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Hardware

Dell finds "Oldest PC" 152

Posted by Hemos from the but-it-still-boots dept.
Alowishus writes "Dell's contest to find the oldest PC still in use has found a winner. It's a MITS Altair 8800b, being used by a lawyer, who has had it for 22 years. Dell's submitting it to a museum and giving the lawyer a bunch of modern hardware. "
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Dell finds "Oldest PC" More

Dell finds "Oldest PC"

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  • I wonder what kind of programs are on there
    Well, there was a version of BASIC written by billg; they were Microsoft's first big customer, afaik. Check out the Virtual Altair Museum [exo.com].
  • How do you think he proved it? I want to believe the guy, but I can't figure out how you make a machine with 256bytes of memory churns out wills and other documents.
  • In 1996, here at Oxford Brookes University, the Computer Services Helpdesk got a weird call.

    Nobody recognised the error message (BDOS error on A:) but eventually they got the user to describe her machine: dark green, with an integral 3" disk drive. The manufacturer's logo said Amstrad. At this point they passed the call over to me.

    When I had recovered sufficiently (I swear the whole of St Elmo's Fire passed before my eyes) I established that:

    The user had received the computer in 1986 - it cost about 400 British pounds at the time.

    She had undergone three hours training at that time.

    She had done useful word processing in Protext on CP/M for ten years.

    After ten years she had had her first ever error message, and correctly called the helpdesk. Who eventually referred her to someone old and sad enough to be able to help her, i.e. me.

    I found this whole episode very encouraging, though it put my head in a serious 80's timewarp for a while...

    george
  • In the old days, people didn't care that much about things like fonts on documents. You actually sent a pretty straghtforward text stream to the printer.

    Printers worked by striking against an inked ribbon which ran over the paper. In some cases, this was done with eight wire pins which would make a vertical array of dots (in which case the font was usually fixed, although later some printers began to store fonts in ROM). The popular office solution was to use a "daisy wheel" printer, which had a round plastic contraption called a font wheel which had a series of fingers with backwards impressions of letters and numbers on them. To produce an "A", the printer would rotate the wheel so that finger with an impression of an "A" was over the ribbon and fire a solenoid to strike the ribbon against the page. To change fonts, you changed wheels.
  • I found this at http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/mits. html , a link off of the site poseted above.
    Meanwhile, the MITS 4K boards being distributed to users weren't working. Bill Gates told Roberts that the boards were inadequate, but Roberts insisted that MITS keep sending them out. This created a great deal of frustration in the users, and eventually an out-of-work hobbyist named Bob Marsh decided to create his own boards. He started a company called Processor Technology in April, 1975, and began selling 4K boards that did work. To prevent erosion of 4K board sales, Roberts tied purchase of the popular BASIC program to his 4K boards. This ploy backfired when hobbyists began making their own copies of BASIC and distributing them for free.


    This is a bit before my time(born in '78, saw my first computer in '82) but it seems that Microsoft's strategy really has been quite consistant over the years.

    "Drats, foiled again!" -Bill Gates
  • 2KB -> 16KB? Must have been a ZX81/TimexSinclair 1000.

    Still have mine somewhere - even found the 16KB addon at a sidewalk sale in 1988!
  • You're pretty optimistic that the Dell would hold its value for that long!!!
  • Gee...I upgraded my machine to 128MB...not cause I couldn't get something done - but because I could and it would make things better.

    So
  • Yeppp...need that 128MB so they can fit all the easter eggs and other useless features in there.

    Oh...don't worry about that bug that'll affect everyone that uses the computer...it'll be fixed (or replaced by another bug) in the next release
  • Oh yes - fired up DU, the well-known disk sector editor for CP/M, and cudgelled the disk into behaving itself.

    The cause - I suppose most floppies' sector marks begin to fade 10 years after formatting.

    george

    "Disk Editor? We hand-wrote bits to the disk with a magnet!"
  • You could get 64K into (or rather, bolted onto the back of) a ZX81. 64K RAM packs weren't all that common, though, since the ZX Spectrum had come out by then and the ZX81 disappeared rather quickly after that.

