What is your favorite vintage computer, besides the Commondor?

Besides the Commodore VIC-20? (which holds the title of my favorite computer of all time, not just favorite vintage computer).

That's a tough call, 2nd place probably goes to the Cactus (jk, it's not actually vintage) the Data General Nova 1200.

I wish I could figure out what exactly is wrong with it, but it's not an easy machine to fix. The new power supply seems to be stable, but the CPU is suspect -- even simple programs don't work consistently. Writing diagnostic routines in assembly is not easy for this architecture, and the diagnostic routines I have from DG are not obvious in how they're supposed to report back failures based on the manual. Without a known-working machine to test each of part in, I'm kinda feeling stuck for the moment, even with the assistance of the modern Data General Users Group (or whatever we're calling ourselves these days).

When the Nova 1200 has worked, it's been fun toggling in programs, and using BASIC on a core memory minicomputer.

Right now it has a diagnostic extension card installed between the bus and the CPU card to hopefully help me figure out what's hosed.

One day we'll be back to running software with no problems. It's a damned cool, beautiful machine that influenced so many important machines that would follow, not just from Data General.

Schede perforate: un mainframe da caserma

— Telescrivente a nastro perforato. Fonte: Aurora Ciardelli. Il primo giorno del CAR, il Centro Addestramento Reclute dell’esercito che formava i militari di leva prima che venissiro assegnati alle rispettive sedi (cioè insegnava a marciare e ad urlare sissignore a squarciagola), mi comunicarono che sarei stato assegnato al battaglione Trasmissioni di Torino, per lavorare con un “nuovo sistema…

View On WordPress

Top On Sale Product Recommendations!

HIGOLE 1 Pro Tablet Pad Industrial Windows 11 Tablet Mini PC 5.5inch Touch Screen Mini Computer Intel J4125 8GB + 128GB +WIFI 6

Original price: USD 250.40

Now price: USD 125.20

Click&Buy :

💾 В чём заключаются плюсы и минусы (поляризация) миникомпьютеров/микрокомпьютеров{Pi}❓

❌ Бешеная скорость обратной реакции, моментальный отклик утилит

❌ Сопоставим со стационарным персональным компьютером [отсутствует батарея]

❌ Оптимизированность и компактность платы

➖ Из-за мобильного чипа, достаточно быстро перегревается на многозадачности [требует охлаждения]

➖ Требует наличия всех устройств ввода и вывода [подбирать под гнездо]

➖ Необходимость заниматься с sd-картами, по причине отсутствия внутренней памяти

➖ Ориентирование на мобильную архитектуру, что при подавляющем большинстве десктопных для устройства портируемых систем, сужает варианты в среднем до семейства Linux, и при этом не такой уж широкой выборки их дистрибутивов [получается эмулятор Ubuntu, грубо говоря]

I am the first to admit that "Doom" isn't very Christmassy, but I need this ornament. It plays the actual game demo... or, in fact, the actual game if you hook up controls. 

i better not hear a single corporation bitch about streaming numbers being down bc its their own damn fault for taking picture in picture away

Me

Creative Computing Benchmark from 1984 showing computational speed of hundreds of classic computers!

Creative Computing Benchmark from 1984 showing computational speed of hundreds of classic computers! #history #vintagecomputers #benchmarks #creativecomputing #basic

Page 6 of the March 1984 issue of legendary publication, Creative Computing, revealed the then latest version of the Creative Computing Benchmark. This benchmark was a short test of computational speed and accuracy and the random number generator in the BASIC programming language for hundreds of platforms. The 11-line BASIC program was run on hundreds of computers, from mainframes to handhelds.…

View On WordPress

The choice of laptops can be depend on the purpose of your purchase. In 2023, Laptops under 40000 price range can be used for basic purposes. In this era of online lectures and meeting these devices can be a best options for accomplishing smallm tasks. If your are student than having exposure to laptop technology in this early age can help you take the bigger benefits from more advance features of different technologies. Below are some of examples of laptops under 40000

1)Acer Aspire 3 Thin and Light Laptop Series- A515-56 processor- core i3 RAM - 4 GB DDR4 expandable upto 12 GB Resolution -1920 * 1080 pixels battery life- 8.5 hours special features- webcam, backlit keyboard, stunning display, and two built-in microphones

