swarm

Kids Do Like History of Computers

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I’ve been pretty amazed that kids attending my computer class are aware of many historic moments in microcomputer history. At first they were scared when I told them that the lesson will be dedicated to history because they are used to the wrong style of teaching history through bullet points and dates. We talked about minis and micros and I’ve brought a lot of hardware from different eras of micro-computing.

It was nice to see that they were interested in historic hardware. They even play on 80s video game consoles at least using emulator software. This photo is from the end of a lesson about history of PC gaming (from beginning to 1996). Some kids were very interested how it is to play the first game from Need for Speed series.

My class is not about retro hardware but I’ve realized that using old computers is an effective and entertaining way to explain computer basics.

Lead-Acid Batteries

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We all have Lithium-based batteries in our mobile devices today. In mid-80s there was the first wave of battery-powered portable (IBM compatible) PCs. They used lead-acid batteries which are much heavier for the same charge capacity. There were a lot of troubles connected with these batteries. Average battery lifetime in a laptop was about one to two years before charge capacity degraded. If you discharged the battery too much or let the device unused for a longer time you had to replace the battery. You even had to unplug your device from wall power when the battery was full. Otherwise it can be damaged according to manufacturer’s instructions.

On the other side these batteries were (and are) cheaper than any other type suitable for large portable computers. These two were removed from my Bondwell Model-8 laptop. They are not specifically designed for the laptop so they can be easily replaced with new ones even today after 30 years. Similar ones are used in some devices such as emergency lights.

Damaged Keyboard on Bondwell Model 8

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Keyboard flex (caused by a loosen screw) was a reason of a damaged keyboard circuit board in my Bondwell Model 8. Fortunately David helped me and repaired an interrupted trace. The laptop is almost in 100% shape now…

Sol-20 Terminal Computer (1976)

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This was for the first time I could see a real S-100-bus computer. SOL-20 was an interesting piece of engineering and integrated all basic components inside a compact chassis. Although intended to be just a terminal this is a fully fledged Intel 8080-based personal computer with five S-100 bus slots for user expansion.

I would like to recommend really nice web pages about S-100 computers (see the whole site): http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Processor%20Technology/History/History.htm

You can find a lot of interesting information and stories from the beginning of some software and hardware products (… did you know the early history of AutoCAD before it was ported to IBM PC?).

UPDATE: An article about S-100 computers: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/01/s100/?page=1

Interesting world of UNIX computers

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I’m always surprised how little I know about old UNIX computers. I started with Linux in late-90s but it was just a low-cost/low-end alternative. Silicon Graphics Inc. was the only company that came to my mind when somebody said: “UNIX graphics workstation”. Thanks to a nice article about BZFlag history (which began in 1992) I’ve realized that there were hi-end graphics workstations even from HP and they had impressive 3D capabilities. In addition to that, HP had four times bigger market share than Silicon Graphics Inc. (workstation market, 1991).

The PC market is more about stand-alone components. These UNIX workstations were about perfect integration of hardware and OS and that’s why even today it is very pleasant to work/play with them. I would be very happy to have modern Linux looking and behaving like old IRIX on SGI computers. After playing a lot with SGI Indigo2 (1995) and O2 (1998) I consider the system very intuitive, stable and easy to configure in comparison with modern Linux distros.

Kids and Old Computers

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There is a way to see many old computers running in one room in Czech Republic. It’s called Bytefest and it is probably the biggest public retrocomputing event in the country. I took about twenty computers in my car with me this year in order to show the evolution of portable computers.

There were a lot of people walking around and some of them brought their kids. It is somehow nice to see little kids trying to do something with computers that are few decades older than they are. When they grow up there is a high chance that these computers will not work anymore.

SGI 1600SW

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A friend of mine gave me this interesting piece of hardware. SGI 1600SW Flat Panel was introduced in 1998 which was quite before LCDs became common. There were not so many LCD screens for desktop computers before this and those which were available usually had smaller resolution – 1600×1024 is not bad even by today’s standards.

Commodore SX-64 (1984)

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Commodore stated this as the first color portable computer. I’m not sure if it’s entirely true but it was quite common to have only monochrome screens in portable computers back then (Osborne, KayPro, Compaq/IBM Portable). I was surprised how small this machine is when I saw it in real life. Second surprise was its weight – with about 10 kilograms it is a heavy machine for its size. On the other hand for less than $1000 you could have a portable computer with a 5-inch color screen, 64KB of RAM and a built-in floppy drive to run advanced software like VisiCalc.

People see C64 mostly as a gaming machine. I’m not sure if this was so different in the 80s but SX-64 was not a huge success. It doesn’t make much sense for portable gaming and business customers were probably more interested in CP/M compatible machines (although more expensive).

Anyway, I like SX-64 a lot. It’s a very nice portable computer with a good color screen and a comfortable keyboard.

TCP/IP on Amiga

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It was a very successful day today because I’ve managed to get TCP/IP working on Amiga 1200. There is a problem that the first version of Amiga OS with built-in TCP/IP stack is from 1999… and I don’t have it and I don’t want to install it on such old machine. There were some third-party packages available before this date but they were not for free or even cheap (~$50).

I’ve installed AmiTCP which looks like something ported from UNIX (like many text-mode software packages on Amiga). There are installation scripts where you can configure all addresses and select the NIC driver but the result is not working with PCMCIA cards. I had to change three script files by trying various combinations (and install two PCMCIA OS fixes) before it started to use the network driver the right way. Whole procedure was definitely more complicated than on any other operating system I’ve ever used.

This is the end of copying software to/from Amiga using floppies or cortex floppy emulator. I can download anything using FTP now. Hooray!

Btw I use 3com Etherlink III (3C589C) PCMCIA network card which is supported in many operating systems. I’ve used it also with Windows 95/3.x/NT3.51/4.0, Windows 2000/XP, Windows CE, Mac OS 7.5 and many older Linux boxes. If you needs PCMCIA networking solution, this is the best one.

Phase5 CyberVision 64/3D (1996)

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CyberVision 64/3D is a graphics accelerator for Zorro II/III slots used in professional Amiga computers. It was introduced in 1996 and uses S3 ViRGE chipset which was for a very short time period something like a leader of the home 3D graphics market (ViRGE stands for Virtual Reality Graphics Engine).

S3 ViRGE (86C325) was designed for PCs with PCI bus so Phase5 developers had to add some programmable logic to convert signals from the Zorro bus used in Amiga. The card is autosensing and can work with Amiga 2000 (1987) where only 16bit slots are used. Full 32bit transfers are available when the card is inserted in newer Amiga computers (A3000, A4000).

The first problem was high price ($399) when compared to the PC world. You could buy a way more powerful 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics PCI accelerator board for $299 and there was plenty of decent 2D cards under $100 for standard PCs. In addition to price there was no support for OpenGL 3D acceleration in Amiga OS in mid-90s. The main reasons for buying this card were its fast 2D acceleration (in comparison with outdated Amiga on-board chipsets) and support for 1024×768 with 16 millions of colors on a standard VGA monitor.