@@Agnemons I've been there and it's not worth it. The first thing they asked me is "what do you do"? I lied and told them I was retired and they hated on me. Obviously they are just in it to promote their business.
I used to work at System Source a number of years ago. I was their maintenance tech for a lot of the 'new' computers Bob would pick up. Fond memories of that place and definitely worth checking out!
I remember the already vintage PDP-8/I as a teen back in the '80s. That RIM loader instruction list on the left of the panel was because it had no ROM/BIOS. It had to be programmed in using the panel switches in OCTAL which was fun after every power up. You can flip 3 switches at a time with each hand very quickly for any 0-7 digit. The RIM loader loads in a more complicated bootstrap that boots an operating system from mag tape, which then recognises the massive (
@tradde11 I was super excited as a teen to get this up and running, sadly the pathetic administrators at the school deemed it dangerous because it didn't have a proper modern mains plug and it was sold for scrap metal and gold instead. I did have 2 weeks of joy after school with it.
The RIM loader was only about 12 instructions. It loaded in programs from tape in a format consisting of address/data pairs for every machine word -- highly inefficient, but easy to interpret. Normally the only program in that format was the BIN loader, which implemented a more efficient program format, but took more code to do so -- more than you would want to toggle in by hand. Then that would load the actual program you wanted to run.
Brings back memories of my days as a Medium System Field Engineer with Burroughs in the early 80's, working on B4700's, B4800's, and their siblings (and peripherals!). We had to learn to directly write into memory a machine code bootstrap routine that would read in a single card from the card reader, then we also had to code that card so it would read in the rest of a card deck, that would load the actual operating system from mag tape, or from one of the disk packs. Fun times! It actually wasn't that hard to do, as the instruction set was pretty powerful... instructions and data shared the same memory, you could even do crazy stuff, like write code that would modify itself. So one card could overwrite the memory that it had just been loaded into, to do something different... Troubleshooting was... ummm... interesting! Ah, those were the days! I was kind of hoping to see a Burroughs medium system in this video, or at least a B1700 or something, but not to be! The video was fantastic though! Man, the memories....
My brother worked for Data General UK in the early 80s. Used to have loads of crashed drives stored in the workshop at home. I agree, they had the best colour scheme and stylish terminals going.
I have no clue how the DG machines compared performance wise to DECs offering, but I do know that DG was killing it with the aesthetics! They're machines always looked good!
I read _Soul of a New Machine_ in high school (for myself, not as part of school)(awesome book). Ten years later while taking a break one night/morning and randomly wandering through my workplace back rooms, I found one still in operation!
Woz actually signed the Apple I replica they have there. The big hard drive you were talking about is one of two disk assemblies out of an IBM 3380 DASD. One of these stores just over 1 gigabyte of data; it was the first disk storage device to do so. And yes, it has two sets of heads.
@@jnelson4765 I guess it's done for compatibility reasons. I understand the storage controllers have their own POWER CPUs in them which handle the emulation.
They have both an original Apple 1 and the signed Woz Replica. The replica is hooked up to a monitor and they fire it up to let people experience it, which I think is just awesome! That's a colossal amount of storage, and I remember a couple of IBM drives did the two sets of heads thing. It's really bonkers to see!
Bloody friggin' hell, that's so much awesomeness I can't even! Gave me shivers when I saw the Univac backplane. They should have named it The Discombobulotron.
Right! It's an epic place! The UNIVAC was an absolute trip to see, it was bonkers trying to wrap my head around all the wiring on the back. Though, while a nightmare, I imagine it's an absolute beast of machine when running!
System Source is a cool place, glad you got a chance to go visit. Seems it's changed a lot since I was there last, added more specific spaces for things. I spy an Inverse Phase...
It truly is an awesome place! There's even more changes in the works. When I was talking about the Alto, just behind that machine was a big open space, which is all slated for more museum space. So the exhibits are really going to grow (nearly double)!
I can't even describe my thoughts on this one. Computing heaven. That is all. And the wiring loom on the Univac was utterly freaking NUTS; pure insanity.
It was so much fun! The Cray in particular was amazing, I would love to go back and spend an entire day in and around the Cray, just learning all the weird little intricacies that you don't normally get to see.
System Source has a bunch of old Macs that belonged to me. Back in late 2008, I was dissolving my household in Baltimore in preparation to move abroad. I couldn’t take my collection of vintage Macs (which, at that time, had not skyrocketed in value as they have in the past few years), and so put up a Craigslist ad listing them all as “free to good home”. Nary a day later, Bob Roswell himself emailed me, asking if he could have them for his “small computer museum”, offering to come pick it all up the same day. And he did, taking not only around a dozen Macs, but also a LaserWriter II, various other accessories, and nearly a whole decade of various Mac magazines. I could not have been more delighted at the outcome. It would have broken my heart to see those things end up in a dumpster, and instead it went to someone who loves old tech even more than I do, with the possibility of it being on display for others to enjoy, too. So if you see a Mac IIci or Quadra 950 at the museum, there’s a good chance it used to be mine! (Also, in talking to Bob, it turned out I already knew his wife, who had worked at a college I had attended! They don’t call it “Smalltimore” for nothing! :) ) I really need to pay the museum a visit the next time I’m back in the area, I’ve actually never been!
When you toggled in info into the first few words of the PDP-8/I, I think you overwrote a "cylon eye" routine that one of a group of us (DEC enthusiasts) had toggled into core when we visited System Source for about a week to work on several of the machines in the DEC room. Of course you didn't know that, so no harm done. It's also possible that someone else had already overwritten the routine. ;)
There was something stored in there already, but I think the Cylon eye routine had been replaced already with someone else's program done a few months ago. I love that core memory is non-volatile and just stores programs forever!
