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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Oh how far we have come....
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9749 |
Hi.  For my 5000th post(crikey!), here is a little perspective on just how far we have come. A chum of mine sent me this scanned ad for a Tandy 5000 PC from 1989:  Our standard MM2 chip in 28-pin flavour for three bucks can run circles around this thing.  The only feature that the MM2 chip does not have is VGA output, but the MM Extreme ones DO if VGA is still your thing. Check out the specs of that Tandy though, and reflect on just how powerful the little MM is by comparison. Also something of a price difference - $8,499 for the Tandy in '89 and that is WITHOUT the monitor and mouse, so I fully expect that with monitor, that system sold for about nine grand. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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twofingers Guru  Joined: 02/06/2014 Location: GermanyPosts: 1671 |
Congratulations to the 5000th!  I hope we will see 5000+ more!  Best wishes from Germany! Michael PS: I paid in 1987 for my first IBM-compatible 80286 including HGC and 20MB HDD only 2500 US$ a bargain!  ... it was a long way to go.  causality ≠ correlation ≠ coincidence |
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Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5157 |
5000 posts! Hmm, I could write some code to reset your post count to 4999, forever.  But seriously, thanks for your posts Grogster, forum wouldn't be the same without your input. I've go a stack of old PC and electronics magazines, some of the prices were shocking! Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| Phil23 Guru Joined: 27/03/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1667 |
The one thing that really caught me is the mouse.... Weren't they a high end item when they first appeared. Easily recall $500+ price tags circa late 80's. Phil  |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9749 |
@ twofingers: Danke, mein freund. (translation: Thank you, my friend) Me thinks it will take me quite a while to do another 5000 posts, so don't get your hopes up!@ Gizmo: Shucks, thanks.  These forums have become something of my 2nd home, I have to admit. If and when you move the forums as you propose to do, I hope there won't be much down-time, or I might go into withdrawal!!!!@ phil23: Yeah, I remember the old serial mouse. The TRUE SERIAL mouse, not any of that fancy PS/2 stuff. I seem to recall they were the great 'In-thing' in the 80's. 70's and early 80's computing was all keyboard, and mostly green-screen terminal only. Point-and-click was a big attraction when it came on the scene. I still remember many a DOS-based application where you would have to install a mouse driver.Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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MicroBlocks Guru Joined: 12/05/2012 Location: ThailandPosts: 2209 |
I miss those days. Being in the computer business at that time a 30% margin was normal. I still prefer 30% over a $8499 computer then 30$ over a $3 'computer. :) In the Netherlands we had the Tulip brand. Similar price. Built like a tank and very reliable.  Microblocks. Build with logic. |
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| Alastair Senior Member  Joined: 03/04/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 161 |
The first computer I used hands on was a DEC PDP-8I. Would have cost the research centre a squillion. My first 'home' computer was a self built Z80 running CP-M which I hacked a bit. The first 'bought' one was a genuine IBM 8086 PC. Slow as a wet week but I thought it was wonderful. Added an external 8" floppy drive and took ages to fill it. Kilobytes were the name of the game, now Terrabytes is all that is worth considering - progress??? Wish I had taken some pictures of my early systems. Ahhh memories. Keep posting Grogster. PS Another memory popped up. We had a team leader who was very democratic and held a meeting each year to discuss the next year's research funding spend. Provided you agreed with what he wanted to do everyone got a say. I was then the most junior member and my opinion mattered didly squat. By this time we had a PDP-15 and there was universal agreement to double the memory from 8K to 16K. It cost about $75K. Ok no more memories - backing to debugging this I2C chip. Cheers, Alastair |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9749 |
My first computer was an Atari 800XL. I loved that machine. It could play really good games(for the time!) and also was an excellent machine to learn to program on. The Atari 800XL was purchased brand new back in the 80's when I was a teenager - what a decade to be alive. I also had a Sinclair ZX81, but it was more of a door-wedge then anything computer-like. An interesting toy, but that's about it. |
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| kg4pid Regular Member  Joined: 08/03/2015 Location: United StatesPosts: 50 |
