighties) had micros - and just one had an Atari 400 [vintage-computer.com]. Boy, we (ie; the other protogeeks) used to give him hell... we all had a 'real computer', the allmighty Commodore 64 [vintage-computer.com]. Back then I used to rule them all, beeing the only one with a 1541 floppy (single side, single density 51/4" disks, connected to the motherboard via a serial cable), meaning I just had to wait five to ten minutes to load the games...

      Good times, good

  • I love the way the Computer History Museum occupies an overdesigned former SGI building. It's one of the many extravagant buildings SGI built then sold in the 90s before everyone noticed SGI was totally irrelevant.

    Computer History indeed.

    • I think it actually occupies my closet - By looking in there and seeing all the various computers I've had since the early 80's, it already seems like I've got just about everything.

      -- Dr. Eldarion --
    • 4 of SGI's most funky buildings are now being used by Google. Pretty fitting color- and design-wise.

      These days SGI lives in its newest buildings (better design overall, but not as "cool looking") as well as some of its older but specialized buildings (RF testing chambers, etc).
      • Today I was at the Reseda Computer Show and someone was selling old SGI boxen. These were the Intel boxes SGI was selling with Windows NT a few years ago. They're not so great looking...black and not entirely unlike a typical black tower case. I didn't even check on what the used computer dealer was selling them for, but I suspect he got them at fire sale prices. RIP SGI.

  • My first computer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones (18351) on Saturday October 11 2003, @01:36PM (#7190697) Homepage Journal
    My first computer was purchased after mowing lawns for two summers and was an Apple ][+ with 48k and a 16k language card with a modem and dot matrix printer. It also came with that phosphor green screen. That system in many ways was and still is pretty effective. It was on instantly, had built in BASIC, had color support, introduced me to word processing, programming and spreadsheets (with Visicalc), and maintained a productive lifespan for me from 12 years old until my second undergrad year at college.

    Thinking back to the pre-internet computer days, it is interesting to see how many of us got information back and forth and this was just as much a revelation to me as the first modem in my Apple ][+ was. My first online experience was with that same Apple ][+ hacking into phone companies after the ma-bell split up to get long distance codes so I could communicate via term with people all over the world. That was pretty heady stuff for a 12 year old back in 1982. I realize now that was stealing, and I make no excuses, but times *were* different back then and hacking was not malicious (at least not from me). There were lots of BBS's around that you could also go to like the Crystal Caverns, and the Pirates Cove where everybody was talking about stuff like the Beagle Bros. I think that is when I permanently set my circadian rhythm to that of nocturnal preference by dialing in to these services late at night when my parents were either at the lab or going back to school.

    My first exposure to what we now call the web was with one of the coolest looking computers ever made, the NeXT cube. I remember thinking that just as when I saw my first GUI on an Apple Lisa, that the "web" was going to change life forever. This was the way that information would be handled, thus making it easy for people to find and access data and learn. Unbelievable, but I would now be completely lost without the Internet. I perform journal research over the web whereas previously one had to go to libraries and look through card catalogues. Remember those? One can now cover so much more information using proper tools on the web in an afternoon that you could previously in an entire week at the library.

    So, did we have any idea of the Internet back then? Apple apparently had some idea as they were the first company to include built in networking in their computers, but man. What a trip it has been. I can't wait for the next twenty years when I think back and say, Jeez, that dual 2Ghz G5 was sooooo slow. I could'nt even begin to model whole retinal circuits with that thing or even predict global weather patterns in less than two hours.

    • I perform journal research over the web whereas previously one had to go to libraries and look through card catalogues. Remember those? One can now cover so much more information using proper tools on the web in an afternoon that you could previously in an entire week at the library.

      Except of course for the vast amount of material that *isn't* on the internet. This [slashdot.org] recent discussion on Slashdot adresses some of these issues.

    • My first computer was purchased after mowing lawns for two summers and was an Apple ][+ with 48k and a 16k language card with a modem and dot matrix printer. It also came with that phosphor green screen.

      You got the cash to buy all that swag from mowing lawns!?! In 1982 that had to have cost a couple grand. Man, either your neighbors paid far too much money for your services or you mowed a helluvalotta lawns. Were you wired on amphetemines the whole summer, covering a three state area and firing up th

      • You got the cash to buy all that swag from mowing lawns!?!

        Yep, I pushed that damn mower into some of the swankier parts of the neighborhood and charged $20 per lawn with edging per week or $60 month. I could get about 5 lawns done/day making for $100 every Saturday and I still had time for soccer in the evenings. In 1982, that was not too shabby.

