This is the Lock-Picking Techie, and what we have for you today is a corroded dip switch from a Centurion serial card. After spraying it with enough Deoxit to drown a horse, I'll use my wave rake. This is available in the Genesis set.
To be fair, I’m older than that drive and, being colder today, I don’t want to start up either. Might I suggest allowing it a nap, another warm up period, then an offer of bourbon. “Can I get 8 working?” We’re gonna need a bigger room.
Sometimes, I just gotta lean down to the drives and say "it's alright, I don't want to work today either, let's pop off early and watch TV and eat snacks until we pass out."
8 working Data Terminals, you could open a Pizza shop! Had a part time job delivering pizzas in the 80's. The whole shop ran on one computer, 8 terminals - for entering orders, directions for the cooks, and order assignment to the drivers, accounting, etc.., 2 label printers for the boxes, and a dot-matrix printer for reports.
Most places still do, but each of the "terminals" are their own little PC. Everything is done on the "backoffice" computer. (which might actually be in the cloud these days.)
Believe it or not, the Sinclair ZX81. I had so much fun building my first one in kit form in 1981 then designing and building peripherals for it. It felt like a huge privilege to actually own my own computer back then. I still have two now, one boxed and in original mint condition, the other with a MASSIVE 32KB of paged internal static RAM with battery backup and an internal HDMI adaptor so I can plug it straight into modern displays. It still gets powered up several times a year for a trip down memory lane playing 3D Monster Maze and 3D Defender. Oh ZX81, how I love thee!
I had a modified ZX80 (the 16 bit integer thing) that I modified so that it could be either a ZX80 or a ZX81 with the flip of a switch. The modification involved an even bigger EPROM with the upper address bit wired to the switch. I could power off, flip the switch and power on and be using the other machine. I also had a "do it yourself" 16K RAM expansion that I created. I am not sure about on a real ZX81 but on mine, I could also do pixel by pixel graphics rather than the character based with a bit of a hack. I could make 320x240 pixel images.
I always wanted to have a ZX80 as a computer all those years ago. It would have been my second computer (my first one was the Cosmac Super Elf). I loved the compact all-in-one design for sure. However - By the time I had enough money, the Acorn Atom computer was offered as a kit, and I went for that one (obviously because I wanted "real" keys in stead of membrane ones). I always have asked myself how things would have went if I could have afford that ZX80 at that time. At the other hand, Acorn was the first one down the line with a RISC processor, and I am still happy to have owned one the very first hobby computer that had one inside (Acorn Archimedes A300).
@@kensmith5694 Respect for your hardware hacking! When I had my ZX81, it never occurred to me that I could add hardware to it. Admittedly I was 13 years old and had school, and I was more into radios than computers at the time. I've returned to the ZX81 many years later, and now have a few with new keyboard membranes and RAM expansions.
The computer that brings me the most cherished memories is the HP85. I was a 13 years old kid and I had no idea what a computer was when, one evening, dad came back home carrying a huge box. He was a civil engineer and owned his own small company doing engineering for bigger construction companies. With my older brother we witnessed the most unbelievable experience: from the box dad extracted a sort of typewriter with a small scree and an even smaller printer. He explained us that this strange contraption was a personal computer. No one I knew possessed a computer. He turned it on, the thing emitted a 'bip' and a cursor started to link on the screen. HP generously provided a demo tape and it didn't took much time before we understood to full potential of that beast : Games of course! I learned all the theory of computing science by reading the HP85's manual. It was huge and explained everything from scratch : bits, bytes, Ram, Rom, programming (in BASIC), networking (HP-IB style). I can't remember how many volumes the documentation had but it was huge. Later with my brother we bought our own computer, an Oric, and then an Amiga and then PCs and even more PCs... But the HP-85 is something apart. We had access to it only during holidays when dad brought it back from his office and we spend hours with dad learning how to program it. He developed his own engineering software to compute tridimensional structures. I learned programming and write some software for his HP85 to render 3D views of the structures he was studying. He used the HP85 until he retired in 2002 along with more HP computers he bought. The tape reader was dead but all the software were stored on hard drives and the old beast was still capable. Dad passed away in 2007. I miss you dad.
Commodore 64 for me. It came with a very complete programmer's guide which included descriptions of BASIC, 6502 Assembly, and a description of the VIC-II video and SID sound chips. I couldn't take the computer to school with me, but I could sure take the book that came with it, and I did. I remember the shock and pleasure that came with knowing that the most sophisticated programs that did graphics and sound or anything else could all be understood, completely, in theory at least, if one learned everything in that manual. The computer seemed to offer limitless possibilities. All the work I'd done at school on a Teletype ASR-33 connected via dialup to the school system's mainframe (Honeywell DPS-8) transferred over, and then some. I wrote Turing Machine simulators, random music generators and simple games, and played thousands of hours of Infocom games on the Commodore 64. To this day, when I think in assembly, I think in 6502 assembly.
It's the 64 for me too. I still can't believe how much STUFF was in that computer, I still find out new things about it on UA-cam. How they packed in that much functionality and complexity into fixed hardware that was shipped with no chance to update it is just amazing!
@@b4cktr4k24 I have followed Adrien Kohlbecker's work on the 65C816 and I wish we could all extend it to make a new standard computer like the C64 but based on the new (1983) 16 bit 65C816.
Hold your giggles, my favorite computer was the TRS 80 model III. I had one in 1980(1981?) and me and my first wife ran a multi user BBS (“bulletin board system”) called “Aphrodite East”. I wrote it in BASIC. It had two modems, 2400 baud and (I think) 1200 baud. Storage was two “quad capacity” 5 1/4” floppy drives at 720KB each - hard drives were stupid expensive, and I don’t recall if the early TRS-80s even supported them. It used a dual com port board I designed and built, plus the local console. One of the most complicated parts of the whole thing was getting the phone company to pull two additional analog POTS lines into my apartment, and the landlord to allow it!
Yeah, I did most of my self-education in computing on a TRS-80, 1st the Model-I then the Model-III. Yes, I believe the Model-III could use a hard drive, but you had to boot from a floppy first. As you say though, the price of the hard drive was probably more than the computer, and it was a huge box, and it was only 5mb (I think later ones were 10mb). My machine only had the standard single-sided drives, so only about 180k! Today I use a TRS-80 emulator so I can try out the various op-syses, and even learn some old programming languages like Fortran and Cobol, and Forth (which is a really weird language).
@@roysainsbury4556 forth on the model I and III are interesting because early Forth storage was 1k “pages” or screens and the model III screen is 1k characters IIRC
What's to laugh about? All of the late 1970s and early 1980s computers were great. I just wish I could have gotten my hands on all of them, not just the ones I had at home or friends' houses. Those UK computers would have been fun to try out.
I was a big fan of the BBS model - I've always thought that an updated BBS system that uses cell networks and encrypted baud signals would be an interesting project. A necessary project? Mostly not, but an interesting one none the less. I remember downloading my first picture of boobs in tif format (if memory serves, might be wrong on that) and instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail (! Strictly for research purposes in the old quarry) on some BBS systems back in the late 80s early 90s. Fortunately I've grown up as a mostly productive member of society and not some crazy person 😂
I have an Amiga 2500 that belonged to a high school friend of mine. One day after we both got out of college, he called to let me know his folks were getting rid of it, and he asked me if I'd like it. I was all "hell yeah, I'd like it!" It's survived the almost 30 years since, three moves, a few upgrades, and one exploded clock battery. It's a pretty decked-out unit, with the 68030 accelerator board, two SCSI hard drives that still sort of work, and the 386 bridge board that Commodore sold for PC compatibility. But these days, all it does is play Amiga games.
Dude, the joy in your videos makes me so happy! I don't understand 90% about what you are talking about (I'm learning though) but to see your love and passion in action is so much fun to watch. Keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing your next video!
My forever computer has unfortunately been lost to time - a Heathkit H8 with a Zenith Z19 terminal and a cassette tape for storage. Forty-four years ago I thought it was the best thing ever! It came as a parts kit that I stayed up overnight to put together. Lots of soldering at the kitchen table and 14-year old me couldn't wait to show my dad in the morning. I learned to program on that thing, and fondly remember hand-typing in a flight simulator program from (probably) Byte magazine. I do have my other forever computer though - an Apple IIe (a replacement) which is what I used through high school and truly expanded my programming knowledge. Truly the best time of my life - I learned so much with those machines.
For me, it's the BBC Micro that I used at College between 1984 and 1987. I completed all of my written course work using it, and even completed a hardware based speech recognition system I designed and built for my final year project. After 38 years, the Micro still works perfectly, and over the years, all I've had to do is make copies of the 5.25 floppies. That stuff was built to last!
I get a Model B for my 21st back in 1982, but unfortunately I moved it on to fund the purchase of an Amstrad twin floppy PC. Isn't hindsight a cruel mistress. However, I've still got an Amiga A1200 that hasn't been powered on in decades. Depending on what life throws at me this year, maybe I should start trying to get that operational.
Try spending 8 years working on printers lol ... They are never reliable because they are all digital someone needs to get an old analog copier chains and cogs and the whole scanner glass moving insanity...
Do you remember when someone made a one pin printer. I think the name was "banana" or something like that. Instead of printing a line of text in one pass, it took 8 passes to print a line. It didn't even print on the return travel so it took something more like 16 times as long to print. You also had to have a special printer driver thing loaded. I think it used your computers CPU to say "step one column, smack the print head, step one column". No multitasking at all
@@kensmith5694 The Sinclair ZX printer ("the silver bog roll burner") had only one motor to drive a stylus on a rubber band over the thermal paper while also advancing the paper. The printers which came with the Amstrad PCW series, sold as word processors but actually classic Z80 CP/M machines, had no electronics and were driven directly by the computer.
I am retired Navy and I got to work with a Digital PDP-1170 during my time. It had two tape drives, multiple printers and disk units. Overtime I could tell what the system was doing just by watching the display lights on the main CPU. It was a joy to work with. I truly miss those days.
0:35 Sure, I'll take your challenge: Commodore 128. My first computer. Played the most memorable games on it. Learned how to program on it (v7 BASIC is a lot easier than v2 C64). My mother used it to do all of the accounting and business correspondence for my father's business on it, well beyond the 8 bit era. Set me on the road to becoming a computer engineer. Still have it, but it's broken. Channels like yours and others have inspired me to try to repair it.
My forever computer is my Tandy TRS-80 Model 1. In 1978 my father brought one home as our 1st family computer. I learned to program on it. I learned soldering and basic electronics assembling and troubleshooting a LNW system expansion kit for it along side my father. My Boy Scout troop directed parking for the local hamfest and after my parking duties were done we scoured the hamfest to get the required electronic parts for the kit. I remember hearing "Robot Attack" speak and thinking it was the coolest thing ever.
Mine I got for my birthday in 1979. The first thing I did was spend half an hour figuring out how to answer "MEMORY SIZE?", but after acquiring a Z80 reference card a few months later, I was pretty much unstoppable. Well, except when I modified the board circuitry. I had a really cool video upgrade (lowercase with descenders, and even inverse alpha in C0-FF) until I screwed one too many things. After that I just put back in the lowercase descenders thing (it was mostly an external board) and stopped being dangerous with it. Right now its video sync is screwed up (because of those 74Cxx chips it uses), and I need to fix someday.
