Vintage Computers

[easysurfer]

I stumbled upon videos of vintage computers by someone who has a really nice collection.
He give a great narration of the history of each computer in his videos.

If you are interested in that sort of thing (brings back memories of looking through magazine ads of those computers), check them out :

https://www.youtube.com/user/tezzaNZ/videos

 

[LoneAspen]

Thanks for posting that!

I had an Atari 400 as my very first computer, and just watched his video on that one. Wow, that brought back memories.

At the time, I lusted after an Amiga 500 but couldn't afford one. Watched his video on that one, too, and more memories!

LOL - Computing in the 80's was a trip.

 

[ziggy29]

I still have a working Atari 800 on a desk in (what used to be) my "home office".

 

[easysurfer]

I used to price watch the Sinclair ZX81 when browsing the Popular Electronics magazines in the library each month. Also, lusted after the other machines (Vic-20, Com 64, Atari 400).

When I got my first j*b, went ahead and got a Timex 1000, then later a TRS 100 Notebook. Still have them stashed away in storage

If I could do it all over again, my first PC would be the Vic 20 or Atari 400. (With the Timex, adding a RAM Pack to the back...while entering a program..one wrong jiggle and the computer would crash which required a re-entry )

 

[Nodak]

I still have an Atari 800 stashed away.

 

[braumeister]

Alas, I didn't keep any of my old machines. Wish I had kept at least a few of them.
I started with an Apple II+ with 48K that I bought in 1980, and went through a number of later Apple models.
When Macs came out, I held off for a while, but bought a Mac Plus with 1 MB in 1987. I still have the motherboard and mouse from that one.
Not long after, I found myself w*rking at a small company that developed custom Mac software, so I either owned or used every model of Mac made until about 1995.
Later, I mainly did UNIX stuff, but at home I'm still basically a Mac guy.

 

[rbmrtn]

Yep, still got a Atari 800. had a timex sinclair, thought the plugin expansion modules were neat. Still got some old XT and AT motherboards and expansion cards. Remember an Osborne "portable" about the size of a suitcase with a 9" yellow on black screen...

An old computer site Atari 800 computer

 

[Turboslacker]

Wow you mean like when there was no internet?? Confused??

Sent from my HTC One using Early Retirement Forum mobile app

 

[obgyn65]

My first computer in Europe was an Oric 1, circa 1982-1983. I got access to the Internet about 15 years later.

No printers. I remember sending handwritten letters to universities in 1983 to be accepted in different programs. That's how old I am

 

[Gumby]

The first person I ever knew with a personal computer was my younger brother, who bought a TRS-80 in 1978 or 79. I recall that the drive was a cassette deck. I wrote a mortgage amortization calculator program in BASIC for it.

 

[GrayHare]

Still have an IBM-PC, dual-floppy, 640K, and color monitor that as a set cost as much as a good used car. Also saved the "rare" PC-DOS 1.0 (version 1.1 was the first widely-used DOS). It will even boot up on today's Wintel computers (if the machine has a floppy drive).

 

[easysurfer]

Yep, still got a Atari 800. had a timex sinclair, thought the plugin expansion modules were neat. Still got some old XT and AT motherboards and expansion cards. Remember an Osborne "portable" about the size of a suitcase with a 9" yellow on black screen...

An old computer site Atari 800 computer

I remember getting my Timex Sinclair at a Sears (walked about 5 miles to buy it on a chilly evening). I did end up getting an expansion module. But the contacts were iffy in that while typing a little too much movement and the program would get zapped and often I'd had to start over. Each time that happened, I say to myself, "I should have got a VIC 20 or Atari 400."

 

[braumeister]

OMG! This thread just reminded me of one of my favorites.
Does anyone remember the Osborne computers?
It was the size (and weight at nearly 24 pounds) of a suitcase, with a 5-inch CRT display, two 5.25 inch floppy drives, 64K of RAM, and a Z80 CPU. It cost nearly $2,000 in 1981 (around $5,000 today).
Osborne 1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A friend of mine was so utterly enamored of this machine, that he decided this was going to be his computer for the rest of his life. The company was already starting to go down the tubes at the time, so he bought two of them, so he would always have spare parts.

