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Wow, lots of memories stirred up in this thread! I recognized a lot of the systems and companies previously mentioned; many I know about from reading, some from using, and some from owning. S-100, Imsai, Altair, 8080s, Z80s, CP/m... the early legends of the hobby home computer movement. Electronics was a big hobby of mine.
Early computers I used or had access to:
* hunt-n-peck typing as a kid helping mom type programs onto punched cards at her college... these fed some type of IBM mainframe, probably a Series 360 class system.
* A Data General Nova 1200 minicomputer at Loyola university - my high school could dial-up access this to run Basic programs on an ASR-33 Teletype. Named Blanche.
* several Radio Shack TRS-80s and Model IIIs in the stores (the owner let me goof around on them after school) I wrote simple demos for him, sometimes showed customers "what computers can do" and how to hook up printers.
* an Imsai 8080 at Loyola High School where one had to manually enter a bootstrap program into memory (via front panel toggle switches) just to get it to read the Basic interpreter off a Kansas City format cassette tape. This was an 8080 computer on the S-100 bus. Named Rachel.
* Loyola high school also had a PDP-8 with no terminal, no manuals, no 'nuthin. I tried to reverse engineer the firmware with a PDP-8 overview book I had at home using the front panel switches and lights to single-step it. Boring, and difficult to do during breaks or lunch time. Nobody else ever tried to do anything with the school's PDP-8 named Linda. I probably gave up within a week.
Early computers I really used but didn't own:
I worked at the Naval Research Lab in Washington D.C. for summer jobs in my last high school years and through college; I worked in several departments over those years and used several NRL systems:
* An HP 1000 rack-mount minicomputer designed for factory automation/control type of things running the RTE-IVb (Real Time Executive) operating system... a very small and simple OS. My job on the HP 1000 was to interface it to a Radio Astronomy observatory owned/operated by NRL; this included making half-duplex serial ports act like full duplex ports to talk to little 8085 single-board computers used as interfaces to the observatory and its hydrogen maser time standard. (not bad for a high school summer job, eh? Beats lawn mowing!)
* One of the first ten hand-built DEC VAX 11/780 computers running VMS 3.3, evolving to VMS 5.something during the years I worked at NRL. For the first 2 summers I could use the VAX but didn't have any work that needed it; I was busy on the HP. The 3rd summer though I got hired by my old boss and his boss - the head of the Space Science Division - so my job changed! I was now the assistant system manager of the VAX... I'd just graduated high school! The real system manager was over in the Chem division, helping train their new system manager on their new VAX. I was to babysit the Space Science VAX in his absence... and design networking and terminal server stuff (this pre-dates the Internet, ARPAnet, etc.) for the division. It was time to tie all sorts of computers and terminals together. This included learning and designing with DECnet, early Ethernet (the stiff rigid cable versions that used clamp-on transceivers - long before today's much easier RJ-45 connectors), using Gandolf and Micom boxes to allow any terminal to connect to darn near any computer in the division, and early versions of the DEC Ethernet based terminal servers.
* Next two summers I ended up in the X-ray astronomy group working with a Data General Eclipse running AOS ("Advanced Operating System"). I used it for processing data collected on a satellite (HEAO for those that remember it) writing my own programs. And I babysat 10 mag tape drives: 2 modern "8 bit" drives and 8 older and lower capacity 7 bit drives with the raw data. I kept feeding old data tapes to the 7-bit drives so they could be copied to the higher capacity 8 bit tapes. During this time I worked with folks on the NASA Spartan mission (the Space Shuttle placed a satellite into orbit for a while to be a radar target, then the Shuttle plucked the sat back into its cargo bay) and the Solar Maximum Mission (satellite to observe the sunspot cycle). So I did all sorts of programming and played with specialized computer hardware.
At college, we had access to Apple IIs with 1, sometimes 2, external diskette drives running the UCSD "P-System" Pascal compiler/interpreter. Slow... These were scattered all over campus in "Apple Orchards." UVA also had a bunch of Prime minicomputers, running the imaginatively named "Prime OS." Accounts on these were assigned to various courses; if you weren't taking one of those courses you didn't have access to the Primes. While I was at UVA the process to replace the Apple IIs with something more current began; we had all sorts of loaner computers to try out and I was one of the testers:
* an Apple Lisa-I that had been modded by Apple to be a Lisa-II prototype (it crashed a lot)
* a pre-production MAC (the original upright box style with the ~9inch BW display) and beta-level Pascal software that locked up at the "enter file name" box. UVA insisted on teaching Pascal to engineering students so all loaner computers had to have some sort of Pascal too. Apple lost out.
