15 Oct
2025
15 Oct
'25
11:01 p.m.
On 2025-10-15 3:48 p.m., Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
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
Computer magazines like Kilobyte, Byte and Dr. Dobb's was my reading
material.
Only with online material have I been reading the trade magazines of the
70's.The surplus AD's like used 1K x 36 bit core plane comes to mind here.
Murray 🙂
Ben.