@ Once I got to the age of typing papers on it I did the Electric Pencil lower case mod on ours. It was replaced for me by a C64 I got for Christmas 82 and it was permanently placed in our crawl space after my father got an IBM XT in 1984. I loved my C64 in the day but don’t have a lot of nostalgia for it now, but I do for the TRS-80.
Yeah, "Robot Atack" was amazing given that there was no sound chip in the machine - all done by banging bits on the cassette port! Some pretty cool music on some games too, like Frogger.
My mum had a VIC 20 when i was young. Played a few games on it, but didn't explore any programming. My programming experience would come when i was in my late teens and i wondered if I could make a resource calculator for a game i use to play. I'd love to mess about with the VIC 20 at some point. Not a forever computer, but one that has stayed in my memory for most of my life.
0:35 My dad’s old Apple Newton 2000. It’s worth quite a bit, but it’s priceless to me. I always found it fascinating as a kid. Apple made my iPad in the late 90s!?
I'm watching you talking about a 96 Megabytes drive and stunned me. That is huge for its age. For comparison, I have a USB flash drive from early 2000s from Dell that is 128 Megabytes. Those are 30 years apart! Its like imagining a mid 90s machine with terabytes of storage! That is nuts!
Father in law used to tell the story and show the receipts for the first TB of storage EDS bought for the Columbus Indiana office. Invoice was over a million$. What stuns me is my mid-level cell phone would run circles around this monster.
my phone that i got in 2010 and used until 2016 only had 16mb of storage the one after that had 16gb yet it still wasn't enough .but with 16 mb i could store a lot of pictures. it was really impressive as long as you don't try to display them on a big screen . i am not sure what someone would do with that in the 80s since this thing seems very limited in other ways even for the time a lot if documents i guess .
I can't say enough how excited I am to be watching multiple terminals hooked up to a single minicomputer! Now all you need to do is to make a tape drive spin and a line printer chunk out some lines of code and I'll be reliving my college days all over again!
I have a 6502 homebrew computer that uses an original 6530-004 TIM chip from 1976. I started building 6502 computers in 1975; and I built several of them and then cannibalized them for the next better architecture. This is the last one and was completed in the late 80's and still works well. It was a microcontroller before microcontrollers were a thing.
My forever computer is my BBC model B. I got it when I was 16, which will be 42 years ago this coming August. I've had to replace a couple of chips over the years, but she is still going strong.
I am still looking for one. I had one many years ago, but I was foolish enough to sell it. Lucky enough there still seem to be some around. I am now in the process of restoring the predecessor, the Acorn Atom, to it's former working order. The poor thing was lent to a acquaintance many years ago, and he returned it completely broken. I have it halfway working (the Acon Atom words and blinking cursor pop up, but the keyboard is unresponsive), but I still have some way's to go.
Same for me, but I lost mine sometime after I went to University... it was well-used but immaculate, with a Microvitec CUB monitor, a DS/DD 80 track floppy, 128K of sideways RAM. I think my sister must've borrowed it while I was at Uni and then lost it during a house move. I keep wistfully flipping through eBay umming and aahhing over various Model Bs, Master 128 and A3000s before deciding that the spectacular emulators like JSBeeb are more than capable and I can't justify the storage space for a Beeb!
My soul will be forever entwined with a particular DEC PDP-11/34 running RSX-11M, with ADCs and DACs to interface with lab equipment and to make music. That’s the computer I learned programming on (my school’s sending off filled in sheets of BASIC to the local college’s mainframe doesn’t really count). I loved that computer so much… 🥲
My favorite part of your journey with the Centurion was watching you write those assembly language programs in earlier videos. Congratulations on getting all 8 terminals to work!
It's so outstanding to see essentially computer archaeology being done on hardware from the mid-80s, the time of my own awakening into computers with the C64 yet on a segment that has been almost completely forgotten and abandoned, having to be re-discovered bit by bit! Dont ever stop, Dave. It's utterly fascinating!
My forever computer - wow! what an amazing question! I’ve retired now and I'm in my 60s. For info’, my IT mentor was a man who worked on the BAC TSR-2 terrain following radar - an amazing man. I’ve had a complete IT life in the computing industry. I worked on UNIVAC, IBM, Olivetti, GENE, ICL, various analogue systems, etc …. and with my Father I built a MINISCAMP, one of the first 8 bit build-it-yourself kit computers in Australia. Nevertheless, my “forever computers" are the AMIGA 1000 and the first Macintosh. The ”thinking and thought” that went into these machines, was incredible. These were amazing times! LOve your comments about printers … my thoughts exactly!
Of all the systems I’ve been able to use, I think my favorite was the AS/400. After working IT in the automotive industry, I ended up as a contractor at IBM because of it. Eventually worked for a business partner. Did a bunch of CISC to RISC system upgrades in the last half of the 90s! Also my first home computer, a Heathkit H8, built when I was 11 years old. Your friend’s museum has all the same components I had.
I remember the condition of the Centurion when you first got it, an amazing restoration and test of determination. Impressive to serve up to 32 users on a mini computer at the time, although extremely slow if more than a couple were processing, especially using the same disk at once. 8 users is more feasible for a good experience, well done for getting the MUX card working.
I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 Model III in 1984, but I don't have a "Forever Computer". My favorite computer is whatever is at the heart of whatever project I'm working on at the moment, but I do have a soft spot for the Z80 CPU. I think I exercised that enough in 2000 by writing (yet another) Z80 emulator in C and x86 assembly. I think your vintage computers are awesome and I really appreciate how you share with us what you learn about them. You satisfy my curiosity for ancient digital tech without me having to upgrade the electrical service to my house ;)
15:35 DUDE! All those switches are open! The label is right there! Your 1K reading is likely a combo of pullup resistors & the resistance of the 74xx chip inputs that are reading the switches. :)
I worked all summer mowing lawns the summer of 8th grade and bought an Atari 600XL from Toys'R'Us. Gamed a ton on that computer and did a little programming as well. I remember it fondly. Data casettes!
Forever Machine - Acorn BBC Micro, 6502 cpu, 32Kb RAM , awesome machine (at least here in the UK!) great work on all your projects David, keep up the good work 👍
I’ve got a 1985 AT&T 3B1 from 1985 which was manufactured by Convergent Technologies for AT&T. I’ve got a memory expansion card and a Voice Power card as well as a QIC tape drive. It runs a weird UNIX which is a cross between System 7 snd Sys-V. The Voice Power software allows scripting a AVR system in Korn shell (the popular bash shell is based off of Korn shell). I talked my boss where I used to work into getting a used Voice Power card for a 3B1 we had and he scripted an employment opportunity job posting voice response system and we slaved it off the phone switch where it ran for many years. AT&T had great documentation for the 3B1 and I have a book with big fold-out schematics for everything in the machine.
Hmmm, forever computer.....quite fond of my HP9825 - I lusted after one way back in the 70s but it was way too expensive for the University of Cambridge to get one for a mere assistant - got one in the end though, just had to wait approx 50 years! I would love to get a PDP11-04, used one to control a mm wave receiver on the UKIRT instrument on Mauna Kea, Hawaii in the early 80s - I had great fun driving it all up to the summit in the back of a Ford Bronco! Used to hand carry the RK05 disk packs in their huge transit cases out from the UK, in those days you could sweet-talk the cabin crew into stowing them in the cabin and twice that earned us an invite to the 747 flight deck in mid-Atlantic from pilots who got wind of the fact there were astronomers on board and thought we would like the view (we did!) - remember those pre 9/11 days?
I don't really know why I find your channel so intriguing, but I do. I got into computers somewhere around the Atari 1040 ST. I've used them for music ever since. Something about these old machines takes me back to my days of building home computers out of used 386 parts that I got from a local used computer shop. My hotrod computer of the day was a 386 DX 40 with a 1200 baud modem. IRQs, Autoexec.bat files, memory drivers, and all that stuff was endlessly fascinating for me. Thanks for the work your doing.
I used an Atari ST to run my ham radio software. At the time, there was something called "packet radio", that was sort-of like a text version of the internet. There were bulliten boards just like the phone ones, and people could send and receive messages globally using a radio network, and all that before the internet become prominent in the UK. You could even send software over the radio using some weird encoding scheme that chopped the program into parts and send them seperately. If you received a corrupted part (very common), the software could be told to request a resend of just that part. Later versions on MS-DOS could do the whole thing automatically and notify you when you had a complete program! Mind you, it was slow. It might take a week to get all the parts!
My forever computer is actually two: (1) is my TI99/4A, which kick-started my interest in programming in 1982 at age 12. I still have the very same TI. And (2) is my 40MHz Am386 (complete with Tseng Labs ET4000 VGA card and 210MB Quantum HDD), which I had whilst studying computer engineering at Uni. This machine cemented my future in computer systems, networking and even early-booting a Linux kernel from floppy disk. It later powered a BBS system for the company I worked at as a student and I foolishly left it there when I started my first full-time job.
Forever Machine - Wow, sobering realisation I've never been in a position to have a forever anything. Closest I come is my 1980 Datsun 280ZX. An everlasting resto project that takes up a similar amount of space to the Centurion. Have come close to having to get rid of it because of other people reasons, but it's hanging in there! This has inspired me to go spend some love on it.
My 1983 Commodore 64. It blew my mind as a child, and still does after owning it for 41 years. My 1541 also still works great and almost all my disks still work! Learning to repair and maintain it has also been a great experience in electronics and soldering. The demo scene is still strong also! But I do have to swap out my VIC chip with a Kawari when I want to play PAL.
Holy cow, you still have the same computer from when you were a kid?! That's impressive. Very few things survived my childhood - I was kind of rough on my things lol
My forever computer is my SGI indigo R4000 Elan. It's still amazing to me the raw graphics power this little blue box had in the early 90s and I still love booting it up and tinkering around with it.
I love the old DEC "PCs', like the Robin and Rainbow. My dad worked for DEC this "the end" and made all his work he had to do at home on those machines. Awesome memories, the oldest I have about computers. Both machines, and a lot more, are waiting at the basement of my parents house to be restored and fired up again. But sadly, I won't have the time in the next years to begin with it.
Such a great video, thanks. Your enthusiasm really is contagious. This so much reminds me of the first time around 1982 I brought up 8 VT100s to a 6809-based SWTPC clone machine running the UniFLEX o/s, a small Unix-like multi-user o/s written in assembly code that worked with a DAT chip allowing the 8-bit 6809 to page through up to 864 Kb of RAM. And I ran from terminal to terminal launching compiles on each of these with delight. The storage was a 10 Mb 5.25" MFM drive. I was just as happy as you were in this video. Thanks for remining me of this moment.
Forever computer: I know you are going to love this... COMMODORE VIC-20! I know it is a toy compared to "real" computers like the Centurion, but I have to select it because it is the one I used during all my teen years. My sister who worked at Commodore a the time gave it to me for Christmas one year, so that adds to the significance.
I am with you on that. And mine is still up and running - recently Elite has been converted to the friendly computer! Limitations make programming rewarding and interesting.
It was summer 1982. Work for the money, and then VC-20. Import from Germany. There goes sunny summer night .... I have it today, and it's still working.