* We also had numerous PC/PC-clone loaners including a Compaq luggable with the orange CRT, an Osborn, a real IBM PC, etc. I graduated before the final contract was awarded... the Apple Orchards were still around when I left.
Somewhere in there I toyed with a Northstar computer of some sort... what I remember about it was it used hard sector 5 1/4 diskettes. For those that never heard of "hard sector" diskettes: if you look at a normal 5 1/4 inch PC diskette you'll notice the slot for the read/write heads and a small hole in the cover; in the magnetic media there is a smaller hole that lines up with this cover hole once per diskette revolution. This is how the diskette drive and diskette controller in the computer track the physical location of the media as it spins. The formatting software watches for the hole to fly by, then it writes a sector ID number, a short gap (to give the controller time to process the ID number when it's reading the disk looking for a particular sector), then the actual data, extra data used for error detection and correction, then another gap before the next sector ID, etc. In a hard sector diskette, there is one hole in the media for each data sector - not just one hole to mark the starting point.
Computers used on my job over the last 27 years:
* PCs with company controlled software. (yuk on the software part) IBMs and Dells.
* DEC microVAX II systems; I was system manager of 5 computers plus 2 workstation units for many years; those systems are long since retired.
* IBM Risc 6000 minicomputers running AIX, IBM's Unix flavored op system. We have these on some of our aircraft flight crew training simulators.
* Gould SEL computers... really old rackmount-ish things. These used Commodore Amigas as the system console terminals though - fancy GUI desktop computer controlling an old dinosaur Gould! Our newest Gould was replaced by an IBM 6000; this Gould in turn replaced even older/slower models on another simulator. I wasn't sorry to see these go; whatever method they used to connect to the hard drives was pathetic... loading modules into the editor program took about 1 minute per kilobyte of text. And 1 minute per Kbyte to save the file too. Compile time? Order a pizza while waiting.
* Motorola 68K family CPUs scattered about in various modules of the simulators, all running some flavor of Unix.
* Harris Nighthawk multi-CPU minicomputer running one of our latest simulators; also running a Unix variant. (and a yuk system in general)
* IBM mainframe system (3090 class) running an old IBM operation system: TSO (Time Sharing Option).
* Several Unix based workstations: Silicon Graphics mostly.
* HP Apollo workstations with Unix. (ugh, these sucked)
* HP "K Server"
Computers I owned:
An RCA CDP1802 CPU powered single board hobbyist computer based on the "Elf" design from a magazine. This was my first computer; it had a couple kilobytes of RAM, no ROM, a hex keypad for data entry, and multi-digit LED readouts. The CDP1802 users manual was a great primer on the innards of basic computer/CPU function and I still point folks to it that want to understand the nitty-gritty of computer operation. I was probably 12 or so when I got this.
After one year of college and typing papers on a Selectric I decided I needed a real word processor... ergo my first "real" computer: I built a Z80 based system running CP/M 2.2 with 64K memory (back when "64Kbytes for under a kilobuck" was a big deal) and 2 eight inch floppy drives. The keyboard was hand-wired; it and the CRT and the case were one giant piece from a swap meet. I had Wordstar and a spreadsheet program for this computer, plus Basic and FORTRAN... this put me ahead of my classmates; only one other Aero engineer student had a computer.
After graduation I "built" PC-clones the typical way: buying cards, cases, and power supplies at computer swap meets/shows. I started with an XT class computer and DOS 3.11, next was a 286 setup, I skipped the 386 generation and went to a 486, then a 486/DX2, a Pentium something, Pentium II (the "Slot A") card style CPUs, a Pentium-III with the extra "cache" memory card on the motherboard, to my current Pentium-IV system, and I'm working on my next: an i7-4771. I've used DOS from version 2, 3.11, and some experimental versions called DOS 4, DOS 5, and even a DOS 6. I've owned Windows from 3.1, WFW, 98SE, and XP. At work I've also had Win2000. My new system will be Win7 based; it'll be my second Win7 setup as a recently built i5 computer is in the living room serving as a Home Theater PC and DVR.
mpc
Early computers I used or had access to:
* hunt-n-peck typing as a kid helping mom type programs onto punched cards at her college... these fed some type of IBM mainframe, probably a Series 360 class system.
