Ars Technica made a brilliant interview with the prince of persia developer explaining how many computational limits he had to overcome purely because of the platform he initially started with and realizing that during the development the evolution had already taken both the audience and performance elsewhere.
A fascinating tour with a knowledgeable guide. So many names I remember. I am glad to hear they are collecting the stories as well as the machines. C64 was my first, got into opcodes becoz Basic was too slow, still took 24hrs to do one screen of the Mandelbrot set!
One of the neat things about watching this video as someone from North America is to see the regional historical variations. These days computing is so global in nature that most products are marketed world wide. Although they exist, you don’t see very much in the way of local regional product variation. An iPhone, or Samsung galaxy phone is the same product here or in the UK. But back then the market was a lot more fragmented. North America didn’t have the BBC micro or ZX spectrum for example.
Ooh I've been in there after my dad moaned there wasn't enough IBM kit on display - Jason had to prove us otherwise :) Once of the most amazing places I've been to!
I saw a Superbrain in the background! My dad had a couple of those, he designed a graphics card for it and had the boards printed, my brother and I soldered the chips onto them. Then someone else came out with a higher resolution card and took our market. I wonder if the museum happens to have one somehow! That would be awesome.
Great video, and that Compaq portable almost brought a tear to my eye, my dad had one of those for work and i learned myself the basic programming language/started my life as a programmer on that thing.
Loved this! What a ride down Memory Lane. I built an Altair 8800a from a kit in 1976 and ended up at Digital Research working under Gary Kildall in the last of the CP/M glory days just as IBM PC/DOS was about to dethrone it. Used a Compaq luggable in the mid-80's to do software development at home in the evenings to supplement my day work at Symantec on an IBM PC/XT (the first model with integral hard drive). Etc. etc. Yes, I agree. The hardware is a great excuse to revel in the stories.
Have any of you ever seen or heard of a system that had been made by Singer Business Machines called the 1500? I was working for Singer when the business machines division was bought by ICL . The systems were renamed the ICL 1500 . These units were made in Utica, NY and were designed by a George Cogar. The 1500 was an early desktop device with two tape drives, a 256 character CRT and a keypunch style keyboard. These systems were quite popular in Europe in the mid 1970s into early 80s. 16 of them could be networked together and share a 20MB disk manager.
You know, the PowerPC Macs didn't run the Motorole 68000 chip. Those came earlier. But they did have an emulation library on them so they could run the older software, much like they later did with Rosetta when they switched to x86.
ManWithBeard1990 Yeap. The PowerPC Macs has the PowerPC 603 and 604 CPU, some models had PowerG3 CPU. What most people don’t know, the PowerPC CPUs were better in computing and performance power than the Intel CPUs of the time. Of course, people didn’t know or care, they just wanted a Windows PC :)
I really wanted to post some video I edited on one but I couldn't find any.... (well there's an old Mac format CD here, will see what I can do with it) >Sean
PowerPCs were 'better' than Pentiums, true. Problem being it was the terribly aged Mac OS that crippled them. Mid 90s Apple was also incredibly stingy with hardware design; a string of Macs with 68040 based boards had PowerPCs hacked onto them, for instance. Having said that.. as a young teenager, I first had a home internet connection in 98' on a 68040-based Mac, and I'm probably clouded by nostalgia, but it didn't seem all *that* slow itself. Now I am delirious with nostalgia...
Quite a few Prime Computers were sold in the UK. They were still being made until about 1999. Also, Floating Point Systems built (attached) array processors that were amazing in their day. I wonder if any have survived.
How does the Center for Computing History stand on retrobrighting? Is it a feature that the computers look like when they where used or is the aim to have as many computers as possible as they where when they where new? I saw some comps there that still had stickers left from their donors, so either those haven't been cleaned up/used since they where donated or the idea is to keep them like that?