        In 1982 that had to have cost a couple grand.

        $2782 with the computer, screen, printer and disc drive!

        All I needed were 28 Saturdays spread over two years

  • Comparing Windows to a Lisp Machine? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jstarr (164989) * on Saturday October 11 2003, @01:38PM (#7190709)
    It seems... odd... to compare Windows to a Symbolics Lisp machine. Certainly, one can compare the two in terms of ease of programming, power of expression, elegance of execution, and on and on. (_The Unix Hater's Handbook_ repeatedly compared Unix boxen to Lisp machines.)

    However, to compare the two on security is non-sensical. The designers of the Lisp Machine were anti-security. Anyone could create an account for themselves by logging on as a generic user and then adding themselves to the user list. While doing so, they could also delete other users, edit any file, and moreso, edit the operating system. The OS was written in Lisp and users were encouraged to modify the OS to their needs. Edits were immediately applied; anything could alter anything.

    While Lisp machines were resistant to buffer overflows, a cracker had no need for such holes. Want to read the files? Go ahead -- there was no file security mechanism. Want to launch a DDOS? Edit the network system (in real-time) to send packets continuously.

    However poor Windows security may be, it is present. Lisp machines were all about access and access is what they gave.

    What Lisp machines reveal is a certain attitude toward empowerment that has disappeared as the playing field has become more hostile.
    • Whereas on a Windows 9x machine we press Escape for similar privileges...

      You should distinguish between Lisp and Symbolics machines. There are plenty of reasons for believing that a Lisp-like language is a better foundation for information security than the C-like ones - the aspect of integrity that you mention is just one.

      Security is about enforcing a complex set of policies, many of which can only be evaluated at run-time. It is at least questionable whether we are really better off building such models

  • HELL YES (Score:3, Interesting)

    by John Jorsett (171560) on Saturday October 11 2003, @01:44PM (#7190731)
    Are we better off today than in the past?

    YOU BET! I've lived thru the evolution of computing from the time computers were these giant things tended by acolytes in air-conditioned rooms. There's nothing I'd go back for. I'm particularly looking forward to playing the new Half Life game. Think I'd want to go back for, say, Castle Wolfenstein? Or maybe Space War played at great expense on an oscilloscope attached to a PDP 11? Noooo.

      • HA. I See somebody just got done reading "Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution". .....go back to your x-box.

        Console gaming sucks. Give me a PC any day of the week.

      • Then I guess you're going to hate thin clients [twindata.com] and blade servers [bioteam.net] then.

        No. What do I care where the computing is happening as long as I can control it? Back in the Days Of The Mainframe, you had to keypunch your programs (or, in the case of one place I worked, HANDWRITE your program and have a unionized keypunchist punch the damned thing for you), then hand your card deck to the dweeb at the counter, then wait an hour or two to get your printout back. Lather, rinse, repeat. It w

  • But they should be *better* (Score:4, Interesting)

    by crmartin (98227) on Saturday October 11 2003, @02:17PM (#7190856)
    I've wondered the same thing. Oh, it's nice having 24-bit color, and believe me we do things graphically in real time now that required a Cray-1 and a Dicomed film recorder (never mind; just read as "millions of dollars") to do as an overnight batch job when I got into this graphic madness.

    But, as an experiment, I did up a wimpy little laptop with TECO, a couple of compilers, and a simple linux; it flat screams and it'd cost, oh, $100. EMACS runs well on it too -- and it should: the laptop has more power than the PDP 11/70 that was shared by 40 grad students when I was in grad school in 1983. What it can't do is massive bitblt operations to let me use some double-plus-ugly ransom-note font for my email.

  • Beagle Bros (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Tax Boy (75507)
    Beagle Bros made possibly some of the best software ever produced for the Apple II. Some of their stuff was truly stellar: Pronto Dos, Beagle Basic, and their Appleworks extensions made Apples do things that seemed impossible. Plus, the packaging included the finest goodies and swag (with the exception of Infocom) in computer history. I still have my "apple peek and poke chart" and some Beagle Bros stickers. The "newsletters" included really cool apple hacks that would give those Obscurcated C and Perl
    • I still have my "apple peek and poke chart" Mine fell apart and was taped back together multiple times. Possibly the single most useful piece of paper I've ever owned. I've have books that have less useful information in them than that one poster...
  • The Bonehead Computer Museum [wetmachine.com] is Still looking for entries! Sent photos and stories of your own most boneheaded digital and analog designs for exhibition. The Bonehead Computer museum was featured prominently in John Sundman's award winning Acts of the Apostles [wetmachine.com]
  • We still have an 8086 down in the basement, 4Mhz and 12 on turbo if I remember. whopping 640k of ram and EGA card. It still runs...I think.

