EBME Forums Forums Free discussion Out of Hours Technology Classic Computers

Nice kit ... with the build quality traditionally associated with Hewlett-Packard. 16-bit too, I see ... in 1968. And (of course), not a microprocessor in sight! You don't see many like that on eBay.

Did you check out the May 1971 price list - man alive - gouge city.

That was back in the days of hand-wired backplanes and ferrite-core memory don't forget. And, just look at the size of the thing!

But I'm intrigued ... what was the application (what was it doing) when you were still supporting it as late as 1993? Something "secret", perhaps? Oh, do tell!

No, it was no secret use It was when I was working for EXLOG (a mud logging company) on the oil rigs.
The Geologists would load the programs from 8" floppy discs. If I remember rightly, all it was used for was working out the bore hole dimensions and characteristics. It was a glorified calculator.

The 8" floppies were in a 19" rack configuration and in a bank of 4. For some reason they were always on the top slot of the 19" rack and weighed around 35 kgs. I very often had to change these single handed trying to juggle them into the optima slide rails. Considering I only weigh 70 kgs myself, it was a real challenge.

Thanks for that. Interesting. But I can't help wondering why they didn't use a calculator! I still recall my first Sinclair (complete with sticking 4 button) ... that must have been 1974.

When I left in 1993, they were using the Sun Sparcstaion 2 .
Now for 1993 this was the best money could buy and I think they retailed at about £5000 with 19" monitors.

Nice looking kit ... but I've always been on the side of Sir.Clive ... trying to do more with less.

It's a bit like the NHS (OK, here I go again) ... it's easy to do clever things when you've got a load of (other people's) money. But not so easy (but certainly more satisfying) when you're working at "shoe-string" level.

Hint: why didn't they use a BBC Micro or something similar (or certainly a high-end Archimedes)? Far easier to program, and would have done the job (whatever it was) just as well (badly), but for far less wonga.

Sorry to be quoting myself ...


... but could this be a case in point?

What's all this got to do with Classic Computers? Well if I didn't have to pay so many so-called stealth taxes for insane nonsense like this, perhaps I could afford to save a few more 8-bit micro's for the Nation!

Here you go guys, test yourself with this quiz...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7671677.stm

John

Only 8/10, I'm afraid (some of that stuff wasn't what I would class as "old")! Interesting remark about the so-called Osborne Effect, though.