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Hardware

IMSAI Series Two 269

Posted by Hemos from the get-your-legacy-on dept.
Dino writes "You can actually pre-order a new IMSAI here. These folks bought the rights to produce the IMSAI in the late seventies, and provided the unit used in Wargames. It has a genuine S100 bus, but also has modern features as well, the most interesting being a driver that will allow you to access an ATX motherboard via the parallel port as a disk drive."
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IMSAI Series Two

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  • I don't really get this, but I suppose some people might be into it.

    Let me know when they port Linux to it.

    • Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)

      by TheKubrix ( 585297 )
      If you had read the specs [imsai.net] you would know it does support Linux.... The PC software support includes a small software "server" that uses the native DOS/Windows/Linux file system to store files.

      • Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)

        by elsegundo ( 316028 )
        No, it doesn't support linix as an OS, but uses a parallel port to use an ATX motherboard using Linux as a disk drive.

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bluethundr ( 562578 ) on Thursday June 13, 2002 @06:44PM (#3697574) Homepage Journal
      Some people are into computers because they have a pure thirst for knowledge. These people learn things that are useful, and things that are useless...its all part of the same continuum for these people. To those that do, computers are toys. They may be apt to learn php or AmigaDOS. This doesn't mean they often will forego something useLESS at the expense of learning something useFULL. But time permitting, its fun to tinker... It used to be that the computer field was filled with enthusiasts who knew their shit. But ever since the unwashed masses learned there was a paycheck attached to this knowlege, the industry was inundated with carpetbaggers who don't know what the fuck they are doing. But these carpetbaggers get jobs anyway, because they have MCSEs or A(asshole)+ certs... So are you just collecting a paycheck, bub? I would assume not, or I doubt you would be on this site. Which is why I am a little puzzled, I suppose...
      • This gadget looks pretty cool for nostalgic devices but I fail to see how it justifies a $995 price tag. Is there something particuarly "special" about this machine that would entice me to shell out the $$?

      • Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)

        by dangermouse ( 2242 )
        Hi. I'm into computers because I have a "pure thirst for knowledge". I try new things for the sheer hell of it. I'm not in it for the money.

        I'm also not in the least bit interested in this IMSAI toy, in part because it's useless. Stick me in the "whatever floats your boat" camp along with the guy you're responding to.

        What you don't seem to understand is that the phrase "unwashed masses" is generally used sarcastically, to mock people who have an elitist attitude like yours. "Carpetbagger" is used similarly nowadays, to mock the unreasonably resentful. You can't imagine how amusing it is to see you use both terms without a trace of sarcasm.

        • Completely useless. Of course it would be, to someone like yourself. You are indeed what the parent poster was describing.

          Things I can think of to do with one of these:

          #1 Learn a little about the history of computing. People like yourself never seem to realize, that computers almost resemble biology, with all the different species and relationships. It's quite easy to have an interest in what part these machines played...

          #2 Teach. Grade schoolers, since obivously any older than that, and they'll be too stupid to appreciate it. Shame we couldn't have got to you in early childhood, you might have turned out better than this...

          #3 Learn assembly language on a CPU that is a bit simpler than your modern superpipelined "no one can keep track of it" predictive scheduling and execution chip. Of course, someone like yourself would have no interest in that either. Also would apply to teaching the same.

          #4 Learn electronics and circuit design. Teach it. Sure, I want to do my own custom PCI cards, but this would be a great way to start learning. Though IEEE 696 did have some funky power requirements... may also be a +5/+12v version of the bus. Dunno.

          #5 Provide a break from having to use the generic and boring winbox that everyone is forced to use all the time. (Note: For others. For myself I have a nice collection to play with.)

          #6 Annoy stupid fucks like yourself, who will never get it. Yes, I'll openly admit it. It's not by accident we antagonize morons like yourself, we actually like it. It's the one tolerable thing about your entire existence. I mean, you've all but admitted that you and those like you commandeered our hobby and occupation because of decent paychecks, and then have the audacity to insult what little is left of it. If we can't torture you, then the world is even less bareable.

