16 Dec
2001
16 Dec
'01
10:26 p.m.
Stan Veit's History of the Personal Computer has a detailed account of the
Sphere's design flaws and other issues, including kits being sent out
incomplete. Veit was a retailer who sold the Sphere when new. Veit stopped
selling the Sphere and admits that the company might have fixed some of the
problems after that.
Do you remember the issue in which the review that the former owner refers
to appeared? The earliest Sphere coverage in BYTE is positive, almost
fawning.
Maybe if the Sphere had been on the cover of Popular Electronics instead of
the Altair people would have been more forgiving of its flaws.
--Mike
Michael Nadeau
Editorial Services
603-893-2379
----- Original Message -----
From: "Loboyko Steve" <sloboyko(a)yahoo.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2001 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: Hardest to Find Classic Computers
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:
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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