The Vic-20 really is a cool little computer. I was too young to have used one back then (I would have been around 4 years old when it came out 😂 ) but now that I have become interested in vintage computers, I really do like it. It's fun to write BASIC programs on it and play around with changing the text and background colors on the fly with code, and creating sound effects. The only gripe I have is that working with disk drives is kind of weird and clumsy on it.
A bit newer than everyone elses but my forever computer will be the custom built AMD 486-DX4 100mhz my grandpa built when i was little and eventually got handed down to me when he upgraded to an AMD K6-2. So much fun learning about computers on that thing running DR-DOS and Windows 3.1. still have it hooked up and use fairly regularly.
My old Apple //e is my forever computer. I spent many happy days writing 6502 assembly for various projects. When we were a young married couple in the 1980s my Apple //e was right next to my wife's sewing machine and we sat side by side pursuing our respective hobbies for hours at a time.
Forever would be my apple iie, when I was 8 in ‘00 I became obsessed with 80s micros and the simplicity of BASIC, one day after school I noticed an apple ii sitting next to the dumpster, went to the office and sheepishly asked if they were going to throw it away. Principal invited my dad and I to school after hours and let us clear out an entire cabinet of Apple ii and LC era machines. One of the most exiting days of my young life haha.
I share your joy in this. It reminds me of when I ran a Unix BBS from my house in the early 90s. A combination of modems and eclectic terminals to have a mutli-user party. What a great time. Keep on doing what you are doing.
That little baby blue terminal is adorable!😻 Wouldn't be surprised if the folks who designed the first iMac were a fan too. The blue/white color scheme of the translucent powermac G3 tower seems very reminiscent of the Centurion as well. Classy stuff
My all-time favorite, but not one that I could own or take anywhere, is a CDC Cyber-72 that I had time-sharing access to as a student thanks to the good offices of the UMRCC (University of Manchester Regional Computer Center) circa 1979. That system was a great example of a regional time-shared super-computer, providing high-reliability, academic computing resources both locally and to UMIST, Salford, Liverpool, Keele and Lancaster universities.
My forever computer is de Exidy Sorcerer. I learned basic, Z80 assembly, CP/M and so much more on this awesome platform as a kid! Of course, it also runs Hellorld! Second is the ZX Spectrum in all it's incarnations.
Mine was built around an AMD 2100+. Built into some old ex government steel chassis that never intended an ATX board be mounted to it. Let alone a perspex window and neon lights (pre CCFL, actual neon tubes), and a black n silver paint job. Dual PSU's, one for the hard disks (x8, all pata) one just for the motherboard. Not just one box, there was another baby AT tower that was just the water cooling unit, brass radiator, 240v fans n pump. It was loud, but that's OK, because it lived outside, with pipes running through the window. Handmade water block. That thing overclocked so brilliantly. I wasn't even into gaming that much, I just wanted the fastest, biggest rig I could afford (n I didn't have much to spend). I went full chonky. She wasn't elegant, but she went hard. I didn't aim for big iron computing, but that's where I ended up
Absolutely fantastic! I've been waiting for this since I started watching the Centurion episodes here :D Hooking such an old machine to the internet to be used remotely is ultimately the coolest thing to do!
My forever computer has to be the home server I've had running in my closet since 1998. It doesn't have any original parts left but I still think of it as the same computer. I mean, it's still the same Debian installation, just upgraded in place a few times and copied over to new hard drives when old ones have started to fail. The oldest timestamps on files in my home directory are 11th Jun, 1998.
I think the oldest part on that computer has to be the KeyTronic keyboard from 1987. Or I'm not sure how old the 14 inch VGA CRT is, but probably newer than the keyboard. Yes those parts are older than the computer itself, but they've been added later.
I have an affinity for the old VAX systems because this is what I used in college. I don't have one but I remember the late nights in front of the green-screen terminals working on class projects.
My fav/forever system would be either an Acorn/BBC Model B or Archimedes A3000, both systems I used throughout school in the late 80s through to the mid 90s. But as I don’t own either, I guess it’ll have to be the Microbee, an Australian 8-bit Z80-based microcomputer system from the early 1980s. A former workmate gave me two, one of which I’m restoring and hoping to get functional this year.
Favourite computer of all time for me was the BBC Model B that I had as a school kid. Sadly I let mine go when I upgraded to the Master and then Archimedes, but in hindsight the Beeb was the most important and fun computer I ever owned.
Mine would be this here Rig of Theseus. It hasn't got a name and was put together by me but it'll be here "forever" as it continues to evolve, which it's done since 2008. No part of it is still from then but this is still the machine I got when I was 17, four CPUs, three motherboards, two cases and seven graphics cards ago.
My personal "Rig of Theseus" started about 1988. It has always had a continuity of parts. Now that I think of it, the very first part might still exist: a HD 5.25" TEAC floppy drive with a jumper which could change the LED from green to red. Rosebud.... Rosebud!
My case goes back to 2002. Nothing inside of it is that old, I know because I rather liked the original LED-lit fans and had to replace them after a while. I don't know how many fans I've gone through, but I'm on the third motherboard, third power supply, the seventh or eighth video card, and long ago lost count of the drives that have passed through. The 5¼" Drive cage is crudely bent to accommodate a slightly larger than ATX motherboard. The power switch is hacked into one of the drive bay covers. The NVMe drive is held in place by a plastic soda cap -- I glued the cap to the case, then sunk a screw into the cap. The whole thing is painted metallic blue with spray paint intended for a car and has a bronze-tinted side panel window also intended for cars, but there's no lighting inside other than the (rather bright) status LEDs on the motherboard. And I barely care because it sits in another room entirely, with the displays and keyboard on this side.
@@mal2ksc I painted my case (and CRT, mouse and keyboard) with "granite" spray paint that was popular in the late 90s The case made it into the early 2000s when I had to go from AT to ATX; on my 3rd rn.
My forever computer was the very first machine I ever developed code for. It was an ICL 1904A mainframe. It filled a huge air conditioned room. It was a joy to see when operating at full capacity. Happy days. The configuration was: ICL1904A CPU Languages: PLAN (Programming language Nineteen Hundred), COBOL Operating system Executive, and eventually George 3 192k Words store 7903 Comms controller (for exchangeable disk drives) 3 EDS60 disk drives 1 TR0 paper tape reader 1 2101 card reader 8 7-track magnetic tape units 2 1933 barrel printers (1600 lpm)
1983, Melbourne, Australia, high school. PDP-11/04: no screen or keyboard, just a dot matrix line printer and mark/sense cards we students filled in with pencil. The operating system was written by the local university for educational purposes and included compilers for Fortran, COBOL, BASIC and Pascal. You had to use different mark/sense cards for each language. Most of the students never saw the machine. We filled out our mark/sense cards in maths class and handed the stack of cards to the teacher, who then ran the jobs in a batch overnight. The students then got the printouts (full of errors) in the next class. In 1985, the school replaced the DEC with a lab of 12 BBC micros. I didn't stay around to see how that worked out, but I won't forget my time with the PDP-11.
I'll have to say my favorite "ancient" computer is the PDP 11/70. It's where I first started my employment as an IT professional. I even modified the system printer control program (written in PDP BASIC) to allow twice as many pages to be printed.
As I'm from the UK and 50ish, my forever computer is the ZX Spectrum 48K. I was lucky enough to receive one xmas 1983 and it was amazing. I'll never forget the excitement of loading games from tape!
That dip switch was in the "OPEN" position, no wonder it measured as "open". There was probably no fault with the old switch (you didn't actually test it.)
I did, it was the same in both directions, I just forgot to flip it back to closed for filming. I didn't notice because it truly was dead inside and measured open no matter the position.
The TRS-80 Model I is my forever computer. I first laid eyes on it in 1978 and mowed lawns and shoveled snow to earn money to buy my first one in 1980. It launch a career in IT where I still work today.
I have a soft spot for the Telefunken RA700, a beast of an analog computer built by the renowed german maker. It's the last hurray of analog computers before their eventual slow demise in the 1970s. To me, together with the EAI 231R-V is the quintessential analog computer "mainframe"
I have two dream systems from my youth. Number one is the Vax 11/780. I’d love you to work on one of those in future! The second is the National Semiconductor 32032 microprocessor. I used that a lot in the 1980s. It was a 32 bit processor with a very nice, Vax like, architecture.
Procomm Plus brings back memories of pulling many, many word processor docs from a CP/M environment over to MS-Dos all via a serial cable when the company I worked for upgraded.
I really don't have a forever computer. This is just really interesting to me. The size of it, how the data is stored and how much can be stored. I love old things that still work. If I had to pick something it would probably be an Apple IIe. I loved that computer. Honestly, the main reason why I'm commenting is that I love the color. I'm seriously considering taking mine apart and painting it that color. It just freakin pops. Anyway, cool video. Thanks for sharing.
Back in the 1990's whan I was repairing DEC PDP's, I had a special loopback adapter for the 8 RS232 connectors of the serial interfaces. I used a simple terminal test that spit out the whole ASCII character set in a loop. The loopback adapter had LED's for the RX and TX lines. When the test ran on 8 or 16 terminals, you could see the timesharing! It looked like a chasing light when every output got half a second of data, then the light moved to the next port and so on.... it was funny to see that 🙂
@@PlaywithJunk No, we had to move the voltmeter quickly from one connection to the other, and we were glad to have it. That wasn't the reaction I expected. See Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen
In the mid/late 80's my dad had a MSX (commodore like machine). He didn't understand how it worked. So me and my brothers were stumbling with it and got it to work to load games from cassettes.. a great time Watching your videos is really fun thanks🎉
My forever computer is my Commodore C128 DCR. Use it as a C64 mostly, but love the fact that I could use CP/M (albeit not everything and pretty slowly) and always keep saying to myself that I'm gonna code on that C128 part. Soon. Maybe. 😅. Love it, will never part with it. That being said: I learned about Centurion computers from you and never heard of them before. You gained quite a lot of knowledge of this and even talked to some former employees? Maybe consider to do a book on the history of these. It's quite a story and who else would do it, actually, ever? 😅 Anyways, hope you're doing fine, cheers and all the best!
my forever machine is the UE-1 of course! it´s just so ingenious, you were able to do something that hadnt been made for years, and with vacuum tubes no less! and the diode logic there really simplifyes it, and the bell you put on there, god i would love to hear it ding once you get a good program on there!
My forever computer would be the Commodore PET2001, hands down. My school had one when I was 12. I learned to type on the chiclet keyboard, I learned BASIC on it as well as 6502 Assembler, and when we got an IBM PC at home from my dad's work, I thought at first that the keyboard was a terrible downgrade because you had to use Shift for all the symbols at the top row of the keyboard that were important for programming in BASIC. Not to mention IBM PC floppy disks could only hold a measly 360K whereas the Commodore 8250 disk drive at school could hold a whopping megabyte.
Forever Computer. My Amstrad CPC464. Together with the computer magazines at that time, it introduced me to software programming. Which is now my passion and profession for over 30 years.