Showing my age here, my first computer was an Apple II+ around 1980. I still have a wire-wrap board that I made for it that had all kinds of I/O on it. The first computer I worked on was a Data General Nova 800 when I was in the U.S. Navy in the mid 1970's. The boards were something like 15 inches (38 centimeters) square and it took two boards just to make up the CPU, mostly done with 7400 series TTL chips. There were separate boards for display, disk controller, etc. It had a total of 16K (yes K) of magnetic core (non volatile) memory made up of 4K and 8K boards . You could have it running a program and kill the power to it, restore power and it would continue running right where it left off. This was on a flight simulator and controlled 10 cockpits. Four of these were connected together with a high speed (at the time) DMA channel for a total of 40 cockpits. To get it running you had to load a small program via 20 toggle switches on the front panel. Amazing what could be done with so little. But the most impressive part was the simulated radar. These were specialy built processors also using 7400 series TTL chips. These things were the size of a large vending machine, had over 100 circuit boards and there was one of these for every cockpit. They each had two, 5 volt 100 amp power supplies. For data storage they used two magnetic drums and could dump all their data in 600ms as there was a read/write head for every track on the drum. This was stuff you could really get your hands on and all board repair was done on-site. The good old days. Max |
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| bigfix Senior Member Joined: 20/02/2014 Location: AustriaPosts: 129 |
I started with some more serious HW for my first computer in the late 70s, early 80s  DEC PDP 11/34 was built out of scrapped parts, burned modules etc... I liked the tantal capacitors, which burned nice clean holes and got me boards All TTL Logic, only the frontend has a 8008 Processor Uses a bit of power (50+ Amps 5v plus some more weird voltages) Real magnetic core memory with 32 Kbytes 9Track Tape, 1Mbyte 8" Floppies Originally I did not have this nice cabinet, so I spent weeks making my own boxes and cabinets out of leftover sheetmetal pieces, cutting with a jigsaw by hand Over the years I spent more time building enclosures, than running those machines I finally had a full Vaxcluster with 12 & 14" Diskdrives at home, serving PC's and Mac's - it got a little warm in summer |
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| hitsware Guru Joined: 23/11/2012 Location: United StatesPosts: 535 |
And all the early ones had BASIC on ROM. I miss that. My first was a VIC-20......... |
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GoodToGo! Senior Member Joined: 23/04/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 188 |
My first computer was one that was verrrry common at the time....... Anyone remember SYS49152? GTG! ...... Don't worry mate, it'll be GoodToGo! |
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| Alastair Senior Member Joined: 03/04/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 161 |
GTG, Me thinks Commodore 64. I was given one after it died and managed to resurrect it. Failed PS and a few chips fortunately the cheap ones. Cheers, Alastair |
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| GoodToGo! Senior Member Joined: 23/04/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 188 |
@Alastair, Me thinks you are spot on! GTG! ...... Don't worry mate, it'll be GoodToGo! |
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panky Guru Joined: 02/10/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1116 |
Guys, Not trying to be a "my !@#$ is bigger than yours...", but some may be interested. My first was a home built kit with my younger brother - a Electronics Aust Educ8 - a 256 BIT serial all TTL CPU. Still have it and it still works! Went on to Motorola 6800 D2 kit, Intelligent Systems Compucolor II, Televideo TPC I and later, the TPC II, a Fergusson Bigboard II made from parts with twin Shugart 8" floppies (and tarted up CP/M called ZCPR 3). Went on to a IBM AT, then a Toshiba portable - later a series of Dell, Toshiba, Acer and Asus laptops, the latest penning this post under Win 7 Pro. Had a dream job on the RAAF and got formal training on IBM 360/75, Perkin Elmer 7/32, DEC LSI 11, DEC 11/03, Data General uNova, Eclipse and MV 8000 series. Also had a play with Lockheed Systems minis, Bolt, Beranack and Newmann Message switch (the original DARPAnet BBN message switch). Seems a long while ago and much has disappeared from the little grey cells but a love of "how things work" has kept me interested and passionately involved. 'Mite Power Rules! Doug. ... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it! |
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| Boppa Guru Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 816 |