    "Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)
  • Your point is valid, but it all boils down to one thing. Is it cheaper to increase hardware speed and decrease software speed, or to let up on hardware research and blast money into better code? And do consumers stop buying slower software (that may have more features, pointless ones or not) when they have access to faster hardware to run it? No, they buy faster hardware and then buy the slower software. Clean tight code throughout the software industry would be wonderful, but unfortunately it makes no economic sense.
    In OSS software, we see a shift in ideals, and the ability of linux to run on older hardware is a representation of that. However, it still must remain portable, thus tending to using a higher level language, thus increased size/decreased speed (this is general, not a hard and fast rule). So OSS tends to value the latter more, but it also values clean code (or at least not bloatware), and both of those are valued above the "Let's just rely on faster hardware to pick up the slack" mentality.

    Derek
  • I believe that Apple coined the term, "Personal Computer," in the Apple ][ days. (It sounds Jobsian, doesn't it?) Of course they never trademarked it. When IBM came out with the "PC" they co-opted the term.
  • IIRC, the Altair could be expanded to address two 256k 8-inch floppy drives, giving a total storage of 512kb. Not too shabby, considering the max RAM on these things was in the 64kb neighborhood. Paper tapes were also an option.

    They were pretty hefty, too. About like a big-ass piece of stereo equipment from the same era.

    But I'm wondering if this is for real. How was the guy doing wills and legal documents on this thing? Didn't the Altair just have toggle switches and LEDs on the front panel? Did he have one of those teletype arrangements so the thing had a keyboard?

    Somebody should upgrade this guy to a VIC-20...

  • It might have had drives (depends on what options the owner sprung for). Here's a picture [museumcomputer.org], and some more Altair info [blinkenlights.com].

    btw, the Altair was not even close to being the first personal computer [blinkenlights.com].

  • No. Not even.

    You couldn't get the Altair to conceive of 256k
    bytes of memory.

    Came with 256 bytes.
  • You can see it here [ebay.com] on Ebay. The guy hasn't had any bids yet, btw.
    J.
  • there is a cross section of that tree in the boston museum of science on display, its neat, it shows historical events on the rings of the tree
    check it out if you can
  • Yeah the real kicker is, the guy was still *using* the computer to write wills and whatnot. Now he gets $15,000 in a new server, desktop (I believe) and a laptop. Maybe more stufff, can't remember. Pretty nice..

  • Congratulations!!!

    Do you just sit there at your Altair's keyboard(?) and reload the page, over and over?



    ---
  • You'll get ~$250 on E-Bay for a mint condition original PET (2001).

    Do you have pics of the PET? I am interested in picking one up. Email me - geologist AT hotmail DOT com.

    --Shane

  • There's a rather good Java simulation of the Altair here [aol.com]. Also a description of the machine and an example "program" to do Fibonacci series.

    Regards, Ralph.

  • Ya know, I bet Linux would run on that..
  • Core Memory -

    A type of memory used in computers (mostly during the mid-late 50's-late 70's, though the later half could be wrong - still used in nuclear warhead carrying missles due to resitance to EMP effects), that consisted of small, donut shaped, ferrite "cores", arranged in a grid pattern by a grid of cris-crossing wires, with one core at each intersection of the grid of wires (think of a screen from a screen door, and where the wires overlap, there would be a core at a diagonal with the wires threaded through). A third wire (called the "sense" wire) is threaded through all of the cores in a the following manner; starting from a corner, and advancing down the diagonal. Each core of the plane represents one bit of memory. These planes were generally stacked into a cubical type structure (some, like on an IBM 360, were the size of a modern refridgerator, and held quite a chunk - 64K or so). In the beginning, a plane could be built/threaded by hand, but as time went by, the size of a plane shrank, and became VERY tiny...

    Operation of a core plane is as follows:

    Assuming all cores are "cleared":

    To write a bit:

    The bit is selected applying half the voltage needed to flip the polarity of the ferrite core on one of each of the grid wires - so for bit 1, half the voltage would be placed on the first X grid wire, and half on the first Y grid wire. The total voltage at the junction would exceed the amount needed to change the polarity of the core, thus writing the bit. Positive voltages applied would flip the bit one way, negative the opposite, thus enabling the two states of the bit.

    To read a bit:

    In this operation, the action of reading a bit effective XORs the bit. It is done by reading state of the bit through the sense wire, while applying either positive or negative half-voltages again via the X and Y selection wire process. If the bit flips, the sense wire will "pulse" in the direction of the bit - so if positive voltages are assumed equal to a bit value of 1, then a positive pulse on the sense wire means that the bit was set. Unfortunately, this process reverses the state of the bit, and the bit must be re-written after being read.