I've always wondered what happened to those machines, since an average phone has as much computing power today and fits in your pocket.

 

[Rustward]

This is the front panel of one I was introduced to in the summer of '73 between my junior and senior high school years. This computer is not one of the "personal" variety, though. But it was the first computer I used. It is a 370/145, or 3145 aka just 145.

First one I ever owned was a Tandy 1000SX in about '86 -- PC clone, kindof, ran MS-DOS. Working with this stuff all day, sometimes six days a week and in a 24x7 call rotation takes away some of the desire to be a hobbyist with it. When we finally got remote access it was nice to have to run a terminal emulator. The company furnished me a Microcom AX2400c modem. 2400bps - tall cotton.

At one point DW had a PC JR with the chicklet keyboard. I don't know what ever became of it but I wish we still had it.

 

[ziggy29]

In 1984, after a year of working and saving money, I bought an Apple IIe computer with a 14" color monitor and a dual 5.25" floppy drive (called a "duodisk").

It set me back something like $1,600.

And there's probably 10,000 times as much overall computing power in my $200 phone than there was in that thing.

But at least I was able to write most of my programming assignments (in PASCAL!) on that thing so it saved trips to the campus computer lab.

 

[samclem]

My first machine was a Commodore 128. Our high school had a single computer for student use, a $24K HP machine that stored work on cassettes.

I ended up buying a color dot matrix printer for my C-128, I'll bet I had $1k invested in that low-budget computer by the time I was through.

You have to marvel at how efficient the code was and the things these machines were able to do within their hardware limitations. My C-128 had a full GUI available through a program called "GEOS." Mouse-controlled, drag-and-drop file handling, WYSIWYG word processing, etc. It felt and acted like a very low end Mac. And it had no hard drive, everything ran off a single 5 1/2" floppy drive. 128K of RAM--amazing.

 

[Nodak]

This is the front panel of one I was introduced to in the summer of '73 between my junior and senior high school years. This computer is not one of the "personal" variety, though. But it was the first computer I used. It is a 370/145, or 3145 aka just 145.

First one I ever owned was a Tandy 1000SX in about '86 -- PC clone, kindof, ran MS-DOS. Working with this stuff all day, sometimes six days a week and in a 24x7 call rotation takes away some of the desire to be a hobbyist with it. When we finally got remote access it was nice to have to run a terminal emulator. The company furnished me a Microcom AX2400c modem. 2400bps - tall cotton.

At one point DW had a PC JR with the chicklet keyboard. I don't know what ever became of it but I wish we still had it.

That is real familiar. The first Megacorp I worked for in Minneapolis had an IBM 370/155 the next model up from what you showed. That "Emergency Pull" knob always fascinated me. I was told that if it was pulled it cut power to everything.

I always felt sorry for our on site customer engineer; IBM required them to wear white shirt and tie always. He frequently had to work on line printers and would get shirts badly stained with ink from the machines.

 

[Fermion]

I have a working TRS-80 model I from 1978.

 

[Brat]

I think our Victor 9000 set us back $6,000.

Speaking of vintage, or almost vintage, we have a desktop running on Win 2000 Pro and its printer is about to croak. Can I find a current printer that accommodates 11 x 17 paper and that operating system? Not yet. Any recommendations?

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

Anybody interested in my beautiful old Sol 20 with complete documentation?

 

[aja8888]

In 1984, after a year of working and saving money, I bought an Apple IIe computer with a 14" color monitor and a dual 5.25" floppy drive (called a "duodisk").

It set me back something like $1,600.

And there's probably 10,000 times as much overall computing power in my $200 phone than there was in that thing.

But at least I was able to write most of my programming assignments (in PASCAL!) on that thing so it saved trips to the campus computer lab.

I had the exact same Apple IIe with a dot matrix printer that would wake the dead when it started printing. I ran an income tax program on that computer and did people's tax returns. I eventually gave the computer to a grammar school near by.