    I remember MS Works version 1.0 when everything was keyboard commands, no mouse support. THen we got version 2 with spell check and mouse "point and click" and that is how I wrote papers 1st - 7th grade.

    I mean MS Works 2 today would do just about everything I need in a word processor. As memory becomes cheaper every day, there is no longer any need for programmer

  • Althigh modern machines are several orders of magnitude more powerful, the old 8- and 16-bit machines were ideal for kids to learn on, being so simple.

    I owe much of what I have today to having been able to learn on 8-bit machines with a few 10's of K or RAM, built-in BASIC and cassette recorders for loading and saving programs.

    The single memory space and easy access to machine code (just dump some bytes into ram and execute) made things so simple. You could turn on your machine, type in a 10-line hex load

  • Let's see, in 1983 I had to wait several minutes for my programs/games/OS to load into my Sinclair ZX-80 (or my Ohio Scientific C2-4P) from cassette tape.

    Now in 2003 I wait hours for the latest version of OpenOffice to download (OK, I've still got a dial-up connection, can't afford $50/mo for cable|DSL).

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.
  • make me an offer. i got it for 400 bucks four years ago. it starts, runs and has a fresh copy of the openstep install. comes with cds and floppys. even have some paper doc too. have a keyboard, and mouse w/ the greyscale studio monitor. long cabling included. a steal

    i love slashbay or is it Edot ??? ? ? ? ?

  • I didn't have a lot of time to stay and see the museum - will go back another day I guess. Here are some photos [seanadams.com] I took at the afternoon exhibit.
  • I love my Commodore, but good l0rd was that thing slow. I just benched it with a sin(sqr()) function plotter, and it took 7 hours. Tabulating the sin(sqr()) function got that down to 74 minutes, but it's still sad.

    You can see the picture and slow source code here: please slashdot me [insightbb.com]

    I'll update with the fast code shortly.
  • I saw this post in the morning and knowing I'd be down that way, I went!

    I expected it to be interesting. It was much more interesting than I thought. There were some items there that were amazing historical objects.

    Lisas, PDP-11s, a restored PDP-5, the orinal Xerox machines with the first GUI, and a great collection of every PDA going back into history.

    That was just the Vintage Computer Festival. Then, there was the museum!

    The Computer History Museum is just incredible. It HAS to be seen. It's really gr
  • it's this:

    When I see the absolutely AMAZING things that people have done with older technology (TCP/IP stack on a C=64?!?!), the industry's collusion with Planned Obsolesence becomes mightily apparent.

    We were all told our machines were old news and we had to get the latest and greatest. Now we're saddled with more complexity and more problems than ever before. Meanwhile, people are happily taking 486s and creating modern desktops (Linux) out of them.

    I can't completely blame the industry. We all bought th
  • I read somewhere that one of the arguments (back in the 80's) against Lisp machines was their slowness (a similar problem with smalltalk machines IIRC). IIRC the whole LISP machine was implemented in hardware and I think that today a Lisp machine could probabaly be an amazing tool given that even Java, the mother of all slow languages runs ok on any PIII from about 600MHz upwards. With a set of hardware encoded security permission sets, it would be fantastic to use, wouldn't it?
  • " Are we better off today than in the past?"

    I am. When I started with PCs back in the 286 days, I had to play with jumpers, it was hard to get support when I had problems, I had to have just the right hardware that most games could play, and I could do only one thing at a time. Today, jumpers are pretty much gone except for 1-time adjustments. Technical Support is as close as Google Groups. Hardware compatibility with games is much broader than it was in the olden days.

    On top of all that, problems wi
    • Two tips.

      Go download and run Ad aware

      Then, after you've run that (check for updates first), click start->run->msconfig (works in all version of windows except NT/2000). Go to the startup tab and uncheck shit.

      My sister's 1.2 Ghz Athlon box was slow as hell and kept crashing under Win98 until I did both of these. Now it boots in under 30 seconds. Go try it!
    • > While I don't long for the past, I sometimes
      > wonder if golden oldies like AmigaDOS or HP
      > openview are any less productive or reliable than
      > what we have now.

      Hit the nail on the head. The primary difference between what we had then and what we have now is that modern software makes use of the more advanced hardware. i.e. AmigaDOS had a small set of black and white icons for its GUI. This greatly helped in keeping the memory requirements down. Now we have machines that can display 16 million

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