Forever computer: alas it got lost along the way, but my old IBM System/34 was and will forever be my favorite. I bought it from its original owner, a fairly large hospital, complete with all the documentation+including schematics!!) and several large boxes of 8" floppies. Two terminals, two printers, and about half a pallet of twinax rounded out the deal--I paid a whopping $20 for the whole mess. Mine had 64kb of ram and two, 13Mb hard drives. It pulled almost 50A at 240V.
My man! That is epic getting all 8 going at once. I was thrilled to see you catch that dip switch failure so soon in the troubleshooting? The faulty item is always the last thing I check, and not the first. haha. All good wishes for 2025!
Same for me! I had A500 when I was a kid and had so much fun with it. For some reason in my early teens I sold it, but later in life I reallized my grave mistake and luckily managed to buy my original childhood Amiga back. Still working and sitting on my desk right now! Such a great machine.
Hi David! I really enjoy every video you post and I wait patiently (or not so much patiently) for every Sunday to see a new episode of whatever computer you're working on. The joy and effort you put into not only restoring computers but also explaining every step you do and why you do it is just enjoyable and mind-blowing. I have two dream computers on my list, one of which I've had since I was a teenager in the 80s: the Commodore 64. I own two of them now, one is working and the other with the infamous PLA problem. I'm going to work on it soon looking for some modern replacement for the PLA. The other dream computer I have is the Amiga 500. I always wanted to buy one but never had the chance and here in Argentina they are not that common to get. I hope I find one soon and can get it working. Thanks David for each one of your videos and for the effort you put into repairing and restoring each of these engineering gems to keep the legacy alive.
It would be fun to see that computer running 8 terminals at a retro computer expo, maybe running a BASIC interpreter with games for people to play. Also WOOT for me hitting the like button to take it up to an even 500 (and it's around 770+ by the time I finished watching). It's nice to know that the fix for that card was so simple. "Forever Computer"... hmm... I guess the one I worked on the most, which was the "Super-80", a kit computer based on the Z80 CPU. I even managed to put TRS-80 BASIC into that computer and make it mostly work, in spite of the Super-80 only having a 40-character screen instead of an 80-character screen.
My absolute favorite has to be my Altos 886 when I first got it in 1993. You actually saw it at VCF East. 8 terminals and it’s a 286 running Altos Xenix v3.2fs8. Nothing like an old multiuser system from the 80’s! If I had to sell my entire collection I’d keep my 886!
That Altos was one of my favorite machines from the whole show! If you bring it again this year, I may be able to make it up again, and I would love to sit down and get hands on with it.
My forever computer, clearly, is the Commodore Amiga 500. It was the first computer I've ever owned (not the first I used) and I own and maintain several of these in multiple configurations (including a factory standard revision 6.1) to date.
While I don't have one today, the computers I have the most affection for are the Atari 8-bit line: the Atari 400 (the first computer I owned), the 800 and the XL/XE series. I cut my programming teeth largely on Atari BASIC. I still boot up an emulator on occasion. The 400/800 were amazingly advanced for 1979, when they first appeared. They never quite became dominant in the market though they were fairly popular for a while. Atari originally planned their architecture to be the successor to their 2600 game console, and they made a couple of cracks at actually turning it into a game console (the 5200 and the XEGS), but, again, never struck gold with this. But the machines do have a lot of gaming-specific features that make them good for that purpose: lots of bitmapped graphics modes and an early form of sprites; easy game-controller integration that used the standard 2600 controllers; a sound chip that was really good for making the kinds of booms and bangs and zaps you want in an arcade game. I moved on to the Atari STs later, had a lot of fun with those and taught myself C and GUI programming on one, but they don't elicit quite the same level of affection.
Forever Computer: From a home perspective got to be the ZX Spectrum (Timex 2000 in the USA). But from a work perspective the one machine I loved was the IBM 5110 PC from the late 1970s well before they released the PC-XT. Programming that in APL was years ahead of anything else and a real challenge.
Forever computer: my first computer, a Compaq Presario 433 my parents bought for me used for me back in 1996 (it was built in 1994). I upgraded it to the max and used it for years, and learned a ton about computers on it. I’ve been dragging it with me for years - over 10 moves and almost 20 years - and it’s still with me. I haven’t tried to boot it in years. At this point I’m sure the battery and capacitors on it are bad. One day I’ll try to replace them and hope they haven’t ruined the motherboard. Even if, it’s my forever computer.
Did much the same with an old pancake AST Advantage 486DX/33 desktop. It was a hand me down from my Dad when he bought an earlyish Pentium 120 from Packard Bell (later had it upgraded to the 200Mhz version when the motherboard went on it about 6 months later). Anyway, upgraded it to where AOL, Windows 95 had slowed the machine down to the point that just getting to the homepage over dialup took minutes, not seconds to reach, thanks to AOL3 and its glitchy software. I stripped any good parts from it and upgraded to a P-133, another AST, this time the tower Bravo unit. Now, I'm gathering the parts for a 15th gen Core 7 Ultra based PC build.
this is so awesome! Thanks so much for sharing this. When i heard you saying global 8 people connect to it idea at the end of the video. i instantly though of A MUD. It would be beyond epic having a Multi User Dungeon game running that the users could interact with and play together .
Keep it up, fellow Texan. I love your enthusiasm for these projects. While I grew up with 80s era computing, I have turned my eye towards single board computers and Unix. It makes me happy that people are preserving, analyzing, and reveling in the functioning of our computer history!
I remember when you had to pay "per User" or "per Session" for Operating Systems and let met tell you, the prices were often insane! In fact the absurd costs for additional Users on Interactive and SCO (before they become evil) were the main reason while I started to play around with BSD in the early 1990ths and settled with Linux a bit later. I wonder what the conditions were back then for the Centurion. And btw, my forever computer will be my Amiga 3000 - running AmigaOS as well as BSD - in fact I started my POSIX-voyages on AmigaOS with an POSIX-compability-Layer, installed NETBSD in its very early days, tried Linux until Debian stopped supporting Linux with 4.0, worked around it for a while and last year called it a day and installed NetBSD again which actually support the Amiga pretty well.
The mainframe makers got killed by the fact that someone could have a computer in there office and get the same job done faster for no ongoing cost. Computer center staff hated it.
@@kensmith5694 My uncle actually became victim of a unsuccessful mobbing by their Mainframe-supplier. He had started to port some applications from the Mainframe to Amstrad PCW/Joyce - and it was a blast! And as a side joke, he had learned to code by DIY. The supplier had suddenly got his account on the mainframe locked because he looked into the code of the applications how to do it. But then rewriting Cobol to Pascal wasn't exactly "stealing" so in the end they couldn't do anything about it. The reaction of his boss to the suppliers action was priceless, he hired two more programmers and ported everything to the desktop, then cancelled the contract for good. Interestingly the supplier didn't pick up the then 14 years old Mainframe until 1992 and the company could use it "for free". I guess taking that old warhorse to the land fill was more expensive than giving it for free to the customer.
I don't have it anymore, but my favorite computer was the HP Vectra 286. My father was a salesman at HP in the 80s, and he had a complete, SOTA system at home that he allowed my 4-year-old self to use. It had a 40-meg hard drive, an EGA color monitor, twin 5 1/4" floppy drives, a LaserJet (before it had model numbers), 16-color plotter, think jet, and the first paint jet. I wasn't yet literate, but thanks to HP's proprietary GUI called PAM (personal application manager), I could mouse to the program I wanted to use. My brother and I played a lot of Space Invaders, Mastertype, and Flight Simulator. We also made loads of pictures in its rudimentary drawing program and pushed them out through whichever printer or plotter was hooked up at the time.
My forever computer has to be my Amiga 600 bone stock the way I like it (for now) but I had in since it first came out and holds so many memories I could never let it go, and it one reason I have my current career as a systems architect
Hahaha, this is epic, and EXACTLY what I'd do if I had such a beast. As it happens, I designed practically the identical riser board to yours so I could work on the floppy controller in my monstrous CPT8520 word processor. I actually did a house lol when you brought yours into view 😆 Seems there was only one 100 pin card edge connector left in the world over xmas, you must've got the 2nd last and I got the last. Splendid work sir, and happy new year!
Did you notice that all DIP switches were set to "open" during your continuity test? But great video again. I love all your series, nice to see some bits from the Centurion world again after all those amazing tube activity :)
Just a minor issue on the B-roll. The shot containing the multimeter results and voiceover has the switch in the closed position. The up-close shot with the probes on the DIP block have them open. Second unit must have not checked the script thoroughly and didn't keep the hardware in the correct state for the pick-up shots. :P
I have 2 - my DecSystem 2020, because it's easily the biggest and most unusual thing I own, and I have some fun ideas for it that I'm yet to execute but watch this space. Also I'm a sucker for big iron, who isn't :) . And secondly, and perhaps unexpectedly, my Mac LC, purely because it was the first ever retro machine I collected when someone at my hackspace wanted rid. It's battery bombed to hell, and covered in bodge wires to fix the fact, along with a whole bunch of misc damage, but it was my first ever retro machine and I love the thing
This is the Lock-Picking Techie, and what we have for you today is a corroded dip switch from a Centurion serial card. After spraying it with enough Deoxit to drown a horse, I'll use my wave rake. This is available in the Genesis set.
Damn, you didn’t even have to get the soldering iron that you and Bosnian Bill made. 😮
Do it again, just to prove it wasn't a fluke!
@@nonoyorbusness Narrator: "It WAS a Fluke. A Fluke 117 - available via the affiliate link in the description."
Click on CRT1, nothing on CRT2.
HA!!!!
To be fair, I’m older than that drive and, being colder today, I don’t want to start up either. Might I suggest allowing it a nap, another warm up period, then an offer of bourbon.
“Can I get 8 working?”
We’re gonna need a bigger room.
Sometimes, I just gotta lean down to the drives and say "it's alright, I don't want to work today either, let's pop off early and watch TV and eat snacks until we pass out."
8 working Data Terminals, you could open a Pizza shop! Had a part time job delivering pizzas in the 80's. The whole shop ran on one computer, 8 terminals - for entering orders, directions for the cooks, and order assignment to the drivers, accounting, etc.., 2 label printers for the boxes, and a dot-matrix printer for reports.
The electric bill would eat up all profits:-)
A question from someone born well after the 80s; was that commonplace at the time, or was your pizza shop an early adopter of computer tech?
Most places still do, but each of the "terminals" are their own little PC. Everything is done on the "backoffice" computer. (which might actually be in the cloud these days.)
in 2001, the motel i worked at had an msdos server... yay travelodge. Routine maintanence was reboot the server every day
mmm Pizza!
For those wondering, "U" is a useful test pattern because it produces a 50% duty cycle waveform on 8N1 serial.
I learned that useful fact in 1969.
But it only works in ASCII, not EBCDIC.
Come to the comments for useful tidbits like this one. Thank you Sir!
I was indeed wondering about that
Thank you for that wonderful insight! What about RXRXRX ?
@@grossteilfahrer U*U*U*U* gives you alternating 1 and 0 on each bit, changing with every character, RYRYRYRY does the same thing in 5-level Baudot
Believe it or not, the Sinclair ZX81. I had so much fun building my first one in kit form in 1981 then designing and building peripherals for it. It felt like a huge privilege to actually own my own computer back then. I still have two now, one boxed and in original mint condition, the other with a MASSIVE 32KB of paged internal static RAM with battery backup and an internal HDMI adaptor so I can plug it straight into modern displays. It still gets powered up several times a year for a trip down memory lane playing 3D Monster Maze and 3D Defender. Oh ZX81, how I love thee!
