The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
#2I used these in grade school back when I lived in Ontario. Your write-up on these is detailed and brought back lots and lots of memories. Thank you!!
Re: The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
#3I used these in grade school back when I lived in Ontario. Your write-up on these is detailed and brought back lots and lots of memories. Thank you!!
Ditto that. Hours and hours on these in the 1990s.
Mostly Mathville and Offshore Fishing, of course.
Re: The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
#4Ah the icon... the one system where you can just tell it to run a shell as root to gain superuser privileges...
https://www.juliandunn.net/2006/08/21/on-hacking-the-unisys-...
Re: The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
#5> Each Unisys ICON came with its own monitor and a very robust keyboard with a trackball embedded in it.
The trackballs were robust indeed.
Due to the client/server nature; a classroom of kids logging in at the same time could take several minutes and most of that time would be filled with a classroom of 7 year olds spinning the heck out of the tennis ball sized trackball.
One more knowledgeable teacher once told us that the this probably made the computers slower because each time you do something it has to pause and decide what to do. I guess he understood interrupts somehow.
But that logic doesn’t work on 8 year olds with a trackball and nothing else to do.
Re: The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
#6Ah, Unisys. I used to buy/sell refurbished laptops and stumbled upon a couple thousand Unisys laptops, one time. Pentium 133’s & 166’s. I wasn’t very familiar with them, but luckily they were all in “like new” condition when I got them. At that time I was probably paying sub $1/Mhz and selling them for $3-4-5/Mhz…so I have very fond memories of Unisys as well. The good old days.
Re: The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
#7My highschool had dozens of these. Hazy memories from 30+ years ago but I seem to recall they had a chat program called Coco (?). I remember chatting with friends in the library while in typing class and getting in trouble for it. High tech!
Re: The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
#8The 186 produced some obscure, kinda great, but ultimately doomed (due to not being PC compatible) systems in the early 80s. My favorites are the Tandy 2000 and the Mindset. This is one I haven't heard of.
I'm also fascinated by the early Canadian personal computer scene. They were trying some innovative things in the great white North. Things like the mostly PC compatible Hyperion, which beat the Compaq Portable to market by a hair (and which You Can't Do That on Television star Christine McGlade famously carried in to work on her motorcycle), and the NABU, an early network computer concept whose software was downloaded through a television cable network (unlike the ICON it was successfully rescued from total obscurity).
Re: The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
#9Previous Discussion:
87 points by jasoneckert on April 4, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 34 comments
Re: The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
#10Well I've seen and programmed on Burroughs Corporation Mainframes(IBM Mainframes as well) and have seen an actual Sperry Corporation Univac Mainframe Drum Storage system(Ginormous beast) in actual use! And has anyone here actually played Space Invaders(ASCII Characters used) on a Burroughs TD830 CRT monitor! And modern day Unisys is the merger of those 2 mainframe makers some time ago!
But none here are maybe from that Era that was coming to a close in the late 70s and are not yet qualified to shake their fist and angrily yell at that singular cloud floating in a beautiful blue sky!