    Ok, I think I got most of that right - I know I am not completely correct - if you want something better, consult a good computer history book. All I know is that core memory was developed in the search for a fast, rewritable, cheap, and easy to manufacture memory system - mercury delay lines and magnetic drum memory (precursor to today's hard drives) just weren't cutting it at the time.

    OK - where are my extra points?
  • I bet he will be begging to get his old Altair back after he sees Windows 98!!!!
  • The PET2001 aka CBM2008/3008 was build first in 1977, with a black and white monitor, tape drive and 8k RAM, running Basic1.0. I once had one of those with additional dual-floppy (each 1meg) and two external 64k-Boxes (not that big at all :-)

    Later it got a green/black-monitor and basic2.0
  • Get a bunch of 'em and make a Beowulf cluster. :)
  • The FAA is still the largest purchaser of vacuum tubes in the US. Guess why? Dinosaur computing hardware.

    Assuming this isn't a troll (in the sense of "troll" I saw in something alt.folklore.urban-related, wherein a "troll" was, as I remember, a known-to-be-bogus outrageous claim posted in the hopes of drawing out heated rebuttals - as opposed to just Boring Old Flamebait, which often gets described as a "troll" on /.), I doubt that - even the crufty old 90whatever machines were based on System/360s, and those were transistorized (the first transistorized machines came out in the mid-to-late '50's, e.g. IBM 7090's).

  • Now he will understand all the "beauties" of modern hardware/software like BSOD...
  • Neither does a single flip-flop, but I still think I'll get more done on a p2 with linux :-)
  • Sounds like you got ripped off [slashdot.org].

    There is no DELL laptop in existence worth $4000.

  • Not the first PC (Score:3)

    by UncleRoger ( 9456 ) on Friday August 20, 1999 @01:53PM (#1734557) Homepage
    I hate to nitpick, but...

    Shepard's old Altair, considered to be the world's first PCs,
    Bzzzt... Wrongo! Not even close. Go try for yourself at the Blinkenlights Archeological Institute's [blinkenlights.com] quiz on the first PC. [blinkenlights.com] I think you'll be surprised.

    As to trading a working Altair for $15K worth of Dell crap; I wouldn't even think of it. It's easily worth that much on eBay -- and you could buy a bunch of really good stuff for a lot less and pocket the change.

  • ok so this computer has 256k of ram, dang that's small. How did they fit an operating system into that? Or was the operating system on a chip? I must imagine that the man was using some other form of storage along with the ram, i mean you couldn't even fit this post into that much ram. Well i guess i'll just stop bitching about my 3.7 gig hard drive being to small now.

  • I found the timing of this piece entertaining. I had just got done placing an order for a spanking-new 500mHz box to replace my 'ancient' (2.5 years old) P120. And here, I thought I'd been very patient to wait so long!

  • No no no. As someone above said, 256 bytes . You can do a lot with 256k - heck the first Macintosh came with 256k of ram. Ah, for the days of System 1... actually, I'd settle for 7.1.
  • Really? I thought that the FAA's myriad of radio systems (RADAR, etc...) used them for their finals?
  • 256 bytes? I really hope they meant kilobytes..

    On a 22 year old computer? Not likely. I first got into computing, well, not quite as long ago as that (but embarrassingly close), and at the time, the typical machine had 16K of memory, expandable (if at all) to a maximum of 64K (due to 16-bit addressing). But why would you bother, that's WAY more memory than you're ever likely to need. 32K max if you're some sort of lunatic power user who really pushes things, but that's still ample memory...

    --

  • I'm starting to agree with the overheated poster above...

    NOT 256k. 256 bytes.

    In 1977, if you wanted a computer with 256k ram, you started by asking the architect how much it would cost for the raised floor and the air-conditioning.

    256 bytes.

    Though perhaps you've confused bytes and 'k', as 256k is plenty for your post. Hell, my first computer only had 16k. I wrote a book on a 64k computer.