Visited System Source after seeing David's video here and the Bendix video. Brendan was a fantastic guide and graciously tolerated the far too many hours I spent on the tour that still has me slack-jawed. If you're even remotely interested in computers, video game systems, and their history, you owe yourself a visit here. One high point was getting my hands on a working Apple Lisa. I remember when the Lisa arrived in early '83 and being able to finally use a machine that laid the foundation for GUIs in personal computers, was a privilege. I even crashed it trying to create a LisaWrite document. Another high point was being allowed to use the Xerox Alto machine. Just knowing how much history was represented by that machine can make any software developer humble. Being able to meet Bob and thank him for this fantastic museum was icing on the cake. I will be donating my old Apple systems here eventually.
If the Cray were larger, it would be slower since light isn't fast enough. That is why it is "C" shaped: the edge of the board that connects to the others has to be closer to them than the other end. Putting the boards in parallel like in all other machines would make the "bus" too long.
@@jecelassumpcaojr890 I always think people who say that light isn't fast enough are pulling my leg as it will circumnavigate the earth 7.5 times at the Equator in one second.
The dopamine was flowing in this episode, David! For us and for you. Thank you so much for sharing a trip to a museum I'll likely not get to visit. Amazing place, amazing coverage. Big thanks.
Thanks for checking the video out! I'll definitely try to get back and get some more footage of individual machines. I'd love to spend a full episode looking at just the Cray-1 or maybe the LINC.
So glad I found this channel through the Veritasium video! Don't know any of these old models but its fascinating to see them. How loud these machines used to be is just mind blowing.
Used my mom's Intertec Quad density Superbrain to write PL/1 programs as a teenager. Bought a used IMSAI PCS-44 and later a VDP-80 from the same source to write compiled basic programs. Still have a wire wrapped video card I developed to display high-res line drawings and images on the PCS-44. Worked well.
I wasn't aware of the IMSAI PCS 80/30, but I have spent a lot of time on a VDP-80. If I had to choose between a VDP-80, an IMSAI 8080, and a SOL-20 with a set of Helios disk drives, I'm not sure which I'd pick. I owned an IMSAI 8080 for about 30 years, before selling it a few years ago. The front panel is the high point in the 8080, but the sleek lines of a SOL-20 with wood side panels is pretty sweet. And VDP-80 being a fully integrated system is pretty cool.
@@JCWren The VDP-80 had the downside that it was massively heavy. Wonderful to use with fast reliable drives and like all IMSAIs had spectacular documentation. It was not easy to move and was obviously expensive to manufacture.
@@fritzkinderhoffen2369 Funny you should mention the weight. Our computer store was on the second story of the complex we were in. The UPS guy ROLLED the box up the stairs, and broke the front of the case around the monitor. UPS had to buy a new case, and that was NOT cheap :)
The Superbrain is one of those systems that I keep running into, seen about five of them in person in the last 5 months, but I've never been hands on with one. What initially drew me to them is that they use the same outer shell as the ADDS Regent 100 terminal I have on the Centurion, which is just a great looking case. Someday I'll get my paws on one and take it for a test drive!
@@UsagiElectric The Superbrain had internally the provision to plug in one s100 card to the unit. Something perhaps not often used. They seem to have been robust systems as the one I had access to was used for development for years with no issues I can remember.
Travelled far to visit the museum today, was absolutely amazing. Bob went out of his way to accommodate. I went to see the computers but was in awe and fell in love with the mechanical machines, in particular the linotype was mind blowing. Wish I had more time there!!!
The G-15 is one of my all time favorites. It's an amazing design with an equally amazing legacy. It's designer Harry Huskey passed away just a few years ago at the age of 102.
I was blown away when I saw the Bendix G-15 at the beginning of the video. One just like it was the only computer in the lab at Northwestern Electronics Institute in Minneapolis when I started there as a student in the fall of 1971. The very first computer I'd ever seen in person.
Such a cool collection! This inspires me to get my 1973 pdp8/m up and running again (haven't been turned on in years - basically the same as an "I" but with switched PSU instead of a linear one).
@@glennpearson3056 I think I bought my copy about that many years ago and I last read it about 15 years ago. I need to find it and re-live it once again 🙂
I was very impressed with the hardware wizards in that book when I first read it. Then, looking at it later, in retrospect, using address bits to specify privilege modes (instead of having an actual mode field in the process-status register, as DEC did) turned out to be a short-sighted decision.
I read "Soul of a New Machine" in high school. I was entranced by it. Later, when I was graduating from college, I interviewed with DG on campus. I mentioned to the interviewer that I'd read the book, and he said, "You read that and you still want to work here?" lol I actually got a plant tour and 2nd interview in Austin and a job offer...
That finale. Holy shit. By the time I was done with the fist pass just looking for loose wires, I’d be making sure the first one I connect is shorted to something flammable. It’s lunacy. I’d have been praying for the Reds to pop off and take me and the rest of world out with them. The Davie Crocket makes a little more sense now.
Next time you will be visiting System Source, take a trip south on I95 to the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Mead. It's been a while since the last time I visited it, but they had a collection of early computing machines. Even if not for the computers, the entire museum is worth the trip.
What a fantastic video! I happen to be in Atlanta, GA on holiday from the UK. I popped over to the Computer Museum of America in Roswell and had exactly the same experience with their collection of Crays. As an 80s kid, I've wanted to see one for decades. And now I finally have! (and I got to play 'Star Trek' on a Vectrex -- so that was another achievement fulfilled!)
I first saw a Cray 1 at Lawrence Berkeley Labs back about 1980 when I was a physics student at UC Berkeley. It was a Physics Club field trip. It was still being used on a daily basis. They didn't let us get anywhere close to it.
I used to “sneak into” the MIT LCS (Labratory for Computer Science), where we actually got to play with/use the Xerox Alto (absolutley the inspiration for Apple), and got to play “Star Wars” on a vector display that was connected to an early DEC PDP6.. What an awesome time that was on the 9th floor, back in the late 70’s 😉
As a kid my dad took me to work and showed me the Cray the Met Office had in Bracknell UK, and yes I sat on the little bench seat! I was around 8 years old. The UK Met Office still run Cray's today.