* A Data General Nova 1200 minicomputer at Loyola university - my high school could dial-up access this to run Basic programs on an ASR-33 Teletype. Named Blanche.
* several Radio Shack TRS-80s and Model IIIs in the stores (the owner let me goof around on them after school) I wrote simple demos for him, sometimes showed customers "what computers can do" and how to hook up printers.
* an Imsai 8080 at Loyola High School where one had to manually enter a bootstrap program into memory (via front panel toggle switches) just to get it to read the Basic interpreter off a Kansas City format cassette tape. This was an 8080 computer on the S-100 bus. Named Rachel.
* Loyola high school also had a PDP-8 with no terminal, no manuals, no 'nuthin. I tried to reverse engineer the firmware with a PDP-8 overview book I had at home using the front panel switches and lights to single-step it. Boring, and difficult to do during breaks or lunch time. Nobody else ever tried to do anything with the school's PDP-8 named Linda. I probably gave up within a week.
Early computers I really used but didn't own:
I worked at the Naval Research Lab in Washington D.C. for summer jobs in my last high school years and through college; I worked in several departments over those years and used several NRL systems:
* An HP 1000 rack-mount minicomputer designed for factory automation/control type of things running the RTE-IVb (Real Time Executive) operating system... a very small and simple OS. My job on the HP 1000 was to interface it to a Radio Astronomy observatory owned/operated by NRL; this included making half-duplex serial ports act like full duplex ports to talk to little 8085 single-board computers used as interfaces to the observatory and its hydrogen maser time standard. (not bad for a high school summer job, eh? Beats lawn mowing!)
* One of the first ten hand-built DEC VAX 11/780 computers running VMS 3.3, evolving to VMS 5.something during the years I worked at NRL. For the first 2 summers I could use the VAX but didn't have any work that needed it; I was busy on the HP. The 3rd summer though I got hired by my old boss and his boss - the head of the Space Science Division - so my job changed! I was now the assistant system manager of the VAX... I'd just graduated high school! The real system manager was over in the Chem division, helping train their new system manager on their new VAX. I was to babysit the Space Science VAX in his absence... and design networking and terminal server stuff (this pre-dates the Internet, ARPAnet, etc.) for the division. It was time to tie all sorts of computers and terminals together. This included learning and designing with DECnet, early Ethernet (the stiff rigid cable versions that used clamp-on transceivers - long before today's much easier RJ-45 connectors), using Gandolf and Micom boxes to allow any terminal to connect to darn near any computer in the division, and early versions of the DEC Ethernet based terminal servers.
* Next two summers I ended up in the X-ray astronomy group working with a Data General Eclipse running AOS ("Advanced Operating System"). I used it for processing data collected on a satellite (HEAO for those that remember it) writing my own programs. And I babysat 10 mag tape drives: 2 modern "8 bit" drives and 8 older and lower capacity 7 bit drives with the raw data. I kept feeding old data tapes to the 7-bit drives so they could be copied to the higher capacity 8 bit tapes. During this time I worked with folks on the NASA Spartan mission (the Space Shuttle placed a satellite into orbit for a while to be a radar target, then the Shuttle plucked the sat back into its cargo bay) and the Solar Maximum Mission (satellite to observe the sunspot cycle). So I did all sorts of programming and played with specialized computer hardware.
At college, we had access to Apple IIs with 1, sometimes 2, external diskette drives running the UCSD "P-System" Pascal compiler/interpreter. Slow... These were scattered all over campus in "Apple Orchards." UVA also had a bunch of Prime minicomputers, running the imaginatively named "Prime OS." Accounts on these were assigned to various courses; if you weren't taking one of those courses you didn't have access to the Primes. While I was at UVA the process to replace the Apple IIs with something more current began; we had all sorts of loaner computers to try out and I was one of the testers:
* an Apple Lisa-I that had been modded by Apple to be a Lisa-II prototype (it crashed a lot)
* a pre-production MAC (the original upright box style with the ~9inch BW display) and beta-level Pascal software that locked up at the "enter file name" box. UVA insisted on teaching Pascal to engineering students so all loaner computers had to have some sort of Pascal too. Apple lost out.
