On 15 Nov 2000, Iggy Drougge wrote: Me neither... but now, since you've admitted to that, I'll admit that I once drooled over an IBM PC-AT (stopped drooling when I added one to my collection a couple of years ago). Back around 1985, still in college, I used (wasted?) some savings to purchase a genuine IBM PC-XT, with a 10 MB (ST-513, IIRC) hard drive, monochrome (not even Hercules) display and 256K of RAM and no math co-processer (I added one later so that I could install FORTRAN software)... US$2,895, from Computerland (can you say "con artists" and "clueless computer buyer"?) ... and regretted that I hadn't spent a little more and gotten an AT which was a more impressive looking machine... only afterwards, when I wanted to play with multitasking and began experimenting with things like C-task, VMiX, Wendin-DOS, Modula-2 coroutines, etc. did I discover that these weren't really useful computers. :-( Interestingly, that PC-XT cost about US$2,000 more than I'd paid for my car a few years earlier, but I'm still driving that car daily (why waste money on a new car?), and that PC-XT is now rarely used. There's a valuable lesson to be learnt from this: never spend much more money on a computer than you'd spend to purchase a 10 year old car, and never spend more money on a car than the average personal computer costs. -RDD -- Copyright (C) 2000 R. D. Davis "The best way to gain a true understanding of All Rights Reserved Wile E. Coyote on the Roadrunner cartoons is to rdd(a)perqlogic.com 410-744-4900 fly, head-first, off a horse into something like http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd a fence or a tree; trust me, this works." --RDD

1977: My first 'PC' was a KIM-1, which now resides in the Santa Barbara Fortress of Schloss Marvin. 1979: I then assembled a Z80/48K/Pertec Floppy/four serial port Cromemco Z2H over a period of about one year, but I don't think that it fits the subject due to it's 'mongrel' nature. 1983: My first "pc" PC was a borrowed Kaypro II, then a 10, that I bought used on a sales promotion scheme for $1400.00 in 1984... my disposible income at that time for about 8 months. The store I worked at (as the Fixit Geek) 'carried the paper'for me, so I suffered only 8 months of chronic malnutrition. Better than starving outright. 1985: I bought a used Columbia Data Products portable XT, and to this day I remember it quite fondly, operation was good (for it's day) and aesthetically it was most pleasing. The keyboard was firm and quick and the display was super-sharp, and the packaging was more like test gear than a computer. Then came a succession of ever-increasing PC Stuff, none of which is germaine to the Topic. Then of course the PDP Preservation Virus invaded, and my house became a Refuge for Old Iron. Cheerz John

From: Roger Ivie <rivie(a)teraglobal.com I have one of those. the ET-6800 and docs (serial #8) ;) - Mike: dogas(a)bellsouth.net

http://www.lerctr.org/~transit/bc/comp.html

I started in computers back at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1967 with a Fortran IV class and continued on with 360 Assembly and Cobol. After graduation, I went to work for Nabisco. After being transferred to the head offices in NYC, I managed to get transferred to Richmond, VA where a new state of the art plant was being constructed. During that time, I attended a number of DEC training classes up in Maynard at the new (at that time) training facility. While in Richmond, I worked mainly on the PDP16 and 11/05 with a small amount of work on the 11/45. From there: 1979 or so - bought a Vector I (which I still have). 1979 or so - bought an Atari 400 and peripherals (which I still have.) 1980 or so - traded a milling machine for a Northstar Horizon (which I still have) 1984 or so - bought a Corona 400 luggable 1985 onwards - People started giving me the old S-100 computers they were throwing away It was about this time I began thinking of saving this stuff because of the historical value. Things get mixed up from this point onwards, but I ended up not wanting to see these things just thown away and ended up with a wide array of computers including a couple of Altairs used at Raytheon that were going to be tossed with the guy was leaving Santa Barbara. And things just went from there. By 1991, I probably had about 100 computers or so. Documentation is something I am always looking for. I had built up a network of friends who kept an eye open for stuff being tossed or sold they thought I would be interested in. One of the few times I actually bought something for more than a couple of dollars for the collection was from someone in the LA area who was selling a Heathkit H-8 system for $100. Turned out to be a good buy as it included the processor, 5 1/4" floppy drives, 8" drives, spare cards, and boxes of documentation and software totalling some 10 - 15 cubic feet of stuff. Somewhere around 1996, I found out about this listserver and joined. Sellam was one of the people who had a vision of a classic computer show and started VCF from conversations started on this listserver. We have a lot of people on this list with a wealth of knowledge who are more than willing to share and I have referred a number of people to this list. Ah, life is good!

