Sorry for the long delay! This 30 minute video took nearly a month of evenings and weekends to produce, which I really didn't see coming (although perhaps I should have!). I've been a fan of digital group for years and really wanted to try my best to do it justice. I enjoy doing documentaries but they require a ton of research, finding video material, editing and green screen silliness, and this video was no exception. Regrettably there is very little in the way of detailed accounts of the company; most 1st hand info comes from Dr. Suding, so some grains of salt should be taken. Anyway, thanks for watching, hope you enjoy and on to the next project!
Whatever effort you went to, it was well worth it. Absolutely fantastic. Great, new material about a hardware house that is undeservedly less known. Your enthusiasm is infectious.
I know that a lot of work have gone into this video, and sometimes most of the credit goes to the part that was the easiest to make... But I have to tell you that the acting and reuse of the same actor in the same scene, is SO well done! And so fitting to the good narrator voice! It is funny without being cringe.
Thanks! I knew Dr. Robert Suding as an innovator in the amateur astronomy field as a maker of a 20" binocular telescope using two matched 20" mirrors. He was in the loop with telescope building and other things with a telescope maker Jim Burr of JMI from the 1990's through the aughts. JMI went out of business several years ago.
I decided to watch this (after The TH-cam Algorithm dropped your Brick Fraud video in my lap) because I still have a digital Starion 919. I didn't realize that digital and "the digital group" were different entities. Still an entertaining and informational video. Thanks!
Love to see this inside look at the company's history .. also a pause at the auction listing shows where Denver was at the time "flopies" and other spelling errors went unnoticed.
As a user (and abuser I guess) of DEC kit from the early 80s onwards I was mighty surprised and confused the first time I came across a Digital Group machine 15 or so years ago. There wasn't a lot of info around at the time so thanks for filling in all the questions I had back then! I still don't understand how DEC let them get away with the name though.
Regarding the name there was also Digital Research, the developers of the CP/M OS for microcomputers. I guess these companies just weren't as uptight about similar names as so many are today.
Love your video. I was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club in the 70's. Loved my Digital Group Computer that I built. It had a huge power supply. The lights would dim in my apartment when ever I turned it on.
Wild… I lived in Denver for a couple of years, and used to ride on a bike trail that apparently went right by 585 S Jason St, their former office building. I never would’ve known. I wonder how many other stories like this there are, the stories that the buildings and places around us have that we don’t know.
I really, really want to get something like this working. I have the dual deck. The quad deck is vanishingly rare. The dual deck has the mounting points inside for 4 drives but just doesn't have the holes up top cut out. It's tempting to get a pro to cut them out. I think it would be incredible to see something like that operate... just because it's tape!
This channel is an absolute under appreciated gem, been binging under quarantine and loved every upload. Hope commenting counts for something with the inscrutable algorithm.
Wow, very impressive video on a very obscure company from the 70's, can't believe you found so much info! - I am an original Altair 8800 owner (still own it) and so I got a big kick out of this video! - One request, we could hear your intriguing monologue much more clearly without "The Entertainer" or other background music while you are presenting such great information. Great job, subscribed and shared!!
This brought back so many memories. I designed periferals for S-100 computers back in the early 80s, even started a user group for one particular make/model S-100 based kit computer back then. What times we had, staying at the meeting til the early morning the day after the meetings - it was all new and very exciting. Even wrote software for CPM which was much fun and used an assembler for the venerable Z-80 for other projects. Ahhh, them were the days! Subscribed. Thanks for the memories. Edit: I had a 4004 CPU stashed around here somewhere. Can't find it...
I loved Digital Group's magazine ads. Their Phi-Decks looked amazing! Sphere made sexy ads too, but IIRC they were way out of my price range.By 1977 when I was ready to buy a serious kit PC of my own, going with a proprietary bus felt like a mistake. S-100 had lots of support from independent vendors by then. I settled on a Cromemco Z2 chassis and 4Mhz Z80 CPU card, partly because that's what my mentor had. Processor Technology's 3P+S card for I/O and their VDM-1 video card, a North Star floppy controller, and a too-new 32k RAM card from TDL rounded out the machine. That TDL card never worked fully loaded, but eventually made a terrific 28k card if you pulled one row of chips and made a few wiring changes. :) Anyway, four different brands plugged into the same bus. That was the S-100 dream in-action. Thanks for the video. I subscribed earlier today and am enjoying what's turning into a binge session as I keep seeing new ones I want to watch RIGHT NOW. :)
Many thanks for the vote of confidence! Yeah dg stuff.. any computer stuff really.. was crazy expensive. You had to be pretty dedicated to be an early adopter like that. Few thousand bucks would buy you a pretty decent car back then I think! That must have been fun mixing and matching S100 parts to get exactly what you wanted!
