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Home computers -a history

I bought an Amstrad PCW - which was the dedicated wordprocessor computer. It was the most reliable and easiest computer to use and I loved it. Wish I still had it now. A wonderful machine. Pre internet.

Gordon
 
Been watching the "Halt and Catch Fire" TV series, about the first "portable" computers. But I don't know what is good history and what is fiction. I also tried the command HCF on my Linux PC but nothing happened.
 
PaulMB said:
Been watching the "Halt and Catch Fire" TV series, about the first "portable" computers. But I don't know what is good history and what is fiction. I also tried the command HCF on my Linux PC but nothing happened.
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It’s a wonderful series, I really enjoyed it right through to the end. It borrows heavily from computer history, but as an amalgam of many companies, technologies and technologies, though you can guess a few key players! More on the term ‘halt and catch fire’ here on Wikipedia.
 
A friend got contacted a few years ago for photos of an IBM mainframe he had.

turned out it was the production team for halt and catch fire.
 
Eh lad, some of the stories I could tell...

I worked on IBM mainframes for many years which were great at handling 100s of concurrent users and huge databases with millions of records. For really heavy processing though it had to run overnight when the users had (hopefully) gone to bed. This meant overnight call out if anything failed.

Came in one morning and everyone looked a bit quiet and glum. Someone had been called out at 4AM because a program had started running at 11PM and still wasn't finished. He looked at the program and worked out what the mistake was and realised that it would take the best part of 12 hours in total to complete. So he decided to cancel the program, thus making the database try to roll back all the updates that it had done.

This involved reading back through the database log tapes for the previous 5 hours. But the database log records all overnight activity, not just for this one program so the tapes are huge and there were about 10 of them. Also it turned out that the tapes from 11 to midnight had already gone offsite so someone had to get on a motorbike for 3 hours to get them back.

End result: Customers had no access to the system all day. But that happened fairly regularly back then :)

But if you tell that to the kids of today they don't believe you :D
 
Tony L said:
It’s a wonderful series, I really enjoyed it right through to the end. It borrows heavily from computer history, but as an amalgam of many companies, technologies and technologies, though you can guess a few key players! More on the term ‘halt and catch fire’ here on Wikipedia.
Click to expand...

I was very disappointed that on the 6800 'boxes' I learnt to programme m/c code with (I was 'only' doing electronic engineering so didn't need anything as sophisticated as 68000 m/c code), H&CF had been disabled. Turns out it was never a very impressive result anyway.

Cool soundtrack to the series from ex-TD member Paul Haslinger.
 
Funny , this is the first I have heard of HCF commands. And I lived through the early microcomputer age, being the first EE student at my uni to play with a 16 bit Micro for my final project (1977, it was a TI 9900 unit on a huge development board that I communicated with by a teletype machine). I wrote a program that monitored heartbeats and used a software digital filter to analyse it. Then spent a few years playing with mostly 6502 processors and systems at home whilst working as a computer engineer for ICL on the largest mainframes they made. I also spent evenings building Acorn computers from kits for a shop in Manchester to sell as ready to run. That paid good money for a while....

By about 1984 I had been working for a Californian minicomputer company for a couple of years and I remember my boss, the service/technical director, lugging in the 'new' IBM PC we had all been reading about in Computer Weekly (remember that?) and Personal Computer World. We took it apart and kind of knew that the world was about to change. Incidentally, somewhere I have a copy of the very first edition of PCW.

My kids still think I must have come from outer space to have been able to do such stuff. Can't remember much of it now - and a PC that goes wrong results in a call to our very own in house IT geek, who is amazing and I wonder where the heck he learns it all from.
 
AT&T Unix contained the error message "lp0 on fire", which indicates a serious jam on the line-printer device, that could potentially cause a fire with certain types of high-speed printers (drum printers) in use at the time.

I was too young to be in the gold-rush years of the home computer boom (I got my first computer, an Amstrad CPC464, in December 1984), but I was just entering the the software business at the end of it, in the mid-1990s when the death of Atari and Commodore pretty much killed the "home" computer market. I had, and still have, an Atari Falcon030, which was the last computer that I bought completely with my own money (everything since then has been either employer-subsidised, or written off against my income-tax).
 
My NASCOM home built Z80 computer (3000+ soldered joints) pre-dates the 'PET'. I remember going to what was then called 'micro computer' show at the Royal Horticultural Halls that later morphed into the BBC Micro event.

I still have that machine plus a ZX81 and external memory pack (built from kits to save dosh) and of course a BBC micro complete with Solidisk sideways RAM and external dual floppy disk drive. I have a load of tapes with ZX81 games on them but 'lost' the tape player over time and house moves. The tapes are probably NBG by now.