    (damn kids)
  • Actually since you mention it, I checked out ebay and did a search, and it seems that of all three 8800's that appear in the search, they were all sole for roughly $2000. He got a good deal in that sense, but I wouldn't have sold it for anything if it were mine!!!
  • If I remember correctly, Cringley (of "I, Cringely" fame) has in his possession an Altair - but not just any Altair - Altair serial# 2... anybody who has seen "Triumph of the Nerds" should remember that... it's a great show. Anyways, I'm jealous of that lawyer!
  • I believe that Apple coined the term, "Personal Computer," in the Apple ][ days. (It sounds Jobsian, doesn't it?) Of course they never trademarked it. When IBM came out with the "PC" they co-opted the term.

    Really? Where were Apple's unfed, ferral, rabid attack lawyers?

    Must have been before Apple bred them. (Did they breed them just in time to sic them on Franklin?)

    Either that or even those vicious monsters were afraid of IBM...

    --

  • As was said earlier, maximum memory on an 8080 was 64KB... although it's possible there may have been a "bank switch" card (remember EMS on the IBM PC?) but CP/M itself only could address 64K.
  • Actually the first Mac came with 128kb :)
  • Why, because mattc speaks the truth ? Face it, Win98 is a toy.
  • Does he have any idea what that Altair is worth???? Those things are going on Ebay for serious money

    Serious money == $2500. A little short of what he got in return, I'd say ...

    he should be thinking about how to maintain and restore and it to pristine shape!

    Presumably the folks at the computer museum will take care of that.
  • For those who just can't concieve of a 256 byte computer, read here [ucdavis.edu]
  • The first personal computer link was a real good read. I Gotta get one of those 1966 kitchen computers with the built in cutting board.
  • PC stands for Personal Computer you hapless techno-weenie. I used an original IBM PC all the way until 1993. It was one of the ones with a B stamped on the back, so it was a little bit souped up in terms of on-motherboard RAM (what, 256KB I think, the rest of the 640K was on a sixpack serial/parallel/memory/clock/joystick card). It had an upgraded BIOS chip, from 1984 I think so it could use a hard drive. Mine had a Seagate 20MB drive. I replaced the Intel chip with some third party chip someone gave me, and it had a 8087 math coprocessor. Unfortunately the cassette port went when I had to replace an ISA slot that melted because of my (8-bit) sound blaster for some reason. But the point (yes there is one) is that on the front there was an elegant little metal square that said IBM Personal Computer
  • You paid 4 grand for a system with a 15" monitor? I get 17" CTX monitors for $206.

    -Barry

    This is my sig...or something

  • Pray that the inventor of this technology never gets as far as innovating to the stage of making this thing talk using any advanced technology such as audio.
  • Well, long before there was a paperclip in Office, there was the Paperclip Computer ....

    Click on PC milestones [blinkenlights.com] & search
  • It wasn't the first 8800, it was a slightly improved model available later. This one could be upgraded as far as 64K memory.

    Altair 8800b Photo and Specs [geocities.com]

    There's also links to a whole bunch of other neat-o Altair stuff, like full-color images of some of the print ads (Napoleon?!), chronology of the various models, accessory prices ...
  • This man needs a talking paperclip to guide him.
  • Ahhh! The memmories!!!
  • Once upon a time simple computers were useable and remarkably funcional given surprisingly limited resources. Then one day a man with great foresight invented a new design concept now known as BLOATWARE(TM). Now ...
  • And in ten years, the Altair will still be worth $2500, at least, while the Dell stuff will be worth $5.
  • I'm sure he probably already knows this. I think it unlikely that he doesn't have another, younger, computer somewhere.

  • 256k was about right, for a mainframe. I remember a System 360 with 256k.
  • I will bet your hardware that all of the stuff they gave this guy will end up in his kids hands. Why? You think he will take the time to learn the new programs? No! Of course not. I have seen it again and again. Once had to get a Lawyer up to an isp. He had spanking new machine - used word star out of a dos-box. Worked at an web design firm - the accountant ran his old dos accounting program from dos - it would not print from under windows. Work here at a math department in a university - you can tell down to the year which faculty member was highered. They still use the programs that were newly installed and shown to them by the sys-admin at the time they came. ( Support is a nightmare - they have everything from dos through nt, and linux on the novell network ).
    These people do not want to take the time and effort to learn new technology as it becomes available. If your tool works use it.
  • The owner posted a message on the ZDnet site and stated that he upgraded the machine to 48K. It was mainly used to access old documents now. He also has several WinX machines running. Amazing that the 8" drives (he had 2 drives) and disks still worked properly. My old machine are beginning to suffer bit rot. My older is from '78.

