16 Oct
2025
16 Oct
'25
1:58 a.m.
On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 8:17 PM ben via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 2025-10-15 3:48 p.m., Murray McCullough via cctalk
wrote:
As a person who could claim to be a "qualified amateur" historian I am
trying to get what you're saying here. I throw the flag on a blanket
statement "what classic/vintage computers were..", especially when the
facts you present are not really accurate historically.
First of all, and I have said this before, vintage means, "of an era" so
it's more historically correct to use a more specific term like vintage
70's micocomputing or vintage 8-bit computers, etc. to describe what *you*
mean by "vintage computers" Bare in mind in the 70s the far more
significant dollars spent, marketshare, bits through wires and however
you'd want to measure was within mini and mainframe computing, in
particular manufactured by IBM. Your statement "...the OS was DOS and
its ink + CP/M.." is totally incorrect for the 70s, but that might just be
a typo on your part. Not sure what DOS you're talking about specifically
but IBM DOS was not sold until the early 1980s. There were many OS's in
the 60's and 70's, but the huge majority of these, the significant ones
were installed on mainframes and minicomputers.
I honestly don't have a beef with your opinions, I can't police everyone's
knowledge, but I suggest you need to do some readin' on the subject first.
Start with Steve Levy's book Hackers followed by "A History of Modern
Computing" by Paul Ceruzzi.
I hope you take my comments as a friendly feedback to your statements
Bill
Hi everyone,
According to historians, and I consider myself one, let us consider what
classic/vintage computers were: The 1970s saw the three amigos: Apple II,
TRS-80 and Commodore PET and the OS was DOS and its ilk + CP/M. The
1980’s
saw the Dells, HPs and many others with MS-DOS
& IBM PC-DOS from QDOS. We
saw this and behold ’bring on the clones’(I just had to say this!) The
era
of old computers saw one generation building on
the shoulders of giants
who
designed these wayback computers(with apologies
to Wayback Machine).
Today’s PCs and ARM machines are just the latest iteration of this
theory(by the way not mine).
The DG NOVA computer is a better example when I think of the 70's for
computing. It was one of the early mass production designs.
Before that computers where hand built for the customer, with SSI chips
if any.The IBM 1130,PDP 9, PDP 8, come to mind.
The 8' floppy drive and the smaller shit was just the right size for
micros that had no memory to spare for disk buffers.
Big drives where for the real computers, with FORTRAN IV, no MICROSOFT
BASIC here.
Happy computing