What a fantastic museum and resource. A great video! I also second the mention of the book: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Amazing to see it's still in print. My copy is forty years old this year and is disintegrating just sitting on a shelf, but at least I can buy a replacement!
Right! It takes a mad-man to design that, haha. But, I'm not gonna lie, if that thing were here in the shop, I absolutely would undertake the insanity of trying to get it up and going again.
The Burroughs medium systems and large systems of the late 70's / early 80's were very similar. Spent many a long hour trying to troubleshoot signals through those backplanes when the machines suddenly stopped.
Hello David - Back in the late-80s / early-90s, I worked at Convex Computer Corp., in Richardson, TX. It was co-founded in 1982 by Steve Wallach, one of the Data General Engineers who was written about in Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine." At Convex, he designed their line of vector mini-supercomputers / supercomputers.
What I really want to know is: How many Bendixes would it have taken to match Bender? Some brief back-of-the-envelope guesstimating later: It appears the answer is at least four, because we know Bender runs on the 6502, we know that has a little over 3,200 transistors, and the Bendix G-15 comprises 450 valves, mostly dual triodes, so I'm guessing that means a Bendix amounts to something close to 800 transistors? Someone correct me if I'm making a mistake here.
A pleasure to see the Bendix G15, one of the first ‘personal computers’. They got taken over by GE and then into Honeywell where the transistorised successor the G115 was used as a remote job entry station. I emulated the G115 protocol back in around 1982 on a PDP11/44 to connect Honeywell machines in UK universities to the rest of the academic network (Janet). What fun!
My grandma work med with some of the early computers I remember as a kid she could believe how computers had gotten loads faster but she just couldn’t comprehend how they had got so small. This must have been in the early 90’s.
Love your channel, love your videos. I grew up with a C64 and have never really stopped loving PCs but I feel like such a Luddite next to you. This place is amazing, I can't explain why I love these things so much when I couldn't even turn one on if I were given the chance but I still love them. Makes me happy that there are people out there that care for these things.
What a place! The Alto alone would be worth a vist. The HP box was shipped in the early 80's and had UNIX in ROM (!). How cool is that? A portable UNIX system with solid state storage (ROM) and a printer. That was unheard of and I'd love to get one. The Zilog S8000 would run ZEUS, a very good Unix derivative. And right next to the Cray-1, is a YMP-EL, the "entry level prosumer Cray" - costing "only" low integer multiples of suburbian homes. There is soooo much to see and play with. I'd really love to visit that place.
@15:02 I've never stood inside of a Cray, but I did get to sit on one. Eli Lilly & Co. had a Cray II which was on display in a visitor area. On a day trip shadowing scientists through their labs, we took a break at the Cray where we sat on the padded seats above the water cooling, and it was lit up to show off the coolant flowing through the system. It was freaking amazing in 1992.
What an amazing museum!! The HP 207 reminds me of my first computer "sound system" - a Realistic AM radio, sitting next to my TRS-80 Model I, which produced all sorts of interesting sounds from that glorious unshielded piece of 4K computing power!
Awesome! I used a PDP-8/I at the local university's computer science department for a couple of years. It ran TSS/8. The computer itself was in a machine room, behind a glass wall. The users talked to it from the adjoining terminal room that had 16 model KSR-33 Teletypes. So I didn't get to touch its front panel... but I could watch the DECTape spools spin. :-) I have been to Hunt Valley, but it was in 2000, long before the museum opened. It's nice to see a DG Eclipse system, after having read Soul of a New Machine.
The "hearing your data as interference" is how early computers were first able to play music. It wasn't long before someone got the idea of trying to make music with it, after no doubt accidentally seeing this phenomenon in action. (probably listening to the radio while programming) Programmers figured out that if they processed data in a certain way while a radio was placed near the computer, it could generate tones of various frequencies. IIRC this was demonstrated on an Altair 8800 at one of the meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, but there are many other examples of it being done on both micros and minicomputers. On PDP-8s, the program counter auto-increments on both DEP and EXAM. That way you can quickly load and/or examine ranges of memory without having to toggle in each address, i.e. you don't have to toggle in an address, followed by LOAD, followed by the data you want to load, followed by DEP, and THEN have to toggle in the NEXT address, hit LOAD, etc.etc. With auto increment, you just LOAD in the starting address, then you can keep on DEPositing and/or EXAMining data until the cows come home and not have to worry about entering each subsequent address.
We did this on a DG Nova 1200. Saw it done on some microcomputer or another, and took the idea. I seriously doubt we were "first" on the 1200, but we did do it from scratch, and using only the front panel.
That Zilog 8000 computer has me intrigued. I spent the first part of my professional career developing software for the Motorola EMX2500 Cellular Telephone Switch, which was actually a DSC (formerly Digital Switch Corporation) DEX 600 with some added hardware to support Motorola's cellular base stations. These systems utilized Z8000 CPUs as their primary processors mounted on pull-out boards, not unlike those in the Zilog 8000 computer (and many other minicomputers and early microcomputers). DSC started in the early 1970s in Richardson or Plano Texas (they were in Richardson by the time I started at Motorola in 1989) and had adopted the Z8000 architecture across their line much earlier in the 1980s. I cannot help but wonder if some of their early Z8000 processor cards weren't either based on the actual Zilog 8000 computer processor card, or may have actually been that card. I'll have to keep watching to see if I can see anything that I can recognize. By the time I left Motorola for good in 2008, they had mostly moved on from using the DSC switches. DSC itself had been purchased by Alcatel, which in turn merged with Lucent, so I'm not even sure what might be left in Texas or elsewhere of that organization. Motorola completely exited the cellular networking business around the time it split into Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions, and I think the remains of that part of the business has moved onto other things entirely under its new ownership.
11:49 I think the actual address you are looking at is in the second row, labelled “Memory Address”. The top “Program Counter” row would be showing the address of the next instruction being executed in a program. But given you are not actually executing a program, it’s being used to show the next memory address to step to.