I remember a marathon, assembling a DG Z80 kit over one Thanksgiving holiday at home. A day or so in, Dad entered the room and asked if I was going to come out and spend some time with the rest of the family... Alas, that system was donated to the Exploratorium during one of my lab purges over the years. I recall designing and building a 16K dynamic ram board that never achieved an acceptable BER, and some struggles trying to get an 8" floppy drive to work as well. Later on, I was able to acquire a Cromemco Z2D, and get on with the business of actually writing code...
Finally got around to watching this - as always it's a treasure, fun and educational. I am typing this on a "stultifyingly conformist" black box x64 desktop though!
At first I though I would be watching the story of Digital Equipment Corporation, but this was far more interesting. I wonder if there was confusion between the two companies with digital in their name.
Thanks for the history lesson. At the time, I was 9 years old and reading Popular Science magazine, and don't recall ever reading about this company. Just another one of those homebrew companies that advertised in BYTE magazine to fall down to the onslaught of Apple/Commodre/Tandy mass-produced ready-to-use systems. MITS took off as an early starter due to being featured on the cover of Popular Electronics -- and that publicity is credited at kickstarting the entire microcomputer revolution. The other startups were only playing catchup until the Big Guys made a much more polished product a few years later. Example: Apple was a typical startup. Until Jobs made the decision to commision a custom machine mold to make an attractive case for the second model. Expensive investment, but it made all the difference in the world for your product to be taken seriously by the press. All the other little guys look crude. This is how you turn a $10,000 company into a $1,000,000,000,000 company.
22:30. Apple's IPO at $22 per share. Apple stock has since split by a factor of 224 since founding, and with a current share price trading at $174, means that those original shares are now worth $38,976 !
I love depictions of offices in the 1960s hairstyles the clothing the office look everything in this clip has some great stuff from that. However at the same time it has such staggering sweeping and completely wrong generalizations of the Computing business that you should know this ahead of time so he did not listen to much of what the script says he's generalizations are absolutely absurd and unbelievably wide of the mark still this piece is entertaining and does have a few nuggets of Truth it also has amazing factual inaccuracies
Such a shame they went the way they did. As always with early computing, a bit better management would have probably saved them in the long run. Absolutely beautiful machines. Maybe if they'd stuck around longer we might have seen an x86 board pop up.
I love your videos. Recently discovered. I know this is an older one and maybe you’ve addressed this but, your audio needs a low pass filter. Certain words are pegging the low band 30-60hz area causing a heavy thud or pop in headphones or in my subwoofer when watching on home theater. :)
My first mic was a Blue Snowball that I suspect was defective. It was always erratic despite replicating the recording conditions. I tried to correct it in Audition but I may have overcorrected. New mic I hope will put things on a better footing.
@@TechTimeTraveller what I do for my newer videos is add an EQ and just pull down all the frequencies below 60hz. Love your work and look forward to watching your stuff!
Surprised that they could call their company 'The Digital group' when 'Digital computer corp' existed... What is crazy is the company I work for, we trash canned our last Dec-server in 2018...
I would not say that you have a vintage car from the 1950's when you have a digital group machine. You need to go further back. I would say something more like a steam powered car, from before Ford Model-T.
A very us centric view IMO, what about the Micral? I can't think yhat a learned person such as you did not take it into account as an inspiration for the Altair. All the best Jerry.
I've mentioned the Micral in other videos. Unfortunately they are so rare and I like to show the actual thing operating. I chose digital group just because it had a bit of a dramatic story. If I ever get a Micral 8008 I'll definitely do a video.
Damn those beautiful vintage chips. That white, gray, purple ceramic, and gold plating gets me every time and I just want to hoard them all. I want to cry when I see these “scrappers“ salvaging gold and putting videos on TH-cam…. where they just destroy hundreds of pounds of those beautiful vintage chips like that that are still in good shape. Sickening. All For a few pennies worth of gold. Makes me wanna slap the shit out of somebody
The whole problem of each CPU requiring software to be rewritten is a really terrible oversight. It may not have been possible, but they should've at least tried to write software that could translate between the CPUs.
I'm delighted that dick bemis was delighted by the "MICRO-8008" 😁😆😁😁 also what a great channel, I got clued in from your latest video (the bricks!!!) being picked up by the algorithm and I àm hooked! good stuff
Great video! Glad the almighty Algorithm has finally seen fit to bestow it unto me. But one day I'll watch a video or read a book about a home computer pioneer company where the "business expert" wasn't a complete oxygen thief 🙄
I really want to see the material in your videos, but the parts with the terrible acting in them are so distracting, I keep giving up. It is too bad, because these are interesting documentaries until the terrible skits make them unwatchable.