    And yes you can run programs in limited memory, but the interface is real terse. There are some programs that can run with no ram (diag programs need to do this). I have a Cheese box program which runs in 48 bytes of Rom and less than 8 bytes of ram. It's assembler of course.

  • In 1977, if you wanted a computer with 256k ram, you started by asking the architect how much it would cost for the raised floor and the air-conditioning.

    A slight exaggeration. In 1975 you could put 256Kb in a PDP-11/45, and that's smaller than a fridge, happy on a solid floor, and needs air conditioning only in the summer :-)

  • I am currently writing software for a client to replace his ancient Commodore PET system. It must be at least 20 years old.

    The PET is still used nearly every day. It is set up to run a single program, which automatically calculates measurements for metal parts, glass, and screens for custom-built house windows, with an integrated "database" of window types. The software was custom-written. By today's standards, it is ugly, user-unfriendly, slow, and clumsy. But back then, it must have been a huge improvement over repetitive number crunching with calculators and pencils.

    Any idea what a fully-functional Commodore PET system, with Commodore monitor and a HUGE external floppy drive cabinet (with two 5 1/4 inch drives) might be worth?

    Should my client or I try to auction it off?

  • Yeah, but those pesky CTX monitors are much harder to fold up with your laptop than a 15" LCD display panel is. The panel also has the benefit of being made into the laptop, so you don't need an extra power cable.


    "Have lunch, or be lunch."
  • Well, after reading Abrash's _Graphics Programming Black Book_, I think Mel is alive in some form. Carmack touched that for a while with his infamous free FP (For the record, the texturing used fixed point, but they used a float instruction 'for free' to correct for the innacuracies every 16 pixels.) which pretty well became *the* killer game and changed a generation of CPUs. (The AMD k6 was faster than the P5 except for FP, if not for Quake changing the FP is too slow for games mentality, the K6 would have been a kickass gamers machine. As is, we had to wait till the K7 for an x86 compatible to kill the pentium lead.)

    And Abrash himself is no mean optimizer. But, my favorite story out of the book was a guy who wrote a program to compile 'life' screens into enough assembly code to compile the next generation and beat the next fastest code by a huge margin. That sounds a bit like a 'Mel' program, esp since Abrash said it took him a few days to understand how it even worked.

    Sure, MS Office will never be svelte, but there will always be people who optimize. People who know enough about the machine to write code that flies. Eventually computer speed/storage increases will start to slow down, even a bit, and then we'll see people looking to the old days for hints.
  • This reminds me of a time I was in San Fransisco, in an Apple Store. This woman came in while I was looking at software, and when asked if she needed help, insisted on buying a computer that would still be working in 20 years time.

    The assistant tried and tried to explain to her that it would be hideousl slow, and there would be no software, but at the end of every sentence, the inevitable reply would come in that southern drawl.. "I just want a computer that'll work in 20 years time.."

    *scream*

  • That's like finding the oldest living tree, and cutting it down to put in a museum.

    That's already happened (sort of).

    From Alamut [alamut.com]:

    Prometheus

    In 1964, a graduate student cut down the oldest living tree, a bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva, Pinus aristata) in order to count its rings:

    "Late in the year of 1964 a young geographer, Donald R. Currey, a student at this university, who was working toward his doctorate, was in the Southwest searching for evidence of Ice Age glaciers. The Wheeler Peak glacier and related phenomena attracted him. When this student and his associate came upon the bristlecones at the timberline, they began to take core samples from several trees, discovering one to be over 4,000 years old! Needless to say they were excited, and at some point, their only coring tool broke. The end of the field season was nearing. They asked for (and I still can't believe it!) were granted permission by the U.S. Forest Service to cut the tree down. The tree was 'Prometheus'.

    "After cutting the trunk at a convenient level, which happened to be more than eight feet above the original base, 4,844 rings were counted. This student had just killed the oldest living thing on earth! Eventually, dendrochronologists determined the tree to be 4,950 years of age."

