Hi everyone — glad I found this place.
I go back a ways with all of this. A lot of the machines you folks restore were just the machines on our desks when I was coming up, and I spent my working life on the software side of the industry. Never really shook the bug. These days I keep a home lab humming, tinker with whatever’s in reach, and enjoy watching people here bring old iron back to life — there’s something satisfying about it that the throwaway stuff today just doesn’t have.
Mostly I’m here to look around, learn the neighborhood, and swap the occasional story. Looking forward to it.
— Jeffry
I remember when the Desk was the Computer. Welcome now to the hardware and software of retro machines.
My story of the day.
I worked for a while on a home built CP/M machine. The 8" floppy would often stick
so you needed to give it a good rap. Too good a rap and the machine would power off and then
reset.
Hi,
I worked in IT since 1979. I wrote a book that might interest you. It’s called This is how I saw it go down. How the mainframe went into your pocket is the thesis but the focus is really on the IBM PC. Remember the IBM PC? You wont find one today. IBM Gave it away. This is how I saw it go down
I wrote my first code summer of 1959. 26 lines of code to test a programmable bit picker of my design. Summer job. The companies product was digital controls of industrial plants, mainly steel companies. I had prior knowledge of digital (but not that word) by my interest in railroad signalling. All relays. And massive ones, 5 lbs each. They had to stay proven given a high speed train literally shaking the earth 5 yards away. But without knowing the word ‘digital’ or the later transistor stuff, I learned its goal & need. So my whole software experience was that 26 lines of code, and my whole hardware experience was electro-mechanical, relays.
Ben what did you do for a living back when the desk was the computer?
You beat me to it by a bunch. 1979 I was wiring boards for an Alphabetic Interpreter. I moved from that to BAL, to COBOL, to C, C++, C#, Java, XCODE SwitfUI. I have been working with AI a lot lately.
I was student at the time taking Electronics Engineering at the time, in the Early 1980’s.
The college had a IBM-1130 computer in a desk (mostly). A Card Reader here, Printer there
a Disk on the side, much like today. Nice and clean and with free A/C, unlike today’s USB mess of cables
and Wall warts. They later replaced it with VAX that onlyComputer.Science people could use,not me.
A few years later Computer Science was replaced with Business Admin and PC’s popped instead.
I did have a access to a PDP/e,PDP/s and VT 76? for a while, but no free time in the lab.
A 1802 was bread board project. The lack of access to a larger computer then, then has driven me
to want a 18 or 20 bit computer.
Ben.
You must be around my age lol. I was in school 1981-1984.
The thing that was cool is in 1979 a guy brought in an Apple prototype. I have no idea where he got it but there it was running VisCalc. The first spreadsheet.
Notice in 1980 most of the PC’s if not all were IBM PC/XT. It came standard with 256k and a 10m HD but was priced out of the market. A year later the same machine with the same case without the logo was sold as brand X for < $1k.
The Windows/Macintosh/XeroxParc story is the one that really makes me laugh. Jobs steals from Xerox, Gates steals from Job, Jobs is late and Gates beats him to the market so jobs calls gates a thief. Gates replies how I can I steal from you what you don’t own.
Then OS/2 joint effort and split. OS/2 dies and NT moves on to become what is now the base windows operating system.
It was a war for sure.