On 04/29/2012 02:17 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: ... But remember, "been there, done that" is completely worthless because it isn't "real information". Instead of trusting the word of people who saw and did it, no, that's just anecdotal. Someone who DIDN'T see or do it, then gets to write about it, THEN that's "reliable information". Wheeee! -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 29/04/12 2:36 PM, David Riley wrote: One set soon becomes the other. I have a foot in both camps. A lot of the stuff I've used, young'uns haven't heard of or seen. And I'm interested in things older than that, that I've never used commercially or even seen myself, too. --T

On 29 April 2012 19:59, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: [Roar] Can I come, please? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 04/29/2012 11:04 PM, Adrian Stoness wrote: I agree 100%. There was an amazing degree of creativity involved when CPU, memory, and storage resources were so limited. Thirty years ago I wrote real code on machines that had less system memory than a single communications buffer that I typically allocate these days. The change in mindset is amazing! -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

Perhaps you now udnerstnad how I feel when I compare the 'modern' solution of 'throw a microcontroller at the problem' wtih the solutions I grew up with using, perhaps half a dozen simple ICs (or even a dozen discrete transsitors) which were much more creative. -tony

Hey, I thought some of you might like to know that an MIT Press book, ala "Racing the Beam", has been released on the Amiga. "The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (Platform Studies)" Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/d3xnnfp Received my copy a couple days ago. Keith

On Mon, 30 Apr 2012, Dan Gahlinger wrote: very ARBITRARY and late. quite arguable, alng with TRS80 and Apple][ exactly absolutely. They were not a participant. AFTER personal computers were WELL extablished, they "decided" to take over that field. There is likely to be peace in the middle east before THAT war dies down.

ah but the original poster wasn't talking about the first personal computer,it was talking about when the REAL history started. and for that, I think we need to stick to when something became a household name,or enough that most people knew what it was. even then, we're going to have the divide of the pacific/oceans. for this, I think we need to look at the TRS-80, the apple or the early atari computers. TRS-80 nov/77 let's say 1978Apple II apr/77atari 400 - 1979 - loses the racecommodore pet - 1977 - announced in jan shipped in oct so the pet and the apple II ran head to head, though I don't recall it this way. commodore ended up winning the home pc war, still outselling any computer to present day. Dan.

On 04/29/2012 02:41 PM, ben wrote: Not quite true or complete. Text editors, Spreadsheets, and databases started to appear before 1978 for many of the machines. The problem was mostly mass storage as cassette tape had one problem, it was not random access nor block replaceable. Back in 1978 a new car was about $5K and a floppy with controller was around 700-2000 bucks (1978-dollars). I even took a Data Structures class at the college and challened the fact that my NS* horizon was with floppy and running UCSD Pascal P-system in early '79 with an Heath H19 terminal with a screen oriented editor. The rest of the class was still punching cards on an 029 doe a Univac-1108. I may have been bleeding edge but not by much. In early 1979 a Northstar* Horizon with enough ram and disk to run P-system was about $2500. What made home computing take off was the cost, software and packaged systems ready to go. The bigger S100 houses, Apple, TRS80, Commodore were very quick to understand that and had success. The rest really did exist int he realm of games and entry level toys. Games were a successful space but one that was very dynamic and tended to push Moore's law to the limit. I find that a rather irrational statement. I started running CPM in '77 with floppies. I considered then as now that mass storage is an element in the chain to making and compute engine go from a controller level to a flexible system. What happened in the mid 80s was the realization that the software in place was getting bigger and the problems people wanted to solve (databases and spreadsheets) were growing and floppies were inadequate storage and 64K of ram didn't fit it all without awkward overlays and all. Sudden realization that by the 80s computing had been around a while? It was. IBM was a legitimizer of something that was more than 5-6 years old by then and most of the software for it was lofted 8bit stuff. Reminder why was the upD78108 (V20) such a big deal, it executed 8080 code directly and allowed a PC to run the already vast library of CP/M and other 8080 code. It didn't hurt that much of that code was freeware or shareware. I was interested in computers from very young as a child as they were amazing machines. By time I'd seen some of the earlier machines in the early to mid 60s I'd a rudimentary idea of what was inside and how they worked. I wanted one! Everything after that was mostly getting to be an engineer and one of those computer for myself.. not in any particular order. As it worked out I was in college when I was tasked with building a then very new 8008 running at a plodding 180khz or about 1khz/$. Everything after that was cutting edge or close to it. As a result most of my collection are machine I had or worked with from "back in the day". Those that were not mine to keep were acquired again at later years as free or cheap to fill the wish of having what I'd worked with. Oh, and I"m still working with cool stuff. Just can't quit yet. Allison I

On 30 April 2012 03:39, Curt @ Atari Museum <curt at atarimuseum.com> wrote: To a certain extent. My experience here in the UK in the 1980s was that they did exist - I was married to one of them for a time. But I think that comes back to the "useful for something" argument - I lots of people through using the group chat and email facilities on Prestel / Micronet 800, (early viewdata-format dialup service, see www.viewdata.org.uk) so it was a bit more like the sort of environment you see on facebook etc. It was entertainment and a way for them to communicate without leaving the house. I'm still in contact with a lady today that I first met in the 1980s when she was using her daughter's Amstrad 6128 to access Prestel.. I knew others who had used the business side of the service at work, found the fun bits, and "brought it home"... Of course, it seemed like almost everybody I knew used Prestel/Micronet, but that's because for a shy teenager it was the easiest way I had to make friends! In hindsight, I know that the number of people who had even heard of it, never mind subscribed, was minuscule, and that shows up the other points being made in this thread - one's perception of how important something was is coloured by one's own experience. (In my case, I think Prestel and it's ilk was important enough for me to set up a website about it. But that's mainly because nobody else had.) I hope I don't go too overboard though! Rob

On Sun, 29 Apr 2012, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: I think CP/M provided a reasonable imitation of those 80-column systems. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

On 04/29/2012 01:50 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: If the discussion is focused on home computers, then I wonder if the typical* use for "productivity" software wasn't along the lines of: "turn the machine on, do some stuff, save, forget" - i.e. the sequential nature of tape storage wasn't a big issue, because needing to search for something that had been previously stored (certainly at somewhere other than BOT) wasn't really _that_ common. * not that there weren't people doing bigger and better things, obviously, but I think they were probably in the minority, with the majority playing games, typing a few short documents, doing home accounts etc. I remember that tapes were cheap and plentiful enough that I rarely stored more than one file on each. Wasteful, yes, but I knew that my file was at the start of the tape and I didn't have to spend time searching for it. My modern home PC boots up, loads a wordprocessor and lets me start typing a document about as fast as my Spectrum with cassette-based storage in 1982 did; the modern system will do so much more, but quite often I find that it's so much more that I don't really need. In the office it was doubtless a different story, and floppies (or hard disks) were accepted - and were useful - much sooner, but I'm not sure that the retention of tape really had much of an impact on the home market until floppy drives became *really* cheap. cheers Jules