Ah, yes. The Wang mini-computer. Looked very much like a Freiden calculator
and had a cassette tape for it (or was it a magnetic card the size of a
business card?). Had to be programed in something much like assembly
language. Wang had some guy in Florida writing programs for it. I had a
demo in my office for about two weeks and IIRC, it cost about $2,200. Since
I had a commercial account with the University of Arizona to use their
Control Data 6400 (at $300.00 per hour of computer time), I declined to
purchase the Wang. (Computer run times were usually just a couple of
seconds at the most, and frequently the printing charges ran more than the
run times.)
You could buy a PDP-10 kit from Heath/Zenith in the early 70's and build
(assemble) your own computer. I think the kit was about $900 - $1100.
I thought that Steve Jobs went to Stanford, and Gates went to MIT.
Roger Turk
Tucson, Arizona USA
Gil Parrish wrote:
>>Clarence Verge wrote:
>>I don't know if it is historically accurate, but according to my eyes,
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had a PDP-8 in their dorm room at Harvard
in 1974.
At that time, even tho it was almost 10 years old, we were still using a
PDP-8 as a teaching computer in an undergrad lab.
The point ? It would have been worth about the cost of a new Buick.
How the heck do students get to have a MINICOMPUTER in their bedroom ?<<
I was in college in 1972, and the guy down the hall in my dorm had a Wang
computer in his room. The college itself was on a mainframe-and-terminals
configuration with IBM equipment, so it wasn't related to the what the
college was doing.
I was told the guy was technically a sales representative for Wang, and
maybe he took it out and demonstrated it-- I don't know. But having a
computer in your room wasn't impossible in that timeframe.<<
