Video MARCH Presents: Apple I Reproduction In Action At HOPE 9 80
Video no longer available.
The name — MidAtlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists — might make you think this is a bunch of nerds who get together to enthuse over long-obsolete computer hardware and ASCII computer games. And that's exactly what it is. There are farmers who gush over antique tractors, drivers who love antique cars, and music lovers who dote on old phonographs. So why not old computers? Many people in the computer industry seem to have asked that question, so there are lots of computer museums around. MARCH was just the group Slashdot ran into at HOPE. Their website has lots of links that will help you connect with fellow antique computer buffs (assuming you are one), wherever you may be. See here a member showing off the MacGyveresque process that is booting BASIC and playing a game on a reproduction Apple I.
Update: 08/01 15:20 GMT by U L : Evan Koblentz (the guy in the video) commented with a bit more information on MARCH (including info on the discussion list and computer museum).
So why not old computers? (Score:5, Interesting)
easy answer to that
vintage cars will basically perform the same function often with more style ... let's say 1/2 the performance of modern as worst case ... same for vintage tractors
old phonographs will again perform the same function with 60 dB of dynamic range compared to ... completely adequate for the 10-20 db for range in pop music
computers on the other hand:
Apple I = 6502 @ 1MHz
Apple iPhone = A9 @ 800 MHz
completely different functionality that should not be compared to cars, tractors & phonographs! or even things like vintage amplifiers
however, there is a place for nostalgia - just recognise they will never have the cult following of vintage equipement that is functionality equivalent to modern stuff
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Apple I = 6502 @ 1MHz
Apple iPhone = A9 @ 800 MHz
Its not quite that simple. With each machine running its contemporaneous software the perceived performance gap is much narrower.
Altering the hardware for convenience, but consider an Apple II running the VisiCalc spreadsheet and an iPad running the Numbers spreadsheet.
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There is always the nostalgia case, but in terms of practicality, usability and user sanity, most of it is just old hat. Frankly speaking, I'd apply the same logic to most classic cars and audio equipment too. If I have a com
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I find that Windows 98 on my PII 266 is snappier than XP on my C2D. Just the UI, that is.
Re:98 on my PII 266 is snappier than... (Score:2)
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And I would still rather have the '63 Mercedes. At least that's a car that's easily understood and not a tangle of wires, check engine lights for no reason, and frankly, was probably built like a tank compared to the paper-thin steel used today. If the "camshaft" breaks (the engine was more likely pushrod back then), and there's no source for a replacement (unlikely), then I have a machineshop make one of a lathe. Chances are the tolerances are not that tight, so as long as I come close, it'll work.
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And I would still rather have the '63 Mercedes.
Not me. Drum brakes rather than disk, no ABS, no air bags, 1/4 the gas mileage of a modern car with the same performance (carb rather than injection)... the only advantage to an old car like that was they were easy to work on. And who ever worked on their own Mercedes? Rich people don't work on their own cars!
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Windows 98 is contemporary for my 1Ghz P3, Windows 7 is for my 3.3Ghz i5. It's not just clockspeeds at the CPU either - faster buses, solid state drives, better code, more hardware optimisations in the software.
Additionally, clockspeed is horrible for doing even rough comparisons of performance. If you underclocked that i5 to only 500MHz, the single-core performance would still easily beat the 1GHz P3.
Re:So why not old computers? (Score:5, Interesting)
vintage cars will basically perform the same function often with more style ... let's say 1/2 the performance of modern as worst case
This depends very much on how you measure performance. My 1960 Dodge Dart Phoenix (2dr) with 318ci hemi (well, ambi-, but close enough) big block and carter 650cfm 4bbl got somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 mpg on the freeway if I drove it nicely, and with ~240hp and ~340ft-lb it was actually something of a monster. But it also weighed four grand or more, was 6.5 feet wide and 18.5 feet long, had four drum brakes and typical wheels/tires and could either brake poorly or lock 'em up and slide merrily along like the lead sled it was. But it also would have had nightmarishly bad emissions by modern standards and it could easily get only 10 mpg around town if you drove it, uh, spiritedly... and it was my first car. It had no safety features, which may not be performance but which is fairly critical if you want to exercise performance and not die, and it had no niceties whatsoever except a push-button automatic transmission.