Apart from the Yank-centric view of the world, you made a basic blunder in your ignorant assertion that "by the dawn of the 1970s, there were no personal computers"!!! The HP9100A was a personal computer, widely available in 1968-1969. I bailed at that point, because it is crystal-clear that you have no idea what you are babbling about.
Huh? Both the American and the Computer History Museum regards the Kenbak 1 as the first personal computer. That debuted in 1971. The 9100a is more akin to a scientific calculator. It was also $34,000 in today's money. Is that really a 'personal' computer? A person technically could have bought an LGP-30 in the late 50s.. it ran on 110v.. there is plenty of room for debate here.
@@TechTimeTraveller No debate. They are 100% incorrect. The HP9100A was the first true personal computer, in 1968. I used one. Your ignorance, nor quotation of ignorant sources, does not alter that solid fact.
man you nailed it. innovative products from complete assholes. i baught/assembled my system day one, and it set me on a computer science path, so a good life investment. first full z80 pc platform, tape bootstrap was great, floppy controller worked well, votrex speech synth was groundbreaking. and their bus and power supply setup was superior to others, but they were too late/slow to take the market. i use lucky to complete mine before they blew up, and did not really count on them, and there was a "handened" user group that made/traded/sold unsponsored products years after...
I really enjoyed this bit of history. Very well done, thank you. I still have my DG system (26K, dual phidecks). I learned a hell of a lot building that thing, it was a pretty cool system for the time. In 1982 or so I met Dr. Suding; I drove to his house in Virginia and bought some hardware from him. He really didn't want to talk much about DG.
No problem and thank you for watching. Does your dg system have the nice chassis? I do hope to get my phideck unit going one day.. I've been debating having two more holes cut in the top to permit four decks. It looks like the bottom has the mounts.. they just didn't cut the additional holes up top. That's awesome that you met Dr. Suding. I wish I could have met him but sadly did not. I understand in his later years he was more willing to discuss dg. I would guess only 3 years after it's collapse he probably wasn't keen to talk about it. :)
@@TechTimeTraveller I have the nice chassis, yes. The DG systems were the cadillacs of the late 70s microcomputers, it's too bad they were so expensive to make. The phidecks were always kind of terrible. Might try some of the fixes that have been proposed for it. In 1981 or so, one of my cow-orkers at the Bureau of Standards (in the DC area) was a guy named Chuck , who had led the DG Software group. He really didn't want to talk about DG much, either. :-)
In a way, it's understandable he didn't want to talk about DG. Dr. Suding comes across as an engineer's engineer who put his heart and soul into the hardware he designed and built. Having it all collapse because the supposed "business guy" wasn't actually any good at business while possibly leaving customers high and dry must have been terrifically traumatic for him.
I really enjoyed watching this! I learned a lot from your research, and all the little skits going on in the background were hilarious! It's obvious that you put a tremendous amount of work into making the video, and it definitely paid off. Keep up the good work!
We had a Digital Group with Oasis multiuser system with several terminals attached. It has an 80 MByte Hard Drive as the main storage. Long gone when IBM appeared.
Thanks for the history. I built a computer for myself out of a Heurikon MLP-8080 and a Digital Group video card with a debugger/loader of my own making. The video card was by far the best available for a reasonable cost at the time (‘78 or ‘79). Video display was a modified 9 inch TV. Sadly I lost the MLP-8080 when I loaned it back to Heurikon so that they could service customer equipment a decade or so later. The rest of the machine got lost with time, except for the isolation transformer used to prevent electrocution from the TV. I still use that part today and it reminds me of when I was young as did this video.
This got me thinking. The Micro Computer days are still around but evolved into a different format. Instead of 8bit CPUs, TTL or CMOS there are Micro Controllers, Single Board Computers and FPGAs. For example FPGA being the huge corporation expensive stuff that many people can't afford while Single Board Computers and Micro Controllers for the Hobbyist. Instead of BASIC there is Python.
Is there a site that lists all the info on building a Mark 8 from scratch ? I can't even find a digital copy of the July 1974 Radio Electronics magazine on the web.
Sometimes i wish that the computer of today were like the computer of the 1970's in that the "motherboard" was nothing more than a backplane where EVERYTHING plugged into
They probably could have done reasonably well as a hobbyist company.. potentially thousands of customers, which in those days was a good amount. They just weren't well capitalized, and once people stopped being willing to pay up-front they essentially had no money to buy parts.
@@TechTimeTraveller thanks. I could watch the rest of the video without ads. I don't mind you monetising the videos, it's just a shame when good content is drowned by excessive ads.
