#retrocomputing folks: I'm trying to get a sense of the proportion of people here who are into a given class of retrocomputer today but didn't experience the machines when they first came on the market.
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@fluidlogic
I had an 8088 PC clone in that time, and a little later got a secondhand TI-99/4A. The PC was pretty cool, top of the line for its day with *two* floppy drives (no swapping disks for WordPerfect!) and a full 640k RAM. We upgraded it Theseus style until it was a Frankenstein 386 in the massive grey desktop case with the classic Big Red Switch.You could have upgraded it to a 486. Not a Pentium, though—Pentium motherboards were ATX and needed the case to provide a soft power button.
As far as I know, nothing much changed after that, so you could put modern hardware in a Pentium-era case…although you might need to drill some extra vent holes in it and add some more fans!
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#retrocomputing folks: I'm trying to get a sense of the proportion of people here who are into a given class of retrocomputer today but didn't experience the machines when they first came on the market. I want everyone's input! Please boost!
This poll is about the early consumer home computers released between say 1977 and 1994.
Minicomputer poll: https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic/116026497511100991
32-bit home/personal computer poll: https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic/116026605156645610
@fluidlogic I worked on PDP 11s from the mid 70s to 1981 then onto Vax gear. So 16bits then 32 bits. It meant I got into 32 bits early and I wasn't interested in the PC machines. I did dabble in Windows towards the end of the 80s because a client wanted it and... only 16 bits? Are you kidding me?
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@fluidlogic My mother worked for IBM so of course rather than a normal computer we had to get a 5150 (version 2 system board, so it could hold up to 256K RAM), which she paid for through payroll deduction. A few summers later I went to a "computer camp" where I was the only kid with a PC in a sea of TRS-80s and C-64s and Apple IIs. It was upgraded over time; the second floppy drive broke and was replaced with a 20M hard drive, and we got a better (non-Epson) printer and a color monitor.
Did you replace the system board at any point? As far as I know, the 5150 BIOS doesn't know how to boot from a hard drive.
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@fluidlogic I worked on PDP 11s from the mid 70s to 1981 then onto Vax gear. So 16bits then 32 bits. It meant I got into 32 bits early and I wasn't interested in the PC machines. I did dabble in Windows towards the end of the 80s because a client wanted it and... only 16 bits? Are you kidding me?
Windows 2.1 and later aren't entirely 16-bit. Apps run in real mode and use 20-bit segmented addressing, but if it's running on a 386 or later then the kernel will run 32-bit and map pages in and out of the 20-bit address space in response to GlobalLock calls.
But you'd have to wait until 1993 to get a Windows in which apps can directly use 32-bit addressing. That's when NT 3.1 and Win32s (a shim to run 32-bit code on regular Windows 3.1) came out.
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Did you replace the system board at any point? As far as I know, the 5150 BIOS doesn't know how to boot from a hard drive.
@fluidlogic @argv_minus_one The controller had an option ROM.
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You could have upgraded it to a 486. Not a Pentium, though—Pentium motherboards were ATX and needed the case to provide a soft power button.
As far as I know, nothing much changed after that, so you could put modern hardware in a Pentium-era case…although you might need to drill some extra vent holes in it and add some more fans!
No, lots of the early socket 5 pentium motherboards were plain-AT, it wasn't until the later ones, with socket 7 and SDRAM, that they started adopting ATX. Mostly because it meant they could get 3.3v directly from the psu instead of needing a regulator on the mobo.
I had a gateway 2000 100mhz pentium with a big clonky power button and big hot 3.3v regulators on the motherboard.
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@quinn it's more of a mix than I expected!
(I had guessed just 10% of retrocomputing folk didn't, when they were first released, have access to the machines that are currently their retrocomputers of choice. The poll indicates right now it's over 20%, which I find encouraging, as it indicates there's a sizeable chunk for whom retrocomputing is not about nostalgia primarily.)
@fluidlogic @quinn maybe more of a mix than you might guess.
I'm not active in any "retro" sense, but I did work for an 8-bit maker in the 1980s - as well as having the same gear personally.
Which means I don't have a rosy nostalgia and instead remember how flaky the hardware was, how scant the documentation was, how few were our ways to get answers - etc.
But what I am grateful for in retrospect, is how understandable those systems were. So much of what I learned then, still guides me.
