A Trip Down Computer Memory Lane

News.com has an interesting stroll down memory lane with a look at the "DigiBarn", a collection of technology from early mechanical calculators to modern web appliances. NASA contractor Bruce Damer and partner Alan Lundell run this "museum in transition" from a 19th-century farmhouse deep in the Santa Cruz mountains. In addition to notable success milestones, the company also includes some of the industry failures, like an Apple III Damer acquired from Apple's legal department.

Handy link to TFA

[iaculus]

Post links to second page; first page at http://news.com.com/A+trip+down+computer+memory+la ne/2100-1042_3-6203311.html [com.com] and almost-ad-free print version at http://news.com.com/2102-1042_3-6203311.html?tag=s t.util.print [com.com]

Go on. Read the article. You know you want to. You'll find out why the museum has to be packed up every winter, and learn that Apple had a portable music player as far back as 1979. And more!

Accuracy

[spacefrog]

Articles like this do more harm then good when they are filled with inaccuracies.

Not everything in the collection is Apple, though. There's also an original 1979 Osborne I--one of the first computers my father ever owned--the giant suitcase-size portable computer, and a Kaypro II, which helped kill the Osborne due to its smaller, sleeker design.

The Osborne I was introduced in 1981. The Kaypo II (there was no Kaypro I) was slightly larger then the Osborne, and weighed 6 pounds more.

This article is crap.

Why no link to the actual museum?

[ruiner13]

Is it that hard to put a link to the actual museum [digibarn.com] instead of to page 2 of an article that talks about said museum? Are the mods asleep today?

OS Wars and Memory Lane.

[twitter]

Ah the irony, a computer museum filled with old M$ OS. Bill Gates once boasted that he would keep a copy of gnu/linux for his computer museum but would eliminate it otherwise. Yet nothing is more useless than an old copy of Windoze. They can be fun, but they are tied to a particular set of hardware and software that's all rotting away. Emulation is interesting but difficult thanks to all the built in traps. Still, it's nice someone is keeping these things around.

Roughly Drafted has a set of articles detailing the OS wars that would complement the physical collection. If you are looking for a trip down memory lane, here it is:

• 1980-1985: 8-bit Platforms [roughlydrafted.com]
• SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1980s [roughlydrafted.com]
• 1990-1995: The Race to Deliver The Next New Platform [roughlydrafted.com]

They are all well written, entertaining and accurate.

Re:Cassette tape? Where are the MP3s???

[Novus]

With a little knowledge of the tape hardware and the way it's used to store data, you can store the data on a tape much more efficiently than an MP3 does (and get faster encoding and decoding to boot). Your average 8-bit with a tape deck (for example, a ZX Spectrum) essentially has a 1-bit ADC and DAC hooked up to the tape deck. Data is (mostly) stored on tape as a long series of pulses of two different lengths (each representing a 0 or 1). Therefore, to create a nice and small tape image file (even of data in a custom copy protected format), simply detect and store a description of these pulses in e.g. TZX format [worldofspectrum.org]. Especially Spectrum emulation users often work with tape files like these.

Re:Cassette tape? Where are the MP3s???

[Alioth]

We have - certainly in the Sinclair Spectrum community. Nearly every piece of Spectrum software has been saved. Not in MP3 format, but in TZX format which gives a compact and accurate representation of the original tape. The World of Spectrum archive has several thousand programs for the Speccy stored in this way.

Open PC BIOS.

[burnttoy]

The article states that the IBM PC was an open architecture. In fact it wasn't.

Whilst the OS, CPU, RAM, UARTs, DMAs etc could all be purchased from 3rd parties (Intel, Microsoft, Motorola and friends) they were not open in the OSS sense, the BIOS was proprietory. Compaq then Phoenix had to write clean room BIOS's to make a compatible machine. The same is true of the video BIOS.

Re:OS Machine Specific

[hawk]

PC-DOS assumed the ROMs of the IBM PC, but thi was a throwback.

MS basic (BASIC-80) used to come in three flavors,

ROM, the minimal level
Extended,which was in ROM
Disk Basic

In the early 16 bits, IBM had extended basic in ROM, and BASICA on floppy extended this to disk basic.

MS-DOS, not being able to rely on having those IBM ROMs (disk basic usually relied on extended basic being in ROM and extending it, rather than replacing it) has GW-BASIC ("Gee-Whiz BASIC"), which was the same thing (but for machine dependent variations).

Anyway, BASICA and GWBASIC, though on 16 bit machines, were for most purposes, MBASIC 5.0 from the 8 bit machines.

hawk

Re:Cassette tape? Where are the MP3s???

[jhalme]

At least on a ZX Spectrum, the psycho-acoustic models do damage the data enough to make it impossible to load. I exported a few .TZX files into .WAV, compressed them into MP3 and tried to load into my 48k Spectrum from a portable MP3 player. I didn't manage to load the program one single time as every attempt ended with an "R Tape load error". I also tried recording the .WAV onto a minidisc (old MZ-R90 portable) but still got similar results, so apparently ATRAC loses too much data as well. Burning the .WAV files onto CD as audio tracks worked flawlessly, though.

This 'computer museum' sucks

[DirtyFly]

I really dont know why do article come out pointing to an half baked computer museum,check this one out , http://www.homecomputer.de/ [homecomputer.de] , and tell me wich one should be on the news ! Jorge Retro Review Magazine http://www.retroreview.com/ [retroreview.com]