Your videos are incredibly informative. There's an order of magnitude more information than other channels I watch for vintage tech. Your relation of the history of these products, companies, and people is impressive. I look forward to more in the future
I think if it wasn't Sphere it would have been someone else. The whole industry then was filled with little 'mom and pop' companies that didn't have venture capital behind them.
@@TechTimeTraveller Shows how volatile a new market can be, things can easily go Darwinian when there's no standard set to protect consumers and businesses, Apple had the kit business model with the Apple 1 and could have easily suffered the same fate as Digital.
wow that Computer looked Sweet! it had every thing going for it and was leading the way in a lot of things that would be standards. but like a lot of places they Fed it up with miss management
This was a great watch! Not only a thorough go-over of the company itself, but very illuminating about what it was like to be involved with personal computing at the time. My knowledge and system experiences only went as far back as ancient IBM PCs and clones and the C-64. Knowing about the spirit of the computer user groups of the 70s and the things they made and sold gives so much further context to things I'd half-known and barely understood. Your videos are great and I am still eagerly diving through the archives! Thank you so much for your work.
That tape deck system is something else, I didn't realize that sort of memory access in tape drives was ever available in the consumer space. I'd heard of industrial computers which had similar access using tape reels but I assumed that diskettes had taken over before anyone tried it on home microcomputers.
According to the creators they didn't know about Digital Group until after they'd done the first season. They based it on Osborne and Compaq, with bits of others thrown in (particularly Digital Research, as Gordon was heavily based on Garry Kildall). It's definitely super close though. Even if it's apparently coincidental.
On the mid 90's I installed a complete network with SEC/Digital equipment on one of the greatest companies in my country...I wonder if it still works today...
Man, I hope you end up doing more videos like this or the miniscribe video. I come back to both so often. Not that I don't love the other videos, but these ones are special
Sorry for the long delay! This 30 minute video took nearly a month of evenings and weekends to produce, which I really didn't see coming (although perhaps I should have!). I've been a fan of digital group for years and really wanted to try my best to do it justice. I enjoy doing documentaries but they require a ton of research, finding video material, editing and green screen silliness, and this video was no exception. Regrettably there is very little in the way of detailed accounts of the company; most 1st hand info comes from Dr. Suding, so some grains of salt should be taken. Anyway, thanks for watching, hope you enjoy and on to the next project!
im a little late to the party here but I just wanted to say excellent work. this was super interesting
This is the best digital group video on YT.
Thanks for your hard work.
Whatever effort you went to, it was well worth it. Absolutely fantastic. Great, new material about a hardware house that is undeservedly less known. Your enthusiasm is infectious.
I know that a lot of work have gone into this video, and sometimes most of the credit goes to the part that was the easiest to make...
But I have to tell you that the acting and reuse of the same actor in the same scene, is SO well done! And so fitting to the good narrator voice! It is funny without being cringe.
J11. My all time favorite process. 60pin Dip.
Thanks! I knew Dr. Robert Suding as an innovator in the amateur astronomy field as a maker of a 20" binocular telescope using two matched 20" mirrors. He was in the loop with telescope building and other things with a telescope maker Jim Burr of JMI from the 1990's through the aughts. JMI went out of business several years ago.
He was such an intelligent, inventive guy. I wish I had had the chance to meet him before he passed.
You deserve more subs. Your research production value, and narration style is on par with lgr, etc. awesome video
I second this.
Videos have way more views than subs, and lots of recent views. Seems like the algorithm is smiling on this channel.
The algorithm found him!
Flattering but untrue
Don't tell him that. Tell all your friends.
I decided to watch this (after The TH-cam Algorithm dropped your Brick Fraud video in my lap) because I still have a digital Starion 919. I didn't realize that digital and "the digital group" were different entities.
Still an entertaining and informational video. Thanks!
Thank you for sharing with us this unknown piece of history! The time and effort is very much appreciated.
Love to see this inside look at the company's history .. also a pause at the auction listing shows where Denver was at the time "flopies" and other spelling errors went unnoticed.
As a user (and abuser I guess) of DEC kit from the early 80s onwards I was mighty surprised and confused the first time I came across a Digital Group machine 15 or so years ago. There wasn't a lot of info around at the time so thanks for filling in all the questions I had back then! I still don't understand how DEC let them get away with the name though.
Guess in those days they were often seen more as DEC (possibly as marketing to match IBM?) than digital which came in later.
Regarding the name there was also Digital Research, the developers of the CP/M OS for microcomputers. I guess these companies just weren't as uptight about similar names as so many are today.