Fantastic seeing all the old computers in this space. I used to program and repair the PDP-8/I for GCA in the 1970's. The machine instruction set is somewhat annoying due to conditional branches having limited range, a problem that was overcome with the PDP-11. At DEC my former boss used to call Data General "Data Generous" due to their penchant for hiring away DEC talent with fat paychecks. I loved reading The Soul of A New Machine when it was first published. This book really captures the intensity, excitement, and extreme challenges of high tech research and development like no other. A must-read book for high tech professionals or those considering a tech career.
Back in 1988 the college computer lab (a community college in NYS) had about 20 Superbrains. It's the machine I learned CPM on. Dual floppies using Turbo Pascal as an editor to write 8080 assembly language.
You mentioned a lot of names that I haven heard in a very long time. Not only did the Cray encompass shear computer power, but it was also a work of art. It looks as if it were designed by a French artist.
Back at the Uni I was lucky enough to have seen a, non functioning, "Univac 120". The 490 you are showing looks just like the same machine, with the tubes replaced by transistors. In the 120, the tube sockets had very long legs, almost like 2 sockets connected by piano wires. It formed something like a cage were they soldered the resistors and capacitors needed for the polarization of the tubes. Then the whole assembly pluged in a backplane in almost the same fashion of those transistor cards in the 490. BTW the front panel of the 490 is way more modern than the one of the 120, that still had a rotary phone dialer as an input device.
Hey, that's less than half an hour from me. I might have to visit some time. I've hidden in an old Cray-2! I used to work in the same Aberdeen Proving Ground building where ENIAC was once installed. They had a decommissioned Cray-2 sitting in the downstairs lobby for decoration. I saw someone coming down the hall I really did not want to make small talk with, so I hopped inside it and crouched down.
In the IMSAI system, the memory you are dumping is not the boot ROM. It is the video RAM that contains the ASCII codes for what is actually on the screen. So when you first issue a dump command it shows you the startup message that is still on the screen, but also the command that you entered. When you press enter to scroll it you see that it starts displaying the earlier output of the dump command.
I recall a program in a magazine that when you poked it in and ran it on an unshielded computer it would generate RF interference that played music (the Minute Waltz).on an adjacent AM radio.
What an amazing tour! A freakin Alto and you got to touch and use it working. I am so jelly right now. Subbed. PS as someone who was all in with Cubase on my ST with a full setup, thank you for getting it and having good sound. Thank you!
OMG, the Atari ST was the first Computer I had when I was a kid; I always fobbed off homework to play games. Homework or Shadow of the Beast? Definitely Shadow of the Beast!
I could not believe my eyes as this video started. That Bendix G15........O M G that partially answered a question I've had for over 40 years.. Those modules with their anodised colour coded handles and the board wired up to the tubes. As a young child interested in electronics I got a box of those modules to tinker around with probably about 45 years ago. I never knew their origin and like so much what we would now call E-waste, I slowly cannibalised them over the years for components. But I never knew their origins and always was impressed by the logical design process. Now I'll have to go dig into the deepest recesses of my archives to see if any have survived all these years. Fantastic to see that something like that was here in Australia so many years ago.
I love the silly noises out of that HP prototype. I hear noises like this a lot on pc motherboards, when some boards start getting older when you do I/O you can really hear it, it's kind of funny it's like adding back hard drive sound when you have a ssd, not that it's loud or anything in these circumstances.
Awesome, I need to plan a visit. I didn't see you mention Honeywell in that mix of computers; I have a 1K bit core panel of memory from one. When new it's memory cost $1.00 per byte and the one I used had a meg worth of memory.
Bob, David and all the museum contributors deserves a thank for their awesome work.
No, they don't deserve a "Thank".
They do deserve a visit though.
Thanks don't support them. Visits do.
Bob and the museum runners are the real rock stars here!
Bob is also just one of the nicest people I've ever had the pleasure of hanging out with!
@@Agnemons there just some business that uses old computers as a hook.
@@Agnemons I've been there and it's not worth it. The first thing they asked me is "what do you do"? I lied and told them I was retired and they hated on me. Obviously they are just in it to promote their business.
I used to work at System Source a number of years ago. I was their maintenance tech for a lot of the 'new' computers Bob would pick up. Fond memories of that place and definitely worth checking out!
That's awesome you used to work there!
It really is an awesome collection worth checking out
I love the nerding out over standing in the middle of the Cray supercomputer. I was grinning with you. 😁
I remember the already vintage PDP-8/I as a teen back in the '80s. That RIM loader instruction list on the left of the panel was because it had no ROM/BIOS. It had to be programmed in using the panel switches in OCTAL which was fun after every power up. You can flip 3 switches at a time with each hand very quickly for any 0-7 digit.
The RIM loader loads in a more complicated bootstrap that boots an operating system from mag tape, which then recognises the massive (
@tradde11 I was super excited as a teen to get this up and running, sadly the pathetic administrators at the school deemed it dangerous because it didn't have a proper modern mains plug and it was sold for scrap metal and gold instead. I did have 2 weeks of joy after school with it.
The RIM loader was only about 12 instructions. It loaded in programs from tape in a format consisting of address/data pairs for every machine word -- highly inefficient, but easy to interpret. Normally the only program in that format was the BIN loader, which implemented a more efficient program format, but took more code to do so -- more than you would want to toggle in by hand. Then that would load the actual program you wanted to run.
Brings back memories of my days as a Medium System Field Engineer with Burroughs in the early 80's, working on B4700's, B4800's, and their siblings (and peripherals!). We had to learn to directly write into memory a machine code bootstrap routine that would read in a single card from the card reader, then we also had to code that card so it would read in the rest of a card deck, that would load the actual operating system from mag tape, or from one of the disk packs. Fun times! It actually wasn't that hard to do, as the instruction set was pretty powerful... instructions and data shared the same memory, you could even do crazy stuff, like write code that would modify itself. So one card could overwrite the memory that it had just been loaded into, to do something different... Troubleshooting was... ummm... interesting! Ah, those were the days! I was kind of hoping to see a Burroughs medium system in this video, or at least a B1700 or something, but not to be! The video was fantastic though! Man, the memories....