          And this is just what I could come up with, off the top of my head. Calling this machine useless is not just inaccurate, but a lie. Then again, claiming you have a pure thirst for knowledge is even more blatant, I suppose. I mean, most if not all knowledge seems useless at first, it's only later you discover how it can help you. Who knows what insight you're losing, that you might have if you used an IMSAI for a few weeks or months.
          • Whee! Here we go...

            #1 Learn a little about the history of computing. People like yourself never seem to realize, that computers almost resemble biology, with all the different species and relationships. It's quite easy to have an interest in what part these machines played...

            On the contrary, it's pretty fucking obvious to anyone with any interest in computing that there's an almost biological heredity tree to the machines and the organizations built around them. I don't see how shelling out $1000 for an example of an outdated machine helps you to understand that. I managed to grasp the idea of man's evolution without buying a fully-functional Neanderthal skeleton. Didn't you?

            #2 Teach. Grade schoolers, since obivously any older than that, and they'll be too stupid to appreciate it. Shame we couldn't have got to you in early childhood, you might have turned out better than this...

            Nice barb, but let's pretend you're not just being an asshole and look at your point: Sure, it's swell as a teaching aid. I'll admit I hadn't considered that. I currently have no use for such a teaching aid, as I have no kids and my friends either have a decent grasp of basic computing or just aren't interested. Besides, if they were, they could buy their own damned $1000 learning aid.

            #3 Learn assembly language on a CPU that is a bit simpler than your modern superpipelined "no one can keep track of it" predictive scheduling and execution chip. Of course, someone like yourself would have no interest in that either. Also would apply to teaching the same.

            I actually did have some interest in learning assembly language for a simple CPU, just to get a feel for how the machine works at that level. Guess what? I did it in a fucking emulator, like everyone else born after 1970. Get the fuck over yourself.

            #4 Learn electronics and circuit design. Teach it. Sure, I want to do my own custom PCI cards, but this would be a great way to start learning. Though IEEE 696 did have some funky power requirements... may also be a +5/+12v version of the bus. Dunno.

            Sure, that could be cool. I'm not so much interested in building hardware, but knock yourself out.

            #5 Provide a break from having to use the generic and boring winbox that everyone is forced to use all the time. (Note: For others. For myself I have a nice collection to play with.)

            This is my point. Use it for what? The reason this machine was dead was that it wasn't capable of handling modern computing needs. It had its time, I'm sure it was swell, but we've moved on. If you just want it for your collection, that's cool, but don't pretend it's particularly useful.

            #6 Annoy stupid fucks like yourself, who will never get it. Yes, I'll openly admit it. It's not by accident we antagonize morons like yourself, we actually like it. It's the one tolerable thing about your entire existence. I mean, you've all but admitted that you and those like you commandeered our hobby and occupation because of decent paychecks, and then have the audacity to insult what little is left of it. If we can't torture you, then the world is even less bareable.

            That's a pretty sad state of affairs. I'm not annoyed by your toy computer. I'm not annoyed that you think it's the shit and want to show it off. What annoys me is the holier-than-thou attitude you've adopted for no reason other than your own amusement. You're a textbook asshole, irrespective of my opinion of your toys. If you think you're torturing me, I don't know what to tell you... you're a pathetic dick, but that's hardly nails on a chalkboard to me.

            There's a lot of knowledge out there, and I don't feel any need to pursue whatever knowledge this blinky box can give me. I've got other projects, and I'm on them and learning from them. If it offends you personally that I don't share the same interests that you do, that's a damn shame; but to think it reflects on me is the most twisted wishful thinking I've seen in some time.

            Like I said, whatever floats your boat. Your buddy was the one who lashed out without provocation, not me.

      • What a strange grouping of words. Lots of rage, lots of bigotry.

        I have a tremendous thirst and drive for knowledge. I'm all over cutting edge tech. I am learning something new all the time. New programs, new coding practices, new languages, new hardware, new OSes. All the time. Always have and always will.

        Yet this is just a waste of time. Time better spent on kepping up with what's current. Working on what's next. Producing something new.

        All this and yes, I earn a large salary doing it. Guess I don't fit into your little peg holes you've defined for everyone. I'd bet that though maybe some people do, most don't fit your narrow, bigoted, hateful view of the world. And that's a good thing!
  • I like the fact that they give you an emulator to play with until you can ever afford the real thing!