Despite the sepiatone view of history, better and better stuff has become available over the years. Diesel-hydraulic tractors, for example. Laser phonographs. Even modern tube amplifiers which benefit from superior supporting components! And of course, all-wheel-drive, turbocharged, direct-injected automobiles. Which do fall down in one category that you did mention, that being style. That and cost are the only potential reasons to maintain a vintage piece of equipment. The vintage computers pass the style test if you're into that sort of thing, but they fall down on the cost test. Building an Apple I kit will cost you hundreds all told. For fifty bucks I can get a far more useful computer from a yard sale or flea market. You can often get Pentium IVs for free (I have one right behind me that I should unload before no one will take it, it's huge.)
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I've got to agree. While I'm nostalgic for my '63 Couple de Ville, I'm not sure I'd want to drive it on the expressway every day.
Recently, my wife and I house-sat for a friend who has a '58 Bel Air and he told us we could drive it if we wanted. I was excited to take it for a spin, and it does turn heads but it felt like a tractor compared to my Acura and didn't have a proper stereo anyway.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to "new-retro" cars like the new Thunderbird or Challenger or Camaro, but I notice nobody is
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I've been in a Triumph TR4 with a 350 and a GM corporate posi rear, big edelbrock intake and carb, scary. And a friend has a spitfire with a Nissan GA16DE FWD engine transplanted, which must be a peach if you're skinny and of average height, which he is. At this point, I just want Chevy to come out with this new 3.0 liter turbodiesel and to cram one in my 300SD.
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The 318ci is a small block. Chrysler big blocks are 383ci and up.
Only The 427ci is a hemi.
That said, my first car was a '73 Dodge Charger with a 318 mated to a 727 Torqueflight transmission (not stock).
It was two blocks long, weighed more than most modern cruise ships, and I loved every second of owning it!
To stay on topic, I'm also nostalgic for my TRS-80 Model 1.
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The Chrysler 318ci is neither a hemi nor a big block.
The 318ci is a small block. Chrysler big blocks are 383ci and up.
Only The 427ci is a hemi.
It would be cool if you knew what you're talking about, but you don't.
There was a big block 318ci from the late fifties into the early sixties, maybe until '62.
It doesn't have fully-domed heads like the 427, but it does have half-domed heads, and it's a sort of proto-hemi.
The original 318 was a big block. Look it up, but you'll probably need a book to do that, like an old Motors manual.
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It is absolutely a small block, interchangeable on a unit-for-unit basis with the 318ci LA (small block).
A polyspherical head is *not* a hemispherical head.
Chrysler big blocks are 383ci and up. Only the 427ci is a hemi.
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It is absolutely a small block, interchangeable on a unit-for-unit basis with the 318ci LA (small block).
Completely untrue. It's based on the "B" block, though not the "RB" block.
A polyspherical head is *not* a hemispherical head.
It fulfills the same function.
Chrysler big blocks are 383ci and up.
They also offered the car with a 383 with dual quads on a cross-ram manifold.
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Entertainment? An AM only radio with front and rear speakers
Front and rear speakers? LUXURY! I had just one speaker in the middle of my dash, and I had to wait for the tubes in my AM radio to warm up!
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Wow these old cars had internet access? Or only in Alaska?
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Vintage computers will basically perform the same function (gaming) with more style. No, emulators don't cut it.
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True that. Nothing more stylish than waiting for your C64 to spool the tape...
Speaking of the devil, I saw this on the BBC re the C64 turning 30 [bbc.co.uk]. :-)
The video shows the tape failing to load
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No, emulators don't cut it.
I respectfully disagree... there is one emulator [mess.org] to rule them all [progettoemma.net]
nostalgia? (Score:1)
nostalgia - I guess that would be my case.
Back in the Apple ][ days, programming had this feeling of wonderment, accomplishment, and fun. Computers, at least PCs, were new. Programs were programs with very little OS interaction and 'frameworks' never came into the picture. You write and run a highly functional program that was only a few hundred KB.
Things weren't so abstract. Even programming in Integer BASIC, you eventually had to hit metal in some way (PEEK, POKE) to something or another.