 

[clifp]

My first computer was the original Apple II back in 1979 complete with 48K RAM, and cassette tape. I quickly add a floppy drive.

But actually I started with personal computers even before that. My best friend bought an IMSAI 8080, which was clone of the Altair computer that got Bill Gates and Paul Allen interested in.

In the late 80s I figured vintage computers someday would be valuable so I leaped at the chance to buy a couple of Xerox Alto circa 1974 computer,for $500 each. The Xerox Alto that was a full ten years ahead of its time and with some work I actually got them running, although they eventually died.

When I moved to Hawaii I donated them to the Computer History Museum in Mountain, where you can see them today.

 

[Ronstar]

Like others here, I had an Apple IIE in the early 1980's. Then I got an IBM PS2. I wish I would have taken the money I spent on the IIE and invested it in Apple stock. Then I would have had no problem buying a mac pro and macbook pro from the proceeds today.

 

[scrabbler1]

Here are my earliest memories of computers I used.

In the late 1970s through 1981, when I was in high school, we had to dial into a central computer system using a rotary phone (of course) then quickly place the handset into a modem after which we would get a login message on a terminal which had a continuous feed paper supply beneath it. I recall if someone wanted to mess with you, he could tap the phone in the modem which would result in some mumbo-jumbo getting printed. I learned how to program in BASIC.

Around 1980 or 1981, my high school added a Commodore Pet which was a stand-alone PC which included a monitor and keyboard all in one. It wasn't connected to a printer.

Also in that time, a friend of mine had an Atari but I forget the model number. It needed a cassette player to load the programs although I recall he later bought a floppy disk drive (those 5" floppies) to load programs more quickly.

Some time in the early 1980s, my parents bought a Commodore 64 which included a keyboard and floppy disk drive. The monitor was an attachment to a TV with one of those adapters. I wrote some programs in BASIC even into the early 1990s. They also bought a dot matrix printer, an OKIDATA 180. I still have these items.

One summer, 1983, I worked at a day camp and one of my roles was the computer specialist counselor. I don't remember the make/model computers we had, but they included cassette players to load programs and large monitors the size and weight of 19-inch color TVs. I had to haul 4 of those large babies from a storage closet to the classroom 2 days a week. I taught the older kids some simple BASIC programs which was kinda fun, a preview of my teaching coworkers how to program in SAS 5 years later. For the younger kids, we had game cartridges we popped into the back of the keyboards.

Fun stuff.

 

[Rustward]

That is real familiar. The first Megacorp I worked for in Minneapolis had an IBM 370/155 the next model up from what you showed. That "Emergency Pull" knob always fascinated me. I was told that if it was pulled it cut power to everything.

I always felt sorry for our on site customer engineer; IBM required them to wear white shirt and tie always. He frequently had to work on line printers and would get shirts badly stained with ink from the machines.

That knob is sometimes called Emergency Power Off (EPO) and it did indiscriminately cut power to the whole machine. It was intended for true emergencies; a standard power off procedure required gracefully ending all running work (mainframes sometimes run work that goes for hours and hours, even days), shutting down all the subsystems, then entering the End Of Day command to the operating system (Z EOD), assuming one of the "OS" operating systems. The machine enters a disabled wait and can then be powered off using that red Power Off button. This could take from a minimum of a a few minutes, to a very long time. But the EPO just cut power to everything, and made everything from the hardware to the software much more difficult to restart.

The EPO pull is just connected to a toggle switch behind the panel. This toggles a very large relay that cut power. The EPO required a field engineer to reset. I knew of one case in the late '70's in which a (not very good) operator was instructed to power off the system for a scheduled outage and he chose the EPO. That was his last act in that data center.

The printer story is familiar. For a while I was in a place that used Xerox 1200's (printers usually came in multiples because they required a lot of TLC). One of these, for whatever reasons, was particularly buggy. The FE had a mat that was about 6x8 feet in size with a diagram for all the parts, and as he would remove a part he would place it in its respective place on the mat. IIRC it seems like he rebuilt that machine onsite about every six weeks. The 1200's got replaced with IBM 3800's, which squirted out paper at 30.5 inches per second.