Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

Lots of perfectly useable computers started out as little more than toys. more below ... Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.ukTo: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.orgSent: Friday, April 26, 2002 5:26 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) microelectronics Yes we were, and yes it does, but the timeline on which I was focusing was 1980, because there were several milestones associated with that. One of them was, IIRC, the release of the "last" version of Apple Dos, and the other was the emergence of the half-height 5-1.4" diskette drive. Another was the drop in price of 8" DSDD drives to under $500 through distribution. I have pretty good recollection of some of what was going on in '80 because I spent the first half of that year mostly sitting at home fooling with computer hardware and straining to grow back a leg I'd lost in a traffic accident the previous year. I bought a couple of rather large, heavy, populated dual disk drive boxes that year, and quickly learned that it wasn't easy moving things from a loading dock to the trunk of the car when you had to hop on one foot to do it. There were numerous things that made distinct impressions ... for I've done that too, and have even built front-panels as diagnostic tools, but I don't find it amusing even to enter a 30-40 byte program via the swtiches, and certainly wouldn't enjoy toggling in the bootloader that way every morning. I'd draw the line at 200 bytes or so. I guess that's why 1702's turned out to be so useful. except IIRC, there were machines from both Intel and DEC that you could buy. They were more capable, hence, more expensive. There were also a couple of small computer devices based on pre-8080 cpu's that were "out there" though not as widely popular as the Altair. Now, that was in '75-'76. Microcomputers were not the "thing" yet. In early 1980, I remember that almost no engineering office I visited, and not just electronics engineering offices, was without some sort of microcomputer, and many of them were from MITS or IMSAI. The key was that those would allow the user to run CP/M and that would allow them to run FORTRAN, in which a vast amount of public-domain engineering software had been written. Well, that's certainly true ... it was intended to teach you about spelling. They're not comparable, but they're both educational toys. It's like a gun. If you buy a pellet gun as one might for plinking cans or even shooting rats, it can do some serious damage. However, if your intent is to do some serious damage, there are far better choices you could make. That was the situation at the time. The thing that made the Altair a breakthrough was its price. You could, given a wirewrap card, etc, build a pretty extensive computer around that hardware and end up with a fully functional computer for under $10K, which was unheard-of in that time frame. Nevertheless, Ed Roberts has gone on record as saying he didn't intend the thing to grow into a computer, which suggests that he didn't originally view it as one. It was an educational computer toy, right up to the point at which it became endowed with I/O that would allow it to input and output data at a rate sufficient to accomplish useful work. Before that point, it wasn't even as useful as a bicycle, since it lacked wheels. Being a toy is not a problem until you want to make it into something the mfg didn't intend. It's still not an insurmountable burden at that point, but it isn't as easy as simply buying what you need. Just as everyone isn't interested in building their own microcomputer from just the parts and some wire, etc, not everyone is interested in doing much more than buying the component devices, lashing the system up, and running the commercially available software.