Well, everything is a big task when you have a thousand computers in storage. And most probably don't even need the treatment, there was a lot of metal-case computers there that doesn't yellow and I expect that the boxed-computers are in the best of shape. Other than that there is always a risk of striping and other results you don't want but if the goal is to preserve history it could be well worth the risk on systems that isn't so unusual. And the workload can always be dropped on volunteers or other cheap labor!
Interview Oded Lachish from the Birkbeck department of computer science please. His research in theoretical computer science in my view merits him a Gödel prize because it is so cutting-edge.
Excellent! I like the long form! Great stories. Too bad you passed by the beautiful SGI machines a few times. I don’t know why or how exactly but those machines intrigue me a lot. The Irix operating system as well. I would love a more in depth demo of the platform!
Yeah, I think they're newer than the museums typical fare, but quite awesome. Maybe some day I'll dust of my Indigo 2 and O2. There was a big community online, again, probably because the machines were from the Internet age, but I doubt it's very active any more.
You don't have to drag all the tape out of an 8-Track cartridge, once you've opend it up, all the tape is on a single deck spool that can be lifted out. It's a lot less mess but not as much fun. :)
I wonder how long the tour would take if time was not an issue and he'd be able to talk about all the machines that interested him back there... I kinda want a video like that.
Commodore did in fact make PC-compatible hardware with four different Intel CPUs - an 8088, an 80286 (in both 10MHz and 12 MHz speeds), an 80386SX at 16 MHz, and an 80386DX at 25 MHz. They were reasonably-priced, decent, but not spectacular. PC-compatible machines for the mid- to late-1980s.
I remember the pizza oven, although I'm sure I remembered it as a toaster, but that might have been innacurate reporting. What you said about the intel chip thing would make sense, as the RPC had a Intel card in to allow the RPC to run dos stuff without any emulation (oh, how I wanted one of those to make the ultimate machine... riscos OS with PC compatibility). Maybe the oven was immediately above the pc card to make the joke stick (the toaster was certainly near the top) Where are the other 5 slices of that monster machine though? It had 7 slices IIRC :)
The lack of sorting within the storage seems to really bug me for some reason. Maybe they should have a challenge for guests: Write a program to take the list of current inventory and sort them, generating a pull-push list. Program that generates the "Best" sorted with minimum of movements wins.
A debugging CPU instruction that causes the computer to enter an infinite loop(like reading all the memory forever), and in rare cases actually catching on fire. The name is not very good, since it actually causes the computer NOT to halt.
So much cool old stuff. Oddly, I have a similar Toshiba large laptop style portable next to me. I have a couple of training manuals for the IBM Display Writer which I'm willing to donate. I also have an ICL OPD which I'm selling, if anybody wants it. The system box on top of the IBM PC appears to be the expansion unit with one hard disk fitted. Oh yes, I remember reading about that pizza oven. Amazing to see it.
These videos are really interesting, but are increasingly hard to watch without an upset stomach. Please *use a tripod*! Or at least try to hold the camera still! Thanks!
I actually like the occasional video that's more than 10 minutes. The more you're interested in any topic, the shorter the video seems, and vice/versa.
Ars Technica made a brilliant interview with the prince of persia developer explaining how many computational limits he had to overcome purely because of the platform he initially started with and realizing that during the development the evolution had already taken both the audience and performance elsewhere.
I like the enthusiasm in him. Such a great guy and I loved this video!
Jeez, this guy knows a lot about computer history.
A computer combined with a phone? Who needs that?
(Send from my iPhone)
A fascinating tour with a knowledgeable guide. So many names I remember. I am glad to hear they are collecting the stories as well as the machines. C64 was my first, got into opcodes becoz Basic was too slow, still took 24hrs to do one screen of the Mandelbrot set!
Oh wow, that 8 track! That's just precious lol
Ironically, I've been thinking of doing that with an hard drive and my 1970's receiver hehehe
The "Pizza Oven" reminded me of the pizza re-hydrator from Back to the Future 2. I bet the production designer used it as inspiration.
Damn, my exact thought! I don't know who inspired who, but they're definitely related.