I had a modified ZX80 (the 16 bit integer thing) that I modified so that it could be either a ZX80 or a ZX81 with the flip of a switch. The modification involved an even bigger EPROM with the upper address bit wired to the switch. I could power off, flip the switch and power on and be using the other machine.
I also had a "do it yourself" 16K RAM expansion that I created. I am not sure about on a real ZX81 but on mine, I could also do pixel by pixel graphics rather than the character based with a bit of a hack. I could make 320x240 pixel images.
I always wanted to have a ZX80 as a computer all those years ago. It would have been my second computer (my first one was the Cosmac Super Elf). I loved the compact all-in-one design for sure.
However - By the time I had enough money, the Acorn Atom computer was offered as a kit, and I went for that one (obviously because I wanted "real" keys in stead of membrane ones). I always have asked myself how things would have went if I could have afford that ZX80 at that time. At the other hand, Acorn was the first one down the line with a RISC processor, and I am still happy to have owned one the very first hobby computer that had one inside (Acorn Archimedes A300).
Love your style.
you are from my era... i chose the zx spectrum 128 because it was my 'drool want' in 1983
@@kensmith5694 Respect for your hardware hacking! When I had my ZX81, it never occurred to me that I could add hardware to it. Admittedly I was 13 years old and had school, and I was more into radios than computers at the time. I've returned to the ZX81 many years later, and now have a few with new keyboard membranes and RAM expansions.
The computer that brings me the most cherished memories is the HP85. I was a 13 years old kid and I had no idea what a computer was when, one evening, dad came back home carrying a huge box. He was a civil engineer and owned his own small company doing engineering for bigger construction companies. With my older brother we witnessed the most unbelievable experience: from the box dad extracted a sort of typewriter with a small scree and an even smaller printer. He explained us that this strange contraption was a personal computer. No one I knew possessed a computer. He turned it on, the thing emitted a 'bip' and a cursor started to link on the screen. HP generously provided a demo tape and it didn't took much time before we understood to full potential of that beast : Games of course!
I learned all the theory of computing science by reading the HP85's manual. It was huge and explained everything from scratch : bits, bytes, Ram, Rom, programming (in BASIC), networking (HP-IB style). I can't remember how many volumes the documentation had but it was huge. Later with my brother we bought our own computer, an Oric, and then an Amiga and then PCs and even more PCs... But the HP-85 is something apart. We had access to it only during holidays when dad brought it back from his office and we spend hours with dad learning how to program it. He developed his own engineering software to compute tridimensional structures. I learned programming and write some software for his HP85 to render 3D views of the structures he was studying. He used the HP85 until he retired in 2002 along with more HP computers he bought. The tape reader was dead but all the software were stored on hard drives and the old beast was still capable. Dad passed away in 2007. I miss you dad.
Great story, thank you for sharing it, and sorry for your loss of your dad.
Commodore 64 for me. It came with a very complete programmer's guide which included descriptions of BASIC, 6502 Assembly, and a description of the VIC-II video and SID sound chips. I couldn't take the computer to school with me, but I could sure take the book that came with it, and I did. I remember the shock and pleasure that came with knowing that the most sophisticated programs that did graphics and sound or anything else could all be understood, completely, in theory at least, if one learned everything in that manual. The computer seemed to offer limitless possibilities. All the work I'd done at school on a Teletype ASR-33 connected via dialup to the school system's mainframe (Honeywell DPS-8) transferred over, and then some. I wrote Turing Machine simulators, random music generators and simple games, and played thousands of hours of Infocom games on the Commodore 64. To this day, when I think in assembly, I think in 6502 assembly.
Same for me, the SID chip is still amazing.
Me too :-)
It's the 64 for me too. I still can't believe how much STUFF was in that computer, I still find out new things about it on UA-cam. How they packed in that much functionality and complexity into fixed hardware that was shipped with no chance to update it is just amazing!
@@b4cktr4k24 I have followed Adrien Kohlbecker's work on the 65C816 and I wish we could all extend it to make a new standard computer like the C64 but based on the new (1983) 16 bit 65C816.
Hold your giggles, my favorite computer was the TRS 80 model III. I had one in 1980(1981?) and me and my first wife ran a multi user BBS (“bulletin board system”) called “Aphrodite East”. I wrote it in BASIC. It had two modems, 2400 baud and (I think) 1200 baud. Storage was two “quad capacity” 5 1/4” floppy drives at 720KB each - hard drives were stupid expensive, and I don’t recall if the early TRS-80s even supported them. It used a dual com port board I designed and built, plus the local console. One of the most complicated parts of the whole thing was getting the phone company to pull two additional analog POTS lines into my apartment, and the landlord to allow it!
Yeah, I did most of my self-education in computing on a TRS-80, 1st the Model-I then the Model-III. Yes, I believe the Model-III could use a hard drive, but you had to boot from a floppy first. As you say though, the price of the hard drive was probably more than the computer, and it was a huge box, and it was only 5mb (I think later ones were 10mb). My machine only had the standard single-sided drives, so only about 180k! Today I use a TRS-80 emulator so I can try out the various op-syses, and even learn some old programming languages like Fortran and Cobol, and Forth (which is a really weird language).
@@roysainsbury4556 forth on the model I and III are interesting because early Forth storage was 1k “pages” or screens and the model III screen is 1k characters IIRC
What's to laugh about? All of the late 1970s and early 1980s computers were great. I just wish I could have gotten my hands on all of them, not just the ones I had at home or friends' houses. Those UK computers would have been fun to try out.
I was a big fan of the BBS model - I've always thought that an updated BBS system that uses cell networks and encrypted baud signals would be an interesting project. A necessary project? Mostly not, but an interesting one none the less. I remember downloading my first picture of boobs in tif format (if memory serves, might be wrong on that) and instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail (! Strictly for research purposes in the old quarry) on some BBS systems back in the late 80s early 90s. Fortunately I've grown up as a mostly productive member of society and not some crazy person 😂
I have an Amiga 2500 that belonged to a high school friend of mine. One day after we both got out of college, he called to let me know his folks were getting rid of it, and he asked me if I'd like it. I was all "hell yeah, I'd like it!" It's survived the almost 30 years since, three moves, a few upgrades, and one exploded clock battery. It's a pretty decked-out unit, with the 68030 accelerator board, two SCSI hard drives that still sort of work, and the 386 bridge board that Commodore sold for PC compatibility. But these days, all it does is play Amiga games.
The A500 was my first computer. Standard 512K later upgraded to 1 meg. Then upgraded to a 2000 and then a 4000. Still think that they were the best.
Amiga is the best :)
Dude, the joy in your videos makes me so happy! I don't understand 90% about what you are talking about (I'm learning though) but to see your love and passion in action is so much fun to watch. Keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing your next video!
I am an electrical engineer graduated 1972 from Michigan Tech. I understand almost all of this and I agree it is a fascinating journey.
My forever computer has unfortunately been lost to time - a Heathkit H8 with a Zenith Z19 terminal and a cassette tape for storage. Forty-four years ago I thought it was the best thing ever! It came as a parts kit that I stayed up overnight to put together. Lots of soldering at the kitchen table and 14-year old me couldn't wait to show my dad in the morning. I learned to program on that thing, and fondly remember hand-typing in a flight simulator program from (probably) Byte magazine. I do have my other forever computer though - an Apple IIe (a replacement) which is what I used through high school and truly expanded my programming knowledge. Truly the best time of my life - I learned so much with those machines.
For me, it's the BBC Micro that I used at College between 1984 and 1987. I completed all of my written course work using it, and even completed a hardware based speech recognition system I designed and built for my final year project. After 38 years, the Micro still works perfectly, and over the years, all I've had to do is make copies of the 5.25 floppies. That stuff was built to last!
I get a Model B for my 21st back in 1982, but unfortunately I moved it on to fund the purchase of an Amstrad twin floppy PC. Isn't hindsight a cruel mistress.
However, I've still got an Amiga A1200 that hasn't been powered on in decades. Depending on what life throws at me this year, maybe I should start trying to get that operational.
at least the bbc micro had graphics and sound output unlike the centurion
My school had a BBC Micro, I remmeber the orange function keys. It had basic and logo
The hardest problem in all of Information Technology has always been how to put smudges on paper... Printing has always been a curse.
And as I was reminded last night, the ink still dries out if you don't use them enough.
PC LOAD LETTER? WHAT THE F*** DOES THAT MEAN?
Try spending 8 years working on printers lol ... They are never reliable because they are all digital someone needs to get an old analog copier chains and cogs and the whole scanner glass moving insanity...
Do you remember when someone made a one pin printer. I think the name was "banana" or something like that. Instead of printing a line of text in one pass, it took 8 passes to print a line. It didn't even print on the return travel so it took something more like 16 times as long to print. You also had to have a special printer driver thing loaded. I think it used your computers CPU to say "step one column, smack the print head, step one column". No multitasking at all
@@kensmith5694 The Sinclair ZX printer ("the silver bog roll burner") had only one motor to drive a stylus on a rubber band over the thermal paper while also advancing the paper.
The printers which came with the Amstrad PCW series, sold as word processors but actually classic Z80 CP/M machines, had no electronics and were driven directly by the computer.
I am retired Navy and I got to work with a Digital PDP-1170 during my time. It had two tape drives, multiple printers and disk units. Overtime I could tell what the system was doing just by watching the display lights on the main CPU. It was a joy to work with. I truly miss those days.
0:35 Sure, I'll take your challenge: Commodore 128. My first computer. Played the most memorable games on it. Learned how to program on it (v7 BASIC is a lot easier than v2 C64). My mother used it to do all of the accounting and business correspondence for my father's business on it, well beyond the 8 bit era. Set me on the road to becoming a computer engineer. Still have it, but it's broken. Channels like yours and others have inspired me to try to repair it.
My forever computer is my Tandy TRS-80 Model 1. In 1978 my father brought one home as our 1st family computer. I learned to program on it. I learned soldering and basic electronics assembling and troubleshooting a LNW system expansion kit for it along side my father. My Boy Scout troop directed parking for the local hamfest and after my parking duties were done we scoured the hamfest to get the required electronic parts for the kit. I remember hearing "Robot Attack" speak and thinking it was the coolest thing ever.
Mine I got for my birthday in 1979. The first thing I did was spend half an hour figuring out how to answer "MEMORY SIZE?", but after acquiring a Z80 reference card a few months later, I was pretty much unstoppable. Well, except when I modified the board circuitry. I had a really cool video upgrade (lowercase with descenders, and even inverse alpha in C0-FF) until I screwed one too many things. After that I just put back in the lowercase descenders thing (it was mostly an external board) and stopped being dangerous with it. Right now its video sync is screwed up (because of those 74Cxx chips it uses), and I need to fix someday.
@ Once I got to the age of typing papers on it I did the Electric Pencil lower case mod on ours. It was replaced for me by a C64 I got for Christmas 82 and it was permanently placed in our crawl space after my father got an IBM XT in 1984. I loved my C64 in the day but don’t have a lot of nostalgia for it now, but I do for the TRS-80.