  • Linux port? (Score:2, Funny)

    by elsegundo ( 316028 )
    Where is the obligatory Linux port?
  • how long until an emulator is out for this thing?
  • But I'd probably buy one anyway, just for das blinkenlights. =]

  • but, why would I want to attach an ATX motherboard through the parallel port and use it as a disk drive?

    I mean, what kind of crazy disk would a motherboard be?

    • I guess I don't have any imagination either.

      Frankly the more I think about the statement "a driver that will allow you to access an ATX motherboard via the parallel port as a disk drive" the less sense it makes.

      How does a driver attach to a parallel port? How do you access a MB as a disk drive? Do the PCI ports get mapped to head/cyl/sector addresses? Can you access USB and serial ports this way too?

      I don't know, it all sounds crazy to me.

      -Peter

    • What they mean is that you run dos/windows/linux on the ATX motherboard, and you run a little custom server application that serves up a portion of your dos/windows/linux filesystem as a virtual "disk" to the IMSAI over the parallel port.
  • OK... Maybe I'm just not nerdy enough... but... what would you actually do with one of these? There's surely not all that much you can do with an old 8080 these days... especially not anything that would warrent spending almost $1K on it anyways.

    I fully appreciate the cool factor... being the machine used in Wargames doesn't get much better... (On a flight between the US and Australia recently they were playing the movie in flight... fine movie, damn fine movie) but I just can't see why anyone would actually pay for anything but the original as used in the movie...
  • It's like building a modernized Wright Brothers plane (or maybe DC-3) with a graphite composite airframe instead of one like the original. (Using a modern cpu would be like adding a jet engine).

    If you're trying for authenticity, stick with the original design. If you're trying for something that runs the old software, you're better off just running a Z80 emulator on your modern PC. Performance will be much higher than the original, etc. And if you're trying to make something that looks cool (front panel with switches and blinky lights), that's fine too, but why not put a modern computer inside instead of bothering with the Z80 innards?

    It all makes no sense to me.

  • controll my battlebot guard dog while chowning my neighbors' cat?

  • WarGames (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mongoks ( 540017 ) on Thursday June 13, 2002 @06:32PM (#3697501)
    I remember being really impressed when the dude broke out with the 8-inch floppies in WarGames. I even remember that they were Elephant brand on the sleeve. Most of the stuff he did on the computer was possible too. The war dialer, the awful speech synthesis (although for some reason it improved halfway through the movie as if the dude learned how to talk correctly), the acoustic modem, etc. Even the trick he used on the door to the infirmary seems like it would be possible but I'm not an EE so I wouldn't know for sure. Definately a great movie.
    • they were Elephant brand

      Ah yes..."Elephant Never Forgets"

    • Re:WarGames (Score:2, Interesting)

      by marmoset ( 3738 )
      As I distantly recall from an article I read around the time the movie was released, the filmmakers made a point to make sure that Matthew Broderick's rig was accurate inasmuch as being real technology available at that time, rather than the usual (for that time period) cardboard mockups that were used in most movies. They also wanted to give the impression that it was sort of secondhand or castoff gear that an avid geeky kid might piece together-- even at the time that film was made, 8-inch floppies and acoustic couplers were well on their way out.

    • Re:WarGames (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13, 2002 @08:35PM (#3698238)
      Most of the stuff he did on the computer was possible too. The war dialer...

      You know, there might be a reason why such programs are called "WAR" dialers.

      • Most of the stuff he did on the computer was possible too. The war dialer...

        You know, there might be a reason why such programs are called "WAR" dialers.

        that's too funny. if you weren't AC & I had mod points I'd bump you up fer shur.

    • Re:WarGames (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ShawnD ( 21638 )
      Most of the stuff he did on the computer was possible too. The war dialer, ...the acoustic modem, ...
      <NITPICK>

      How do you war dial on an acoustic modem? Even if it could generate DTMF tones to dial the phone it couldn't work the hook switch to dial the next number.

