Vintage Computer Festival Shows Off Ancient PCs

Markgor writes "Just finished looking through some pictures from the recent Vintage Computer Festival in Marlboro, Massachussetts, the first time that it's been held on the East coast. The best pic has to be the one of the Sol-20. Here in Ottawa, we have a bunch of vintage computers sitting in one of our museums, including an Altair, but I haven't seen an intact Sol-20 in a long long time"

Vintage computers in Austin

[b1t r0t]

Anyone in or near Austin who wants to see some vintage computers should check out the Goodwill Computer Store on US 183 at Ohlen. Lots of old micros there in the back room museum, plus a disk array frame (I think that's what it is) out of a Cray.

Why TI BASIC was so friggin slow

[b1t r0t]

TI pulled out of the computer business about six months after we got it, though, so it never got beyond 16K and the hideously slow (double-interpreted?) built-in BASIC.

The reason it was so slow was that the 16K it used was the video chip RAM. This is esentially the same chip used in the ColecoVision (except Coleco for some bizarre reason used the RGB version and an RGB video to RF modulator!) In order to use this RAM, you have to tell the video chip the address, then you can read sequential data bytes from it. This is an I/O operation, rather than a normal memory operation. Everything must have been stored out there, including the program and variables.

I learned how slow it was one day when I saw one powered up in a store. I hit the RETURN key and the thing took a whole second of thinking before it did the nothing that I asked it to! That's right, it took a whole second just to do nothing!

When you had a PEB or sidecar RAM, that was in the 64K address space of the CPU, and I've heard that BASIC would know to use that instead. Of course TI discouraged any non-PEB expansion, so sidecar options were only used by the tech savvy. (And not many tech savvy folk went with the TI in the first place.)

Maybe someone has a TI up on eBay or whatever for not much...it'd be nice to have one again, just for the hell of it.

The main units (and about two dozen different cartridges) were very common back in the mid 90's when I was collecting classic video game stuff. Except for the old non-A version with the chiclet keyboard, that is. It's the goodies that will set you back.

This would have been better attended...

[Agent Green]

...if it were better publicized.

Marlboro is in a good location, particularly since eastern Massachusetts is largely considered to be the Silicon Valley of the east coast. Being a resident of MA and working in the industry, I would have expected someone at the company I work at to have heard about it and reported it.

That particular hotel is a nice little joint too...and it's a stone's throw off I-495. ;)

It almost makes me want to recover the Apple //e from my parents' house and waste my days playing AutoDuel again...or loading AppleWorks into the 1mb RamWorks III board (with the CGA extension card). The nostalgia almost gets me teary-eyed!

SOL-20??

[subsolar2]

That's gotta be one of my favorite vintage computers of all times! That was the first computer I programed in basic at highschool back about '78 with a wopping 32KB of ram!

It was a great deal of fun sitting down with the manual and a copy of creative computing typing in the programs and learning at the same time. My favorite games that came with it were Trek-80 and target (a shooting gallery type game).

For some links to PT stuff try out the following:
http://www.geocities.com/~compcloset/ProcessorTech Sol20.htm [geocities.com]
http://www.corestack.com/machines/sol.html [corestack.com]
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =344 [old-computers.com]
and for an SOL-20 emulator: http://thebattles.net/sol20/sol.html [thebattles.net]

I also learned to program in 8080 assember, and played with focal and anything else I could find included with it.

The one we had had a dual drive Helios II 8" floppy drive.
These things were the oddest drives I've seen. They had motorized eject and loading ... you slide the disk most the way in and it would "suck it in", and you would push a button and it would whirr and eject the disk. A bad think to do with these was to was to grab the disk as it was still being ejected ... would as often as not cause the drive to jamb.
The other odd thing about the drives is that both drives had their heads mounted to a single voice-coil positioner ... the drives sounded like somebody bouncing on an old bed when they were busy seeking.

Enough reminicing from an old fart computer geek!

- subsolar

I used to work in Ottawa...

[Kinetix303]

I used to work in Ottawa at the museum of science and tech, during the time where they were shifting their computer structure around. We used to have a hall of computers, and there were displays and booths that taught kids about electronics and circuitry through hands on information... kids could manipulate magnetic core memory, and see the information being changed in real time, and have it read back off the core... Ping pong balls and pinball plungers were arranged in such a way that gates were represented in a way which they could wrap their heads around... Oh, and best of all, EVERY computer on display was functional, including the Crown 'micros' from the 60s... every kid got their name or a phrase given to them on a small piece of punch tape printed by devices older than their parents... but it was also kept current, all the way up to the PCs and Macs of the day (this was around 1995). Then the museum got a huge cash infusion from Microsoft and Intel, and suddenly all of the vintage historical machines either got put into storage (some were lucky enough to make it onto display, such as the right arithmetic wing of an old USAF computer) but not in a functional state... hands on became kids sitting in front of twenty pcs playing the latest microsoft educational software and browsing a very limited intranet... as well as easy access to hotmail. I quit my job at the museum after this, and never looked back. I'm throughly disappointed in the computing section that exists at the NMSTC now... it's still in the same state it was in 1995.

Re:This would have been better attended...

[Tackhead]

Shameless plug for Vintage Computer Festival 5.0 [vintage.org] in San Jose, Sept 15-16th. (And the CA Extreme [caextreme.org] classic arcade machine show, held in the same building.)

The MA show was the first "East Coast" (VCF East 1.0 [vintage.org]) version of VCF, and if attendance at the San Jose VCF 3.0 and 4.0 (and projected 5.0) is any indication, VCF East has a bright future ahead of it. Just give it a year or two.