* We also had numerous PC/PC-clone loaners including a Compaq luggable with the orange CRT, an Osborn, a real IBM PC, etc. I graduated before the final contract was awarded... the Apple Orchards were still around when I left.
Somewhere in there I toyed with a Northstar computer of some sort... what I remember about it was it used hard sector 5 1/4 diskettes. For those that never heard of "hard sector" diskettes: if you look at a normal 5 1/4 inch PC diskette you'll notice the slot for the read/write heads and a small hole in the cover; in the magnetic media there is a smaller hole that lines up with this cover hole once per diskette revolution. This is how the diskette drive and diskette controller in the computer track the physical location of the media as it spins. The formatting software watches for the hole to fly by, then it writes a sector ID number, a short gap (to give the controller time to process the ID number when it's reading the disk looking for a particular sector), then the actual data, extra data used for error detection and correction, then another gap before the next sector ID, etc. In a hard sector diskette, there is one hole in the media for each data sector - not just one hole to mark the starting point.
Computers used on my job over the last 27 years:
* PCs with company controlled software. (yuk on the software part) IBMs and Dells.
* DEC microVAX II systems; I was system manager of 5 computers plus 2 workstation units for many years; those systems are long since retired.
* IBM Risc 6000 minicomputers running AIX, IBM's Unix flavored op system. We have these on some of our aircraft flight crew training simulators.
* Gould SEL computers... really old rackmount-ish things. These used Commodore Amigas as the system console terminals though - fancy GUI desktop computer controlling an old dinosaur Gould! Our newest Gould was replaced by an IBM 6000; this Gould in turn replaced even older/slower models on another simulator. I wasn't sorry to see these go; whatever method they used to connect to the hard drives was pathetic... loading modules into the editor program took about 1 minute per kilobyte of text. And 1 minute per Kbyte to save the file too. Compile time? Order a pizza while waiting.
* Motorola 68K family CPUs scattered about in various modules of the simulators, all running some flavor of Unix.
* Harris Nighthawk multi-CPU minicomputer running one of our latest simulators; also running a Unix variant. (and a yuk system in general)
* IBM mainframe system (3090 class) running an old IBM operation system: TSO (Time Sharing Option).
* Several Unix based workstations: Silicon Graphics mostly.
* HP Apollo workstations with Unix. (ugh, these sucked)
* HP "K Server"
Computers I owned:
An RCA CDP1802 CPU powered single board hobbyist computer based on the "Elf" design from a magazine. This was my first computer; it had a couple kilobytes of RAM, no ROM, a hex keypad for data entry, and multi-digit LED readouts. The CDP1802 users manual was a great primer on the innards of basic computer/CPU function and I still point folks to it that want to understand the nitty-gritty of computer operation. I was probably 12 or so when I got this.
After one year of college and typing papers on a Selectric I decided I needed a real word processor... ergo my first "real" computer: I built a Z80 based system running CP/M 2.2 with 64K memory (back when "64Kbytes for under a kilobuck" was a big deal) and 2 eight inch floppy drives. The keyboard was hand-wired; it and the CRT and the case were one giant piece from a swap meet. I had Wordstar and a spreadsheet program for this computer, plus Basic and FORTRAN... this put me ahead of my classmates; only one other Aero engineer student had a computer.
After graduation I "built" PC-clones the typical way: buying cards, cases, and power supplies at computer swap meets/shows. I started with an XT class computer and DOS 3.11, next was a 286 setup, I skipped the 386 generation and went to a 486, then a 486/DX2, a Pentium something, Pentium II (the "Slot A") card style CPUs, a Pentium-III with the extra "cache" memory card on the motherboard, to my current Pentium-IV system, and I'm working on my next: an i7-4771. I've used DOS from version 2, 3.11, and some experimental versions called DOS 4, DOS 5, and even a DOS 6. I've owned Windows from 3.1, WFW, 98SE, and XP. At work I've also had Win2000. My new system will be Win7 based; it'll be my second Win7 setup as a recently built i5 computer is in the living room serving as a Home Theater PC and DVR.
mpc
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