My very first computer was actually the Heathkit EC-1 from Iowa City that just traded last week on ebay. When I saw Iowa City in the listing, I wrote to the fellow, and sure enough, it's a small world. I had purchased it at the University or Iowa Surplus outlet for next to nothing, maybe $5. I sold it about 20 years ago for $25. I played with it slightly, but never had any attachment to it, and hardly knew what it was, at the time. Next I got a Scelbi 8h. I traded an EKG machine, that I also got from University Surplus, for it. This has 1k of ram, with an 8008. The very first kit with a microprocessor. No keyboard, video, paper tape, nothing. And all entry is via front panel switches. This was my introduction to processors, and I managed to load a program that made the data lights sweep from left to right. That was quite an accomplishment, because the "step" switch was so noisy that it was difficult to load very many instructions without screwing something up. This machine has 14 I/O connectors that look like octal sockets, but have 11 pins. My most ambitous project was to wire up a series of oscillators, hoping to build a music machine. My next machine was an Imlac PDS-1. I got it at a community auction for $25, bidding against a guy in farm boots and overalls who couldn't have had the slightest idea what he was bidding on. I barely did myself. But it had lots of switches and lights, which were neat. The manuals didn't come with it, but I picked them up at the Surplus several months later. By then I had bumblingly erased any resident bootstraps or character generators it might have had in its 8k of 16 bit core. So I spent about a month writing my own character generator and keyboard routines. I really got into the guts of this machine once when it developed a problem with the ALU. It was spread out over 4 boards, 4 bits each, in TTL. I drew the whole thing out and tracked down the bad chip. It was exhilarating when it finally worked, but it took about 40 hours. Next I got a Commodore Pet, It had 4k of ram and a tape unit. But I didn't have it long, because a friend really wanted to give it a try, and I was so rich in electronic junk that it would have seemed selfish to deny it to him. Besides, he was a philosopher, so it seemed like outreach to let him toy with it. He liked it so much that I couldn't ask for it back. After that, I got my first "real" computer, a Commodore 64. Wow, what a machine! Totally modern. A electronic friend had wired a torque sensor to a voltage to frequency converter that plugged into the user port, and convinced a factory in Ohio that I could solve their statistical quality control problems for them. So I bought a disk drive at K-Mart, and started programming. Soon I upgraded to twice as much memory and greater speed with the C-128. Years later I traded it for a trap dipole. I miss the C-128, but the dipole is on my roof to this day. The same electronic friend had created an infrared thermometer that required a Motorola 6805 and look-up table to compensate it, but he wasn't into programming at all. He sort of thought processors were a sort of dishonest approach to electronic design -- so he had me do it. I borrowed a Compaq Portable that had an eprom burner board in it, and wrote a 6805 emulator in BASIC. Another friend had written a cross-assembler for the 6805, also in BASIC. I became quite fond of the Compaq along the way. Very nice keyboard. The processor had been upgraded to the NCR V-20 (10 MHz) and the drive upgraded to 20 Mb from the original 10. I sold my grandfather's baseball cards (1909 tobacco series) and bought it. It was a career investment, and I was hoping he would have understood. Along the way I developed a project (Peace Parts) in Nicaragua during the Reagan war. I was a "sandalista". So I lugged the Compaq there and back several times. I used it to print mailing labels, and to write a newsletter. I know this is a hardware thread, but maybe software comments would be interesting to some. Database engines were barely available and were expensive. The mailing labels were produced from a text file that used the left-most character as a key to the function of any particular line in the file, so I could have conditional output. I did everything in BASIC. Finally I bit the bullet and learned dbaseIII. Then I learned Clipper. That lead to writing a water billing program for a small town in Iowa, then to the development of state database for industrial recycling, then to a billing system for MCI, all in Clipper. Last year I designed a "billing verification system" for a web-based insurance brokerage integrator, and lead the team effort to construct it, which we did in MS Access. Currently I'm self-unemployed and trying to use the time to unload several buildings worth of priceless antiques. Well, actually they do have prices, bargains in fact. Just several months ago I got a dollar each for 20 cga monitors, from a fraternity that wanted to throw them off of their roof so as to impress new pledges. What could I say? I would have had to pay good money to take them to the dump. My greatest regrets along this line would include the drum storage I disassembled for the motor, and all of the vacuum tube logic cards I pitched. My collection includes: Scelbi 8h Imlac PDS-1 Microkit 8/16 IBM 5110-3 Commodore 8032-32B Commodore 64 HP-35 calculator HP-85 Timex Sinclair 1000 TI-74-S Compaq Portable Apple IIc Apple Macintosh 512k NEC PC-IV Guidance computer from Minute Man missle (1961)