Love your video. I was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club in the 70's. Loved my Digital Group Computer that I built. It had a huge power supply. The lights would dim in my apartment when ever I turned it on.
So awesome to see personal computers at the roots of the 70's.
The designs looks very sleek!
This is an excellent video! Thanks for the time and effort! I have thoroughly enjoyed every single of your videos so far!
Absolutely fascinating video, thanks for all the hard work that obviously went into this!
@@LiquidAudio Thank you!
I feel like I'm watching a Ken Burns documentary on PBS, this is awesome! Thank you!
Wild… I lived in Denver for a couple of years, and used to ride on a bike trail that apparently went right by 585 S Jason St, their former office building.
I never would’ve known. I wonder how many other stories like this there are, the stories that the buildings and places around us have that we don’t know.
Damn fine video. Thanks! Love your self created stock footage and humour.
Very informative, and enjoyable video. Thanks for your effort in research, narration, and editing.
15:40 How awesome it must have felt for the 70s hobbyist to watch (and hear, and feel) their quad-cassette drive system randomly access files.
I really, really want to get something like this working. I have the dual deck. The quad deck is vanishingly rare. The dual deck has the mounting points inside for 4 drives but just doesn't have the holes up top cut out. It's tempting to get a pro to cut them out. I think it would be incredible to see something like that operate... just because it's tape!
Excellent overview! Great research!
This channel is an absolute under appreciated gem, been binging under quarantine and loved every upload. Hope commenting counts for something with the inscrutable algorithm.
Wow, very impressive video on a very obscure company from the 70's, can't believe you found so much info! - I am an original Altair 8800 owner (still own it) and so I got a big kick out of this video! - One request, we could hear your intriguing monologue much more clearly without "The Entertainer" or other background music while you are presenting such great information. Great job, subscribed and shared!!
This was beautiful.
Amazed I'm only coming across your channel now. Subbed, with gusto!
Man, I really enjoyed this - Thanks!
This brought back so many memories. I designed periferals for S-100 computers back in the early 80s, even started a user group for one particular make/model S-100 based kit computer back then. What times we had, staying at the meeting til the early morning the day after the meetings - it was all new and very exciting. Even wrote software for CPM which was much fun and used an assembler for the venerable Z-80 for other projects. Ahhh, them were the days!
Subscribed. Thanks for the memories.
Edit: I had a 4004 CPU stashed around here somewhere. Can't find it...
I thought this was going to be about DEC, pleasantly surprised, what a wonderful history to learn about. The other digital!
Just Wow! You are a unique and talented storyteller. Your videos are a treasure. Thanks for this one, it filled in some big gaps for me.
That board setup in the thumbnail looks so incredibly similar to my 1984 Compucorp Metric 85 that it's uncanny
Oh wow! I didn't think I'd hear about the high school at the end of my road in a tech video, lol.
Thank you thank you thank you for calling it a microprocessor and not a microprawhsessor.
Used lots of 74SNs in my beginner days, 20 years ago.
Excellent video. This must have been a ton of work to put together. Thanks
This channel is awesome! Thanks for the great content.
Waiting for the YT algorithm to notice it.
Great content, thank you!
Thanks for watching!
"Nerd Praetorian Guard" You know... with an impressive logo... I'm smelling TTT t-shirt or pin merch on the horizon.
I loved Digital Group's magazine ads. Their Phi-Decks looked amazing! Sphere made sexy ads too, but IIRC they were way out of my price range.By 1977 when I was ready to buy a serious kit PC of my own, going with a proprietary bus felt like a mistake. S-100 had lots of support from independent vendors by then. I settled on a Cromemco Z2 chassis and 4Mhz Z80 CPU card, partly because that's what my mentor had. Processor Technology's 3P+S card for I/O and their VDM-1 video card, a North Star floppy controller, and a too-new 32k RAM card from TDL rounded out the machine. That TDL card never worked fully loaded, but eventually made a terrific 28k card if you pulled one row of chips and made a few wiring changes. :) Anyway, four different brands plugged into the same bus. That was the S-100 dream in-action.
Thanks for the video. I subscribed earlier today and am enjoying what's turning into a binge session as I keep seeing new ones I want to watch RIGHT NOW. :)
Many thanks for the vote of confidence! Yeah dg stuff.. any computer stuff really.. was crazy expensive. You had to be pretty dedicated to be an early adopter like that. Few thousand bucks would buy you a pretty decent car back then I think! That must have been fun mixing and matching S100 parts to get exactly what you wanted!
Very interesting and well made.