      </NITPICK>

  • Seems that you can mount an ATX motherboard in these things. Kinda neat, be the envy of other geeks at the next lan party.
  • In College we had a class that featured a topic just like this, its so intresting and Fun. I am glad they added a ATX option really makes it better! Man I sure do Love IMSAI, hopefully they will also add Usb support so I can use my wireless Nic.

  • Ah, nostalgia... (Score:4, Informative)

    by jejones ( 115979 ) on Thursday June 13, 2002 @06:40PM (#3697553) Journal
    I see that they're offering it for a kilobuck...remember when that was the price of a 64K Ithaca Intersystems S100 bus RAM card kit?
  • Did these people just crawl out of a luddite cave?

    $1000 for this honking piece of shit?

    $1000 for something with less processing power than a Nintendo?

    I'd pay $1000 for a WOPR, but not for this.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • This box would be more comparable to some overpriced kit car that tries to look like a 1932 Ford, rather than an actual 1932 Ford.

        It is a "class thing". However, you're the one that doesn't "get it".
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • his box would be more comparable to some overpriced kit car that tries to look like a 1932 Ford, rather than an actual 1932 Ford.

          A better comparison might be to a Cobra kit car as compared to an original Cobra. There definitely aren't enough of those to go around, and the ones that are left are ridiculously expensive. And to top it off, the better modern Cobras (say, Factory Five's, for example) are actually *better* than the originals. All the good of the original, with some of the stupidity filed off. (If you've ever ridden in a real big-block Cobra, you'll remember the funny smell of your shoes being roasted by their close proximity to the exhaust, shielded (or is that just re-radiated?) only by a bit of flimsy sheet metal...)

          No this isn't for everyone. It's cool, though, and I wish them well. In fact, I wish I'd thought of building them myself.

          We were robbed when they took away our front-panel switches and LEDs! Keyboard? We don't need no stinkin' keyboard...

  • Outdated technology (Score:1, Redundant)

    by 00_NOP ( 559413 )
    I'd be interested if they upgraded to something bleeding edge - like a Z80, for instance.
  • How does the megahertz myth apply to this?
  • Being a Nevada City native, my first thought on getting to the web page was "My God! Somebody listens to KVMR enough to post it on their web site!" My second thought was "My God! KVMR has a webcast!"

    Anyway, check it out if you want to listen to a seriously strange mix of radio. Don't get discouraged if you hear a show you like and can't find it next week, as their schedule is pretty bizzare. "Every third Wednesday, 4-7AM" is par for the course.

  • Well have you seen what Imsai's are currently going for on Ebay? This one is cheap. Of course where are you going to find any S100 cards?
  • I was there for the first time these S100 computers came out. Always wanted a NorthStar S100 machine, just couldn't scrape together the cash a the time.

    A couple of years ago I saw a nice, wood case NorthStar S100 system sitting on a surplus table for a very modest amount. I was tempted, but had to admit that there was nothing I would do with it. Would have had to use a PC as a terminal into the NorthStar, and even an old 386 could emulate the S100 machine faster than the S100. So what's to be gained by running an S100 system?

    Of course the IMSIA would at least have the nice Blinkin' Lights, the NorthStar was one of the S100 PC's that avoided them and went right to a ROM monitor, but beyond that I can't see anything I would enjoy about an old S100 system.

    By the way, Bil Gates didn't have an S100 system when he wrote MS Basic. He used an Emulator. The way I heard it from another student there at the time, as a student he got caught at Harvard running the emulator for commercial gain (developing a commercial product, MS Basic). He was instructed to cease immidately, or he would be thrown out of the university. He elected to leave. (Can anyone confirm that this is how it went down?) Lets just all be glad that he doesn't do such questionable things anymore. ;-)

  • But then i saw the slashdot ad when i started reading the comments. It made me want to buy from penquin computing. For around $1,700 i can get an AMD server from penquin computing.

