a rewrite of VMS... yes?
Posted on 12/07/2014 1:10:09 PM PST by Monty22002
The father of video games, Ralph H. Baer, has passed away at age 92. He came to rest in his New Hampshire home on the night of Saturday, Dec. 6 according to Wikipedia and a Facebook post by video game historian Leonard Herman, a friend of Baer.
Dubbed the "Thomas Edison of the home TV game" by Popular Electronics Magazine in 1980, Baer's Odyssey game system was the first home video game system. The patent for the idea was filed on August 10, 1970 and the system was released by Magnavox in 1972.
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a rewrite of VMS... yes?
my first pc was a Rainbow
i couldn't figure that out wither 8^)
I have one.
RIP Mr. Baer.
lol
Many years since I read it.
The protagonist (Cutler)and most of his team came from DEC. But it was New Technology+ OS/2.You may recall the short lived agreement; Gates used to kill OS/2. ( I still sometimes mourn the loss of OS/2 still have it on my shelf.)
But Linux works well, and the price is right.
the old V/W M/N T/S - VMS=WNT has more than a little ring of truth
RIP Mr. Baer
Was the computer GAY? Rainbow? Never heard of it....
and you say you worked for DEC??? 
my bad, thought you were somebody else... it was a hell of a machine back in the day
What impresses me the most is wifi. The evolution of the PC was kind of expected. The video game industry drove that evolution. But to be able to sit on your couch and connect securely into your LAN is impressive.
The evolution of the Internet has been pretty impressive too.
And now you can do a something similar with your phone over the telecom network. At first, speed wasn't that great but it is now finally ready for prime-time at the full data rates. Internet/data transfer is finally useful versus a cute cool idea.
“What will I see before I die if I live to my fathers age.”
Exactly. I agree completely. Who knows what will be next.
A side note: I had use a distributed computer network at DEC and hated it. I HATED IT! There is a trend back to that type of network where I work and I told them to avoid it. I help out with IT. They'll probably not listen to me, though.
You might like the below links.
The Rainbow was DEC’s first halfhearted attempt at getting into the PC market. It was a “me-too” offering and didn't last. It ran CP/M and apparently wasn't that good. I only remember seeing one on top of a cabinet when I worked at DEC. I remember it was built like a tank — tons of heavy sheet metal.
mine came with CP/M and MS-DOS and it really wasn't a bad machine, and it had many features the IBM's never had that and i could dial into work with it so it served me well
my biggest gripe was the box wasn't square so it couldn't stand up on end without help
it also had 8bit and 16bit processors so what ever chip was running the program, the other one was doing all the house keeping functions
but it was the bus architecture that doomed it to failure
The Rainbow was DEC’s halfhearted attempt at the PC market. It probably worked okay. Chode can probably attest.
The problem for DEC....
The PC industry made computer hardware and software a lot cheaper and a commodity.
A start up could build a reliable, cheap, file server from misc PC parts.
Even a modern file server is probably made from PC parts.
The processor is probably Intel based (Intel processor), Intel chipset, PC memory sticks, with SATA or SAS drives, a NIC and running some form of Linux.
Everything that DEC did was custom and designed and built from scratch. Custom CPU system, custom drive servers, custom OS, etc. And VERY expensive.
Cool.
No one that I knew had used one and it was always treated like an orphan. After all, it was a PC and “PCs were a passing fad.”
It sounds like it worked well for you. Great!
You might like the below link...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100
cool... a friend had a DEC PRO-350, it was PDP compatible and that put the PC to shame
i had one of the first Micro-VAX's the company ever bought under my desk back in the day, and THAT, was the t!ts...
Unsung hero to kids everywhere. RIP.
“what did this Cathode-ray tube amusement device actually do??? couldn’t figure it out from the patent”
You would put your pre-printed target onto the CRT screen (like a picture of an aircraft or a ship). These were printed on a clear overlay so they lined up with a certain point in x-y space on the screen as the intended target point to hit. The player then controlled a point of light using x-y controls to hit the target (like you were shooting a missle, I think). It is described as being like a radar screen where you track your missles toward the target. The description says it could potentially make an explosion-like flash when the intended target point was hit, but I’m unsure if it actually was ever made to do that. There was probably some kind of drift put into the feedback to move the missle to make it more challenging. The description says it required skill to hit the target (making movements in both x and y at the same time like on an etch-a-sketch).
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