Yeah, "Robot Atack" was amazing given that there was no sound chip in the machine - all done by banging bits on the cassette port! Some pretty cool music on some games too, like Frogger.
Mine was Tandy 200, because it had its own screen
My mum had a VIC 20 when i was young. Played a few games on it, but didn't explore any programming. My programming experience would come when i was in my late teens and i wondered if I could make a resource calculator for a game i use to play. I'd love to mess about with the VIC 20 at some point. Not a forever computer, but one that has stayed in my memory for most of my life.
0:35 My dad’s old Apple Newton 2000. It’s worth quite a bit, but it’s priceless to me. I always found it fascinating as a kid. Apple made my iPad in the late 90s!?
I'm watching you talking about a 96 Megabytes drive and stunned me. That is huge for its age. For comparison, I have a USB flash drive from early 2000s from Dell that is 128 Megabytes. Those are 30 years apart! Its like imagining a mid 90s machine with terabytes of storage! That is nuts!
Most machines back then might have access to 5 or 10 MB. Many were KB like 700KB. It was all text so no GUIs.
Father in law used to tell the story and show the receipts for the first TB of storage EDS bought for the Columbus Indiana office. Invoice was over a million$. What stuns me is my mid-level cell phone would run circles around this monster.
my phone that i got in 2010 and used until 2016 only had 16mb of storage the one after that had 16gb yet it still wasn't enough .but with 16 mb i could store a lot of pictures. it was really impressive as long as you don't try to display them on a big screen . i am not sure what someone would do with that in the 80s since this thing seems very limited in other ways even for the time a lot if documents i guess .
I can't say enough how excited I am to be watching multiple terminals hooked up to a single minicomputer! Now all you need to do is to make a tape drive spin and a line printer chunk out some lines of code and I'll be reliving my college days all over again!
I have a 6502 homebrew computer that uses an original 6530-004 TIM chip from 1976. I started building 6502 computers in 1975; and I built several of them and then cannibalized them for the next better architecture. This is the last one and was completed in the late 80's and still works well. It was a microcontroller before microcontrollers were a thing.
My forever computer is my BBC model B. I got it when I was 16, which will be 42 years ago this coming August. I've had to replace a couple of chips over the years, but she is still going strong.
I am still looking for one. I had one many years ago, but I was foolish enough to sell it. Lucky enough there still seem to be some around. I am now in the process of restoring the predecessor, the Acorn Atom, to it's former working order. The poor thing was lent to a acquaintance many years ago, and he returned it completely broken. I have it halfway working (the Acon Atom words and blinking cursor pop up, but the keyboard is unresponsive), but I still have some way's to go.
Same for me, but I lost mine sometime after I went to University... it was well-used but immaculate, with a Microvitec CUB monitor, a DS/DD 80 track floppy, 128K of sideways RAM. I think my sister must've borrowed it while I was at Uni and then lost it during a house move.
I keep wistfully flipping through eBay umming and aahhing over various Model Bs, Master 128 and A3000s before deciding that the spectacular emulators like JSBeeb are more than capable and I can't justify the storage space for a Beeb!
My soul will be forever entwined with a particular DEC PDP-11/34 running RSX-11M, with ADCs and DACs to interface with lab equipment and to make music. That’s the computer I learned programming on (my school’s sending off filled in sheets of BASIC to the local college’s mainframe doesn’t really count). I loved that computer so much… 🥲
My favorite part of your journey with the Centurion was watching you write those assembly language programs in earlier videos. Congratulations on getting all 8 terminals to work!
It's so outstanding to see essentially computer archaeology being done on hardware from the mid-80s, the time of my own awakening into computers with the C64 yet on a segment that has been almost completely forgotten and abandoned, having to be re-discovered bit by bit!
Dont ever stop, Dave. It's utterly fascinating!
My forever computer - wow! what an amazing question! I’ve retired now and I'm in my 60s. For info’, my IT mentor was a man who worked on the BAC TSR-2 terrain following radar - an amazing man. I’ve had a complete IT life in the computing industry. I worked on UNIVAC, IBM, Olivetti, GENE, ICL, various analogue systems, etc …. and with my Father I built a MINISCAMP, one of the first 8 bit build-it-yourself kit computers in Australia. Nevertheless, my “forever computers" are the AMIGA 1000 and the first Macintosh. The ”thinking and thought” that went into these machines, was incredible. These were amazing times!
LOve your comments about printers … my thoughts exactly!
Of all the systems I’ve been able to use, I think my favorite was the AS/400. After working IT in the automotive industry, I ended up as a contractor at IBM because of it. Eventually worked for a business partner. Did a bunch of CISC to RISC system upgrades in the last half of the 90s!
Also my first home computer, a Heathkit H8, built when I was 11 years old. Your friend’s museum has all the same components I had.
I remember the condition of the Centurion when you first got it, an amazing restoration and test of determination. Impressive to serve up to 32 users on a mini computer at the time, although extremely slow if more than a couple were processing, especially using the same disk at once. 8 users is more feasible for a good experience, well done for getting the MUX card working.
I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 Model III in 1984, but I don't have a "Forever Computer". My favorite computer is whatever is at the heart of whatever project I'm working on at the moment, but I do have a soft spot for the Z80 CPU. I think I exercised that enough in 2000 by writing (yet another) Z80 emulator in C and x86 assembly.
I think your vintage computers are awesome and I really appreciate how you share with us what you learn about them. You satisfy my curiosity for ancient digital tech without me having to upgrade the electrical service to my house ;)
15:35 DUDE! All those switches are open! The label is right there! Your 1K reading is likely a combo of pullup resistors & the resistance of the 74xx chip inputs that are reading the switches. :)
My forever computer is Atari 800XL. Awesome games, productivity, i wrote school papers on it. Today it has a Fuginet and connected to the world!
Atari 800 800xl were my pick as well....started my computer journey on an 800 back in 1982/83
I worked all summer mowing lawns the summer of 8th grade and bought an Atari 600XL from Toys'R'Us. Gamed a ton on that computer and did a little programming as well. I remember it fondly. Data casettes!
Forever Machine - Acorn BBC Micro, 6502 cpu, 32Kb RAM , awesome machine (at least here in the UK!) great work on all your projects David, keep up the good work 👍
I’ve got a 1985 AT&T 3B1 from 1985 which was manufactured by Convergent Technologies for AT&T. I’ve got a memory expansion card and a Voice Power card as well as a QIC tape drive. It runs a weird UNIX which is a cross between System 7 snd Sys-V. The Voice Power software allows scripting a AVR system in Korn shell (the popular bash shell is based off of Korn shell). I talked my boss where I used to work into getting a used Voice Power card for a 3B1 we had and he scripted an employment opportunity job posting voice response system and we slaved it off the phone switch where it ran for many years.
AT&T had great documentation for the 3B1 and I have a book with big fold-out schematics for everything in the machine.
23:57 Hey, thanks for the shout-out, and so glad to see this thing in an episode! Yay!
Hmmm, forever computer.....quite fond of my HP9825 - I lusted after one way back in the 70s but it was way too expensive for the University of Cambridge to get one for a mere assistant - got one in the end though, just had to wait approx 50 years!
I would love to get a PDP11-04, used one to control a mm wave receiver on the UKIRT instrument on Mauna Kea, Hawaii in the early 80s - I had great fun driving it all up to the summit in the back of a Ford Bronco! Used to hand carry the RK05 disk packs in their huge transit cases out from the UK, in those days you could sweet-talk the cabin crew into stowing them in the cabin and twice that earned us an invite to the 747 flight deck in mid-Atlantic from pilots who got wind of the fact there were astronomers on board and thought we would like the view (we did!) - remember those pre 9/11 days?
I don't really know why I find your channel so intriguing, but I do. I got into computers somewhere around the Atari 1040 ST. I've used them for music ever since. Something about these old machines takes me back to my days of building home computers out of used 386 parts that I got from a local used computer shop. My hotrod computer of the day was a 386 DX 40 with a 1200 baud modem. IRQs, Autoexec.bat files, memory drivers, and all that stuff was endlessly fascinating for me. Thanks for the work your doing.
I used an Atari ST to run my ham radio software. At the time, there was something called "packet radio", that was sort-of like a text version of the internet. There were bulliten boards just like the phone ones, and people could send and receive messages globally using a radio network, and all that before the internet become prominent in the UK. You could even send software over the radio using some weird encoding scheme that chopped the program into parts and send them seperately. If you received a corrupted part (very common), the software could be told to request a resend of just that part. Later versions on MS-DOS could do the whole thing automatically and notify you when you had a complete program! Mind you, it was slow. It might take a week to get all the parts!
My forever computer is actually two: (1) is my TI99/4A, which kick-started my interest in programming in 1982 at age 12. I still have the very same TI. And (2) is my 40MHz Am386 (complete with Tseng Labs ET4000 VGA card and 210MB Quantum HDD), which I had whilst studying computer engineering at Uni. This machine cemented my future in computer systems, networking and even early-booting a Linux kernel from floppy disk. It later powered a BBS system for the company I worked at as a student and I foolishly left it there when I started my first full-time job.
Forever Machine - Wow, sobering realisation I've never been in a position to have a forever anything. Closest I come is my 1980 Datsun 280ZX. An everlasting resto project that takes up a similar amount of space to the Centurion. Have come close to having to get rid of it because of other people reasons, but it's hanging in there! This has inspired me to go spend some love on it.
My 1983 Commodore 64. It blew my mind as a child, and still does after owning it for 41 years. My 1541 also still works great and almost all my disks still work! Learning to repair and maintain it has also been a great experience in electronics and soldering. The demo scene is still strong also! But I do have to swap out my VIC chip with a Kawari when I want to play PAL.
Holy cow, you still have the same computer from when you were a kid?! That's impressive. Very few things survived my childhood - I was kind of rough on my things lol
My forever computer is my SGI indigo R4000 Elan. It's still amazing to me the raw graphics power this little blue box had in the early 90s and I still love booting it up and tinkering around with it.
I love the old DEC "PCs', like the Robin and Rainbow. My dad worked for DEC this "the end" and made all his work he had to do at home on those machines. Awesome memories, the oldest I have about computers. Both machines, and a lot more, are waiting at the basement of my parents house to be restored and fired up again. But sadly, I won't have the time in the next years to begin with it.
Such a great video, thanks. Your enthusiasm really is contagious.
This so much reminds me of the first time around 1982 I brought up 8 VT100s to a 6809-based SWTPC clone machine running the UniFLEX o/s, a small Unix-like multi-user o/s written in assembly code that worked with a DAT chip allowing the 8-bit 6809 to page through up to 864 Kb of RAM. And I ran from terminal to terminal launching compiles on each of these with delight. The storage was a 10 Mb 5.25" MFM drive. I was just as happy as you were in this video.
Thanks for remining me of this moment.
Forever computer: I know you are going to love this... COMMODORE VIC-20! I know it is a toy compared to "real" computers like the Centurion, but I have to select it because it is the one I used during all my teen years. My sister who worked at Commodore a the time gave it to me for Christmas one year, so that adds to the significance.
I wish I still had my Vic! Getting mine in the 4th grade completely changed my life!
