A Blast From Tech Past

[Janke 1st MRB]

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Here's a video I took today at my school of 3 amazing relics of technology. In order from left to right there is a Commodore PET Model 4032 (May 1980, original PET models (Model 2001) released 1977), a Commodore Amiga Model 500 (1987, original Amiga models (Model 1000) released 1985), and an Apple Macintosh 512K (Released August 1984, original Macintosh models (128K) released January 1984). Now, for a little background on the computers, by telling you what I know;

The PET, made by Commodore, is often heralded as the first Personal Computer. Original PET models had 4 kilobytes or 8 kilobytes of RAM, the model I used, the 4032, had 32 kilobytes of RAM. It used an MOS Technology 6502 CPU with a clock speed of 1 Megahertz. It had optional peripheral 5.25 inch floppy disk drive attachments and optional (or on some models integrated) cassette tape-drive support. Yes, it used a Cassette tape as an I/O interface. The great thing about this computer is the BASIC Operating system (OS), which was entirely text based, was loaded on ROM in the computer, not from a floppy disk, meaning this one was the only one we could use (a couple other reasons arose for why we couldn't use the others as well). When I turned it on and saw green text that said;

***COMMODORE BASIC 4.0***

31743 BYTES FREE

READY.

.

||

I could not have been happier. I was amazed that this computer, older than my computers teacher, was still working. He showed me how to print text in a BASIC program, and I figured out how to do math, and that's about all I can do with it. We put it at the end of a line of Core 2 Duo Dell computers, so that people can both see and use the computer if they want to. It was awesome to get the thing working, and to be able to use a computer older than I was.

The Amiga, another Commodore computer, was probably the best Graphical User Interface (GUI) OS computer of the '80s. It supported up to 4096 colours on all models, more than the black & white of Apple's System OS and the 256 colours of Windows. It was an amazing machine for graphics, video editing, photograph editing, digital design, and even audio editing. The Amiga had a slew of games and applications for it, and peripheral cards allowed it to be upgraded in terms of both hardware and interface, with people designing IDE controllers (for hard drives and CD drives), USB adaptors, Ethernet adaptors and a web browser, and upgrades for RAM and CPU. It was an amazing computer and interface, from what I've seen of it it looks better than Windows versions up until 98, the problem is it wasn't marketed right. The Amiga computer had anywhere from 512 kilobytes of RAM to 9.5 Megabytes of RAM. It used the 16-bit Motorola 68000 CPU initially, clocked at ~7 Megahertz, and later upgraded versions of that family that supported 32-bits, as Amiga OS was one of, if not the, first 32-bit OS, and they made it run on a 16-bit CPU. It had an integrated 3.5 inch floppy drive, and supported up to 840 kilobyte floppy disks.

When I had Amiga OS within arm's reach, I wanted it working, however we couldn't find the power adaptor, as the Amiga used some special one, and the only one on eBay was $40. We had EVERY OTHER CORD AND PERIPHERAL, including audio cables, the mouse, and a monitor, we just didn't have the power, and after some more research I found that the model 500 needed floppies to boot into what was called Kickstart back then, later called (or perhaps also called) Amiga OS.

The Macintosh 512K, one of the only Apple computers we have in the school, was released in August of 1984, as an upgrade to the initial release Macintosh, from January, with only 128 kilobytes of RAM. The 512K, as the name says, has 512 kilobytes of RAM. It ran a Motorola 68000 CPU with a clock speed of 8 Megahertz. Its floppy that was built-in supported 400 kilobyte disks, but you could buy 800 kilobyte peripheral floppy disk drives (needed for using/loading OSes System 3.2 and later). The Mac was a huge success due to the big name Apple had made for itself and Steve Jobs' url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8]amazing 1984 Superbowl ad advertising the Mac. It was a huge success, used by many graphics designers and publishers, even though the Amiga, which came only a year later, did so much more. It was the start of Apple today, and is what really created their loyal fanbase by having a simple yet ingenious GUI of the OS that took up little hardware to process. It was one of the first computers to use a mouse, and arguably the first affordable one (Granted $2700 is being lenient, except when the alternatives at the time were $9000 (Apple Lisa) and $16000 (Xerox Alto)).

This was the first one of the relics I found, and was really eager to get it working. Initially we didn't have the mouse (though we found it later, sadly missing its trackball, but I used it regardless), but we knew we could run it keyboard-only. We turned it on and amazingly it worked, though it started clicking, a noise coming from the floppy drive. We looked at the screen and saw a floppy disk with a flashing question mark in the middle, it looking for the System OS boot disk. We unfortunately didn't have the OS for it, meaning we would not be able to boot it. We tried putting a floppy disk, one incompatible with it but the same size, in the drive, only to find it wouldn't pull the floppy in as it was supposed to, indicating the floppy drive was broken. It loaded to a screen and seemingly taunted me, almost but not quite working!

We put all these computers on to one table, turned on what we could of them, and I took a video of it with my iPhone, to document the day I was near not just one, but three computers older than I was, and the day I got to actually use on of them. Those three computers alone are amazing pieces of history, but consolidated together, along with a little bit of research and some information on a few other old computers/computer software, are enough to teach a course of computer history. It really makes you appreciate the GUI OSes we take for granted every day, when you see some of the computers that started them, and get to use one that pre-dates them.

[Sarsons]

wow, just wow