Vintage Computers

The Darkness said:
I'm completely addicted to this guy's youtube channel. Take yourself down the genius where they reverse engineer the Apollo core memory modules and vintage programming: https://www.youtube.com/c/CuriousMarc/videos
Click to expand...
Those days they did proper programming, profiling and debugging, because lives and expensive equipment was at stake.

Today's development process will not be able to gain the same functionality and reliability of that time.
 
Stuey74 said:
That is it, exactly the same one.
Click to expand...
I found this one in JHB a while ago. Been battling to get more info on it.

Can you recall anything about it, brand name, documentation, etc?

Also, to confirm, you got yours in the UK or SA? And around what time was this?
 
The_Librarian said:
Those days they did proper programming, profiling and debugging, because lives and expensive equipment was at stake.

Today's development process will not be able to gain the same functionality and reliability of that time.
Click to expand...
So true. They unpack the complexities and redundancy designed into the Apollo guidance systems in this series. The foresight and brilliance of this generation cannot be understated:
 
jannievanzyl said:
I found this one in JHB a while ago. Been battling to get more info on it.

Can you recall anything about it, brand name, documentation, etc?

Also, to confirm, you got yours in the UK or SA? And around what time was this?
Click to expand...
It came in a box with a picture of it and Russian text - was purchased in Moscow sometime around 1986 or 1987. Brought it with us to SA when we came in 1991, my Father gave away/sold all my Atari stuff sometime in 1994, this would have been with it, maybe you have mine.
 
Stuey74 said:
It came in a box with a picture of it and Russian text - was purchased in Moscow sometime around 1986 or 1987. Brought it with us to SA when we came in 1991, my Father gave away/sold all my Atari stuff sometime in 1994, this would have been with it, maybe you have mine.
Click to expand...
I was wondering if it might not be yours! Would be cool if we can figure out if it is. The back stories to these old systems are as cool as the machines itself.

I got it from a guy who lived on the western side of JHB. He's got a lot of Atari stuff.........so your stuff might well be in there.

Any way you would be able to ID this as yours? You mentioned you rewired it, etc?
 
The_Librarian said:
Those days they did proper programming, profiling and debugging, because lives and expensive equipment was at stake.

Today's development process will not be able to gain the same functionality and reliability of that time.
Click to expand...
It depends on the developers... and the talent. Tools today are better than before.
Put a kid raised on OOP and Java on something like this and you'll see predictable results..
 
jannievanzyl said:
I was wondering if it might not be yours! Would be cool if we can figure out if it is. The back stories to these old systems are as cool as the machines itself.

I got it from a guy who lived on the western side of JHB. He's got a lot of Atari stuff.........so your stuff might well be in there.

Any way you would be able to ID this as yours? You mentioned you rewired it, etc?
Click to expand...
The only thing I could think of is if the wiring looks obviously re-soldered, I was 13 and was mostly a spectator to the work.
 
A little bit of historical trivia - the Intel holographic mouse pad from 25 years ago. Holograms were very fashionable back then. They shipped this to me from the US when I bought one of their Pentium Pro CPUs.

Intel_Mousepad.JPG
 
garyc said:
There was a lot of noise about it, but very little uptake before things moved on to SSE.
Click to expand...
I had so much fun writing SSE code back then. MMX wasn’t that interesting to me being integer.
 
The_Librarian said:
en.wikipedia.org

Pentium FDIV bug - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...

As someone who worked on actual floating point financial calculations in the 1990s I remember this well. Pentium processors were fairly rare, and people who needed floating point division were the exception, so the real efects were negligible. Nevertheless Intel's bad handling of the PR fiasco led to an expensive recall.

Not exactly vintage computers, but 25 years ago is beyond the recall of most people today.

P.S. The story is quite an interesting precursor to the Covid pandemic, when relatively obscure technical details become front page controversies, and everyone becomes an 'expert' through the media.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X