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#retrocomputing folks: I'm trying to get a sense of the proportion of people here who are into a given class of retrocomputer today but didn't experience the machines when they first came on the market. I want everyone's input! Please boost!
This poll is about the early consumer home computers released between say 1977 and 1994.
Minicomputer poll: https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic/116026497511100991
32-bit home/personal computer poll: https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic/116026605156645610
@fluidlogic I could only dream of 16 bit processors
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@fluidlogic I worked on PDP 11s from the mid 70s to 1981 then onto Vax gear. So 16bits then 32 bits. It meant I got into 32 bits early and I wasn't interested in the PC machines. I did dabble in Windows towards the end of the 80s because a client wanted it and... only 16 bits? Are you kidding me?
@rogerparkinson did you skip the 8-bitters entirely?
You're a candidate for the minicomputer poll!
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I don't think you could buy any 8- or 16-bit computers in 1994. That was well into the 32-bit era.
The beginning of the end of the 16-bit era was 1986. That's when the 386 came out. It was obsolete in 1989, so that's when I'd say the 32-bit era had begun in earnest.
@argv_minus_one yes, they overlapped. In 1992, Atari released the Falcon and Commodore released the Amiga 4000.
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@fluidlogic there's a lot of room to carve this up. Like CP/M was mostly before my time but I got pretty into those machines when they were at once relatively almost new, but also very obsolete- and I'd argue that was retrocomputing. Similar for the TRS/80 model 2/16/6000 which could also run XENIX and verged on being minis.
@wotsac yes "heyday" is shorthand for "the time during which a machine felt new and exciting and was productive".
This is not remotely a scientific poll! I have no idea if people who are answering are really current retrocomputing aficionados, for example.
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@rogerparkinson did you skip the 8-bitters entirely?
You're a candidate for the minicomputer poll!
@fluidlogic I did skip them entirely, yes. Though I have done things with embedded 8 bit devices more recently eg ATTiny85 and Teensy.
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@fluidlogic I did skip them entirely, yes. Though I have done things with embedded 8 bit devices more recently eg ATTiny85 and Teensy.
@rogerparkinson did you consider them mere toys at the time?
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I don't think you could buy any 8- or 16-bit computers in 1994. That was well into the 32-bit era.
The beginning of the end of the 16-bit era was 1986. That's when the 386 came out. It was obsolete in 1989, so that's when I'd say the 32-bit era had begun in earnest.
You could definitely buy major name consumer grade 286 desktop PCs in 1990.
My dad replaced our family's z80-based Heathkit with a 286-based Packard Bell on or around that year.
A lot of people just didn't use Windows back then, and the extra cost of a 386 had little advantage if you weren't doing gui+multitasking.
It wasn't the 386 that ushered in the end of 16 bit computing, it was windows 3.1... which could run on a 286 but was painfully restricted there.
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@AdrianRiskin yes! Put the word out on here, using the tags #retrocomputing , #vintagecomputing , #commodorepet and optionally #losangeles and you'll get people popping up offering to take it off your hands. If you can include a snap or two, so much the better. Good luck!
I suggest not putting power into it, as the chemistry-based electronics will have degraded in storage and might pop, making repair harder.
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@scuttlebutt thanks - I wasn't aware.
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@argv_minus_one yes, they overlapped. In 1992, Atari released the Falcon and Commodore released the Amiga 4000.
Hmm? I don't understand. Those are both 32-bit machines.
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@rogerparkinson did you consider them mere toys at the time?
@fluidlogic I can't say I thought about them much, other than the idea of taking a machine home rather than using it at the office. I got a PC and I mainly used it to dial into the VAX machines at work. I never gave the others (ie 8 bits) a thought. Then I had to do some programming on, by then, Windows 3. Had to jump through lots of hoops to do what I wanted in 16 bits.
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#retrocomputing folks: I'm trying to get a sense of the proportion of people here who are into a given class of retrocomputer today but didn't experience the machines when they first came on the market. I want everyone's input! Please boost!
This poll is about the early consumer home computers released between say 1977 and 1994.
Minicomputer poll: https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic/116026497511100991
32-bit home/personal computer poll: https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic/116026605156645610
@fluidlogic First computer was a 386 SX. When Doom came around I was still having a blast at like 8fps.
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