What an amazing museum! Thanks for sharing your trip with us.
It truly was an awesome experience!
My brother worked for Data General UK in the early 80s. Used to have loads of crashed drives stored in the workshop at home. I agree, they had the best colour scheme and stylish terminals going.
I have no clue how the DG machines compared performance wise to DECs offering, but I do know that DG was killing it with the aesthetics! They're machines always looked good!
I read _Soul of a New Machine_ in high school (for myself, not as part of school)(awesome book). Ten years later while taking a break one night/morning and randomly wandering through my workplace back rooms, I found one still in operation!
the scary part???....I remember a lot of those old computers when they were in daily use....must be getting old......
Same here. A lot of water has passed under the bridge.
Woz actually signed the Apple I replica they have there.
The big hard drive you were talking about is one of two disk assemblies out of an IBM 3380 DASD. One of these stores just over 1 gigabyte of data; it was the first disk storage device to do so. And yes, it has two sets of heads.
And virtualized 3390s are still used to this day on modern mainframes - the DS8K storage arrays can emulate thousands of 3390-27 and 3390-54 drives.
@@jnelson4765 I guess it's done for compatibility reasons. I understand the storage controllers have their own POWER CPUs in them which handle the emulation.
I almost fell out of my chair when he said Apple I. Those auction for a half million.
They have both an original Apple 1 and the signed Woz Replica. The replica is hooked up to a monitor and they fire it up to let people experience it, which I think is just awesome!
That's a colossal amount of storage, and I remember a couple of IBM drives did the two sets of heads thing. It's really bonkers to see!
Bloody friggin' hell, that's so much awesomeness I can't even! Gave me shivers when I saw the Univac backplane. They should have named it The Discombobulotron.
hi Keri !!
Right! It's an epic place!
The UNIVAC was an absolute trip to see, it was bonkers trying to wrap my head around all the wiring on the back. Though, while a nightmare, I imagine it's an absolute beast of machine when running!
System Source is a cool place, glad you got a chance to go visit. Seems it's changed a lot since I was there last, added more specific spaces for things. I spy an Inverse Phase...
It truly is an awesome place!
There's even more changes in the works. When I was talking about the Alto, just behind that machine was a big open space, which is all slated for more museum space. So the exhibits are really going to grow (nearly double)!
I can't even describe my thoughts on this one. Computing heaven. That is all. And the wiring loom on the Univac was utterly freaking NUTS; pure insanity.
It was truly awesome!
And the Univac was bonkers to say the least, haha!
It's like watching a kid in a candy shop. It brings a big smile on my face...😁
It was so much fun! The Cray in particular was amazing, I would love to go back and spend an entire day in and around the Cray, just learning all the weird little intricacies that you don't normally get to see.
System Source has a bunch of old Macs that belonged to me. Back in late 2008, I was dissolving my household in Baltimore in preparation to move abroad. I couldn’t take my collection of vintage Macs (which, at that time, had not skyrocketed in value as they have in the past few years), and so put up a Craigslist ad listing them all as “free to good home”. Nary a day later, Bob Roswell himself emailed me, asking if he could have them for his “small computer museum”, offering to come pick it all up the same day. And he did, taking not only around a dozen Macs, but also a LaserWriter II, various other accessories, and nearly a whole decade of various Mac magazines. I could not have been more delighted at the outcome. It would have broken my heart to see those things end up in a dumpster, and instead it went to someone who loves old tech even more than I do, with the possibility of it being on display for others to enjoy, too.
So if you see a Mac IIci or Quadra 950 at the museum, there’s a good chance it used to be mine!
(Also, in talking to Bob, it turned out I already knew his wife, who had worked at a college I had attended! They don’t call it “Smalltimore” for nothing! :) )
I really need to pay the museum a visit the next time I’m back in the area, I’ve actually never been!
Thank you again! Please come visit when you are back in the area! Bob
Wonderful episode David
I was almost expecting you to say "And as I enter this building, I present to you, the ENIAC"
When you toggled in info into the first few words of the PDP-8/I, I think you overwrote a "cylon eye" routine that one of a group of us (DEC enthusiasts) had toggled into core when we visited System Source for about a week to work on several of the machines in the DEC room. Of course you didn't know that, so no harm done. It's also possible that someone else had already overwritten the routine. ;)
There was something stored in there already, but I think the Cylon eye routine had been replaced already with someone else's program done a few months ago. I love that core memory is non-volatile and just stores programs forever!
Visited System Source after seeing David's video here and the Bendix video. Brendan was a fantastic guide and graciously tolerated the far too many hours I spent on the tour that still has me slack-jawed. If you're even remotely interested in computers, video game systems, and their history, you owe yourself a visit here. One high point was getting my hands on a working Apple Lisa. I remember when the Lisa arrived in early '83 and being able to finally use a machine that laid the foundation for GUIs in personal computers, was a privilege. I even crashed it trying to create a LisaWrite document. Another high point was being allowed to use the Xerox Alto machine. Just knowing how much history was represented by that machine can make any software developer humble. Being able to meet Bob and thank him for this fantastic museum was icing on the cake. I will be donating my old Apple systems here eventually.
I've stood in a cray-1 super computer, it's a fun experience! I've also enjoyed sitting on the bench.
added to my bucket list
Surprised by the (small) size of the Cray 1.
Thx for stepping inside!
If the Cray were larger, it would be slower since light isn't fast enough. That is why it is "C" shaped: the edge of the board that connects to the others has to be closer to them than the other end. Putting the boards in parallel like in all other machines would make the "bus" too long.
@@jecelassumpcaojr890 I always think people who say that light isn't fast enough are pulling my leg as it will circumnavigate the earth 7.5 times at the Equator in one second.
I think the Cray 2 was even smaller.
@@northof-62 That means a planet sized computer could run at 7.5 Hz. At 100 MHz your computer is limited to 3 meters, at 1 GHz to 30 cm.