    For some reason, Prof. Donald R. Currey's home page at the University of Utah [utah.edu] doesn't mention the accomplishment

  • As someone stated above, the owner of the machine posted on ZDNet that he had upgraded the computer to 48K of memory. That's plenty enough to do serious work; I remember coding some pretty useful stuff on a VIC-20 with 5KB (3.5 available to the user) and later upgraded to 16K of RAM, so 48K would seem luxurious by comparison. The Altair was a pretty simple machine, but with enough RAM boards and a decent terminal I could see doing the kind of stuff he was describing.

    Personally I liked this article, if only because it's one of the few "PC" related ones that doesnt make me feel old -- I got my first computer (the aforementioned VIC-20) in 1981 when I was 11. These kids today with their hair and their clothes...
  • and get rc5 on there!!
  • So he was using a 22 year-old computer to do his day-to-day work, now he gets a server, a desktop, and a laptop??? What the hell? He obviously doesn't need all of that. But you know what? I DO! My mom is pretty old, I'll give her to a museum for $15,000 dollars worth of computer love. Just send those computers to...

  • Sure, as long as it doesn't slow down SETI too much.
  • Well, according to this book that's just miraculously appeared on my desk in a blinding flash, you were first up against the wall when the revolution came...

    james
  • My SO interns at one of the most respected building law firms in Boston. They have recently computerised - only one computer is connected to the internet (via a dial-up modem). Each morning a secretary prints out the emails for the partners and associates, who dictate there responses. The dictaphone tapes then go back out to the seccies and, well you can guess the rest. Luckily the firm she will be starting with back home in London is rather more clued up [roweandmaw.co.uk].

    The senior partner at my mother's firm boasts that he never plugs his laptop into the mains "because that's how you get viruses".

    The sad thing is these people end up as judges and then sit through computer crime and intellectual property cases...

    Nick

  • Watch this poor lawyer's productivity go straight to hell as he suddenly catches up with 22 years of counterproductive advances in business computing.

    He'll be begging for his Altair back within a week.

  • I bet his productivity drops like a rock.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law

  • What they left out.... (Score:3)

    by DonkPunch ( 30957 ) on Friday August 20, 1999 @01:06PM (#1734621) Homepage Journal
    They packed the Altair in styrofoam and bubble-wrap and gingerly loaded it onto a Dell truck. The winner smiled as he looked around at his $15,000 in new hardware....

    ...then ran out of the office after the truck, screaming, "Wait! I've still got to get my data off that thing! WAIT!"
  • Look all he needs someone to do his show him how to double click the little icon for whatever word processor he's going to use. Then he will type whatever he needs and have someone show him how to print it. I doubt he'll save whatever it was to disk.

    He may have trouble putting new paper and ink in the printer but thats not really a software problem.
  • It can't possibly have been 256Kb. The Commodore 64 came out in 1982 with 64Kb, which was "more than any home user would ever need".

    But sure, 256 bytes is not much if you really want to use it for your business. I guess this Altair might have come originally with 256 bytes, and it got expanded a bit over the years. And it might have some additional ROM.

    Pocket calculators usually have 4-bits CPUs and probably less than 256 bytes of RAM, and they can be very useful.
  • Just what every company needs, a customer that buys a new system every 25 years.

    Guess they can write him off from buying anything new. Wonder if he got a printer with the deal.

  • Remember the Commodore 128? 128K of RAM with a 6502 derivative CPU (8510? I think.) Though 512K of RAM would have been like 20 empty universes to play with back then...


    The 128 had an 8502, which was derived from the 6510, which in turn was derived from the 6502. The 6510 had bank switching as well. The Commodore 64 (which had a 6510) needed that because it had 64kB of RAM, plus some ROM. Bank switching was necessary to be able to read all of the RAM. The 8502 had more advanced bank switching apparently. And there was a 512kB expander for the 128.

    The 128 was a truly weird machine. I still have mine... (with the original "q isn't a letter" ROM-bug)

    It's interesting to note that the 1541 (the Commodore 64's original disk drive) had a built-in 6502 processor, and (I think) 4kb of RAM. That alone would be an upgrade from an Altair in tems of computing power, but the UI of a lone 1541 kinda sucks... :-)
  • And, you'll get a kick-ass beowulf cluster out of these babies...
    --
  • I'm still puzzling over how this guy could be churning out wills, etc. on this thing.. sheesh!

    It shoomed on over my head...