  • I got started on the original IMSAI... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by superscalar ( 229943 ) on Thursday June 13, 2002 @06:52PM (#3697633)
    My uncle had built the thing from a kit, and then we inheritted it. We didn't quite have to key in binary code on the front panel (although it was a good exercise), but I DO remember being excited about getting a used 32K S-100 memory card up at the Trenton Computer Festival (do they still have those?). We started off with a cassette interface and a 64x16 character monochrome display. Eventually added two 'hard-sector' 5-1/4 inch floppies (about 100K each). The processor got upgraded from the original 8080 to an 8085 and later a Z-80. We also built a TMS9918A-based video card (that was a pretty neet chip - wasn't it used in the Colecovision or something?) and I later built a MIDI interface for it. This was all back in the early/mid-eighties. A BSEE, MSEE, and 15 years of experience later, I still learned a lot of what I use on a regular basis on that machine.

    • Trenton Computer Festival (do they still have those?)

      Yup. http://www.tcf-nj.org/
    • I suspect that was the video chip in the TI 99-4, and later the 4/A. (which added an amazing, high-tech feature... lower case! :-) )

      My memory may be wrong here, too. I keep thinking "TMS9900"... I wonder if the 99/4 used a lower-cost version of the chip you mention?

      And yes it was a cool chip, but the interface to the CPU was a byte-wide gate with a toggle bit somewhere... 'there's new data for you'. Then you'd have to load another byte and flip the toggle, and load another byte and flip the toggle.

      This pretty much killed the machine for any real gaming, although the chipset was powerful enough to do quite a bit of disconnected work. Sprites were the big thing on this chip... you could have 32 of them, all in automatic motion with collision detection. But it really didn't do bitmap-addressable graphics in any mode that was easily reachable to an ordinary programmer. Instead, it used character maps.... redefine what an A looks like and sprinkle them on the screen to make pictures. This was painful.

      The main CPU was 3.54 mhz, 16-bit.... not very EFFICIENT, but still pretty fast even so. Hardware multiply and divide. If the gateway to video RAM had been anything reasonable, and if the bitmap graphics had been easier to get to (it DID have them, they were just deeply buried) the machine would have kicked serious ass.

    • Re:I got started on the original IMSAI... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by lhand ( 30548 ) on Thursday June 13, 2002 @09:23PM (#3698407)
      I paid about $300 for my IMSAI when I first bought it. It was all the money I had so it took months before I could buy a memory board for it and actually do something with it (like blink the lights).

      The mother board has 22 slots. That meant I had to solder 2,200 connections for the sockets. Whew! Of course there was none of that surface mount stuff so it really wasn't so hard, just tedious.

      When I had another $500 I bought a floppy drive and controler board. The 8 inch single-side double-density drive held a whopping 300K of storage. The Jade controller I built had a 4 MHz Z80 chip on it. The Main CPU was a 2MHz 8080A. It seemed weird to have a better processor on the disk controller than as the main CPU.

      I had to build a custom clock circuit to run a serial port at 55 baud so I could interface to my old Teletype model 20 (Baudot machine). But man, it felt great to key in some instructions and watch a big piece of hardware start hammering away and shake the table it was on. I wrote drivers to convert ASCIIBaudot so I could actually use the TTY as a terminal.

      God, I miss that. I wish I had room to set up that old thing. Not sure what I'd do with it, but I really loved it.

      For those of you who don't know what good this type of thing can be: it provided a machine which was completely understandable, required understanding to build and use, and therefore provided training on how every little bit of a computer worked. That training wasn't available in school unless you went to someplace like MIT or Cal Tech. The only computer classes available at my college at that time (1973) were a few Cobol classes in the Business school.

      In a very real sense, we were all kernel hackers then. And yes, it was fun.
      • I envy you for the time and environment that you grew up in, tech-wise, at least. My first introduction to computers was an Atari 1200xl. I was 13 and didn't have clue about how it worked. Wish I had been just a little more curious, at least enough to have really jumped into the whole scene at the time. I read 'Fire In The Valley' and 'Infinate Loop' last year and became nothing short of utterly fascinated with the early years of the PC, before the empires were built around the OS and Micro$oft. I just about kicked myself for being alive during that time in history and was oblivious to the "good-old-days" that were happening around me while I was dropping quarters into various Space Invaders and Pac-Man machines The IMSAI, Osbourne, Altair and PET were marvels of their day but now are looked down upon and scoffed at. Those were the days when anyone who could put together their own system had way more than a clue and a "Build Your Own PC" book from Amazon.com. Ye Gods!, a trained seal could put one together today. My hat is off to you, Sir. It sounds like you were paying attention while soon-to-be gen x'ers like me were asleep.
  • Under the new licensing scheme, upgrading your 1977 version will cost you $36k, or about $9/byte.