Friend of mine just did a live chiptune set, playing a vic20 on a guitar strap, so they are certainly a fun machine :)
I am with you on that. And mine is still up and running - recently Elite has been converted to the friendly computer! Limitations make programming rewarding and interesting.
It was summer 1982. Work for the money, and then VC-20. Import from Germany. There goes sunny summer night .... I have it today, and it's still working.
The Vic-20 really is a cool little computer. I was too young to have used one back then (I would have been around 4 years old when it came out 😂 ) but now that I have become interested in vintage computers, I really do like it. It's fun to write BASIC programs on it and play around with changing the text and background colors on the fly with code, and creating sound effects. The only gripe I have is that working with disk drives is kind of weird and clumsy on it.
I love how you stay so positive and get so excited when something starts working. Love your channel.
A bit newer than everyone elses but my forever computer will be the custom built AMD 486-DX4 100mhz my grandpa built when i was little and eventually got handed down to me when he upgraded to an AMD K6-2. So much fun learning about computers on that thing running DR-DOS and Windows 3.1. still have it hooked up and use fairly regularly.
My old Apple //e is my forever computer. I spent many happy days writing 6502 assembly for various projects. When we were a young married couple in the 1980s my Apple //e was right next to my wife's sewing machine and we sat side by side pursuing our respective hobbies for hours at a time.
Forever would be my apple iie, when I was 8 in ‘00 I became obsessed with 80s micros and the simplicity of BASIC, one day after school I noticed an apple ii sitting next to the dumpster, went to the office and sheepishly asked if they were going to throw it away. Principal invited my dad and I to school after hours and let us clear out an entire cabinet of Apple ii and LC era machines. One of the most exiting days of my young life haha.
I share your joy in this. It reminds me of when I ran a Unix BBS from my house in the early 90s. A combination of modems and eclectic terminals to have a mutli-user party. What a great time. Keep on doing what you are doing.
That little baby blue terminal is adorable!😻 Wouldn't be surprised if the folks who designed the first iMac were a fan too. The blue/white color scheme of the translucent powermac G3 tower seems very reminiscent of the Centurion as well. Classy stuff
My all-time favorite, but not one that I could own or take anywhere, is a CDC Cyber-72 that I had time-sharing access to as a student thanks to the good offices of the UMRCC (University of Manchester Regional Computer Center) circa 1979. That system was a great example of a regional time-shared super-computer, providing high-reliability, academic computing resources both locally and to UMIST, Salford, Liverpool, Keele and Lancaster universities.
My forever computer is de Exidy Sorcerer. I learned basic, Z80 assembly, CP/M and so much more on this awesome platform as a kid! Of course, it also runs Hellorld!
Second is the ZX Spectrum in all it's incarnations.
That's a mighty FINE Forever Computer, Mr. Schuur.
15:19 All switches on the Dip-switch are open! The measurements are expectable then. There was nothing wrong with this card except the setting.
Mine was built around an AMD 2100+. Built into some old ex government steel chassis that never intended an ATX board be mounted to it. Let alone a perspex window and neon lights (pre CCFL, actual neon tubes), and a black n silver paint job. Dual PSU's, one for the hard disks (x8, all pata) one just for the motherboard. Not just one box, there was another baby AT tower that was just the water cooling unit, brass radiator, 240v fans n pump. It was loud, but that's OK, because it lived outside, with pipes running through the window. Handmade water block. That thing overclocked so brilliantly. I wasn't even into gaming that much, I just wanted the fastest, biggest rig I could afford (n I didn't have much to spend). I went full chonky. She wasn't elegant, but she went hard. I didn't aim for big iron computing, but that's where I ended up
Absolutely fantastic! I've been waiting for this since I started watching the Centurion episodes here :D Hooking such an old machine to the internet to be used remotely is ultimately the coolest thing to do!
My forever computer has to be the home server I've had running in my closet since 1998. It doesn't have any original parts left but I still think of it as the same computer. I mean, it's still the same Debian installation, just upgraded in place a few times and copied over to new hard drives when old ones have started to fail. The oldest timestamps on files in my home directory are 11th Jun, 1998.
I think the oldest part on that computer has to be the KeyTronic keyboard from 1987. Or I'm not sure how old the 14 inch VGA CRT is, but probably newer than the keyboard. Yes those parts are older than the computer itself, but they've been added later.
That system used to have an HP Laserjet IIP plus on it, from 1990 I think, but it finally went the way of all printers.
If you haven’t already, you should rename that system “Theseus” 😂
I have an affinity for the old VAX systems because this is what I used in college. I don't have one but I remember the late nights in front of the green-screen terminals working on class projects.
My fav/forever system would be either an Acorn/BBC Model B or Archimedes A3000, both systems I used throughout school in the late 80s through to the mid 90s. But as I don’t own either, I guess it’ll have to be the Microbee, an Australian 8-bit Z80-based microcomputer system from the early 1980s. A former workmate gave me two, one of which I’m restoring and hoping to get functional this year.
Favourite computer of all time for me was the BBC Model B that I had as a school kid. Sadly I let mine go when I upgraded to the Master and then Archimedes, but in hindsight the Beeb was the most important and fun computer I ever owned.
Mine would be this here Rig of Theseus. It hasn't got a name and was put together by me but it'll be here "forever" as it continues to evolve, which it's done since 2008. No part of it is still from then but this is still the machine I got when I was 17, four CPUs, three motherboards, two cases and seven graphics cards ago.
My personal "Rig of Theseus" started about 1988. It has always had a continuity of parts. Now that I think of it, the very first part might still exist: a HD 5.25" TEAC floppy drive with a jumper which could change the LED from green to red. Rosebud.... Rosebud!
My case goes back to 2002. Nothing inside of it is that old, I know because I rather liked the original LED-lit fans and had to replace them after a while. I don't know how many fans I've gone through, but I'm on the third motherboard, third power supply, the seventh or eighth video card, and long ago lost count of the drives that have passed through. The 5¼" Drive cage is crudely bent to accommodate a slightly larger than ATX motherboard. The power switch is hacked into one of the drive bay covers. The NVMe drive is held in place by a plastic soda cap -- I glued the cap to the case, then sunk a screw into the cap. The whole thing is painted metallic blue with spray paint intended for a car and has a bronze-tinted side panel window also intended for cars, but there's no lighting inside other than the (rather bright) status LEDs on the motherboard.
And I barely care because it sits in another room entirely, with the displays and keyboard on this side.
@@mal2ksc I painted my case (and CRT, mouse and keyboard) with "granite" spray paint that was popular in the late 90s The case made it into the early 2000s when I had to go from AT to ATX; on my 3rd rn.
My forever computer was the very first machine I ever developed code for. It was an ICL 1904A mainframe. It filled a huge air conditioned room. It was a joy to see when operating at full capacity. Happy days.
The configuration was:
ICL1904A CPU
Languages: PLAN (Programming language Nineteen Hundred), COBOL
Operating system Executive, and eventually George 3
192k Words store
7903 Comms controller (for exchangeable disk drives)
3 EDS60 disk drives
1 TR0 paper tape reader
1 2101 card reader
8 7-track magnetic tape units
2 1933 barrel printers (1600 lpm)
I'll never get rid of our NeXT cube. It is truly a forever computer.
1983, Melbourne, Australia, high school. PDP-11/04: no screen or keyboard, just a dot matrix line printer and mark/sense cards we students filled in with pencil. The operating system was written by the local university for educational purposes and included compilers for Fortran, COBOL, BASIC and Pascal. You had to use different mark/sense cards for each language.
Most of the students never saw the machine. We filled out our mark/sense cards in maths class and handed the stack of cards to the teacher, who then ran the jobs in a batch overnight. The students then got the printouts (full of errors) in the next class.
In 1985, the school replaced the DEC with a lab of 12 BBC micros. I didn't stay around to see how that worked out, but I won't forget my time with the PDP-11.
I'll have to say my favorite "ancient" computer is the PDP 11/70. It's where I first started my employment as an IT professional. I even modified the system printer control program (written in PDP BASIC) to allow twice as many pages to be printed.
As I'm from the UK and 50ish, my forever computer is the ZX Spectrum 48K. I was lucky enough to receive one xmas 1983 and it was amazing. I'll never forget the excitement of loading games from tape!
That dip switch was in the "OPEN" position, no wonder it measured as "open". There was probably no fault with the old switch (you didn't actually test it.)
I did, it was the same in both directions, I just forgot to flip it back to closed for filming. I didn't notice because it truly was dead inside and measured open no matter the position.
Came here to say this :)
The TRS-80 Model I is my forever computer. I first laid eyes on it in 1978 and mowed lawns and shoveled snow to earn money to buy my first one in 1980. It launch a career in IT where I still work today.
I have a soft spot for the Telefunken RA700, a beast of an analog computer built by the renowed german maker. It's the last hurray of analog computers before their eventual slow demise in the 1970s.
To me, together with the EAI 231R-V is the quintessential analog computer "mainframe"
I have two dream systems from my youth. Number one is the Vax 11/780. I’d love you to work on one of those in future! The second is the National Semiconductor 32032 microprocessor. I used that a lot in the 1980s. It was a 32 bit processor with a very nice, Vax like, architecture.
I would love to get hands on with 11/780 someday, that's a proper piece of kit!
@@UsagiElectricCross fingers you do get your hands on one! Congratulations on the channel! Really impressive work in all your videos.
Procomm Plus brings back memories of pulling many, many word processor docs from a CP/M environment over to MS-Dos all via a serial cable when the company I worked for upgraded.
Brings back memories for me too. But Telix was .my favorite App.
I really don't have a forever computer. This is just really interesting to me. The size of it, how the data is stored and how much can be stored. I love old things that still work. If I had to pick something it would probably be an Apple IIe. I loved that computer. Honestly, the main reason why I'm commenting is that I love the color. I'm seriously considering taking mine apart and painting it that color. It just freakin pops. Anyway, cool video. Thanks for sharing.
Back in the 1990's whan I was repairing DEC PDP's, I had a special loopback adapter for the 8 RS232 connectors of the serial interfaces. I used a simple terminal test that spit out the whole ASCII character set in a loop. The loopback adapter had LED's for the RX and TX lines. When the test ran on 8 or 16 terminals, you could see the timesharing! It looked like a chasing light when every output got half a second of data, then the light moved to the next port and so on.... it was funny to see that 🙂
I have seen something like that along the way. It helped me understand time-sharing.
You had LEDs LUXURY! We had to look for twitching on a volt meter
@@kensmith5694 Did you have 8 voltmeters? 🙂
@@PlaywithJunk No, we had to move the voltmeter quickly from one connection to the other, and we were glad to have it.
That wasn't the reaction I expected. See Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen
In the mid/late 80's my dad had a MSX (commodore like machine). He didn't understand how it worked. So me and my brothers were stumbling with it and got it to work to load games from cassettes.. a great time
Watching your videos is really fun thanks🎉
My forever computer is my Commodore C128 DCR. Use it as a C64 mostly, but love the fact that I could use CP/M (albeit not everything and pretty slowly) and always keep saying to myself that I'm gonna code on that C128 part. Soon. Maybe. 😅. Love it, will never part with it. That being said: I learned about Centurion computers from you and never heard of them before. You gained quite a lot of knowledge of this and even talked to some former employees? Maybe consider to do a book on the history of these. It's quite a story and who else would do it, actually, ever? 😅 Anyways, hope you're doing fine, cheers and all the best!
my forever machine is the UE-1 of course! it´s just so ingenious, you were able to do something that hadnt been made for years, and with vacuum tubes no less! and the diode logic there really simplifyes it, and the bell you put on there, god i would love to hear it ding once you get a good program on there!