I remember a marathon, assembling a DG Z80 kit over one Thanksgiving holiday at home. A day or so in, Dad entered the room and asked if I was going to come out and spend some time with the rest of the family... Alas, that system was donated to the Exploratorium during one of my lab purges over the years. I recall designing and building a 16K dynamic ram board that never achieved an acceptable BER, and some struggles trying to get an 8" floppy drive to work as well. Later on, I was able to acquire a Cromemco Z2D, and get on with the business of actually writing code...
Finally got around to watching this - as always it's a treasure, fun and educational. I am typing this on a "stultifyingly conformist" black box x64 desktop though!
At first I though I would be watching the story of Digital Equipment Corporation, but this was far more interesting. I wonder if there was confusion between the two companies with digital in their name.
17:04 Mini byte master, now that's a nice looking machine.
What an interesting but sad story.
Well done! Liked and subbed.
Thanks for the history lesson. At the time, I was 9 years old and reading Popular Science magazine, and don't recall ever reading about this company. Just another one of those homebrew companies that advertised in BYTE magazine to fall down to the onslaught of Apple/Commodre/Tandy mass-produced ready-to-use systems. MITS took off as an early starter due to being featured on the cover of Popular Electronics -- and that publicity is credited at kickstarting the entire microcomputer revolution. The other startups were only playing catchup until the Big Guys made a much more polished product a few years later.
Example: Apple was a typical startup. Until Jobs made the decision to commision a custom machine mold to make an attractive case for the second model. Expensive investment, but it made all the difference in the world for your product to be taken seriously by the press. All the other little guys look crude. This is how you turn a $10,000 company into a $1,000,000,000,000 company.
The 7404N, yeah!!!
I have a Cromemco system which I never got to work. It is currently sitting in the floor next to my desk.
22:30. Apple's IPO at $22 per share. Apple stock has since split by a factor of 224 since founding, and with a current share price trading at $174, means that those original shares are now worth $38,976 !
I love depictions of offices in the 1960s hairstyles the clothing the office look everything in this clip has some great stuff from that. However at the same time it has such staggering sweeping and completely wrong generalizations of the Computing business that you should know this ahead of time so he did not listen to much of what the script says he's generalizations are absolutely absurd and unbelievably wide of the mark still this piece is entertaining and does have a few nuggets of Truth it also has amazing factual inaccuracies
@@joegoldman3065 What was inaccurate?
I had a rainbow 100 once back in the early 90s and it ran cp/m.
Interesting machine, couldn't do crap with it.
Think I traded it for a hard drive lol
you are my new favorite channel and i am in love with u
Good video, but you really need a pop-filter for your microphone. :)
I actually have one. I think the mic I was using had some issues. I'm hoping I've solved that now with a different one.
Such a shame they went the way they did. As always with early computing, a bit better management would have probably saved them in the long run. Absolutely beautiful machines.
Maybe if they'd stuck around longer we might have seen an x86 board pop up.
I love your videos. Recently discovered. I know this is an older one and maybe you’ve addressed this but, your audio needs a low pass filter. Certain words are pegging the low band 30-60hz area causing a heavy thud or pop in headphones or in my subwoofer when watching on home theater. :)
My first mic was a Blue Snowball that I suspect was defective. It was always erratic despite replicating the recording conditions. I tried to correct it in Audition but I may have overcorrected. New mic I hope will put things on a better footing.
@@TechTimeTraveller what I do for my newer videos is add an EQ and just pull down all the frequencies below 60hz. Love your work and look forward to watching your stuff!
Surprised that they could call their company 'The Digital group' when 'Digital computer corp' existed... What is crazy is the company I work for, we trash canned our last Dec-server in 2018...
I've searched the few Digital Group sites and have not been able to find what discipline Dr. Suding was actually a Doctor of. Can you enlighten us?
I believe it was for Systems Analysis at Florida State U.
I'm very much late to comment, but what happened to the sound around 7:11 or so?
Are there any surviving working examples of the The Digital Group 6501 CPU board?
Yes.. bytecollector had one. He sold it to someone a couple of years ago. AFAIK it was working.
Digital fireplace
I would not say that you have a vintage car from the 1950's when you have a digital group machine. You need to go further back. I would say something more like a steam powered car, from before Ford Model-T.
A very us centric view IMO, what about the Micral?
I can't think yhat a learned person such as you did not take it into account as an inspiration for the Altair.
All the best Jerry.
I've mentioned the Micral in other videos. Unfortunately they are so rare and I like to show the actual thing operating. I chose digital group just because it had a bit of a dramatic story. If I ever get a Micral 8008 I'll definitely do a video.
Bemus? Bemis? Man, that sure sounds familiar.
Interesting, but they failed the switch from a designer for computer kits to a distributor for ready made systems.
lol I thought this would be about Kildall.