You felt like y
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That's very true, I hope the mods see it. My best programming experiences were on primitive machines, the TS-1000 and the MC-10. I wrote a battle tanks game for the TS-1000 in BASIC, but it was unplayably slow, so I rewrote it in assembly, then hand-assembled the machine code, POKEd ito into a REM statement, and I had to put loops in to slow it down. I had it read the keyboard directly, so two players could control their tanks at the same time from the same keyboard.
Much fun. After buying a repair manual fo
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LOL noobs always think "power" is "processor frequency".
"power" is defined by what you do with the computer not the rate that an arbitrary flipflip in the logic can be toggled.
I can run a 1960s mid size corporation data center inside my desktop as an emulator. Very interesting, lots to learn about design. The supposedly much more advanced desktop can ... merely run minesweeper or maybe solitaire. Booooring.
Another knee slapper is when someone claims their iphone has "100 times" the "power" of the compute
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Clock speed is imprecise, particularly when comparing generations or processor families, but the industry is not quite ready to abandon conventional measures of hardware performance in favour of "lol vln can do 150 internets per hour on this bitch".
Re:So why not old computers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hrmmm. Let's compare:
Boot time for my 8-core Lenovo Laptop == 20 minutes
Boot time for my Apple IIe == about 1 second.
I know you're going to have a hard time groking this; but I can actually be productive in a shorter time period on an older machine. My word processor is 16k and loads in a fraction of the time of MS word -- for basically the same results.
Heck, I can boot a C=64 into GEOS faster than Windows loads these days -- and still get a complete WIMP/WYSIWYG operating environment.
Old doesn't necessarily mean useless. Check out the TRS-80 Model 100 -- still in use out in the field by journalists with limited access to electricity -- it will run for months on 4 AA batteries -- and provide you with BASIC,. a word processor, a telecommunications program (built-in modem), and a few other goodies. Negroponte should have looked at THAT when he was designing the OLPC. Hackers today are still finding uses for it.
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Now try that with an Apple I not IIe ... Or a Commodore PET not a C64
vintage vs old, perhaps? Old can be useful but vintage is just for nostalgia or true geeks :-)
Re:C=64 into GEOS (Score:2)
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Boot time for my 8-core Lenovo Laptop == 20 minutes?
What are you running on these?
My Lenovo Laptop boots up in about 6 seconds.
You are doing something wrong.
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old phonographs will again perform the same function with 60 dB of dynamic range compared to ... completely adequate for the 10-20 db for range in pop music
It depends on how old the turntable is. Turntables made before about 1960 or so had very heavy tonearms which would wear out records (and even cheap phonographs from the '80s and '9-s had heavier tonearms than good turntables, but not as bad as old ones), and most turntables and phonographs before around 1960 were monophonic. About 1970 or so they came o
this is good but... (Score:1)
...I have a VMS orange wall gathering dust in a garage in Sussex (England), and I haven't found anyone willing to take it off me.
I also have boxes of old crap which I don't know what to do with, but I'd never dare throw anything away. I mean I know the VAXstation 4000/60s and such probably have hobbyist or even industrial spares value, and goodness knows I need to do something with the DECmate III, but there is still a pile of Sparc boxes etc which have probably suffered circuit rot by now. This is all the
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Did you talk to the classiccmp mailing list folks?
http://www.classiccmp.org/lists.html [classiccmp.org]
when I offered it all for free.
There is no "free" other than locals within maybe 10 miles or so, and there might not be any locals within 10 miles, so... The main problem I see is in your first line "Sussex (England)". The density of historical re-enactors or classic enthusiasts or whatever you want to call us, is pretty light on the ground in England, despite the cluster of people that hang around Bletchley Park.
If you were my neighbor, I'd take the
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There are notorious examples of critical, heavily relied-upon collector sites that have disappeared upon their owners' demise, that were never mirrored anywhere.
I remember that happening to the CP/M site.
Please don't be harsh with bitsavers, archive.org, or other orgs and sites, like TUHS.org
Agreed those guys are awesome. If you want to call out individuals Jason Scott (now at archive.org) has archived a lot of stuff ... I've donated a fair chunk of change to him over the years to keep on doing what he does... Some people donate money to the ballet, some to the orchestra, I think /.ers should send their "cultural donations" to those type of sites (Oh and the EFF too)
What could Apple make one for? (Score:2)
If they could do something like that for $100, the Apple TV price, they probably could sell a decent amount due to nostalgia and curiosity.