My forever computer would be the Commodore PET2001, hands down. My school had one when I was 12. I learned to type on the chiclet keyboard, I learned BASIC on it as well as 6502 Assembler, and when we got an IBM PC at home from my dad's work, I thought at first that the keyboard was a terrible downgrade because you had to use Shift for all the symbols at the top row of the keyboard that were important for programming in BASIC. Not to mention IBM PC floppy disks could only hold a measly 360K whereas the Commodore 8250 disk drive at school could hold a whopping megabyte.
Forever Computer. My Amstrad CPC464. Together with the computer magazines at that time, it introduced me to software programming. Which is now my passion and profession for over 30 years.
Forever computer: alas it got lost along the way, but my old IBM System/34 was and will forever be my favorite. I bought it from its original owner, a fairly large hospital, complete with all the documentation+including schematics!!) and several large boxes of 8" floppies. Two terminals, two printers, and about half a pallet of twinax rounded out the deal--I paid a whopping $20 for the whole mess.
Mine had 64kb of ram and two, 13Mb hard drives. It pulled almost 50A at 240V.
I want a PDP-11/45. It was my personal computer for my PhD, and had outstanding computer graphics kit. That was mid '70s.
Well, you know it has to be the Warrex Centurion CPU4 that started it all at Warrex and was the grandfather of the CPU5, CPU6 and CPU7. Regards, Ken
My man! That is epic getting all 8 going at once. I was thrilled to see you catch that dip switch failure so soon in the troubleshooting? The faulty item is always the last thing I check, and not the first. haha. All good wishes for 2025!
My forever? the Amiga 500. Had it through some significant points in my life as a kid/teen and also really got into hardware hacking on it.
Same for me!
I had A500 when I was a kid and had so much fun with it. For some reason in my early teens I sold it, but later in life I reallized my grave mistake and luckily managed to buy my original childhood Amiga back. Still working and sitting on my desk right now! Such a great machine.
Amigaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Hi David! I really enjoy every video you post and I wait patiently (or not so much patiently) for every Sunday to see a new episode of whatever computer you're working on. The joy and effort you put into not only restoring computers but also explaining every step you do and why you do it is just enjoyable and mind-blowing.
I have two dream computers on my list, one of which I've had since I was a teenager in the 80s: the Commodore 64.
I own two of them now, one is working and the other with the infamous PLA problem. I'm going to work on it soon looking for some modern replacement for the PLA.
The other dream computer I have is the Amiga 500. I always wanted to buy one but never had the chance and here in Argentina they are not that common to get. I hope I find one soon and can get it working.
Thanks David for each one of your videos and for the effort you put into repairing and restoring each of these engineering gems to keep the legacy alive.
It would be fun to see that computer running 8 terminals at a retro computer expo, maybe running a BASIC interpreter with games for people to play. Also WOOT for me hitting the like button to take it up to an even 500 (and it's around 770+ by the time I finished watching). It's nice to know that the fix for that card was so simple.
"Forever Computer"... hmm... I guess the one I worked on the most, which was the "Super-80", a kit computer based on the Z80 CPU. I even managed to put TRS-80 BASIC into that computer and make it mostly work, in spite of the Super-80 only having a 40-character screen instead of an 80-character screen.
My absolute favorite has to be my Altos 886 when I first got it in 1993. You actually saw it at VCF East. 8 terminals and it’s a 286 running Altos Xenix v3.2fs8. Nothing like an old multiuser system from the 80’s! If I had to sell my entire collection I’d keep my 886!
That Altos was one of my favorite machines from the whole show! If you bring it again this year, I may be able to make it up again, and I would love to sit down and get hands on with it.
@@UsagiElectric I’ll see what I can do 👍 Even if I just bring it and throw it on a table in the back 👍 Excellent work on the Centurion!!
My forever computer, clearly, is the Commodore Amiga 500. It was the first computer I've ever owned (not the first I used) and I own and maintain several of these in multiple configurations (including a factory standard revision 6.1) to date.
While I don't have one today, the computers I have the most affection for are the Atari 8-bit line: the Atari 400 (the first computer I owned), the 800 and the XL/XE series. I cut my programming teeth largely on Atari BASIC. I still boot up an emulator on occasion. The 400/800 were amazingly advanced for 1979, when they first appeared. They never quite became dominant in the market though they were fairly popular for a while. Atari originally planned their architecture to be the successor to their 2600 game console, and they made a couple of cracks at actually turning it into a game console (the 5200 and the XEGS), but, again, never struck gold with this. But the machines do have a lot of gaming-specific features that make them good for that purpose: lots of bitmapped graphics modes and an early form of sprites; easy game-controller integration that used the standard 2600 controllers; a sound chip that was really good for making the kinds of booms and bangs and zaps you want in an arcade game.
I moved on to the Atari STs later, had a lot of fun with those and taught myself C and GUI programming on one, but they don't elicit quite the same level of affection.
Forever Computer: From a home perspective got to be the ZX Spectrum (Timex 2000 in the USA). But from a work perspective the one machine I loved was the IBM 5110 PC from the late 1970s well before they released the PC-XT. Programming that in APL was years ahead of anything else and a real challenge.
I learned programming on a DEC Vax, i hope to have one some day. Have fond memories of VMS and Fortran
Forever computer: my first computer, a Compaq Presario 433 my parents bought for me used for me back in 1996 (it was built in 1994). I upgraded it to the max and used it for years, and learned a ton about computers on it. I’ve been dragging it with me for years - over 10 moves and almost 20 years - and it’s still with me. I haven’t tried to boot it in years. At this point I’m sure the battery and capacitors on it are bad. One day I’ll try to replace them and hope they haven’t ruined the motherboard. Even if, it’s my forever computer.
I have a sweet spot in my heart for the 486. My first computer was an 8088, but when I got a 486 I spent so much time on it.
Did much the same with an old pancake AST Advantage 486DX/33 desktop.
It was a hand me down from my Dad when he bought an earlyish Pentium 120 from Packard Bell (later had it upgraded to the 200Mhz version when the motherboard went on it about 6 months later). Anyway, upgraded it to where AOL, Windows 95 had slowed the machine down to the point that just getting to the homepage over dialup took minutes, not seconds to reach, thanks to AOL3 and its glitchy software. I stripped any good parts from it and upgraded to a P-133, another AST, this time the tower Bravo unit.
Now, I'm gathering the parts for a 15th gen Core 7 Ultra based PC build.
this is so awesome! Thanks so much for sharing this. When i heard you saying global 8 people connect to it idea at the end of the video. i instantly though of A MUD. It would be beyond epic having a Multi User Dungeon game running that the users could interact with and play together .
05:13 the main function of the printer is to make you angry. eventually it can print...
Keep it up, fellow Texan. I love your enthusiasm for these projects. While I grew up with 80s era computing, I have turned my eye towards single board computers and Unix. It makes me happy that people are preserving, analyzing, and reveling in the functioning of our computer history!
I remember when you had to pay "per User" or "per Session" for Operating Systems and let met tell you, the prices were often insane! In fact the absurd costs for additional Users on Interactive and SCO (before they become evil) were the main reason while I started to play around with BSD in the early 1990ths and settled with Linux a bit later. I wonder what the conditions were back then for the Centurion. And btw, my forever computer will be my Amiga 3000 - running AmigaOS as well as BSD - in fact I started my POSIX-voyages on AmigaOS with an POSIX-compability-Layer, installed NETBSD in its very early days, tried Linux until Debian stopped supporting Linux with 4.0, worked around it for a while and last year called it a day and installed NetBSD again which actually support the Amiga pretty well.
The mainframe makers got killed by the fact that someone could have a computer in there office and get the same job done faster for no ongoing cost. Computer center staff hated it.
@@kensmith5694 My uncle actually became victim of a unsuccessful mobbing by their Mainframe-supplier. He had started to port some applications from the Mainframe to Amstrad PCW/Joyce - and it was a blast! And as a side joke, he had learned to code by DIY. The supplier had suddenly got his account on the mainframe locked because he looked into the code of the applications how to do it. But then rewriting Cobol to Pascal wasn't exactly "stealing" so in the end they couldn't do anything about it.
The reaction of his boss to the suppliers action was priceless, he hired two more programmers and ported everything to the desktop, then cancelled the contract for good. Interestingly the supplier didn't pick up the then 14 years old Mainframe until 1992 and the company could use it "for free". I guess taking that old warhorse to the land fill was more expensive than giving it for free to the customer.
I don't have it anymore, but my favorite computer was the HP Vectra 286. My father was a salesman at HP in the 80s, and he had a complete, SOTA system at home that he allowed my 4-year-old self to use. It had a 40-meg hard drive, an EGA color monitor, twin 5 1/4" floppy drives, a LaserJet (before it had model numbers), 16-color plotter, think jet, and the first paint jet. I wasn't yet literate, but thanks to HP's proprietary GUI called PAM (personal application manager), I could mouse to the program I wanted to use. My brother and I played a lot of Space Invaders, Mastertype, and Flight Simulator. We also made loads of pictures in its rudimentary drawing program and pushed them out through whichever printer or plotter was hooked up at the time.
My forever computer has to be my Amiga 600 bone stock the way I like it (for now) but I had in since it first came out and holds so many memories I could never let it go, and it one reason I have my current career as a systems architect
A fellow Amiga guy 🎉
Hahaha, this is epic, and EXACTLY what I'd do if I had such a beast. As it happens, I designed practically the identical riser board to yours so I could work on the floppy controller in my monstrous CPT8520 word processor. I actually did a house lol when you brought yours into view 😆 Seems there was only one 100 pin card edge connector left in the world over xmas, you must've got the 2nd last and I got the last. Splendid work sir, and happy new year!
Did you notice that all DIP switches were set to "open" during your continuity test?
But great video again. I love all your series, nice to see some bits from the Centurion world again after all those amazing tube activity :)
Yeah I noticed that too. But I really enjoyed the episode so it’s all good!
Just a minor issue on the B-roll. The shot containing the multimeter results and voiceover has the switch in the closed position. The up-close shot with the probes on the DIP block have them open.
Second unit must have not checked the script thoroughly and didn't keep the hardware in the correct state for the pick-up shots. :P
I tune in as much to see your enthusiasm as to enjoy the tech. LOL. Happy New Year 2025!
I have 2 - my DecSystem 2020, because it's easily the biggest and most unusual thing I own, and I have some fun ideas for it that I'm yet to execute but watch this space. Also I'm a sucker for big iron, who isn't :) . And secondly, and perhaps unexpectedly, my Mac LC, purely because it was the first ever retro machine I collected when someone at my hackspace wanted rid. It's battery bombed to hell, and covered in bodge wires to fix the fact, along with a whole bunch of misc damage, but it was my first ever retro machine and I love the thing
tech from my childhood, your channel - it`s a real time machine! thx a lot for all of your great job!