Vintage computer fun

[Tony L]

Haha! That is more fun, proper obscenities on public display.

The best trick came a lot later; MS Office (or similar) auto-correct is a prank goldmine, e.g. quietly set it to replace ‘the’ with ‘the f***ing’ and it will give a whole new creative slant to any documents anyone attempts to write! It is amazing how many folk don’t know what has happened/how to put it back. You can replace a word with an image too, e.g. someone types the boss’s name, gets a picture of a camel’s butt. You just copy the .jpg into the ‘replace’ dialogue box (legitimately useful for headers, signatures etc).

 

[richardg]

My kind of childishness....

 

[Marchbanks]

Anyone else do this at school?

10 PRINT "Dave (or whoever) is a xxxx"
20 GOTO 10

Or - how to make an opening title sequence.

 

[MJS]

Some great stories here, especially regarding the Manchester machines and Tom Kilburn. If I had more spare time I'd be helping restoration efforts at my local computing history centre which just happens to be Bletchley Park.

I started off with a Vic-20 and soon learned its limits, but most of my friends used Spectrums so eventually got one of those. The posh kids all had BBCs.
My school had a room full of Electrons with home-made interfaces wired into a RM380z acting as a server IIRC. This was in a Nobel Laureates former classroom (at least one PFM member knows this room as we've mentioned it before).
From there the local college again had BBCs everywhere, with disk drives, wow. I learnt 6502 machine code on an EmmaII micro board. I actually enjoyed that immensely.
Home machines from that era were a crappy Amstrad PC, followed by an Amiga 600, then 1200 pimped to the rafters. After I left Naim (themselves running on a PDP11 in a cupboard) I joined a company who were a household name in computer graphics at the time. Sadly they lost a court case against what is now the household name in computer graphics and are a shadow of what they once were. They had a shed load of machines and disk technology I'd never even heard of before. That was an eye opener and quite handy for my pimped-up A1200.

I'm a Mac man now. Yet still have a number of Raspberry Pis around the house on various duties.

 

[Tony L]

Some great stories here, especially regarding the Manchester machines and Tom Kilburn. If I had more spare time I'd be helping restoration efforts at my local computing history centre which just happens to be Bletchley Park.

The National Museum Of Computing in the huts behind Bletchley is a truly wonderful thing. So many exhibits and a great volunteer-driven culture with the attitude to get stuff fixed, up and running and in use so folk can see it working. The star exhibit for me is the Harwell Dekatron in its fully working splendor.

I don’t understand the politics behind it, but there seems to be a lot of ill-feeling between the Bletchley Park museum and TNMOC, who both share the same site. A real Judean People’s Front vs. People’s Front Of Judea thing going on there, which is very sad to see. Both have very different cultures, Bletchley being a modern heavily-curated/story-boarded ‘visitor experience’, TNMOC being something far looser and to my mind more adult and interesting being driven by real enthusiasts, but it is a shame there is not more overlap. I need to get down there again at some point as I want to have a play with the EDSAC replica!

 

[Tony L]

I found a mini-jack to 5 pin DIN lead in my ‘Quad Leads’ box so I’ve just tried using my iPad as an Electron tape drive as detailed here on 8BitKick and it works! I had a quick game of Pacman (Acornsoft Snapper) and its great! I’m still utterly crap at playing it, which comes as no surprise, but great fun as I’ve not had a go since the early ‘80s.

It took me a couple of goes to get it to load; it needed far more headphone volume on the iPad than I’d have guessed, I started off at about 20% and ended up at 75-80% before it worked without any errors. I’ve no absolutely idea how a headphone output relates to whatever a cassette input is voltage wise, so I started very low as I didn’t want to fry anything! By saying that it is pretty quiet playing an iPhone or whatever through a line-level hi-fi preamp input, so I guess it makes sense. I just didn’t want to break anything.

This is a superb idea/site, it turns any working old Electron, which can be had from eBay for £20-50 typically, into a rather cool retro 8-bit games machine without having to spend a fortune hunting down old cassettes that may or may not work. I will have a go with Elite later...

 

[gavreid]

Wouldn't it be cool to get one of these. An old boss had two in pieces, laying around in the corridor - they had cost him so much that he just couldn't bear to toss them out!

 

[Seeker_UK]

Wouldn't it be cool to get one of these. An old boss had two in pieces, laying around in the corridor - they had cost him so much that he just couldn't bear to toss them out!

 

[Tony L]

Wouldn't it be cool to get one of these. An old boss had two in pieces, laying around in the corridor - they had cost him so much that he just couldn't bear to toss them out!

I remember seeing (a smaller) PDP11 in a skip back in the early ‘90s. I thought it was a huge shame at the time even though I barely knew what it was. Not a lot I could do as I just lived in a little flat.

It is only fairly recently computer conservation has become ‘a thing’ with people finally grasping they are as historically important as say castles, looms, steam engines, aircraft or anything else. There is a very healthy home enthusiast scene built around the home old computers (Apple II, Commodore 64, BBC etc) and the consoles (Atari, Sega, Nintendo etc), plus we have a few museums exhibiting larger vintage computers, e.g. THMOC, the Science Museum London has a nice PDP8 on display amongst other things including a Ferranti Pegasus, MSI has a PDP11, Pegasus, some Eliott kit etc, though it is sadly in storage at present. I’d love to collect loads of the smaller home stuff myself as it is great fun, but storage and ongoing maintenance would be challenging!

 

[gavreid]

Or at the other end of the scale, my Dad had one of these Osborne-1 'portable' computers for work. CP/M OS. I learnt Fortran on it in the early eighties...

 

[Arkless Electronics]

A well-understood phenomenon

Nail on head!