Cheers,

DV
 
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Darth Vader said:
My NASCOM home built Z80 computer (3000+ soldered joints) pre-dates the 'PET'. I remember going to what was then called 'micro computer' show at the Royal Horticultural Halls that later morphed into the BBC Micro event.

I still have that machine plus a ZX81 and external memory pack (built from kits to save dosh) and of course a BBC micro complete with Solidisk sideways RAM ad external dual floppy disk drive. I have a load of tapes with ZX81 games on them but 'lost' the tape player over time and house moves. The tapes are probably NBG by now.

Cheers,

DV
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We used NASCOM Z80 machines at college and learned about machine code in hex on them. I remember trying to make led lights do the Knightrider car thing.
 
cutting42 said:
We used NASCOM Z80 machines at college and learned about machine code in hex on them. I remember trying to make led lights do the Knightrider car thing.
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Exactly! I remember the first power on after the build and checking voltages etc then tuning the TV to around the correct channel and then seeing the NAS-SYS monitor prompt and thinking what next? Thats when I had to learn how computers worked, registers, flags, memory maps, ports, PIO, UART, interrupts etc and writing in machine code.

Later when they became available I had Xtal Basic and Nascom Pascal but still most programming was done in machine code until we had the ZEAP assembler -Yay! I still have my EPROM programmer and phase-locked-loop high-speed tape reader/writer that I built all those years ago.

The original kit the PCB and all components less power supply was £197.50 in I think 1977 and for that you got 2KB of static RAM (less than 1KB available for programs/code). Later I added (once available) 64KB of dynamic RAM. Money and time well invested and what wasn't foreseen is that it caused a major change in career from teaching to IT.

Cheers,

DV
 
Seeker_UK said:
Simple answer:
sir-clive-sinclair_1494610c.jpg
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twizy-coupe.jpg

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
 
I always stayed on the prebuilt cream side of PCs ie I did not assemble a PC from components until I wanted to replace my PS/2 Model 80 with a faster bigger machine. The model 80 had had two editions of mother board added to it from a company in Austin Texas - a Reply board, very fast compared to the standard machine.
My first play with the PC was in Boca Raton Fl in 1983. The person we were staying with had access to lots of software that he was "evaluating". Evaluating software became quite a past time with my work collegues back in the UK after we bought IBM PCs relatively cheaply with the employee purchase scheme.
Interesting to think that I spent my own money to prepare myself for the final 10 years of employment. The investment paid back many times.
 
david ellwood said:
Most influential computer of all time?

Or maybe the Archimedes because of RISC and ARM.
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Given how many ARM descendants there are in use, and how smart Sophie Wilson is, that's what would get my vote.

Its a curious selection of photos on the Grauniad page. I assume the book has far more examples/
 
Derek Wright said:
The model 80 had had two editions of mother board added to it from a company in Austin Texas - a Reply board, very fast compared to the standard machine.
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Interesting, I’d never heard of any third-party upgrades to a PS/2! I assume it did away with the MCA architecture?

I liked the PS/2s, they were really nice machines. Stunningly well built with some very nice design features and sharp styling. Great quality plastics too, they haven’t turned yellow in the way most of the cheap competition. Using a PS/2 case for a modern server would be quite a cool project! I wish I’d kept my old Model 30 DOS box, bought second-hand in 89 IIRC. That was my inroad to computing; no games machine, but good enough to run COBOL, Borland Pascal, WP 5.1, dBase III etc.
 
Its an A3010 in its ugly pyjamas. That’s a second gen Archimedes isn’t it?

PS And no matter what the picture looks like we all know its now bright yellow and its leaked battery acid has burned through the mainboard!
 
Ah, the good old IBM PC. It was my first PC, and I got it through a corporate purchase program in early 1982. Was working for a company that provided custom financial and manufacturing solutions through a time sharing service (STSC, later Manugistics).

All of our software was written in APL, and IBM supported APL from the PC's first ship date. I recall that the interpreter was almost entirely compatible with those found on the company's two mainframes, an Amdahl V8 (MVS) and an IBM 3084 (VM), so developing on the PC and then testing/releasing on the mainframe was pretty straight forward.

I also vaguely remember upgrading from floppy drive only to a hard drive. IIRC, the process was anything but straight forward!
 
The Reply main board for the PS/2 Mod 80 was fully MCA - that is why I bought them so that the other components I had installed would continue to work
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/ps2_80486/

I cannot remember the specs now but it had a much faster processor than in the original version. I upgraded the Mod 80 I had in the office and suitably impressed the other members of the team. Reply came out with a further version of the main board that was even faster so I put that in the home machine. I was able to test aplications much faster.
These Reply mainboards were Y2K compliant which surprised the testers when looking at a machine that appeared to be 8 or so years old
THese boards cost about £1000 I think and had to be specially imported from the US.
 
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