One of my favourites is our kitchen computer, which was built in 1965 for the Neiman Marcus department store. It looks like a desk containing a row of switches and blinking lights. It stands on a futuristic-looking pedestal and is painted in fire-engine red and white. You could buy this for the woman of the house for ,500. It came complete with two programming manuals, a cookbook and a two-week programming course. The only way to get any information into it was by flicking binary switches and the only way to get anything out was to look at a row of blinking lights, so it was absolutely useless in the kitchen. They didn't sell any of them, so this prototype is the only one like it in existence.
From an interview with Michael Williams on preserving old computers. The oldest computer I have is my first PC, bought in 1984 with a monochrome monitor, 64k of memory, and floppy. The floppy card was on back order so for the first few weeks I booted into cassette basic and wrote small throwaway programs since I didn't have the cables for saving to cassette.
comment?
permanent link
email this
Two weeks ago a phalanx of freshly rolled snowmen graced these pages, upright and proud. Look what they have become...
Oblivious to the harsh environment, Technocat calmly rides the landlocked ice flow in search of snow meece.