 

[Paul R]

The National Museum Of Computing in the huts behind Bletchley is a truly wonderful thing. So many exhibits and a great volunteer-driven culture with the attitude to get stuff fixed, up and running and in use so folk can see it working. The star exhibit for me is the Harwell Dekatron in its fully working splendor.

I don’t understand the politics behind it, but there seems to be a lot of ill-feeling between the Bletchley Park museum and TNMOC, who both share the same site. A real Judean People’s Front vs. People’s Front Of Judea thing going on there, which is very sad to see. Both have very different cultures, Bletchley being a modern heavily-curated/story-boarded ‘visitor experience’, TNMOC being something far looser and to my mind more adult and interesting being driven by real enthusiasts, but it is a shame there is not more overlap. I need to get down there again at some point as I want to have a play with the EDSAC replica!

The relationship seems to have thawed, BP has gone full 'National Trust House' style visit then stop in the gift shop, whereas TNMoC is clearly a museum. Apparently no plans to reinstitute ticket sharing or open the gate though. The Bombe is now at TNMoC and is a really excellent attraction, they have been loaned an Enigma now so circle is almost complete (there's a whole less told story about the use of punch card equipment to sort messages for matches that made them suitable for statistical processing and then Bombe menu. Perhaps that will come.)

FWIW Edsac will be off-limits over part of the winter, something to do with dealing with the 1940s asbestos in the roof.

 

[Jim Audiomisc]

Nail on head!

Yes. My pet peeve, though, about such 'student reports' was the ones that had nothing much in the way of punctuation, or paragraph breaks - or even page numbers. Usually in teeny text. (sigh)

 

[gintonic]

I remember seeing (a smaller) PDP11 in a skip back in the early ‘90s. I thought it was a huge shame at the time even though I barely knew what it was. Not a lot I could do as I just lived in a little flat.

It is only fairly recently computer conservation has become ‘a thing’ with people finally grasping they are as historically important as say castles, looms, steam engines, aircraft or anything else. There is a very healthy home enthusiast scene built around the home old computers (Apple II, Commodore 64, BBC etc) and the consoles (Atari, Sega, Nintendo etc), plus we have a few museums exhibiting larger vintage computers, e.g. THMOC, the Science Museum London has a nice PDP8 on display amongst other things including a Ferranti Pegasus, MSI has a PDP11, Pegasus, some Eliott kit etc, though it is sadly in storage at present. I’d love to collect loads of the smaller home stuff myself as it is great fun, but storage and ongoing maintenance would be challenging!

back in the 1990s I used go attend the odd Computer Conservation Society meetings/talks and in steam events at Science Museum, but I got bored of the political griping griping.

I'd love go see working Elliot 801. I have a load documents etc from Elliot, including photos of the we had in our lab.

 

[stephen bennett]

Or at the other end of the scale, my Dad had one of these Osborne-1 'portable' computers for work. CP/M OS. I learnt Fortran on it in the early eighties...

I did my first coding on one of these.

Then this.

Stephen

 

[Darth Vader]

back in the 1990s I used go attend the odd Computer Conservation Society meetings/talks and in steam events at Science Museum, but I got bored of the political griping griping.

I'd love go see working Elliot 801. I have a load documents etc from Elliot, including photos of the we had in our lab.

That was the first computer that I got my hands on at Uni. We programmed it in Algol and I still have the scars as it was so badly taught. The 801 came with 8KB of core memory and filled a box the size of a large sideboard. However the compiler took up most of that 8K to run! The first program we ran was to calculate the prime numbers and after the first handful it go slower and sloower and slooower.

Some years later when I got hold of a TI SR-56 programmable calculator it was the first program I entered and this pocket sized device was so much faster than that 801.

Cheers,

DV

 

[gintonic]

That was the first computer that I got my hands on at Uni. We programmed it in Algol and I still have the scars as it was so badly taught. The 801 came with 8KB of core memory and filled a box the size of a large sideboard. However the compiler took up most of that 8K to run! The first program we ran was to calculate the prime numbers and after the first handful it go slower and sloower and slooower.

Some years later when I got hold of a TI SR-56 programmable calculator it was the first program I entered and this pocket sized device was so much faster than that 801.

Cheers,

DV

which Uni?

 

[Tony L]

For fans of 80s retro-computing the BBC’s ‘The Computer Program’ series is up on YouTube in its entirety:

This was all part of the launch propaganda for the BBC Micro, the computing in schools initiative etc and makes for an interesting period piece. I vaguely remember it, but I’d long left school by ‘82. It has a Kraftwerk theme tune, as every good TV program should.

 

[Cesare]

Wouldn't it be cool to get one of these. An old boss had two in pieces, laying around in the corridor - they had cost him so much that he just couldn't bear to toss them out!

I had a smaller friend of it, a PDP-11/23 for a number of years, running RT-11. I always planned to get the earliest version of unix I could find running on it, and was slowly building up the bits to get it into a suitable state (with a fujitsu eagle 19 inch rack mount HD). Twin 8 inch floppies, and quite a bit of RAM eventually having rewired the backplane.

It ended up a bit of a drag getting it between places when I was first working, and I ended up leaving it behind with a friend when I moved out. Not sure what happened to it after that.

Having a quick look online I found that the commodore 128D that I used to use when I was writing some C64 stuff in the later years go for real amount of money. Funny, the one I had kept overheating and was a pain, so the case was normally unscrewed so your could push the chips in if it started playing up. I have fond memories of those days, but also I realise they were all a bit crap too. Strange.

 

[Joe P]

I was taking pictures at the computer museum launch at work a while ago.

The school used to have an IBM 360 Model 75, a ginormous computer that filled an entire room...

... but the only thing that remains is the console thingy from the CPU.

We also have a ginormous slide rule.

Everything was big back them — computers, slide rules, speakers...

Joe