It's the "black & decker hydrator".
superb video. i've been to this museum and its amazing.
One of the neat things about watching this video as someone from North America is to see the regional historical variations. These days computing is so global in nature that most products are marketed world wide. Although they exist, you don’t see very much in the way of local regional product variation. An iPhone, or Samsung galaxy phone is the same product here or in the UK. But back then the market was a lot more fragmented. North America didn’t have the BBC micro or ZX spectrum for example.
Ooh I've been in there after my dad moaned there wasn't enough IBM kit on display - Jason had to prove us otherwise :) Once of the most amazing places I've been to!
I saw a Superbrain in the background! My dad had a couple of those, he designed a graphics card for it and had the boards printed, my brother and I soldered the chips onto them. Then someone else came out with a higher resolution card and took our market. I wonder if the museum happens to have one somehow! That would be awesome.
Great video, and that Compaq portable almost brought a tear to my eye, my dad had one of those for work and i learned myself the basic programming language/started my life as a programmer on that thing.
Loved this! What a ride down Memory Lane. I built an Altair 8800a from a kit in 1976 and ended up at Digital Research working under Gary Kildall in the last of the CP/M glory days just as IBM PC/DOS was about to dethrone it. Used a Compaq luggable in the mid-80's to do software development at home in the evenings to supplement my day work at Symantec on an IBM PC/XT (the first model with integral hard drive). Etc. etc.
Yes, I agree. The hardware is a great excuse to revel in the stories.
Thanks for the tour, this was amazing!
Oh man, I want a separate video for every single one of these machines.
Imagine a cat staring at a bird in the backyard, That's how i'm looking at this video.
Visited last year (having seen some of Ashens' videos going through the archives). Fascinating place if you are ever in Cambridgee
Ahhh, the old Compaq 'Lugable'. I carried one for many years as a piece of test equipment. They were a solid piece of kit.
I saw an Apple II GS in the beginning! We used to have a GS in school, and that was in the 2000s!
50 Shades of Beige
Yep, gotta help alleviate that eye strain.
Have any of you ever seen or heard of a system that had been made by Singer Business Machines called the 1500? I was working for Singer when the business machines division was bought by ICL . The systems were renamed the ICL 1500 . These units were made in Utica, NY and were designed by a George Cogar. The 1500 was an early desktop device with two tape drives, a 256 character CRT and a keypunch style keyboard. These systems were quite popular in Europe in the mid 1970s into early 80s. 16 of them could be networked together and share a 20MB disk manager.
As soon as the Exidy Sorcerer got pulled out I hoped the 8 track cartridges would be mentioned and was very happy when they were.
What an amazing collection.
great! short, but great. could watch this for hours.
You know, the PowerPC Macs didn't run the Motorole 68000 chip. Those came earlier. But they did have an emulation library on them so they could run the older software, much like they later did with Rosetta when they switched to x86.
ManWithBeard1990 Yeap. The PowerPC Macs has the PowerPC 603 and 604 CPU, some models had PowerG3 CPU.
What most people don’t know, the PowerPC CPUs were better in computing and performance power than the Intel CPUs of the time.
Of course, people didn’t know or care, they just wanted a Windows PC :)
I really wanted to post some video I edited on one but I couldn't find any.... (well there's an old Mac format CD here, will see what I can do with it) >Sean
I still have one of the floppies that MacOS 7.1 came on. I don't know where the other five went but it's a nice nostalgia piece.
PowerPCs were 'better' than Pentiums, true. Problem being it was the terribly aged Mac OS that crippled them. Mid 90s Apple was also incredibly stingy with hardware design; a string of Macs with 68040 based boards had PowerPCs hacked onto them, for instance. Having said that.. as a young teenager, I first had a home internet connection in 98' on a 68040-based Mac, and I'm probably clouded by nostalgia, but it didn't seem all *that* slow itself. Now I am delirious with nostalgia...
