Vintage / Retro Computing

My first computer. Portable! Well... Transportable.

It was fairly expensive at that time and my mom and dad really struggled to buy it. But it was the best gift ever and I couldn't appreciate it more.

I learned to program on it since there wasn't really much else you could do on it (apart from Microsoft Multiplan), so it has paid for itself many thousand of times over.

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deonb said:
My first computer. Portable! Well... Transportable.

It was fairly expensive at that time and my mom and dad really struggled to buy it. But it was the best gift ever and I couldn't appreciate it more.

I learned to program on it since there wasn't really much else you could do on it (apart from Microsoft Multiplan), so it has paid for itself many thousand of times over.

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"Transportable" meaning "it has a handle and two men and a boy can lug it around". Yep. That's what my boss described them as when we were building a transportable automated test equipment computer with in circuit emulators, signature analyzer, volt meter and pulse counter built in.

I've stayed out of this thread so far. My first portable (OK transportable) computer was my dad's Chameleon (https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=107). Had both a Z-80 and an 8088 on the motherboard. We (mostly me) were not sure whether CP-M would remain as king of PCs or this new fangled MS-DOS. It purported to run both. It actually ran MS-DOS.

The next portable I had was a work computer. Compaq 486 luggable: https://www.retropaq.com/the-compaq-portable-486/
Color screen. Ran NT (which was in prototype shape then).

After that a completely predictable collection of IBM Thinkpad, Dell and MacBooks.

My current pair: For work-MacBook Pro 15-inch 2019. 2.4GHz 8-core Intel i9, 32GB 2400MHz DDR4
For personal use: Dell XPS 15, 8 core, 32GB and a high res screen.
 
jsstevens said:
"Transportable" meaning "it has a handle and two men and a boy can lug it around". Yep. That's what my boss described them as when we were building a transportable automated test equipment computer with in circuit emulators, signature analyzer, volt meter and pulse counter built in.

I've stayed out of this thread so far. My first portable (OK transportable) computer was my dad's Chameleon (https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=107). Had both a Z-80 and an 8088 on the motherboard. We (mostly me) were not sure whether CP-M would remain as king of PCs or this new fangled MS-DOS. It purported to run both. It actually ran MS-DOS.

The next portable I had was a work computer. Compaq 486 luggable: https://www.retropaq.com/the-compaq-portable-486/
Color screen. Ran NT (which was in prototype shape then).
Click to expand...

Ah, this reminds me of the good ol' "Mac Portable". Generally nicknamed the Mac Luggable.

When dot matrix printers started to go out of style, Macworld magazine printed a list of the "Top Ten Uses of an ImageWriter II" (Apple's very popular old dot matrix printer). The number one use? "Counterweight for a person carrying a Mac Portable." :rofl:
 
flyingron said:
I was at Martin at the same time. We had these tempest VT-100s which looked like a regular VT100 except the keyboards weighed a ton. The system they were connected to was set of dual pdp-11/70s running RSX. Amusingly we found that when building the systems in one lab, the RSX sysgen script told us "This will take a while, go have a cup of coffee." In the other lab, it told us to have a cup of tea. We dug through the script and found out it was conditional on the configured line frequency (one system was being set up to be deployed in Europe).

The 9000/500's indeed were the first single chip fully 32-bit microprocessors (came out in 1982). Prior to that the 9000s used 68000 family processors. Later they switched to PA/RISC. We had a several prerelease PA/RISC machines (snakes).
This led to a series of goofy machine names. Since the project was code named Snake, our first few machines were called things like Cobra and Rattler. The next one was King ( after the king snake), but the next one after that got named Ace, then we had Deuce, and Joker, which led to various Batman related hostnames.

The 9000's and 3000's converged on PA/RISC. The major difference is the 9000 ran UNIX (HP/UX, usually pronounced H-Pucks) and the 3000 ran the HP proprietary MPE (Mighty Poor Excuse).

The Army let me touch their 7600 mainframe and attached processors just once. They regretted it. I did play extensively with the Cray X/MP and put my signature to the $25MM Cray II procurement.
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The project I was working on got around the TEMPEST requirements for the computer systems by putting them in a shielded room with an airlock type entry. I didn't see the TEMPESTized VT-100s as a result. Oh, and TEMPEST is where I got my start in EMC back in 1976. Field testing for the Navy for a bit over 3 years, then 4 years at MMA (used to be MMC, but I'm sure they changed as MMC also stood for Mickey Mouse Club :p ).

The HP guys gave me a cube containing that processor when I left MMA in October 1983. It was quite a machine for its time. IIRC, that processor ran at 18 MHz, which was screamingly fast at the time. I had a program that I had originally written in FORTRAN that did magnetics analysis on spacecraft (see my paper from the EMC symposium in Zurich in 1983 for details) and wrote a BASIC program that did a part of it to run on the HP machine. If I ran a compiled FORTRAN program using that smaller version of the program it ran in about the same time on a VAX 11/750 as it did on the HP 9000/500. And the HP sat on a desk, unlike the VAX 11/750.

Where did you work for Martin? I started in the DSC in late 1979 and moved to the main Waterton plant (SSBN) a year later. MX at DSC, still can't say what I worked on after moving to the main plant.
 
Yeah, the computers themselves were in a tempest shielded room, but we were lucky that they decided to run fiber optic lines up from the machine room to our offices (non-shielded, but still a SCIF). The conduit with the fiber was visible because they replaced the ceiling tiles under it with plastic. The conduit was also pressurized. They gave me the choice of having it power off the entire 11/70 or just the terminal mux in case the conduit detected a pressure failure, I told them it didn't matter, the system would crash either way.

I spent almost all my time in the ADM building. The were building SSB-2 when I was there. It was maybe twenty years later when I found out just what satellites they were building in SSB-2. I was cleared for the wrong organizations back then so I didn't know.
 
Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. Right now July 8, 9pm MDT. Truly retro computers. VT100, dot matrix printers,
 
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