  • Oh, I remember those babies! And the dual-headed external 5.25" inch drives. Those drives are something special. If you take them apart, you'll discover that they're really a small computer of their own, complete with a 6510 CPU, and 2 or 3K worth of RAM.

    There wasn't enough ROM space inside the PET to put a full disk operating system, so what Commodore did was put their entire disk operating system inside the disk drive, and the disk drive talks to the PET via a serial cable.

    The PET may not be really that old. I remember hacking on them in high school, between 1984 and 1986.
    --

  • You can't run Wordstar on one of those! Have you ever seen an Altair 8800b? If it's anything more primitive out there it would have to be an Imsai (used in War Games if I'm not mistaken). My old Nascom-II from about the same time was almost advanced compared to it (2KB RAM, yay!). Running Wordstar on it would be like running Word on your pocket calculator. TA
  • So it looks like Woz was wrong. There were computers with integrated
    keyboard (IBM 5100) before Apple I.
  • They obviously meant 256 bytes, although that wasn't much even for the time. But you certainly couldn't get 256 KB RAM in any small computer in 1976. My own had 2KB and I wished I had enough money to buy the 16KB RAM kit. Remember that the first IBM PC that came in 1981 (five years later is a long time in the computer age!) only had 16KB RAM. Sixteen kilobytes.
    TA
  • didn't HP call it's reprogamable caluclators that it made in the late sixties to early seventies a Personal Computer?

    am I right, or just mistaken?
  • NO you couldn't get 256KB at the time, whatever way you tried! Not only would it be super-extremely expensive, nobody had ever even heard about any microcomputer with such an amount of memory. Even the Alpha LSI minicomputer we used when I was studying at the time only had 16KB (not RAM, it was actually real core memory.. non-volatile, bonus points for those who can explain what core memory is).
    It came with 256 bytes (static) RAM alright, however he certainly got himself a little more memory after a while.
    TA
  • Great story, but you forgot to tell how it ended.. did you find what caused the BDOS error on A:?
    TA
  • Maybe its time for the 256 byte operating competition - or is this taking the idea of micro-kernels a bit too far! I would be surprised if any of the current operating systems could even fit one part of a micro-kernel in to the 32 kb of my BBC Micro computer (still my favourite computer). What could an IBM-compatible PC [usefully] do in 256 bytes... (it would take a very efficient character set to get this message into under 256 bytes!)
  • The C-128D wasn't exactly a predecessor to the IBM PC, though. The C64, however, was, and although the system didn't say "personal computer" on it, I am fairly certain that the box it came in did.
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
  • The main reason you could actually use it for something with less than a kilobyte of RAM was that at that time computers didn't necessarily have an operating system. The Altair and the Imsai came with just some switches at the front, what you did was basically that you just set the byte value (one switch per bit, 1 or 0), then you set the address with another set of switches (or sometimes it could be automatically counting and you first had to specify a start address, this depends on the computer. I don't remember exactly what the Altair did put I think I still have the '75 magazine with the details) and then you pressed a key to enter that value into RAM at the right position. After having entered a bunch of byte values starting from, say, address zero, you just set the program counter to zero and pressed the 'run' key (setting the program counter means to put the value into the PC register). That's it. You could get a lot done that way, I never did it on an Altair (it was just a dream for me at the time), but as late as 1982 I did essentially the same thing on a 16-bit minicomputer, it had those switches despite actually having a real solid operating system. For debugging some programs it was actually easier to enter a little test loop from the front switches and watch the blinkenlights to see what happened (the 'blinkenlights' would show the value of the current memory address, one light per bit). You could single step the computer that way.
    However, the Altair could be extended with both more RAM and also with the, at the time, great operating system CP/M. CP/M was a hacker's dream operating system, you could quite easily port it yourself to a new computer. You would just write your own BIOS, the functions needed were very clearly described in the documentation, then you loaded BDOS which would run using the BIOS entry points. A lot of this software came with full commented source.
    TA
  • the guy was still *using* the computer
    Why not? There's very little that could be done in Office 97 that couldn't be done in, say, Wordstar (which still holds a place in my heart, tucked inside the left ventricle). The main difference -- unless your OLEing all over the place -- is that in Wordstar you had to know how to spell. Of course, you needed to know a bit about grammar, but not as much as you do nowadays so you can contradict Office's[1] view of the English language.

