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House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

tomshardware.com

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Re: House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

#41

Post by thfuran »

rsynnott wrote: post #32
Tor3 wrote: post #9

That this 8008 computer from 1972 should have 16KB of RAM sounds unlikely. I haven't been able to find any real info stating this - still, the headline on tomshardware says "16KB". That's very hard to believe. Static RAM of that size would have been extremely expensive at the time, the much much later Altair 8800 didn't get past 4KB without a dynamic RAM board (which was also very unreliable). The Q1/Lite, a Z80-base…

From the actual article: > They use the Intel 8008 CPU, an 8-bit CPU capable of processing a whopping sixteen kilobytes of memory Which is correct. As you say, highly unlikely that the computers had that much, though. I'm not sure how Tom's Hardware does things, but it's well-known in the _newspaper_ industry that the headlines aren't written by the person who writes the article, and misinterpretation happens from ti…

Surely by 2050 they'll have figured out how to associate a credibility measure and attested provenance with every bit of knowledge to prevent that sort of thing. What a time to be alive.

Re: House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

#42

Post by b112 »

purpleflame1257 wrote: post #35
Fluorescence wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they are inherited by a confused youngster who puts dad's weird old trash on the kerb :(

This is how I got an Emmy statuette.

You!!! I NFT'd that, scanned it, and the original was meant to be destroyed, meant to be in the trash.

Now I'm being sued, after you put it on ebay! You have no right sir! None! You don't own the NFT!

Re: House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

#43

Post by adrian_b »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #39
adrian_b wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia says that the 512x512 PLATO plasma display had a cost of $2500 at a time when that was a much greater value than today. Moreover, I doubt that the cost includes the one thousand high voltage transistors that would have been needed to drive the display. As I have already written, such a display would have been too expensive for a desktop computer with an 8-bit CPU. In the early seventies, as an alternative t…

Where did you get the 1000 high voltage transistors thing? I used PLATO at UIUC in the late 80s briefly, because they were still around, but everything had been WYSE-50 or Sun already (or contemporaries) and the PLATO terminals weren't some monstrosities....just looked 20 years old.

In the simplest case you need one transistor per row and one per column for bitmap displays.

If any transistor in omitted, than that row or column must have a fixed voltage, which means that the corresponding column or row of pixels would no longer be controllable and they would display the same pixels as whatever other column or row is selected at a given instant.

One thousand transistors do not need a huge space (they would fit easily on a PCB of a size compatible with a PLATO terminal, based on the photo from Wikipedia), but they were quite expensive. Suitable high-voltage integrated circuits have appeared later. In 1972, one could have used Nixie decoders like 74141 for the negative voltage, replacing 512 transistors with 64 IC packages, but 512 discrete transistors would still have been needed for the positive voltage.

For segmented alphanumeric displays you need only 14 or 16 transistors for the segments plus one transistor per character.

Re: House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

#44

Post by gumby »

Tor3 wrote: post #9

That this 8008 computer from 1972 should have 16KB of RAM sounds unlikely. I haven't been able to find any real info stating this - still, the headline on tomshardware says "16KB". That's very hard to believe. Static RAM of that size would have been extremely expensive at the time, the much much later Altair 8800 didn't get past 4KB without a dynamic RAM board (which was also very unreliable). The Q1/Lite, a Z80-base…

14 year old me in 1978 had a whopping 4K of RAM in my S-100 system (a whole card full of 2102s) and I couldn't have had that much without my parents helping me out.

A full 16K six years before seems unlikely, especially given the size of programs back then.

Re: House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

#45

Post by linker3000 »

gumby wrote: post #44
Tor3 wrote: post #9

That this 8008 computer from 1972 should have 16KB of RAM sounds unlikely. I haven't been able to find any real info stating this - still, the headline on tomshardware says "16KB". That's very hard to believe. Static RAM of that size would have been extremely expensive at the time, the much much later Altair 8800 didn't get past 4KB without a dynamic RAM board (which was also very unreliable). The Q1/Lite, a Z80-base…

14 year old me in 1978 had a whopping 4K of RAM in my S-100 system (a whole card full of 2102s) and I couldn't have had that much without my parents helping me out. A full 16K six years before seems unlikely, especially given the size of programs back then.