    Seriously though, if you're interested in the history of this machine and the dawn of the pc era in general, check out a book called "Once Upon a Time in Computerland". [amazon.com]
  • Funny how for a machine that is supposed to ship in about a month that all the "pictures" they have of it are just computer drawings. I personally would find it interesting if they did ship this thing (though I'd never buy one), but I have to wonder though. It's too bad they decided up "upgrade" it, thereby losing any sales to those wanting something much closer to the original. It's kinda like reproductions of antique stuff (like phonographs say). Many people would buy repro's just because they like the look of the old phonographs and they probably won't ever even play it. But in the case of phonographs, these repros are significantly cheaper than purchasing an original. Here the price is almost even and I don't know of too many people who would purchase the thing to have it look good in their office (at least now post-web collapse).

  • Games (Score:5, Funny)

    by 00_NOP ( 559413 ) on Thursday June 13, 2002 @06:56PM (#3697666) Homepage
    Does it play "Global Thermonuclear War"? That looked like a great game.

  • IDE? (Score:2, Funny)

    by iangoldby ( 552781 )
    IDE disks? IDE disks? What the bloody hell are IDE disks?

    When I were a lad, we 'ad to use 8 inch floppies [imsai.net].

    8 inch floppies? You were lucky.

    Cut to the Four Yorkshiremen sketch [w3.org]. Is there anyone else here who remembers Phoenix?
  • I think it is a pretty neat thing. Almost like the life size X-wings Neiman Marcus used to sell for 14 grand in their christmas catalog.

    Wargames was a pivotal moment in computer geek history. He got the girl changed, changed his grade, busted into SAC. Gave all of us geeks hope.

    There was a time where us computer geeks had to play down our careers and hobbies if you wanted to get girls. Now it is cool, chicks did it, and Wargames had a fellow nerd who did it all.

    Yeah I would buy one and put an ATX board in it. I think that would be much cooler than a wateer cooled case, mounting a motherboard in a fridge, and some of the other riduclous shit we see on /.

    I went to the first Atari Computer camp in the early 80s. Yep, 400, 800, and early 1200 xls. We learned assembly by day and were regualr kids by night. But the best thing was the actor who played Doctor Falken in the movie visited the camp and signed autographs. It was an awesome experience for a 12 year old. Still got my 5/4 sleeve with the sig.

    puto
  • 1. Post first!
    2. Read story, and maybe links.
    3. Profit!!!!!
  • I wanted to make a processor board like this. Its real cheap components and would be great to program. I made a nice univrsal graphical debugger which can be used for any processor board and wanted to try it out with other architectures (other than ARM and MIPS).

    If anyone has an old 8008 or anything simmilar please send it me and Ill make a board for it.
  • The Geek Factor is high here but so is the smell of ageism, I mean, why? But if you were there and wanted a Spartan reminder of why the Bronze Age was the One Golden Age then maybe, whynot?
  • You guys are LAME! This thing is HOT HOT HOT!!!.
  • I have a real IMSAI 8080 in my garage: 8KB memory, video board, RF modulator. One owner, low mileage.
  • Isn't there something *evil* abouyt a web page for an IMSAI?


    hawk, who got hired as a programmer for not knowing the difference between IMSAI and "MIS System"

  • 20 MHz! 1MB! (Score:4, Funny)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Thursday June 13, 2002 @07:14PM (#3697794)
    With a 20 MHz CPU and the expanded instruction set of the Z8 processor, it should also be able to spool hundreds of biorhythm charts out to my daisywheel in seconds and run Hunt the Wumpus really fast. This is nice!

    I wonder if they're going to update CP/M to support all that RAM transparently. That would be sweet.

    • ...I think Z-System, a CP/M-compatible operating system for Z80's that was made in the '80s, could indeed handle as much RAM as you'd managed to make the system address. I ran it on a TRS-80 Model 4 that had a processor upgrade card on it that used a HD64180, a relative of the Z180, and 384K of RAM. Hey, you laugh, but for a while I ran a BBS on it--since I could load the entire OS, BBS software and database indexes for 800+ messages into RAM, it ran faster than a lot of the PC BBS's of the day.

