Posted on 07/12/2003 9:49:48 PM PDT by quietolong
Priorities, you know! =^)
LOL we are showing our age. I remember using all this "stuff" plotting Magellan Spacecraft test data at the Cape. :-)
Ha! I had forgotten...reminds me of Jazz and 50's airplanes...
<jealous> Sometimes I'll run this eBay search & browse, and kick myself for throwing out so much "junk" in the '80s, or not thinking ahead & doing a little scrounging back then, ya know?WOW, I bet between us we have quite a collection. My oldest "computer" (trainer) is a Minivac 6010. I also have a PDP-8 with an ASR-33 Teletype.
My more "modern" ones are on the par with my Imsai 8080.
We have visited the American Computer Museum in Bozeman, MT. IIRC, it was started by a Russian immigrant who let his computer collection run wild. Then there's this gentleman in Portland, OR, who's working towards building a museum of working minis & mainframes.
Hey, speaking of "writing a book" on old computers, there is only one book I know of on that subject, "Collectors Guide to Personal Computers and Pocket Calculators", by Thomas Haddock, and it's out of print. The Pocket Calculators book, by Ball & Flamm, is still in print, however. That's the nice thing about books on obscure collecting niches - there's little chance of competition! LOL!
Hmmm... since I'm reminiscing about pocket calculators & '70s microcomputers, should that make me feel young? :-D
The only reason I have any of this stuff, is I scrounged before it became popular. I picked up an Imsai 8080 with disk drives and a DECwriter II terminal for 5 dollars at a flea market. (welcome to silicon valley LOL!)
You betcha! :-)
The folks who worked on Whirlwind or the Eniac are getting a bit long in the tooth though!
Talking about old planes, I used to fly in a Convair 580 on a regular basis. :-) One of the oldest was a Lockheed Super Constellation. :-)
Wow, when was that?
I keep thinking about the technology that is considered junk today - 5" floppies, PC ATs, MS Windows 3.11, software from the early '90s, early books about the Internet, 2400 baud dial-up modems - and I have saved a couple examples of some of those - but there's not much that evokes a passion in me. OTOH, even now, Windows 1.0 is scarce & expensive on eBay! That would be very cool to have. If we came across one of those, we'd buy an early IBM PC XT just to run it on as a display piece.
Maybe early (analog) cellphones will become collectors' items. Or the earliest digital cameras, which I'm sure must be starting to appear at yard sales by now. I need something small, that won't threaten to take over a whole room if the collection grows large. :-)
Speaking of collecting, I've noticed that quantity has a quality all its own: My mom used to save a plate block of every first-class stamp that came out. But when I looked up the prices years later, I realized that everybody & their brother was probably doing the same thing, the values were so low. Only the large-denomination stamps have increased in value over the years. Which makes sense when you think about it: Very few people felt they could afford to collect a block or sheet of every $1.00 stamp that came out. But those would be the (only) ones to collect if you wanted something that would end up a rare prize.
I guess it's kind of like that for you few, intrepid guys who have saved minicomputers or mainframes from the trash heap, as opposed to all those people who have boxed away their early microcomputers or saved a pile of 8" diskettes.
It also helps to right-click to zoom in.
That stuff doen't do it for me either. S-100 and CPM rules! LOL. Most of my collection that could be considered worth anything at all are my pre 1980 computers. I also have every issue of Byte magazine from the 70s.
And also every issue of a couple of other periodicals too ;^)
Ah! There's one article from Byte that I wish I could find someday. It was a 3-parter I think, called "The Brains [or Minds?] of Men and Machines". Its explanation of how the neuron works made me understand why our brains are able to pack so much power into such a small space: Each neuron may output only one bit, but it's a bitstream that encodes the equivalent of a floating point number in the frequency of its pulse train. What an elegant solution! I think it also described how the eyes vibrate back & forth about 10 times a second, and thereby detect & transmit the edges of light & dark areas instead of having to transmit the whole, uncompressed image.
Come to think of it, that article helped seal the notion that there was no need to invoke any kind of magic to explain the mind. So in that sense it was part of the Vast Atheistic Materialist Conspiracy of Science, which helped to corrupt at least one college-age youth!
I was tutoring these two kids who would just not learn math. Then I showed them a slide rule I picked up from a thrift store. Math teachers are missing a terrific prop!
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