@@jecelassumpcaojr890 lol!
The dopamine was flowing in this episode, David! For us and for you. Thank you so much for sharing a trip to a museum I'll likely not get to visit. Amazing place, amazing coverage. Big thanks.
Thanks to Bob too, by the way. So appreciated.
Thanks for checking the video out!
I'll definitely try to get back and get some more footage of individual machines. I'd love to spend a full episode looking at just the Cray-1 or maybe the LINC.
So glad I found this channel through the Veritasium video! Don't know any of these old models but its fascinating to see them. How loud these machines used to be is just mind blowing.
Thanks for finding your way over from the Veritasium video! It was a ton of fun hanging out with Derek that day.
Used my mom's Intertec Quad density Superbrain to write PL/1 programs as a teenager. Bought a used IMSAI PCS-44 and later a VDP-80 from the same source to write compiled basic programs. Still have a wire wrapped video card I developed to display high-res line drawings and images on the PCS-44. Worked well.
I wasn't aware of the IMSAI PCS 80/30, but I have spent a lot of time on a VDP-80. If I had to choose between a VDP-80, an IMSAI 8080, and a SOL-20 with a set of Helios disk drives, I'm not sure which I'd pick. I owned an IMSAI 8080 for about 30 years, before selling it a few years ago. The front panel is the high point in the 8080, but the sleek lines of a SOL-20 with wood side panels is pretty sweet. And VDP-80 being a fully integrated system is pretty cool.
@@JCWren The VDP-80 had the downside that it was massively heavy. Wonderful to use with fast reliable drives and like all IMSAIs had spectacular documentation. It was not easy to move and was obviously expensive to manufacture.
@@fritzkinderhoffen2369 Funny you should mention the weight. Our computer store was on the second story of the complex we were in. The UPS guy ROLLED the box up the stairs, and broke the front of the case around the monitor. UPS had to buy a new case, and that was NOT cheap :)
The Superbrain is one of those systems that I keep running into, seen about five of them in person in the last 5 months, but I've never been hands on with one. What initially drew me to them is that they use the same outer shell as the ADDS Regent 100 terminal I have on the Centurion, which is just a great looking case. Someday I'll get my paws on one and take it for a test drive!
@@UsagiElectric The Superbrain had internally the provision to plug in one s100 card to the unit. Something perhaps not often used. They seem to have been robust systems as the one I had access to was used for development for years with no issues I can remember.
Travelled far to visit the museum today, was absolutely amazing. Bob went out of his way to accommodate. I went to see the computers but was in awe and fell in love with the mechanical machines, in particular the linotype was mind blowing. Wish I had more time there!!!
That Univac was also designed by Seymour Cray!
6:26 Omg, it sounds exactly like the beep-boop-bop that all the old sci-fi taught us computers were supposed to sound like!
The G-15 is one of my all time favorites. It's an amazing design with an equally amazing legacy. It's designer Harry Huskey passed away just a few years ago at the age of 102.
I'm absolutely in love with the G-15!
Hopefully, I can get some new G-15 content headed this way soon-ish!
Soul of a New Machine! Picked up a copy decades ago, loved it, still have it, and it deserves another read. Great video!
Absolutely amazing thanks to all involved, I would love to see it in person one day.
Love your enthusiasm… Thanks for bringing us on this epic tour. Per (1963 - DK)
I'm spoiled. I recently went to the Computer History Museum in CA. One day is not enough time to see it all. Room after room of awesome.
I was blown away when I saw the Bendix G-15 at the beginning of the video. One just like it was the only computer in the lab at Northwestern Electronics Institute in Minneapolis when I started there as a student in the fall of 1971. The very first computer I'd ever seen in person.
What a cool place, thanks so much for documenting it!
Awesome, please show us more
Awesome production. Incredible collection
Such a cool collection! This inspires me to get my 1973 pdp8/m up and running again (haven't been turned on in years - basically the same as an "I" but with switched PSU instead of a linear one).
" The Soul of a New Machine" I have that book and have read it several times over the years 🙂
As soon as I heard the name "Eclipse", I thought of that book. It's been 30 years since I've read it.
@@glennpearson3056 I think I bought my copy about that many years ago and I last read it about 15 years ago. I need to find it and re-live it once again 🙂
I was very impressed with the hardware wizards in that book when I first read it. Then, looking at it later, in retrospect, using address bits to specify privilege modes (instead of having an actual mode field in the process-status register, as DEC did) turned out to be a short-sighted decision.
Todays episode was such a treat.
That UNIVAC and it's spider-web of wires was awesome. But I would'nt like to reverse engineer it. LOL.
I read "Soul of a New Machine" in high school. I was entranced by it. Later, when I was graduating from college, I interviewed with DG on campus. I mentioned to the interviewer that I'd read the book, and he said, "You read that and you still want to work here?" lol I actually got a plant tour and 2nd interview in Austin and a job offer...
That finale. Holy shit. By the time I was done with the fist pass just looking for loose wires, I’d be making sure the first one I connect is shorted to something flammable. It’s lunacy. I’d have been praying for the Reds to pop off and take me and the rest of world out with them. The Davie Crocket makes a little more sense now.
Next time you will be visiting System Source, take a trip south on I95 to the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Mead. It's been a while since the last time I visited it, but they had a collection of early computing machines.
Even if not for the computers, the entire museum is worth the trip.
What a fantastic video!
I happen to be in Atlanta, GA on holiday from the UK. I popped over to the Computer Museum of America in Roswell and had exactly the same experience with their collection of Crays. As an 80s kid, I've wanted to see one for decades. And now I finally have!
(and I got to play 'Star Trek' on a Vectrex -- so that was another achievement fulfilled!)
I first saw a Cray 1 at Lawrence Berkeley Labs back about 1980 when I was a physics student at UC Berkeley. It was a Physics Club field trip. It was still being used on a daily basis. They didn't let us get anywhere close to it.
