classics I threw away or sold ... foolishly

[Randy Dawson]

About 10 ISC (Intecolor) 19" color computers, set them on the curb for the trash.
These were 2MHz 8080 computers, wit a modified MS Basic in them.

MY company (USDATA) sold these as realtime industrial control terminals for use with Programmable Logic Controllers.

We modified the Basic, trapping 'syntax error' and jumped to our code that would parse new statements we added for PLC communications, reading and or writing to PLC memory. 

Most were working, I got tired of hauling them around.  I should have kept one or two.

Randy

________________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Eric Christopherson <echristopherson at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2016 8:54 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: classics I threw away or sold ... foolishly

On Wed, May 18, 2016, Swift Griggs wrote:
>
> I've stack-ranked all the classic items that I, to my everlasting shame,
> let go of at some point and now I feel like it was a mistake:

I guess I don't have too much to regret yet. The things I regret getting
rid of:
1. My family's first Commodore PET 8032, back in 1988 or so. Strangely I
miss the books more than the system, though, perhaps because I have
another system like it now. It was great to see one of the books I
missed most from that set a few years ago at a friend's house; I gave
him $5 for it. It was available on Bombjack, but I had no idea what it
was called or how to find it. Anyway, the 8032 thrown on the curb was
working except for some keyboard keys, and had a nice LQ daisywheel
printer and an 8050 dual floppy drive. Both worked AFAIK, except that
one time I apparently sent a control code to the printer that switched
it to real ASCII, and I could never get it back to PETSCII even with a
power cycle. My new 8032 worked perfectly, including the keys, in the
late 1990s when I got it, but has stopped powering on now.
2. My NES and SNES with a fairly good number of games, plus a Super
Advantage. I don't know what specific revisions the consoles were, but
they didn't look like the later redesigns. I reasoned that emulating
games was not only good enough but better, because I could pause,
rewind, and fast-forward them.
3. My first Intel PC, a GHC EasyData 486SX/25. If I had known EasyData
was so uncommon I probably would have kept it. It was no speed demon,
even after I put the OverDrive and 24 MB (I think it was) in it, but it
was a big step up from 8-bits.
4. Various systems I got to see only a few times at my dad's work, when
they liquidated the company a few years after he died. I was interested
in the Sun workstations and to a lesser extent the Harris mini (not sure
what kind). But I would have been even less equipped to deal with them
(especially the big metal) than I am now.

--
        Eric Christopherson