Damn those beautiful vintage chips. That white, gray, purple ceramic, and gold plating gets me every time and I just want to hoard them all.
I want to cry when I see these “scrappers“ salvaging gold and putting videos on TH-cam…. where they just destroy hundreds of pounds of those beautiful vintage chips like that that are still in good shape. Sickening.
All For a few pennies worth of gold. Makes me wanna slap the shit out of somebody
At least they weren't putting bricks in inventory boxes.
The whole problem of each CPU requiring software to be rewritten is a really terrible oversight. It may not have been possible, but they should've at least tried to write software that could translate between the CPUs.
If only everyone could have had a DEC VAX 750S in their house the could do the books and games using text mode.
lightning fast 0.05 mhz processor!
Imagine the bitcoin mining potential! :)
I'm delighted that dick bemis was delighted by the "MICRO-8008" 😁😆😁😁
also what a great channel, I got clued in from your latest video (the bricks!!!) being picked up by the algorithm and I àm hooked! good stuff
Great video! Glad the almighty Algorithm has finally seen fit to bestow it unto me.
But one day I'll watch a video or read a book about a home computer pioneer company where the "business expert" wasn't a complete oxygen thief 🙄
I got a question on digital did they do mainframes
Dude make at least one friend. ;)
Disco in 79. check your facts. Was the age of Blondie, Talking Heads and Gary Numan.
There were still discos in 79. I have the relatives to prove it.
Why hasn’t a movie been made? Johnny depp would be a good fit for Robert Suding
I really want to see the material in your videos, but the parts with the terrible acting in them are so distracting, I keep giving up. It is too bad, because these are interesting documentaries until the terrible skits make them unwatchable.
Facts? Good.
Narration? Good.
Acting? Not so much.
Gotta fire that guy.
@@TechTimeTraveller just have him stick to what he's good at.
Apart from the Yank-centric view of the world, you made a basic blunder in your ignorant assertion that "by the dawn of the 1970s, there were no personal computers"!!!
The HP9100A was a personal computer, widely available in 1968-1969.
I bailed at that point, because it is crystal-clear that you have no idea what you are babbling about.
Huh? Both the American and the Computer History Museum regards the Kenbak 1 as the first personal computer. That debuted in 1971. The 9100a is more akin to a scientific calculator. It was also $34,000 in today's money. Is that really a 'personal' computer? A person technically could have bought an LGP-30 in the late 50s.. it ran on 110v.. there is plenty of room for debate here.
@@TechTimeTraveller No debate.
They are 100% incorrect.
The HP9100A was the first true personal computer, in 1968.
I used one.
Your ignorance, nor quotation of ignorant sources, does not alter that solid fact.
I really enjoy hearing about the history of these early firms -- it is nice to cover something rather more obscure, too. Thank-you!
man you nailed it. innovative products from complete assholes. i baught/assembled my system day one, and it set me on a computer science path, so a good life investment. first full z80 pc platform, tape bootstrap was great, floppy controller worked well, votrex speech synth was groundbreaking. and their bus and power supply setup was superior to others, but they were too late/slow to take the market. i use lucky to complete mine before they blew up, and did not really count on them, and there was a "handened" user group that made/traded/sold unsponsored products years after...
I really enjoyed this bit of history. Very well done, thank you.
I still have my DG system (26K, dual phidecks). I learned a hell of a lot building that thing, it was a pretty cool system for the time.
In 1982 or so I met Dr. Suding; I drove to his house in Virginia and bought some hardware from him. He really didn't want to talk much about DG.
No problem and thank you for watching. Does your dg system have the nice chassis? I do hope to get my phideck unit going one day.. I've been debating having two more holes cut in the top to permit four decks. It looks like the bottom has the mounts.. they just didn't cut the additional holes up top.
That's awesome that you met Dr. Suding. I wish I could have met him but sadly did not. I understand in his later years he was more willing to discuss dg. I would guess only 3 years after it's collapse he probably wasn't keen to talk about it. :)
@@TechTimeTraveller I have the nice chassis, yes. The DG systems were the cadillacs of the late 70s microcomputers, it's too bad they were so expensive to make.
The phidecks were always kind of terrible. Might try some of the fixes that have been proposed for it.
In 1981 or so, one of my cow-orkers at the Bureau of Standards (in the DC area) was a guy named Chuck , who had led the DG Software group. He really didn't want to talk about DG much, either. :-)
In a way, it's understandable he didn't want to talk about DG. Dr. Suding comes across as an engineer's engineer who put his heart and soul into the hardware he designed and built. Having it all collapse because the supposed "business guy" wasn't actually any good at business while possibly leaving customers high and dry must have been terrifically traumatic for him.
