RANT Re: PDP-8 on e-bay

At 06:38 PM 1/20/99 -0500, Doug wrote: And the PDP-8 penetrated the personal space? How about the KL-10? The point I'm trying to make is that while much collecting is driven by nostalgia for the computers we could have owned when we were younger, many of us forgo trying to own the computer we learned to program on if it was a mainframe. However the people who came after me had Sun workstations at college (at least at my alma mater USC where the Sun's were replacing the KL as I was leaving). Anyway, those people will be reaching their earning/disposable income zeniths in about 5 years. That will spike the value of older Sun machines. I'm not familar with the Terak and PERQ but I am intimately familiar with the Star and the Alto. My wife was the Network Services Architect for Xeroxes Office Systems Business Unit during the Star's heyday. The fact was that the Star was sold as a dedicated word processor. A visual typewriter if you will on the same price sheet as the memory writers I believe. Now tahoe (later named the Xerox Development Environment (XDE)) ran on Dandelions (aka the 8010 series) but it wasn't sold to third parties. Later during the Daybreak years Mesa (waayy cool language BTW) was ported to Suns and Intel architectures. I don't believe the Alto ever escaped PARC as more than a research tool for some folks. The "PERQ page" asserts the claim to first graphics workstation, I'm sure Tony has some feelings about this. In the US at least Apollo was always claiming to have "invented" the graphics workstation (defined as a general purpose computer whose "console" consisted of a bitmapped display.) At about the same time CMU defined something called a "3M" machine which was 1 million pixels, 1 million instructions/sec, and 1 million words (bytes) of memory. --Chuck