15:54 That Sony MSX2 machine - well one from that series - was used in the MIR space-station as a video-digitizer, just to add a story :)
3 of those I had in my youth. Wish I still had them.
Quite a few Prime Computers were sold in the UK. They were still being made until about 1999. Also, Floating Point Systems built (attached) array processors that were amazing in their day. I wonder if any have survived.
How does the Center for Computing History stand on retrobrighting?
Is it a feature that the computers look like when they where used or is the aim to have as many computers as possible as they where when they where new?
I saw some comps there that still had stickers left from their donors, so either those haven't been cleaned up/used since they where donated or the idea is to keep them like that?
Well, everything is a big task when you have a thousand computers in storage.
And most probably don't even need the treatment, there was a lot of metal-case computers there that doesn't yellow and I expect that the boxed-computers are in the best of shape.
Other than that there is always a risk of striping and other results you don't want but if the goal is to preserve history it could be well worth the risk on systems that isn't so unusual.
And the workload can always be dropped on volunteers or other cheap labor!
retrobright damages plastic and makes them brittle
anodizing in the kitchen sink < That's kind of high level DIY is amazing
It looks like he forgot to put that note back in the Osborne 1!
All these computers will be in fashion again according to Alien.
Interview Oded Lachish from the Birkbeck department of computer science please. His research in theoretical computer science in my view merits him a Gödel prize because it is so cutting-edge.
Oh wherefore art thou, my old Exidy Sorcerer. :D
probably the best quote: "The hardware is just an excuse to tell those stories"
Excellent! I like the long form! Great stories.
Too bad you passed by the beautiful SGI machines a few times. I don’t know why or how exactly but those machines intrigue me a lot. The Irix operating system as well. I would love a more in depth demo of the platform!
Yeah, I think they're newer than the museums typical fare, but quite awesome. Maybe some day I'll dust of my Indigo 2 and O2. There was a big community online, again, probably because the machines were from the Internet age, but I doubt it's very active any more.
Same here. I'd like to see one in real life at some point.
Thoroughly enjoyed this!
You don't have to drag all the tape out of an 8-Track cartridge, once you've opend it up, all the tape is on a single deck spool that can be lifted out. It's a lot less mess but not as much fun. :)
"the hardware is just the excuse to tell the stories."
12:40 "286 it's for games" luv it. I had an unlicensed Apple IIE, remember it fondly. They got any MicroBee's there ??
had an AT, C64 286, 386.. too :)
Yep, two of them ... :) we did a video about them on our channel.
I wonder how long the tour would take if time was not an issue and he'd be able to talk about all the machines that interested him back there... I kinda want a video like that.
The Acorn "pizza oven" reminds me of the pizza re-hydrator machine in the background of Back to the Future Part 2
Commodore did in fact make PC-compatible hardware with four different Intel CPUs - an 8088, an 80286 (in both 10MHz and 12 MHz speeds), an 80386SX at 16 MHz, and an 80386DX at 25 MHz. They were reasonably-priced, decent, but not spectacular. PC-compatible machines for the mid- to late-1980s.
20:39 Woah! A computer with a synthesizer built in? Did it have a keyboard, or was it just like a pre-AdLib sound card deal?
I remember the pizza oven, although I'm sure I remembered it as a toaster, but that might have been innacurate reporting. What you said about the intel chip thing would make sense, as the RPC had a Intel card in to allow the RPC to run dos stuff without any emulation (oh, how I wanted one of those to make the ultimate machine... riscos OS with PC compatibility). Maybe the oven was immediately above the pc card to make the joke stick (the toaster was certainly near the top)
Where are the other 5 slices of that monster machine though? It had 7 slices IIRC :)
Cool way to make me feel old!
I'm still using a Power Macintosh :)
Brilliant machine!
The Exidy Sorcerer has to be one of the most 1970s computers ever.
The lack of sorting within the storage seems to really bug me for some reason. Maybe they should have a challenge for guests: Write a program to take the list of current inventory and sort them, generating a pull-push list. Program that generates the "Best" sorted with minimum of movements wins.
archive.org has a huge computer magazine archive too
Ashens made some videos here. Pretty cool place.
