16 Dec
2001
16 Dec
'01
8:22 p.m.
I stumbled upon a link some time ago belonging to a
very bitter former owner of Sphere. The gist of his
article was that Byte Magazine destroyed Sphere with a
very bad review, and, that most computers of that era
took some hacking to work anyway (example: the "clock"
- and I use the term clock charitably - of the
original Altair 8800).
--- William Donzelli <aw288(a)osfn.org> wrote:
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of
your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com
or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com
Ah yeah. Good
pick. That is definitely a rare
beast. I've only ever
known one person who had one (I forgot his name,
he used to be on the list
a few years ago). He sold it off to someone else
and then got out of
collecting computers.
Was that me? I have/had three, but they are promised
to go out West. One of
those deals that seems to be taking a very long
time, mostly due to me
trying to unearth it all and boxing the stuff up.
Anyway, Sphere aparently was one of the early bad
guys. The computers they
sold (many as kits, I think) basically did not work.
Unlike Altair, Sphere
was trying to break into the business sector, so
there really was not much
of an excuse for the crapiness. They all needed a
huge number of hacks to
get them to function (my favorite is a a few-mH coil
made of telephone
wire kludged onto one of the oscillators, in order
to keep the thing
going. Basically, wrap some wire around a pencil,
and tack solder it into
place, and adjust accordingly).
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org