I used to “sneak into” the MIT LCS (Labratory for Computer Science), where we actually got to play with/use the Xerox Alto (absolutley the inspiration for Apple), and got to play “Star Wars” on a vector display that was connected to an early DEC PDP6.. What an awesome time that was on the 9th floor, back in the late 70’s 😉
7:21 Maxwell’s equations! (Though I think it might have been Heaviside who figured out how to condense them down to that simple form.)
I live in Maryland and have been to this museum several times. It's well worth the trip. I never expected I'd ever see a functioning Xerox Alto.
As a kid my dad took me to work and showed me the Cray the Met Office had in Bracknell UK, and yes I sat on the little bench seat! I was around 8 years old. The UK Met Office still run Cray's today.
What a fantastic museum and resource. A great video! I also second the mention of the book: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Amazing to see it's still in print. My copy is forty years old this year and is disintegrating just sitting on a shelf, but at least I can buy a replacement!
The Univac is so insane...lol that back-plane is absolutely terrifying and beautiful at the same time
Right! It takes a mad-man to design that, haha.
But, I'm not gonna lie, if that thing were here in the shop, I absolutely would undertake the insanity of trying to get it up and going again.
@@UsagiElectric you are as equally sick as you are brilliant !
The Burroughs medium systems and large systems of the late 70's / early 80's were very similar. Spent many a long hour trying to troubleshoot signals through those backplanes when the machines suddenly stopped.
That back plane has been taken over by Digital Spiders.
Hello David - Back in the late-80s / early-90s, I worked at Convex Computer Corp., in Richardson, TX. It was co-founded in 1982 by Steve Wallach, one of the Data General Engineers who was written about in Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine." At Convex, he designed their line of vector mini-supercomputers / supercomputers.
What I really want to know is: How many Bendixes would it have taken to match Bender?
Some brief back-of-the-envelope guesstimating later: It appears the answer is at least four, because we know Bender runs on the 6502, we know that has a little over 3,200 transistors, and the Bendix G-15 comprises 450 valves, mostly dual triodes, so I'm guessing that means a Bendix amounts to something close to 800 transistors? Someone correct me if I'm making a mistake here.
A pleasure to see the Bendix G15, one of the first ‘personal computers’. They got taken over by GE and then into Honeywell where the transistorised successor the G115 was used as a remote job entry station. I emulated the G115 protocol back in around 1982 on a PDP11/44 to connect Honeywell machines in UK universities to the rest of the academic network (Janet). What fun!
what an awesome collection
My grandma work med with some of the early computers I remember as a kid she could believe how computers had gotten loads faster but she just couldn’t comprehend how they had got so small. This must have been in the early 90’s.
Love your channel, love your videos. I grew up with a C64 and have never really stopped loving PCs but I feel like such a Luddite next to you. This place is amazing, I can't explain why I love these things so much when I couldn't even turn one on if I were given the chance but I still love them. Makes me happy that there are people out there that care for these things.
What a place! The Alto alone would be worth a vist. The HP box was shipped in the early 80's and had UNIX in ROM (!). How cool is that? A portable UNIX system with solid state storage (ROM) and a printer. That was unheard of and I'd love to get one. The Zilog S8000 would run ZEUS, a very good Unix derivative. And right next to the Cray-1, is a YMP-EL, the "entry level prosumer Cray" - costing "only" low integer multiples of suburbian homes. There is soooo much to see and play with. I'd really love to visit that place.
I truly want to thank you for sharing this video with us. It was truly amazing to see all that dated equipment.
Thanks for sharing!
@15:02 I've never stood inside of a Cray, but I did get to sit on one. Eli Lilly & Co. had a Cray II which was on display in a visitor area. On a day trip shadowing scientists through their labs, we took a break at the Cray where we sat on the padded seats above the water cooling, and it was lit up to show off the coolant flowing through the system. It was freaking amazing in 1992.
Cray 2 was cooled with Fluorinert, not water.
What an amazing museum!! The HP 207 reminds me of my first computer "sound system" - a Realistic AM radio, sitting next to my TRS-80 Model I, which produced all sorts of interesting sounds from that glorious unshielded piece of 4K computing power!
I live in Maryland and had no idea this was here - will have to stop by for sure!
Going there for sure!!
Awesome!
I used a PDP-8/I at the local university's computer science department for a couple of years. It ran TSS/8. The computer itself was in a machine room, behind a glass wall. The users talked to it from the adjoining terminal room that had 16 model KSR-33 Teletypes. So I didn't get to touch its front panel... but I could watch the DECTape spools spin. :-)
I have been to Hunt Valley, but it was in 2000, long before the museum opened.
It's nice to see a DG Eclipse system, after having read Soul of a New Machine.
Amazing collection.
Baltimore is just over 2 hours away for me. Sounds like a good day trip one weekend! Thanks for sharing. 👍
the backside of that UNIVAC looks like one of those server room, cable management , horror videos.
Having a sofa attached with your computer is peak mainframe master race!
The "hearing your data as interference" is how early computers were first able to play music. It wasn't long before someone got the idea of trying to make music with it, after no doubt accidentally seeing this phenomenon in action. (probably listening to the radio while programming) Programmers figured out that if they processed data in a certain way while a radio was placed near the computer, it could generate tones of various frequencies. IIRC this was demonstrated on an Altair 8800 at one of the meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, but there are many other examples of it being done on both micros and minicomputers.
On PDP-8s, the program counter auto-increments on both DEP and EXAM. That way you can quickly load and/or examine ranges of memory without having to toggle in each address, i.e. you don't have to toggle in an address, followed by LOAD, followed by the data you want to load, followed by DEP, and THEN have to toggle in the NEXT address, hit LOAD, etc.etc. With auto increment, you just LOAD in the starting address, then you can keep on DEPositing and/or EXAMining data until the cows come home and not have to worry about entering each subsequent address.
We did this on a DG Nova 1200. Saw it done on some microcomputer or another, and took the idea. I seriously doubt we were "first" on the 1200, but we did do it from scratch, and using only the front panel.