Not to jinx, but what's the fire protocol there?
If you have some old computers in the garage, will they accept them?
Yep :)
Are those steven hackett’s imacs?
No Amigas?
Scratch that, I think I caught a glimpse of a 1500 in the background :)
they definitely have Amigas :) - Hoping to do some Commodore stuff soon >Sean
Bit of a stretch to expect Spanish women in England, innit?
I was watching intently just to see my old 1000, but alas.
all that glorious dead-end technology
I want that keyboard with a phone. Not necessarily running Sinclair QL.
Great video.
Thank you
I actually have a question why do some countries even with the same language have different keyboards like UK keyboards vs US keyboard?
Do you share your digital archive with archive.org?
24:42 Because they're *transportable* (aka "luggable") not portable...
Hello Computerphile
What is the origin of the phrase hold/halt and catch fire?
A debugging CPU instruction that causes the computer to enter an infinite loop(like reading all the memory forever), and in rare cases actually catching on fire.
The name is not very good, since it actually causes the computer NOT to halt.
thenorup thanks...
The 6800 or 6809 has the HCF instruction
You guys really need a table somewhere in that area.
It's just an archive.
There’s one on the ground floor :)
That displaywriter beamspring keyboard ..... drool
7:58
It's a toaster! :D
380z! First micro I used.
I did that with Encarta and Compton's too! Original Video For Windows, Intel Indeo and the like
I want the keyboard from the OPD so bad.
Oh wow, I didn't know Prince of Persia was made by Brøderbund. They also made the Myst series.
How about a white pointer of destiny?
Love this guy! gr8 vid
Really cool
I will probably faint out there ....
So much cool old stuff. Oddly, I have a similar Toshiba large laptop style portable next to me. I have a couple of training manuals for the IBM Display Writer which I'm willing to donate. I also have an ICL OPD which I'm selling, if anybody wants it. The system box on top of the IBM PC appears to be the expansion unit with one hard disk fitted.
Oh yes, I remember reading about that pizza oven. Amazing to see it.
Wasn't Apple chosen because it would come first in a phone book and seen before IBM?
Apple what? (Just joking guys)...CP/M = CONTROL PROGRAM MONITOR. Is OS NOT a LANGUAGE.
8:35 Guess you could call that a retro smartphone.
I could only imagine how many of those machines have replaced cmos batteries... Hopefully there are no original batteries laying around... :-x
seventhday savior we do remove batteries :)
8:20 Hey i have one of these ! Rainbow 100A !
Lazy Game Reviews would cream himself to be in there...
Still better than my build 😎
I thought the video was running on 1.25x speed, I set it to 0.75x and even with this speed this guy is speaking so fast :D
Seems fine to me but I'm English.
Mate B. Native language is binary
It is ok
oh... mama mia!
These videos are really interesting, but are increasingly hard to watch without an upset stomach. Please *use a tripod*! Or at least try to hold the camera still! Thanks!
The Sony MSX doesn't like its place :)
Talking of fruit, Banana Computers specializes in refurbished CAD Workstations
so if CP/M and DOS are 'languages', what is FORTRAN or c? operating systems? xDDDD
That whole place stinks of Rick.
Second
First!
7th
32 minutes maan... Why don't just divide this video in 2 or 3 parts?
Andre Angelo What would the point of that be?
Take it like a man, RAWGH
Just come back to it later if you're busy.
I love this channel as much as the next person but 32 minutes?? If I wanted documentaries I'd watch Discovery Channel.......
Sebastian Elytron there's maybe one episode like this per year... Some topics just can't be summarized in
Too short. I could listen to this sort of thing for hours.
doesn't seem you know much about the channel you so much love ,-, these are common..
In the future they will invent fast forward ! The future is bright !
I actually like the occasional video that's more than 10 minutes. The more you're interested in any topic, the shorter the video seems, and vice/versa.