2) Dell 15 Series- INSPIRON 3511 processor- core i3 RAM - 8 GB DDR4 expandable upto 16 GB Resolution -1920 * 1080 pixels battery life- 6 hours special features- WVA AG narrow border display

3)Hp15 Series- 15s-gy0501AU processor- Ryzen 3 RAM - 8 GB DDR4 expandable upto 16 GB Resolution -1920 * 1080 pixels battery life- 4 hours special features- IPS display with anti-reflective feature

4) Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 Series- IdeaPad 3 15IML05 processor- Core i3 RAM - 8 GB DDR4 expandable upto 12 GB Resolution -1366 x 768 Pixels battery life- 7 hours special features- Light and thin, TN display, anti-glare, Xbox GamePass Ultimate 3-month subscriptio free

Yes there are few more laptops which can fit in your budget of laptops under 40000 with more useful features. Continue with your research by visiting to our website 3aceslaptops and ping anytime for more knowledge

Usagi Electric's Litton Minicomputer

ibm 5100 (1975), ibm's first minicomputer, which was "specifically designed for professional and scientific problem-solvers"

Blinkenlights is a neologism for diagnostic lights usually on the front panels on old mainframe computers, minicomputers, many early microcomputers, and modern network hardware. It has been seen as a skeuomorph on many modern office machines, most notably on photocopiers. (via Wikipedia)

????

Prior to the early 1990s you couldn't just access the internet because you wanted to. Only people with a connection to the US Defense Department were allowed* to use it. That included a lot of universities under contract with the US Government (not always the DoD.)

* In theory. In practice you just needed a buddy who was a systems administrator for said contractor. That's how I first gained access, in 1982 I was a physics grad student with buddies in the High Energy Physics lab. They had access through the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. So they gave me access via a dumb TTY terminal on the physics department's DEC VAX 11/780 minicomputer. It was useful as a way of connecting to other LGBT+ computer nerds on net.motss ("members of the same sex") which may have been the world's first queer social networking system. I'm that much of a relic. (By 1986 I was also developing communications equipment for the early internet, which at that time was called the Defense Data Network. I still have one of the old DDN tech manuals around the house somewhere. One of my gaming buddies was Roy Fielding, coinventor of HTTP and inventor of the RESTful API. I also know everyone quoted in the following article. )

I wrote about the death of tech competition and its relationship to lax antitrust enforcement and regulatory capture for The American System in The American Conservative

Tech was forever a dynamic industry, where mainframes were bested by minicomputers, which were, in turn, devoured by PCs. Proprietary information services were subsumed into Gopher, Gopher was devoured by the web. If you didn’t like the management of the current technosphere, just wait a minute and there will be something new along presently. When it came to moving your relationships, data, and media over to the new service, the skids were so greased as to be nearly frictionless. What happened? Did a new generation of tech founders figure out how to build an interoperability-proof computer that defied the laws of computer science? Hardly. No one has invented a digital Roach Motel, where users and their data check in but they can't check out. Digital tools remain stubbornly universal, and the attacker’s advantage is still in effect. Any walled garden is liable to having holes blasted in its perimeter by upstarts who want to help an incumbent’s corralled customers evacuate to greener pastures. What changed was the posture of the state towards corporations. First, governments changed how they dealt with monopolies. Then, monopolies changed how governments treated reverse-engineering.

-A Murder Story: Whatever Happened to Interoperability?

Unfortunately, for operating systems, the PC at first represented a great leap backwards, as early systems forgot (or never knew of) the lessons learned in the era of minicomputers. For example, early operating systems such as DOS (the Disk Operating System, from Microsoft) didn’t think memory protection was important; thus, a malicious (or perhaps just a poorly-programmed) application could scribble all over memory. The first generations of the Mac OS (v9 and earlier) took a cooperative approach to job scheduling; thus, a thread that accidentally got stuck in an infinite loop could take over the entire system, forcing a reboot. The painful list of OS features missing in this generation of systems is long, too long for a full discussion here.

incredibly cringe

DEC PDP-12 minicomputer