On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 8:17 PM ben via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 2025-10-15 3:48 p.m., Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > > > According to historians, and I consider myself one, let us consider what > > classic/vintage computers were: The 1970s saw the three amigos: Apple II, > > TRS-80 and Commodore PET and the OS was DOS and its ilk + CP/M. The > 1980’s > > saw the Dells, HPs and many others with MS-DOS & IBM PC-DOS from QDOS. We > > saw this and behold ’bring on the clones’(I just had to say this!) The > era > > of old computers saw one generation building on the shoulders of giants > who > > designed these wayback computers(with apologies to Wayback Machine). > > Today’s PCs and ARM machines are just the latest iteration of this > > theory(by the way not mine). > > > The DG NOVA computer is a better example when I think of the 70's for > computing. It was one of the early mass production designs. > Before that computers where hand built for the customer, with SSI chips > if any.The IBM 1130,PDP 9, PDP 8, come to mind. > > The 8' floppy drive and the smaller shit was just the right size for > micros that had no memory to spare for disk buffers. > Big drives where for the real computers, with FORTRAN IV, no MICROSOFT > BASIC here. > > > Happy computing > > > As a person who could claim to be a "qualified amateur" historian I am trying to get what you're saying here. I throw the flag on a blanket statement "what classic/vintage computers were..", especially when the facts you present are not really accurate historically. First of all, and I have said this before, vintage means, "of an era" so it's more historically correct to use a more specific term like vintage 70's micocomputing or vintage 8-bit computers, etc. to describe what *you* mean by "vintage computers" Bare in mind in the 70s the far more significant dollars spent, marketshare, bits through wires and however you'd want to measure was within mini and mainframe computing, in particular manufactured by IBM. Your statement "...the OS was DOS and its ink + CP/M.." is totally incorrect for the 70s, but that might just be a typo on your part. Not sure what DOS you're talking about specifically but IBM DOS was not sold until the early 1980s. There were many OS's in the 60's and 70's, but the huge majority of these, the significant ones were installed on mainframes and minicomputers. I honestly don't have a beef with your opinions, I can't police everyone's knowledge, but I suggest you need to do some readin' on the subject first. Start with Steve Levy's book Hackers followed by "A History of Modern Computing" by Paul Ceruzzi. I hope you take my comments as a friendly feedback to your statements Bill
