Dawn of the Personal Computer: From Altair to the IBM PC

Maximum PC ^ | 03 June 2009 | Erik Klein

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

And This....:

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MIPS Equivalents

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This guy was a wheel in IBM's support of Linux:

Meet the Tuxers

[shorty_harris]

When the company I worked for finally stopped using what seemed like acres of those machines, your company probably went bust.

I worked in the Advanced Disk Technology Division at my company. We were working on an 8" winchester drive that had 80mb of storage...thought we were hot stuff! While it was still in development, we heard that some Japanese company had introduced a 160mb drive in a 5" form. It was shortly after that the whole division was dismantled and everyone in it was laid off.

[paulycy]

It was shortly after that the whole division was dismantled and everyone in it was laid off.

Stuff changed fast. Looks like you survived to FReep another day. ;0)

[Vroomfondel]

While it was still in development, we heard that some Japanese company had introduced a 160mb drive in a 5" form.

At a previous place of employment, I was one of a team that was tasked with designing a hard disk/floppy controller for PC/AT class machines that showcased the technology of a particular manufacturer's controller chip. We designed a controller with about a dozen chips on it that could handle MFM hard disks and floppies; at the time, the IBM controller was a monster board packed full o' stuff.

Our design only had two problems:

• It couldn't deal with copy-protected floppies.
• It wasn't register-compatible with the PC controller, so we couldn't run things like Unix.

To work around those, we sprouted a 765 floppy controller and an on-board microprocessor to emulate the WD controller used by the PC.

By the time we were done, we had this monster board crammed full of chips, just like the original PC/AT controller.

Right about that time, WD came out with their new generation hard disk controller, which swept everything (compatibly) into about half a dozen chips.

Needless to say, all that hard work never saw the light of day...

[shorty_harris]

First and only time I’ve ever been laid off. I got out of that particular line of work...

[SunkenCiv]

I miss Octal. ;’)

[SunkenCiv]

Shaky Early Days of Apple Revealed
NBC Bay Area | Tue, Jun 2, 2009 | JACKSON WEST
Posted on 06/02/2009 2:22:49 PM PDT by nickcarraway
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2263234/posts