That Zilog 8000 computer has me intrigued. I spent the first part of my professional career developing software for the Motorola EMX2500 Cellular Telephone Switch, which was actually a DSC (formerly Digital Switch Corporation) DEX 600 with some added hardware to support Motorola's cellular base stations. These systems utilized Z8000 CPUs as their primary processors mounted on pull-out boards, not unlike those in the Zilog 8000 computer (and many other minicomputers and early microcomputers).
DSC started in the early 1970s in Richardson or Plano Texas (they were in Richardson by the time I started at Motorola in 1989) and had adopted the Z8000 architecture across their line much earlier in the 1980s. I cannot help but wonder if some of their early Z8000 processor cards weren't either based on the actual Zilog 8000 computer processor card, or may have actually been that card.
I'll have to keep watching to see if I can see anything that I can recognize.
By the time I left Motorola for good in 2008, they had mostly moved on from using the DSC switches. DSC itself had been purchased by Alcatel, which in turn merged with Lucent, so I'm not even sure what might be left in Texas or elsewhere of that organization. Motorola completely exited the cellular networking business around the time it split into Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions, and I think the remains of that part of the business has moved onto other things entirely under its new ownership.
11:49 I think the actual address you are looking at is in the second row, labelled “Memory Address”. The top “Program Counter” row would be showing the address of the next instruction being executed in a program. But given you are not actually executing a program, it’s being used to show the next memory address to step to.
That was well nerdy.
I watched it all! 😁
This is a very good video, thank you!
Fantastic seeing all the old computers in this space. I used to program and repair the PDP-8/I for GCA in the 1970's. The machine instruction set is somewhat annoying due to conditional branches having limited range, a problem that was overcome with the PDP-11. At DEC my former boss used to call Data General "Data Generous" due to their penchant for hiring away DEC talent with fat paychecks. I loved reading The Soul of A New Machine when it was first published. This book really captures the intensity, excitement, and extreme challenges of high tech research and development like no other. A must-read book for high tech professionals or those considering a tech career.
My next trip! Amazing collection and I've never heard of it.
Back in 1988 the college computer lab (a community college in NYS) had about 20 Superbrains. It's the machine I learned CPM on. Dual floppies using Turbo Pascal as an editor to write 8080 assembly language.
This is quite an amazing collection, as advertised.
You mentioned a lot of names that I haven heard in a very long time. Not only did the Cray encompass shear computer power, but it was also a work of art. It looks as if it were designed by a French artist.
I mostly like your walk into the CRAY-1
Back at the Uni I was lucky enough to have seen a, non functioning, "Univac 120".
The 490 you are showing looks just like the same machine, with the tubes replaced by transistors.
In the 120, the tube sockets had very long legs, almost like 2 sockets connected by piano wires. It formed something like a cage were they soldered the resistors and capacitors needed for the polarization of the tubes. Then the whole assembly pluged in a backplane in almost the same fashion of those transistor cards in the 490.
BTW the front panel of the 490 is way more modern than the one of the 120, that still had a rotary phone dialer as an input device.
The Motorola EXORmacs is a development system for the 68000 CPU, just like the EXORset was for the 6809.
Hey, that's less than half an hour from me. I might have to visit some time.
I've hidden in an old Cray-2! I used to work in the same Aberdeen Proving Ground building where ENIAC was once installed. They had a decommissioned Cray-2 sitting in the downstairs lobby for decoration. I saw someone coming down the hall I really did not want to make small talk with, so I hopped inside it and crouched down.
In the IMSAI system, the memory you are dumping is not the boot ROM. It is the video RAM that contains the ASCII codes for what is actually on the screen.
So when you first issue a dump command it shows you the startup message that is still on the screen, but also the command that you entered.
When you press enter to scroll it you see that it starts displaying the earlier output of the dump command.
Cool video thanks for sharing 👍
Ok. After all that a Cray 1! That was epic
👍Amazing work!
It is awesome. thank you.
I recall a program in a magazine that when you poked it in and ran it on an unshielded computer it would generate RF interference that played music (the Minute Waltz).on an adjacent AM radio.
Ha, I went on a recon trip yesterday to look at a UNIVAC 418 that might end up going there. Wild to see this video ;)
I used to put a radio beside my Atari and listen to the various sounds as I played various games. The HP reminded me a lot of that
What an amazing tour! A freakin Alto and you got to touch and use it working. I am so jelly right now. Subbed. PS as someone who was all in with Cubase on my ST with a full setup, thank you for getting it and having good sound. Thank you!
OMG, the Atari ST was the first Computer I had when I was a kid; I always fobbed off homework to play games. Homework or Shadow of the Beast? Definitely Shadow of the Beast!
(@19:05) - the web of the infamous “wire-eating” spider! 😆 Black widow spiders have NOTHING on this beast!
I could not believe my eyes as this video started. That Bendix G15........O M G
that partially answered a question I've had for over 40 years..
Those modules with their anodised colour coded handles and the board wired up to the tubes.
As a young child interested in electronics I got a box of those modules to tinker around with probably about 45 years ago. I never knew their origin and like so much what we would now call E-waste, I slowly cannibalised them over the years for components.
But I never knew their origins and always was impressed by the logical design process.
Now I'll have to go dig into the deepest recesses of my archives to see if any have survived all these years.
Fantastic to see that something like that was here in Australia so many years ago.
I love the silly noises out of that HP prototype. I hear noises like this a lot on pc motherboards, when some boards start getting older when you do I/O you can really hear it, it's kind of funny it's like adding back hard drive sound when you have a ssd, not that it's loud or anything in these circumstances.
absolutely fascinating!!!
16:30 Beam me down, Scotty!
Awesome, I need to plan a visit. I didn't see you mention Honeywell in that mix of computers; I have a 1K bit core panel of memory from one. When new it's memory cost $1.00 per byte and the one I used had a meg worth of memory.
I have only 1 word for it: WOW 😍
I live a few miles north of here I'm definitely checking this place out I can't believe I never heard of it