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You mean a Raspberry pi with an Apple II emulator? Apple probably could sell something like that, but not for the kinds of margins they are used to. Commodore and Atari have licensed reproductions, the C64 DTV and Atari 2600 flashback, which were fairly successful. But neither of them are the most profitable company in the world right now. Apple wouldn't bother, they want people to forget about the times that Apple was an open, engineer driven company anyway.
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I can't help but wonder what Apple could make a modernized replica Apple II for.
It'd be funnier if Samsung made one.
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Most USB keyboards don't have a reset button on the bottom.
Reproduction? (Score:2)
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Checking the article, "reproduction" is indeed a more accurate description than "clone".
Usually, a clone copies functionality of the original machine, using whatever tech is available / preferred currently. For example you could replace rows of old RAM chips with 1 larger, modern RAM chip.
In this case it seems they copied the original board, used same components etc. Which is a very unusual way to produce a 'clone'. I guess it's not so much for people who want to run Apple I software on real hardware, but r
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Awesome (Score:2)
Vintage parts for repairs & reproductions (Score:1)
Besides folks on eBay also people scrapping old electronics will realize the value of some of the parts on old boards. I'm mostly thinking of poor chaps in China that demolish e-waste from the west with their hands & crude tools. But it might apply to others in this chain.
The next step is firing up an old IC production machine, produce a few batches of different parts, put the newly produced IC's in housings that are made to look like they're 30 years old, and apply markings to suggest the same. Wouldn'
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When was the last time you saw anyone talk about old IBM
LOL every collector / enthusiast / re-enactor / whatever we are has a certain date they don't go before and often pretend nothing existed before then.
If you're willing to go before the mid 80s, the IBM mainframe guys are at least as much into their mainframes as the apple collectors are into their apples.
If you love computers, you owe Apple *everything*.
I think you owe the original '360 developer team. The 1960s IBM 360 mainframe development team, not the xbox 360.
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You got that right. I'd just about kill for a working 2741 terminal with an APL keyboard.
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When was the last time you saw anyone talk about old IBM atari or commodore p.o.s. computers like they do Apple computers?
Look in the comments above, I specifically mentioned that I wished I'd kept that old XT, and many others mentioned Commodore and Atari. Which, BTW, were NOT pieces of shit; they were as solid as Apples, just not as expensive.
Once again we witness how Apple invented an industry by being not just first, but best in every way that matters.
Wrong, fanboi. Commodore had a fully functional PC b
MARCH Computer Museum / VCF East (Score:2, Informative)
Hello Slashdot! I'm the guy in the video ... I know, not exactly the world's best on-air presentation. :) Anyway: my user group, MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists) formed in 2004. Anybody can join (it's free, as in beer) although our focus is on the northeast quadrant of the USA. Our bricks-and-mortar museum is in Wall, N.J. (InfoAge.org); we're solely run by volunteers. The computer museum is open Sundays from 1pm-5pm and other times by appointment; InfoAge itself is open Wednesday / Saturday
Perfect for Kickstarter (Score:2)
Count me in. I still search Ebay for original Altair computers and IMSAI 8080 machines. There's still something cool about computers with switches and lights on the front. Probably why I also like steam punk.
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Try something bigger. More lights and fun. And the fan noise. I had a PDP11 in my kitchen. Power up both 14 inch disk drives and watch the breaker for the 20 amp circuit blow. 8-(
The SIMH emulator can run PDP11 software and give you the 11/40 blinking lights in a window. I put up RT11 and did some toggle in programs to test it. Amazing. I just wish we had the 11/45 and 11/70 light panels to watch as well.
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He also sells the Replica 1 (Apple 1 clone) and Micro-KIM (MOS KIM-1 clone). They, however, use true 6502 processors.
http://www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/ [brielcomputers.com]
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Sweet. Now I'd also like to see a Connection Machine CM-5.
Video professionalism (Score:2)
MARCH Guys are good guys (Score:2)
I spoke with Evan at HOPE 9, and also attended the Vintage Computer Fest East in Wall, NJ recently. Evan, and the others, are all cool guys who are doing a great job keeping this history alive. The repros showed at HOPE were very cool, and even though I follow this stuff I did not a lot of the stuff they showed existed. If you're on the east coast and Evan or others from the club are around be sure to check it out.
But why reinvent.. (Score:1)