      The "new IMSAI" looks like a machine I'd have loved about a decade ago, back when some ex-CP/M hackers had designed a Z180-based Z-System machine on a Baby-AT motherboard that used the XT bus. As I recall the official name was the "PC-Z" but they referred to it informally as the "Grudge." (Which of course led to someone suggest they should make a portable version and call it the "Pet Peeve.")

      No, as fond as I am of reminiscing, I don't think I'll buy a new IMSAI, in case anyone asks. If I ever miss the old days, I break out a TRS-80 emulator, play a few rounds of an arcade game in its glorious 128x48 resolution, and remember that even if people pushed hardware to the limit those days in a way that they don't now, that doesn't mean it'd be much fun to go back.

  • Actually (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Basil Ganglia ( 565458 )
    ...I'd rather have an old PDP 8E.
  • All true geeks lust for a machine like this one that still allows you to program it and examine its state via the front panel, but this is an absolute requirement for all sincere geeks-in-training! Flush VB down the toilet if you haven't already; forget Perl, OOL, Linux and anything with an API that places 5 or 6 layers of insulation between you and the bare metal! If you really want to understand how a computer does it's job on a fundamental level, if you want to actually learn what the thing's doing, then you cannot do without a good basic machine like this. You will never be able to stand among the Great Geeks of History if you lack this kind of experience.

  • alternatives (Score:2, Funny)

    by Splurk ( 576481 )
    The Series Two is a powerful microcomputer that more than fulfills most users' needs, but people should know that there are less expensive computers available that often feature satisfactory performance along with popular accessories such as a keyboard and monitor.

  • OR just spend $60 on a sharp wizard 730! (Score:3, Informative)

    by mekkab ( 133181 ) on Thursday June 13, 2002 @08:17PM (#3698156) Homepage Journal
    You get a nice built in keyboard, an lcd display,
    and it'll sync up to your real computer.

    From there you can program your Z80 in assy, C, or basic. Heck, you can even download a basic interpretter onto your little palm-top/pda.

    Experience the joys of accessing memory, indirectly indexing, and jumping back and forth.

    And save $900 in the process!

    So yeah, this is cute, but as dumb as a box of rocks. You can get those microprocessor notebook-style trainers for a couple of hundred bucks (check mouser.com [mouser.com] ), not 9!

  • This is even more useless than a salad shooter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by leereyno ( 32197 ) on Thursday June 13, 2002 @09:30PM (#3698444) Homepage Journal
    Someone needs to remind these guys what year it is. Had something like this come out in 1977 or so it would have been a competitive product. The problem is that it is 25 years later now and while Star Wars might not look too dated this thing sure does. S-100 systems and CP/M have been dead since before a good majority of the slashdot community were even born. Is there some reason why I should now shell out a thousand dollars for an S-100 system? For that kind of money I could get a Sun Blade 100, build myself a pretty decent Athlon system, or get my car's transmission fixed.

    This product surely belongs in the more dollars than sense catagory.

    Lee

    • There's nothing inherently wrong with playing with obsolete technology: by examining the systems of the past, you give yourself a chance to learn from history. Not only that, but it has all the normal benefits of a counterculture: the return of ancient systems to viability (by those who are freakish enough to take an interest) necessarily works against the tendency of mainstream society to damage itself by producing a monoculture.

      One thing that interests me, though, is that people who resuscitate ancient hardware get kudos, whereas doing the same with ancient protocols [slashdot.org] is a "pretty crazy idea".

    • Maybe its just me, but computers have lost virtually all their facination for me. I grew up programming a TI99/4a first via basic, then forth, then assembly language. Getting the machine to do anything was so much fun, I'd forget to sleep at night. Now, some *cough* 20 years later, the facination is completely gone.

      Lately I've been thinking getting a vintage computer might restore some of the wonder in programming. Personally, I'd never pay $1K for one. Instead, I'd find something on ebay for under $100.

