#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 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.
@fluidlogic then you've got stuff like the Atari 800 XL and the Ti 99/4A which were just brutally obsolete because there was just very little in the way of software an peripherals to be had by the late 80s. Then there's the C64 which held onto a bit of sparkle into the 90s even
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@fluidlogic then you've got stuff like the Atari 800 XL and the Ti 99/4A which were just brutally obsolete because there was just very little in the way of software an peripherals to be had by the late 80s. Then there's the C64 which held onto a bit of sparkle into the 90s even
@fluidlogic Apple II was a live issue all the way through the era - there was still a big IIe lab in my high school when I graduated in 1995.
And when you cross into the 16 bit tranches it's even more finely divided and refined
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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
IBM PC XT.
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@bthylafh ...and you got to use it at that age?
@fluidlogic Sure did! I was one of the first kids in my age cohort at school to have one. Wound up keeping it for around eight years before we replaced it with a 486.
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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 got an Atari 800 with 48K RAM and 410 tape deck, plus the Star Raiders and Atari BASIC program cartridges for Christmas 1981 or 1982, can't remember, but I was 13 or 14 years old.
My next computer was an Apple Macintosh IIsi around 1992 or 1993?
I went to Carnegie-Mellon in 1986, so I didn't need my own computer during those years.
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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 Vic 20, C64, C128, PC 8088/8086, Atari 1040ST
Apple IIe if you count the computers at school.
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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
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.
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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.