Another Vic20 user here, was my first actual home computer (3 1/2k of ram, I had the super expander, so had a massive 6k of ram to play with) Our high school had a single computer at the beginning, an apple ii europlus, it was both the office computer and the computer studies one, had a 19" black and white AWA tv set modified to accept composite video input (that was a conversion done a lot in the early days, I did a princess 12" b/w portable conversion myself as a young teenager for the vic- its video modulator was uhf and only our lounge room tv actually had uhf! the princess was a vhf only One thing I loved about that vic was its user port- it had 8 control lines that you could actually hook things up to and control the real world via peeks and pokes!- mine started off running a HO model railway, then became a programmable light chaser using opto isolators and triacs to run 8 channels of 1200w each lighting, it actually did that role up until just before the 2000 olympics when it finally died (spilt beer and computers dont mix grrr) I remember the apple had a disk drive (160k) but disks (Verbotten???) were expensive for a high schooler, over $10 each!- so we used to carefully cut out another write notch on the opposite side of the 5 1/4 floppy with scissors, so we could flip them over and use the other side!- Anyone remember the little silver write protect labels you put on them, some floppy drives could use any tape to cover the notch, but the apple needed silver ones in the early full height drive, as it used electrical conductors to check for the notch, other brands used opto or a microswitch Cassette drives- c10 cassettes and typing in programs by hand from magazines, and several times they released 45 singles made of floppy vinyl in the magazines- they only played a couple of times before tearing Then IBM started changing the world of computers, IBM clones (my first was a 386sx16, 256kb of ram, bought the motherboard 2nd hand, it ran for two years sans case, it all lived in the top drawer of my old school study desk with an amber screen monitor off a Hercules video card- that was the ducks nuts at the time for high resolution (monochrome only) cga was around- colour, but on text was almost too blurry to read, ega was still brand new and $$$$ |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
I'm older than dirt! Excerpts of my curiculum vitae follows. 1956 IBM 1401 at Cornell, helped write an assembler 1959 IBM 704 FORTRAN II architectural resonance program at Bolt Beranek & Newman 1961 began designing broadcast and recording studios 1966 Pan Am - Honeywell PDP-8 the Hawker-Sidley Trace programs for Bendix autopilot 1967 Sperry airborne 707 inertial navigation computers 1968 Bendix 707 Doppler Navigation Radar and Computer 1969 747 time domain TTL multiplex passenger entertainment mess 1970 GM Delco Carousel II 747 intertial navigation system 1971 Bendix 747 autopilot computer automatic test equipment 1974 IBM 370 DB2 aircraft maintenance database system program 1976 IBM Async communication system from Hong Kong from New Jersey via Echo Star 1978 Radio Shack Model III tax accounting program for my wife in cassette basic 1979 Radio Shack Model III payroll program for my wife's brother in disk basic 1981 Bendix 747 central air data computer 1982 bought serial number 13 IBM PC from Sears, downgraded tax program to cassette 1983 put some floppy disks in the IBM PC and switched to Microsystems DOS PLUS basic 1985 Hamilton Standard 747 cabin pressurization computer 1986 electrical standards - keeper of the volt and ohm 1987 barometric pressure standards - keeper of the altitude and airspeed 1988 Pan Am wised up, kicked me into an office, got me away from things that fly 1991 I finally succeeded in bankrupting Pan Am all by myself 1992 began buying and rebuilding tug boats 1996 decided I was tired of working - in other words, retired 1997 began dreaming up weird projects so I could play with computers 2017 still dreaming up weird projects to annoy everyone It's been very interesting! I wish I could do it again! Paul in NY |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9749 |
Wow, a very interesting career you have had there, Paul. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
Grogs -- Actually I grew up on a dairy farm in the Catskill Mountains milking 95 Holsteins morning and night with my uncle. I wanted to be an agriculture department county agent helping farmers improve crop yields with chemistry. I got trapped into electronics when I started playing with ham radio transmitters about 1952. It's been downhill ever since. Paul in NY |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9749 |
You wrote the 'IBM 370 DB2 aircraft maintenance database system program' the year I was born.... It would seem we have an avionics engineer in our midst, people!  EDIT: I am a nervous flyer, but the avionics side of aircraft have always interested me. All those fabulous systems they have - CVR/FDR/GPWS/Glideslope/TCAS to name but a few. Electronics really rule the modern cockpit and the older cockpit too! EDIT: I suppose for those not familiar with those abbreviations, I should clarify: CVR - Cockpit Voice Recorder FDR - Flight Data Recorder GPWS - Ground Proximity Warning System(lets you know if you are too close to the ground) Glideslope/GLS - Will guide your approach to a landing, and advise if you are outside of that ideal approach vector TCAS - Traffic Collision Avoidance System(lets you know if you stray too close to any other neighbouring aircraft, and will advise on a method of avoidance) I am only a novice, so Paul the avionics man will correct any errors there with my definitions. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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