Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

I grew up using these throughout high school in the mid-to-late 80's. They were the perfect machine for a budding hacker because they were very close to a real UNIX system without actually being well-designed. They had networking. They had a very primitive speech synthesizer chip or subsystem of some kind - I had no documentation for it, but there were a handful of samples that said fixed words and so I was able to chop up the sample utterances and make it say other things to some degree. You could redirect these requests over the network and make other people's machines speak during class. There was a basic inode-type file system but it had weird permissions and was pretty closely mapped to the physical disk topology so you could edit directories and reassign file locations to be the locations of other files, like, say, the password file. There wasn't anything to stop you from writing a fake login prompt to capture passwords from the unsuspecting. They had structured pascal, a decent LOGO interpreter and a C compiler so they could support really any sort of sophisticated program that a high school student of the day could write.

It's sad they ordered them all destroyed. While they were obsolete the day they were made it would be great for there to be a working installation of them to show off how advanced Ontario was once upon a time.

A 186 - the HP Palmtop years later would put basically this entire machine into a device the size of a paperback book.

I worked briefly for a Toronto company named Trigon that had a government contract in 1984 to produce interconnected office software (word processor, spreadsheet, calendar) for the Icon. The product was called "Emerald". I don't think the Icon hardware existed yet, we developed on Unix. As far as I know, the company went broke before the product was delivered.

Ah yes, the computers of my youth at K-8 primary school. I spent many a computer period playing such fine games as Mathville and Offshore Fishing. Damn you, shark!