On 10/8/2011 11:42 AM, Rich Braun wrote:
Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer:
My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back
then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people.
At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a
MITS Altair
The first desktop I ever ran across was in my math teacher's class in
Arlington, VA in 1977: an HP 9830A (you can find pics of it via Google).
Anyone else remember those? It had 4K of RAM, kept your programs on a
cassette tape, printed out (quickly) on an 80-column wide thermal printer.
You programmed it in BASIC; I remember writing a banner printing program and a
biorhythm chart generator.
Being exposed to bigger mainframe computers starting around '72, I never
thought of these micro things as anything other than toys. So when the TRS-80
and Apple ][ came out, they held little interest for me--my first
factory-built (i.e. not cobbled-together) home computer was a 1982 DEC surplus
PDT-11/150; it ran RT-11. The first "real" home computer, that rivaled
mainframe performance, came along about 10 years later: the Intel 486.
That's when speed-of-light constraints came to favor microchips over the
"frames" containing CPUs in multiple circuit boards spread across a backplane,
and transistor density has accelerated ever since.
By the time of the 486, Linux was available: today's supercomputing clusters
usually run Linux.
-rich
The first computer I had any personal experience with was an IBM 1620.
20K of BCD digits, and the peak instruction rate was about 6,000 per
second. (The memory cycle was 20 microseconds and the shortest
instructions took eight cycles.) Oh, and a hard disk that stored 2M of
BCD digits.
After a year my school replaced it with an IBM 1130, which was hardly a
powerhouse either: 8K bytes of RAM and a peak execution rate of perhaps
80,000 instructions/second (5.85 microsecond cycle time and most
instructions took multiple cycles). Oh yes, another hard disk; this one
stored one megabyte and used stepper motors that made a loud saw-like
noise during seeks. Although it was a hard disk it was no faster than a
floppy drive.
I did have some exposure to more powerful systems at the nearby state
university. They had a midrange 370 system (370/155 if memory serves)
that was used in batch mode (submit deck of cards, come back later for
printouts) and a PDP-10 timesharing system with ASR-35 terminals.
Once home computers had floppy drives they were already exceeding the
performance of the 1620 and 1130 (though the early floppies didn't have
as much capacity as the hard disks did) so they were never toys to me.
It was a while before I could scrape up the cash to buy one of my own (I
had an SWTPC 6800 kit that I never quite got to work properly, and later
an Atari 800XL) but I certainly wanted a home computer right away!
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