DoubleClutcher
Ridgcrest,CA
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Joined: 12/30/2006
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joraz wrote:I had one of the old IBM PCs with the two 5 1/4" floppy drives in the front. I remember the day we got it. Unpacked it, set it up and and looked at the three manuals that came with it. That's when I learned these nifty new machines needed something called software! Who knew? Later on, after upgrading my old 8086 processor to a new one with a blazing speed of 5 MHz or thereabouts (it was a V-20 or something like that), I scored a copy of Windows I. It was a full screen analog clock with a second hand. I was thinking, "How could it get any better than this!" I never worked with computers but I had a lot of fun writing Basic and dBase programs. Hours of frustration and fun! After many computers and operating systems I finally retired the PC to a back room and settled on Apple products.
jor
I taught electronics at Pima College in Tucson in those days. I got a discount on a Zenith 8MHz with 640K ram. I ordered it with a 10MB hard drive and couldn't figure what I would use that much for in my lifetime. When it arrived it had a 20MB hard drive for the same price. I still have the computer.
I liked Apple products in the early days. They published schematics and software listings for OS on the Apple II. By the time they moved to the Mac they had locked down everything and it was way too expensive to develop software for it. The PC was open and fit my needs.
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pulsar
Lewisville, NC
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Joined: 12/30/2001
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DoubleClutcher wrote:joraz wrote:I had one of the old IBM PCs with the two 5 1/4" floppy drives in the front. I remember the day we got it. Unpacked it, set it up and and looked at the three manuals that came with it. That's when I learned these nifty new machines needed something called software! Who knew? Later on, after upgrading my old 8086 processor to a new one with a blazing speed of 5 MHz or thereabouts (it was a V-20 or something like that), I scored a copy of Windows I. It was a full screen analog clock with a second hand. I was thinking, "How could it get any better than this!" I never worked with computers but I had a lot of fun writing Basic and dBase programs. Hours of frustration and fun! After many computers and operating systems I finally retired the PC to a back room and settled on Apple products.
jor
I taught electronics at Pima College in Tucson in those days. I got a discount on a Zenith 8MHz with 640K ram. I ordered it with a 10MB hard drive and couldn't figure what I would use that much for in my lifetime. When it arrived it had a 20MB hard drive for the same price. I still have the computer.
I liked Apple products in the early days. They published schematics and software listings for OS on the Apple II. By the time they moved to the Mac they had locked down everything and it was way too expensive to develop software for it. The PC was open and fit my needs.
The Mac hardware architecture was pretty well locked down, but not the programming interface. You could buy programming tools from Apple, but one didn't need them. The APIs (Application Programming Interface) were published. I used Inside Macintosh for the APIs and some version of Pascal, when I started programming Macs. (Not sure what Pascal enviornment. At some point I switched to Code Warrior, because I used that for Windows programming, starting with Windows 98.) At that time, I much preferred progamming for the Mac. One could make really cool application that were either impossible on the PCs, or would require a lot of grunt work.
Tom
2002 Adventurer 32V - Workhorse chassis
1998 CRV toad - manual transmission
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magicbus
LBI, NJ or Nantucket, MA
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pulsar wrote:The Mac hardware architecture was pretty well locked down, but not the programming interface... One could make really cool application that were either impossible on the PCs, or would require a lot of grunt work. Yeah, unless you needed access to the hardware!!! We developed a lot of cool stuff on the IIe and started on the Lisa, but then had no way to use an Apple to control devices and had to switch to accessible hardware.
Dave
Life doesn't come with a safety fence around it... enjoy it anyway.
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COMPUTER_PALL
HAWLEY, MN
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When Radio Shack came out with their first harddrive, I was using a couple of 8" floppy disk drives for storage. The harddrive was a stand-alone unit with a capacity of 8MB. I 'knew' I would never need any more storage than that, so I bought one for $3500. I still have it in the basement.
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DoubleClutcher
Ridgcrest,CA
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magicbus wrote:pulsar wrote:The Mac hardware architecture was pretty well locked down, but not the programming interface... One could make really cool application that were either impossible on the PCs, or would require a lot of grunt work. Yeah, unless you needed access to the hardware!!! We developed a lot of cool stuff on the IIe and started on the Lisa, but then had no way to use an Apple to control devices and had to switch to accessible hardware.
Dave
That's what I ran into. I designed and sold a piece of professional biofeedback equipment. It was much easier use an ISA bus interface card with my own A/D converters and a Yamaha sound chip all with direct access to the processor. With DOS based Pascal and assembly language I could take over the computer and not have the OS jumping in at a critical point. That problem still exists in the latest Windows/Mac systems. In fact it is worse.
Sounds like you went the same route I did with the Apple IIe and then attempts at the Lisa. That 6502 processor was a nice little chip.
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magicbus
LBI, NJ or Nantucket, MA
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DoubleClutcher wrote:Sounds like you went the same route I did with the Apple IIe and then attempts at the Lisa. That 6502 processor was a nice little chip. Sounds like we took the exact same path - including Pascal! I did a bunch of work later with the 6502 that someone - I forget who - had mounted on a board complete with UART and an 8-bit parallel port and sold as a package. They had a couple of add-on boards like an A/D converter and a standalone buss assembly so you could gang things together easily. For a software guy like me, it let me cobble hardware together for controlling things and then easily talk to a personal computer for development with a high-level language.
Dave
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Chris Bryant
DeLand, Florida, USA
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Joined: 03/26/2003
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Man- if I get the time (yeah, right), I need to dig out my Apple II+, it still worked fine the last time I used it a few years ago, and actually still did what I bought it for.
I was working with a company that used Tandy Deskmate software for a long time, and have an old Tandy with Deskmate in ROM- basically instant on. In the early to mid '80's I would use a Tandy Model 100 (a *great* little computer) to dial up the home office and download mailing lists. I could proof read the lists as they came across  .
I've got to say that is one reason I love Linux so much- it doesn't try to hide the "guts" so much- even though you don't have to use command line, it's so much faster to open a console and type a couple of commands than click this, click that, click the other thing, and customizing is largely a matter of simple editing of text files, which are well documented. It leaves me in total control.
-- Chris Bryant
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Yahooligan
Temecula, CA
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Ahhh, the memories. Not quite the same as some of you, though.
I started out with a Commodore 64, then around '87 got an Amiga 500. Had that for a while, got a taste of Unix by helping out a local ISP beta test one of their new systems running SunOS4 on an SS5. A short while later I traded the A500 for an Amiga 3000, which I still have today.
These days my paying job is system architect for a Unix shop (Linux and FreeBSD) so command-line is where I live. That said, I do have Windows, Mac and Linux desktops and laptops at home. I'm bummed I can't get one of the OSx86 distros installed on my main desktop, but oh well.
--
Hogan & Clan
2005 Nissan Titan CC SE 4x4
2010 Keystone Hideout 31BHSWE
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dfb
gardnerville
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"It's the Latest, the Greatest, you'll be amazed at all you can do".
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Chris Bryant
DeLand, Florida, USA
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