I really enjoyed watching this! I learned a lot from your research, and all the little skits going on in the background were hilarious! It's obvious that you put a tremendous amount of work into making the video, and it definitely paid off. Keep up the good work!
We had a Digital Group with Oasis multiuser system with several terminals attached. It has an 80 MByte Hard Drive as the main storage. Long gone when IBM appeared.
Thanks for the history. I built a computer for myself out of a Heurikon MLP-8080 and a Digital Group video card with a debugger/loader of my own making. The video card was by far the best available for a reasonable cost at the time (‘78 or ‘79). Video display was a modified 9 inch TV. Sadly I lost the MLP-8080 when I loaned it back to Heurikon so that they could service customer equipment a decade or so later. The rest of the machine got lost with time, except for the isolation transformer used to prevent electrocution from the TV. I still use that part today and it reminds me of when I was young as did this video.
This got me thinking. The Micro Computer days are still around but evolved into a different format. Instead of 8bit CPUs, TTL or CMOS there are Micro Controllers, Single Board Computers and FPGAs.
For example FPGA being the huge corporation expensive stuff that many people can't afford while Single Board Computers and Micro Controllers for the Hobbyist. Instead of BASIC there is Python.
Is there a site that lists all the info on building a Mark 8 from scratch ? I can't even find a digital copy of the July 1974 Radio Electronics magazine on the web.
Thanks for another interesting video! I'm more into 80s early 90s computers but i really enjoy the story of this older technology! Thanks again.
I'm so happy that Adrian mentioned your channel in one of his recent videos. Incredible content -- thank you.
Sometimes i wish that the computer of today were like the computer of the 1970's in that the "motherboard" was nothing more than a backplane where EVERYTHING plugged into
Yet here we are, in this day and age with computers in our pockets running on none other than micro processors which then people were skeptical about.
$16530 in 1979 is over $68k in 2022
Ain't that some shit.
How many customers could they have had if they fulfilled their orders on time?
They probably could have done reasonably well as a hobbyist company.. potentially thousands of customers, which in those days was a good amount. They just weren't well capitalized, and once people stopped being willing to pay up-front they essentially had no money to buy parts.
I thought Compaq bought Digital out
Excellent video. But I stopped watching after the TENTH interruption by ads. The frequency of ads makes the video unwatchable.
I tried trimming it down before - now I've knocked out the midrolls entirely.. hopefully that makes it easier to watch. Thanks for the feedback!
@@TechTimeTraveller thanks. I could watch the rest of the video without ads. I don't mind you monetising the videos, it's just a shame when good content is drowned by excessive ads.
Your videos are incredibly informative. There's an order of magnitude more information than other channels I watch for vintage tech. Your relation of the history of these products, companies, and people is impressive. I look forward to more in the future
Sphere really did an Atari and ruined the market, wonder how far the other startups would've got if that didn't happen
I think if it wasn't Sphere it would have been someone else. The whole industry then was filled with little 'mom and pop' companies that didn't have venture capital behind them.
@@TechTimeTraveller Shows how volatile a new market can be, things can easily go Darwinian when there's no standard set to protect consumers and businesses, Apple had the kit business model with the Apple 1 and could have easily suffered the same fate as Digital.
wow that Computer looked Sweet! it had every thing going for it and was leading the way in a lot of things that would be standards. but like a lot of places they Fed it up with miss management
This was a great watch! Not only a thorough go-over of the company itself, but very illuminating about what it was like to be involved with personal computing at the time. My knowledge and system experiences only went as far back as ancient IBM PCs and clones and the C-64. Knowing about the spirit of the computer user groups of the 70s and the things they made and sold gives so much further context to things I'd half-known and barely understood. Your videos are great and I am still eagerly diving through the archives! Thank you so much for your work.
That tape deck system is something else, I didn't realize that sort of memory access in tape drives was ever available in the consumer space. I'd heard of industrial computers which had similar access using tape reels but I assumed that diskettes had taken over before anyone tried it on home microcomputers.
Fantastic! Really seems like the inspiration for the amazing “Halt and Catch Fire” series.
According to the creators they didn't know about Digital Group until after they'd done the first season. They based it on Osborne and Compaq, with bits of others thrown in (particularly Digital Research, as Gordon was heavily based on Garry Kildall). It's definitely super close though. Even if it's apparently coincidental.
On the mid 90's I installed a complete network with SEC/Digital equipment on one of the greatest companies in my country...I wonder if it still works today...
Man, I hope you end up doing more videos like this or the miniscribe video. I come back to both so often.
Not that I don't love the other videos, but these ones are special
At 16:52, you use a black and white picture of a color graphics board which gave me a chortle