    [1]Not just Office, of course; they're all shite. But who can resist an opportunity to pick on Microsoft?
  • I can see using an old computer, but one with 256 bytes of memory? How do you word process on that, when you can't even store a full page in memory? Dump it to tape each line? Someone should interview this guy.
  • What kind of drives does this thing have? Those 9 inch super-floppy disks? Or maybe a tape drive? Anyone want to enligten me on this one? =] I wonder what kind of programs are on there, and how long they took to boot. What about the size? Anyone know how big and how much this product weighs? I'm sure they didn't have even MFM/RLL drives back then, so I don't suppose it had any form of a hard drive?
  • Yes, Robert X Cringely found the Altair 8800 serial #2 in the early '90s and filmed it for his documentary. (serial #1 was lost in the mail)

    Way to go, Dell.

  • The Dell press release on this [dell.com] quotes the owner as saying

    It became a bottomless pit because of constant upgrades.

    so maybe he'd upgraded it to 64K or something (or whatever the maximum was on that machine) at some point in its life.

  • Does he have any idea what that Altair is worth???? Those things are going on Ebay for serious money, and will only continue increasing in value as a collectors item. Never mind getting his data off that machine, he should be thinking about how to maintain and restore and it to pristine shape!
  • *yawn*

    I never considered that the doc would fit into 256 bytes. I did, however, wonder how he would write enough code to read the external data source, somehow display the result, handle I/O for editing of the doc...and still fit into those 256 bytes. It would still be a hell of a trick.

    And, hey look! Turns out that he had upgraded the machine to 48K. So I guess he couldn't do it in 256bytes after all. Who's the fucking moron now, you fucking moron?


  • Geez, you kids.

    I got my first job programming very similar systems. The problem is that the 8080 had an 16 bit address space, so the most you could theoretically address was 64K, which very few people had (kind of like having 4GB of RAM now, it could be done but most people don't). You had to be efficient, and think in terms of saving bytes. I remember hacking TurboDos (a CP/M derivative) to put the time of day on my Wyse terminal; what a blast; maybe 30-50 lines of assembly.

    Back in those days you really communed directly with the bare machine; some other guy's cruft almost never came between you and the computer. Sweet Jesus, what a time we had. Back then, you could no practically everything there was to know about everything. Nobodody cared if you had a degree, and nobody was handing out "certifications" in other people's crufty systems (e.g., MSCE). You just swaggered up to the job interview with someone who had no more idea of what it took to program a computer than what it took to build a time machine. Well, I guess some things don't change.

    Of course the machines I worked on had a princely amount of RAM -- 16K. When we eventually got 32 the era of 32K or even 64K, we thought we had the world by the balls. By then, we started to have Winchesters too -- 5MB capacity with 10 inch platters.

    256 bytes is a little slim even for that era, though, unless you were just loading machine code through the front panel switches (no ROM -- god that was fun; we used to be able load the bootstrap program faster than we could have typed the assembly; I really miss the blinking lights, which were way cooler than translucent cases IMO; besides, my case is never on my computer). Certainly this guy didn't have CP/M with that little RAM. Even if you did all your work in machine language, you'd still be hard pressed to do much in 256 bytes of memory, I'll admit, but you'd be surprised at what you could do with 2K. At 16K and with floppy disks, runing on a 5MHz 8 bit processor, we did tons of useful stuff: word processing, spreadsheets, databases, accounting, and games (text based, of course).

    As far as 2MHz concerned -- these babies did much less per clock tick than a modern processor; no superscalar execution here. Also remember this was with an eight bit word and instruction set; the S100 data bus was only 8 bits wide too. If you had a 16bit operand (very common since 8 bit ints aren't too useful), you had to fetch the operand in two cycles. Even the higher end computers those days weren't any great shakes; I used to start compiling a thousand line C program on our mini and I'd have time to go for a walk in the park, and if it compiled OK, I'd go out for a cup of coffee because linking would take almost as long.

    Around the same time, we did a lot of work on System III Unix (on minis, of course). I remember being excited about Sys V because it had this new fangled thing called a symbolic debugger that would actually allow you to look at the values of variables instead of having to scheme it out from a stack pointer offset.

    The amazing thing was despite the crude tools (with the exception of Emacs, of course) and hardware, System III was way more stable and a greater pleasure to program in than Windows is today.


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