We're of a similar age. I had to make do with 1152 bytes on the school's Acorn System Ones - until the CBM (PET) 3016 arrived.

Re: House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

#46

Post by gumby »

linker3000 wrote: post #45
gumby wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

14 year old me in 1978 had a whopping 4K of RAM in my S-100 system (a whole card full of 2102s) and I couldn't have had that much without my parents helping me out. A full 16K six years before seems unlikely, especially given the size of programs back then.

We're of a similar age. I had to make do with 1152 bytes on the school's Acorn System Ones - until the CBM (PET) 3016 arrived.

You could do quite a lot with a small amount of RAM. And if you were using the front panel switches (not on the acorn I suppose) you didn't want a large program!

Re: House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

#47

Post by rbanffy »

kragen wrote: post #20
pm215 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html says it had a "neon-orange plasma display", which would have been pretty advanced for the time.

the neon-orange plasma displays invented for the plato system in the late 01960s had an enormous, unique advantage for this kind of thing they were bistable and switchable! so you could have a 512×512 display which had, in the physical display itself, 262144 bits of memory, equivalent to 32768 bytes. by contrast (heh), a lcd or normal crt fades in a second or two if you don't redraw it, which means you need a separat…

This one seems to be 12 rows of 32 columns.

Still pretty cool. I wish I could find an 80x24 one (or two 40x24) for a sensible price. Would be lovely for a text-only terminal thingie.

> brian dear wrote a very interesting book about the history of the plato project

It's an interesting book, full of interesting stories. It is a bit confusing though, as it goes back and forth in time quite a lot - it has a very Primer-like timeline.

Re: House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

#48

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rbanffy wrote: post #47
kragen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the neon-orange plasma displays invented for the plato system in the late 01960s had an enormous, unique advantage for this kind of thing they were bistable and switchable! so you could have a 512×512 display which had, in the physical display itself, 262144 bits of memory, equivalent to 32768 bytes. by contrast (heh), a lcd or normal crt fades in a second or two if you don't redraw it, which means you need a separat…

This one seems to be 12 rows of 32 columns. Still pretty cool. I wish I could find an 80x24 one (or two 40x24) for a sensible price. Would be lovely for a text-only terminal thingie. > brian dear wrote a very interesting book about the history of the plato project It's an interesting book, full of interesting stories. It is a bit confusing though, as it goes back and forth in time quite a lot - it has a very Primer-l…

Toshiba had plasma luggables in the 80s.

Re: House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

#49

Post by Turing_Machine »

adrian_b wrote: post #36
Turing_Machine wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we think of as "plasma screens" were invented at UIUC for the PLATO project in (checks) 1964, by Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson. They had a resolution of 512x512. They started cranking them out in bulk in 1972. These were monochrome orange vector displays. They didn't use segments.

Wikipedia says that the 512x512 PLATO plasma display had a cost of $2500 at a time when that was a much greater value than today. Moreover, I doubt that the cost includes the one thousand high voltage transistors that would have been needed to drive the display. As I have already written, such a display would have been too expensive for a desktop computer with an 8-bit CPU. In the early seventies, as an alternative t…

> As I have already written, such a display would have been too expensive for a desktop computer with an 8-bit CPU.

They were subsidized to some extent, but they were nonetheless cranked out by the hundreds.

> Vector displays are possible only where there is a drawing spot that can be moved in any programmable direction, i.e. only on CRTs or mechanical plotters. They are not possible with plasma displays.

I'm sorry, you are simply wrong here. The Plato display did have vector graphics.

Your own Wikipedia citation disagrees with you:

"The display was a 512×512 bitmap, with both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. It included fast vector line drawing capability, and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second."

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