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"

Re:Processor Tech Sol

[sakusha]

Oh yeah, I still have my Sol-20, it's sitting about 4 feet from me right now. I built it from a kit in 1975, it took me months to get it running. I learned programming and assembler in college on this machine, and did some of my first professional programming jobs with it's assistance. I recently fired it up and it still works but the keyboard contacts have rotted away so no kbd input. I contacted a guy who sells keyboard refurbishment kits for the Sol, I've got to order one and get this darn keyboard working again and then it will be 100% operational. I've been reading some experiments done by old vintage PC users that stored programs on audio tape. One of them recorded the data tapes to CD and burned audio CDRs of the programs. Now you can just hit play on a CD and load the programs like you used to load them from tape. Very convenient. I've got to get the old SOL running and get my old tape library verified and archived on CDs.

Re:Anybody remember OSI? How about the Cosmac?

[spamtrap]

From Memory..

71 Disable
30 90 BRANCH PC+90
F8 08 Load Immediate 08 Put Low R3
A3 Set P = Reg 3 (I think)

Never heard of it ;-)

I wire wrapped my first 1802 from the Popular Electronic's article in (1976-7??). Debugged it by replacing the xtal with a switch and stepped it one machine state at a time..

I bought an OSI "Super Board" (no case of course) for $279.00 from a local vendor and made a channel 3 modulator from a 7504 a coil and a variable cap.. Screwed up every tv the entire apt. complex..

I wanted a comadore PET at the time but the darn price was too high.

I did port microchess from the KIM-2 listings and used the OSI character set to create a "visual" chess (that was fun)

My first real computer job was doing 8008 assembler using a asr 33 teletype to papertape and burning the code into 1702 EEPROM's (256 bytes ea.) but was able to leverage my 1802 knowledge to change jobs and work on an real "blue and white" COSMAC. I still have the COSMAC with dual 8" drives in the attic somewhere..

Some kids have no idea about the joy of figuring out the difference between indexed-indirect and indirect-indexed on a 6502.

chuck

can I help?

[Johnny5000]

I have an apple IIc in my mom's basement. It still works, too.

Last time I was there I played space quarks and wilderness.

-J5K

Processor Tech Sol

[glitch!]

The SOL was quite a computer :-) I first learned 8080 assembly language on one.

Correction, machine language... I didn't have an assembler at the time, so I photocopied the 8080 instruction set page (note singlular) and went from there. One side of the page had the opcodes and the hex values, the other had the inverse so you could look up an opcode by hex value.

In the time when everyone was selling their $100 to $500 BASIC, Processor Tech gave away their "5k basic" in source code form. Imagine that :-) I still have my paper copy somewhere... Years later, I translated it into 8086 code, in case anyone is interested :-)

Yep, that was a beauty and a beast. The video card had 1k of RAM, mapped as 64x16. What's interesting about the video is that you could reprogram the character bitmaps so that you could get custom "graphics" on that screen, and a clever programmer could do FAST graphics by changing some critical character definitions at the right time.

Don't forget the Northstar floppy disk system. The disks were hard-sectored, so you couldn't just get the ones from Radio Shack to work. I had to drive to the next town to buy one - and they were $5 each at the time...

(Four Yorkshiremen can start any time now :-)

Nobody here knew of the show! I swear!

[Animixer]

I work in Marlborough, Mass at a large helio-centric computer company, and nobody heard any mention of this vintage computer show. Given that 50% of tech employees in Mass are ex-DECies, and at least 25% of them have a VAX or PDP in their basement, I'm surprised there wasn't as many exhibitors or attendees. If only it had been advertised....something of this nature usually spreads pretty quickly by word of mouth, but I still didn't hear anything. Very odd.

If I had known about the show, I would have dragged along some of my old equipment, and some other stuff that people have around work. I've got a fully functional Atari ST, with mouse, external scsi drive, monitor, and all kinds of MIDI software...hook it up to my synths and I could have put on quite a show! Maybe I would have found someone there with a copy of Epoch UNIX too....a co-worker of mine has an old Epoch server board, that just needs a copy of the OS to run. Anyone here know where I can find a copy of Epoch UNIX? :-) Hmm...maybe I could have found someone at the show that has a use for a case of 8" floppies...I've got to get rid of these darn things. Heh.