      Now, as a hobby, I build embedded systems. Lately, I've been using the arm core (Atmel AT91 and StrongArm), but debugging the hardware for one of these requires a very expensive logic analyser.

      Where has the childhood fascination gone?

      -tim
  • Please try to explain WTF it is you're talking about in your summary of your news article. Slashdot just passes lots of this stuff through without adding any useful commentary, and I know you think you're being cool and all by using acronyms that only you and a few of your friends are familiar with, but please do the rest of us a favor by making your submissions easier to read.

    "IMSAI Series 2"? WTF is that??? And then the rest of the caption goes on to spew more unintelligable stuff about this IMSAI thing? It has an S100 bus? Great! What does that mean?!?!

    I've just seen too many of these stories posted on Slashdot lately ... where it looks like the poster has just wanted to sound cool by not bothering to explain to the 99% of the population that isn't familiar with their pet little hobby, WTF they are talking about.

    How about this:

    "KLV Chip Gets MOD4 Scoping"

    F-Wad writes "Dysgen Inc. has begun shipping a new KLV chip with MOD4 scoping, allowing a bandwidth increase of over 50% in many cases. This should allow those of us without an interswitch to copy G6-level data nearly as fast as a real TTI-Mark IX!"

    This could have come right off of the front page of Slashdot, I swear.

    • Yeah, I just *hate* it when a site oriented to technical types uses technical terms.

      You can also start bitching at all those .jp sites that use Japanese as well. Heck, go to slashdot.jp and get pissed at both at once.

      --
      Evan

    • Ask your Daddy, you're to young to understand.

    • that's it (Score:4, Funny)

      by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Friday June 14, 2002 @03:56AM (#3699660)
      Your geek and nerd cards are revoked immediately. Someone who doesn't know what an IMSAI or S-100 bus is just cannot be a geek or nerd.
      • He could have been excused for his ignorance; after all, he might not have been born when these came out the first time.

        But... any geek born since that time would have the curiosity to search google for the answer, rather than complaining about not understanding.

        That, in a nutshell, is the difference between a geek and normal person.

        Thank you, God, for making me a geek.
    • Wow. I've posted my fair share of (hopefully) well-thought-out stuff to Slashdot but the one day that I am in a bad mood and post a ranting flame that I think no one is going to read anyway, I get more responses than anything I've ever posted before. Guess I hit a nerve!

      You all have very good points. I was myself thinking about how this is a News for Nerds site and that there always will be people who aren't clued in on a particular topic when it comes up, and in fact my ranting could certainly be criticized from that perspective but ...

      If I were a submitter of a story suggestion to
      Slashdot, and I thought that there was a decent
      chance that many people would not know what it
      is (which I still believe is the case for IMSAI 2
      or whatever it is - I am as well-informed as your average geek and I have *never* heard of it), I would try to do everyone the courtesy of giving a small background clue about it.

      Really it all come down to my laziness. I like to scan through the Slashdot news items and pick up the ones that I find interesting and read more about them. It just makes it hard when there is so little to let me know what a story is about aside from a few acronyms. Yes, I am lazy and I could search google or what have you for details on it, but ... well, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to glimpse some clue of the meaning of the story from the Slashdot blurb on it. And I couldn't. And I really think it's because the IMSAI-2 and S100 bus are kind of obscure. Or at least obscure enough that it would be reasonable to suggest that alot of people (even Slashdot regulars) don't know what it is.

      It's just that I've been seeing many of these types of articles lately, and seeing one more just kinda pissed me off. It was a rant, I know. I even tried to put </rant> at the end of my message, but being in plain old text mode caused that tag to get swallowed for some reason and I was once again too lazy to bother correcting that, I just posted it as it was.

      Anyway, nobody is going to read a topic so old so ...
  • The hit counters have been going nuts and the e-mail has suddenly taken a huge jump! I don't know what's happening yet..

    "Shall we play a game?"

    "How about G-l-o-b-a-l N-u-cl-e-a-r Sl-a-s-h-d-o-t-t-i-n-g."
  • Ever had to enter the IPL by entering the boot instructionsn on the front paned?

    Back in the days when you'd be able to make sense of the pattern of flashing lights. Now fuggedaboutdid.

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