4 May
2007
4 May
'07
1:56 a.m.
The 8" Micropolis drive was also used in the
Tektronix Magnolia...a very
early prototype workstation-class machine that used a bitmap display,
and was based on Smalltalk as the native operating system. Tek (to my
knowledge) never sold any of these machines, but quite a few of them
were built as prototypes, and used in various areas of Tek as
engineering workstations. The Magnolia was way ahead of its time. Had
Tek had the marketing and sales skills to sell this thing as a computer,
they could have grabbed the engineering computing workstation market
before it even really existed. This was long before Sun or PERQ. It
was more in the timeframe of the early Xerox PARC machines. In fact,
some of the software engineers that developed the working environment
for the Magnolia came from Xerox PARC.
I had my hands on a Tek Magnolia once and even recognized it for what
it was. Unfortunitely long before I knew of the list. And long before
I realized that you wanted to save the very first models. I didn't get
to play with it very long.
We got it in with a mother load of Intel (from Intel) about 1992 at
911 NW Hoyt in PDX. the Magnolia looked like an engineering prototype,
ugly box with no covers, cables all over.... A little squater than the
Xerox 8010s it came in with.
What I didn't recognise was the Alto that came in with the group. It
was several years later that I saw a picture. It was such a funny
Xerox.
From Intel were many of every early development
systems, 800, 8000,
II, III, & IV. What I would give for that mother load
now......
ago, I had occasion to run into the 6130 while
unpacking stuff from a
storage unit, and I brought it home, hooked it up to a trusty Heathkit
H19 terminal, and powered it up. It booted up right away. Not even a
fsck required. I even remembered the root password! Did a full "dd" of
the disk to /dev/null, and no read errors at all. I think I still have
a couple of these drives stored away.
One of the few Tek computers I never got my hands on, the 6130.
Is there a museum or timeline of Tektronix Computers / test equiipment
/ video equipment in physical space or on the Web? I don't think Paul
Pierce is collecting much Tektronix?
Paxton
--
Paxton Hoag
Astoria, OR
USA