22 Jun
2007
22 Jun
'07
8:14 a.m.
Well, the Original Mac (and subsequents) did have a CLI, you just needed
to know the sequence of buttons to push to get a CLI window to pop up...
I remember the spring/summer of 1985 while working in the computer lab
at college, they just got in a Mac 128 with a Laserwriter, nobody wanted
to go near the thing, I was the only brave soul to touch the unorthodox
little creature. I remember how unsettling it was to be separated from
being able to directly talk with the computer and only being able to
deal with things within windowed area's, it was a truly weird experience.
The lab got in a Fat Mac upgrade and a Laserwriter rom upgrade later and
I (being the officially unofficial caretaker of the beastie) performed
the upgrade. What floored me was how tiny and how little there really
was on the Mac motherboard, I couldn't believe so much power and
abilities came from so little. That first year was a bit of a bare,
the original Mac was so slow and having to deal with 2 400K floppy
drives and the constant swapping back and forth was a bit of an
annoyance, but well worth the end result.
Curt
Liam Proven wrote:
I never cease to be amazed by the level and depth of
knowledge of
obscure machines on this list. Knowledgeable discussions of machines
I've never even heard of in 20y in the business and a good while
longer as a hobbyist.
So I thought I'd ask a question on a slightly different tack.
What are the most bizarre, way-out or just plain *different* machines
that folks have seen?
The basic von Neumann computer is well-established, but most of them
have a lot more common ground than that. Uniquely-identified disks, an
OS with a command line that lets you create, rename, execute, edit and
delete files on those disks. Maybe graphics. Maybe dumb terminals.
Maybe a teletype. But set aside the cosmetic differences, they are, to
a large degree, much of a muchness. From a PDP/11 to a VAX to MS-DOS,
the actual overall CLI experience is very similar. Unix is a bit
different - cryptic commands, one big virtual directory tree - but
it's really more of the same underneath.
The Mac was pretty different when it was new: no CLI at all, for
example. Otherwise, though, it's not that remarkable.
But I keep reading about Lisp machines. No good general-purpose
introduction for the interested computer-literate reader who's never
seen one and doesn't speak Lisp, though, but from what I've read, they
sound unique.
The Canon Cat had a unique UI as well, from what I've seen.
What else was there? What other machines - general-purpose desktop (or
desk-side or whatever) computers were there that Thought Differently?
I'm not really thinking of embedded systems and the like here, but
thinks you sat in front of and worked upon.