Have you seen Droste Week on RetroBattlestations?

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Thu Jun 18 18:01:18 CDT 2015


Chris Osborn wrote:

>[...] I thought it would be fun to do a challenge where people don't just
> post a picture of their computer, but they display the picture of their
> computer *on* their computer and post that!

Not quite within these rules, but here are two cases of old computers
showing drawings of themselves back when they were new:

Alan Kay's PhD thesis was about the FLEX Machine he developed with Ed
Cheadle. These "screen captures" include a drawing of the the machine
itself from around 1968 or 1969:

http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/wp-content/uploads/6.jpg

Here is my own Merlin 2, a 68000 based Smalltalk computer, with a
drawing of itself in 1987:

http://smalltalk.org.br/fotos/inova11.jpg

Drawing with a keyboard was awkward enough that I didn't bother making
the chip layout very accurate, not the drawn keyboard either. The colors
are wrong because I was playing the the color pallet after the drawing
was finished (http://smalltalk.org.br/fotos/inova12.jpg shows a
different setting) and I don't have a picture of the setting where the
boards are green and the keyboard white, unfortunately. The drawing also
shows the original Ethernet based configuration instead of the one with
the adapted PC bus on which the drawing is being shown.

-- Jecel



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