Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE

[emanuel stiebler]

On 2021-01-02 22:34, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Jan 2021, Liam via cctalk wrote:
>>  I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as
>>  well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and
>>  IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of
>>  the time.
> 
> Possibly, they weren't aimed at the same target audience.
> 
> Perhaps they were intended more to compete with machines such as PDP-11,
> rather than Apple][ and IBM PC.

I was working 1981 with pdp11s and VAX780. Then I heard/read about the
68000, had to have one of those. Simple programming model, flat address
space and really good performance. Signed up at a startup in Germany in
1982, had a lot of fun with all of them(68000, '10, '20, '30, '40). We
basically only sold to research/labs.
Every time, somebody told us the PC is better, we asked them to run
their code on the 68000 and compare themselves. That's how easy it was
back than ;-)

We ran our own OS, own compilers, and also UCSD Pascal, CPM/68k, APL,
coherent Unix ...
Was a lot of fun. When I saw the Sage II on a fair, I thought it is a
pretty cool machine, but lacking graphics. Still was impressed with
their marketing ...

Cheers