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Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

jasoneckert.github.io

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Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

#11

Post by guyzero »

enos_feedler wrote: post #4
guyzero wrote: post #3

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 c…

I remember the sad moments when something went wrong and the teacher went to the corner of the room to reset _all the machines_ Or walking in for computer class and they would all be hung on the boot screen

I think they had some sort of GUI but we never got it at our school - they just dropped you into a command prompt on boot like God, Thompson and Ritchie intended.

Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

#12

Post by guyzero »

jjmellon wrote: post #10
jjmellon wrote: post #7

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.

The founder of Trigon was a guy named Don Tapscott. Back then, he had a gift for hyping the "next big thing". I haven't thought or heard anything about him in decades, so it was interesting just now to find that he has a website (dontapscott.com, of course), and that his current passion is Blockchain.

Tapscott has been a "futurist" for years, probably decades now. Sadly the trouble with being a futurist is that you gotta keep making up a new future every year.

Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

#13

Post by KerrAvon »

guyzero wrote: post #3

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 c…

Curious, what wasn’t actually well designed about it? QNX generally seems to be regarded as superior to 80’s era Unix in most regards.

Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

#14

Post by KerrAvon »

guyzero wrote: post #12
jjmellon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founder of Trigon was a guy named Don Tapscott. Back then, he had a gift for hyping the "next big thing". I haven't thought or heard anything about him in decades, so it was interesting just now to find that he has a website (dontapscott.com, of course), and that his current passion is Blockchain.

Tapscott has been a "futurist" for years, probably decades now. Sadly the trouble with being a futurist is that you gotta keep making up a new future every year.

See also Negroponte.

Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

#16

Post by version_five »

> you probably remember the ICON as a cool looking steel monstrosity that had an indestructible keyboard and trackball (which everyone tried to spin as fast as they could)

This is roughly my memory. I had forgotten about these entirely and now I'm racking my brain trying to remember how we used them. I do remember the trackballs, a big computer lab, and only using them on special occasions... I think it must have been around 1989 but I may be off by a year or two

Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

#17

Post by ncmncm »

KerrAvon wrote: post #13
guyzero wrote: post #3

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 c…

Curious, what wasn’t actually well designed about it? QNX generally seems to be regarded as superior to 80’s era Unix in most regards.

QNX was superior to '90s Unix, too.

Re: Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

#20

Post by aurizon »

I remember this as a huge political pork barrel project. The province gave grants to boards to buy these dogs, yep woof, woof, woof. The lack of programs and support/training and the huge fail rate meant these were soon relegated to storage, where a few techs/hackers kept some running with parts for others. They fell far behind Apple/IBM, commodore, radio shack etc. It was such a huge embarrassment that the government ordered their destruction = closed off and possible resale resource(in truth it was not worth keeping even for that) Burroughs POV was that data was valuable, so detailed circuits etc were denied. Want it fixed? Send it here, here are our rates $$$
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