SMART is not the whole story

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jgreco

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You guys are really making me feel old... my first computer was an 80286 AT clone with 1MB of RAM.

300px-Synertek_SYM-1_%28VIM-1%2C_1978%29.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYM-1

I still have one sitting in a box in my "museum" here. I kinda wish I had held on to the RCA Studio II with the programming cartridge that some enterprising members of the users club designed. That only had 512 bytes of memory.

... I remember the joy of finally owning a machine with greater-than-1K of memory ...
 

Spearfoot

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...I had an abacus in the 4th grade... does that count? :smile:
 

Robert Trevellyan

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Ericloewe

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I guess that's a failure iff your goal is to crush Intel.
Motorola tried, failed, moved on to presumably greener pastures and ended up being bought by google and torn to pieces to extract the patents with the rest sold off to Lenovo.
IBM tried, failed (in good part due to IBM's classic business model of divesting anything that isn't printing money) and stubbornly refused to admit defeat.
MIPS tried, got bought up by SGI, failed, got sold to Imagination and only stayed relevant due to a number of console wins (N64, PS1, PS2) and, more recently, embedded device SoCs (ARM SoCs in routers and the like used to be surprisingly rare).

As a sidenote, apparently a professor of mine co-founded one of MIPS' acquisitions and ended up making several million bucks off that sale. This raised a number of questions:
  • He was clearly incompetent at basic electronics and digital circuitry. So, how did he ever end up making millions off a MIPS acquisition?
  • Did he go on a massive drug abuse marathon that robbed him of his engineering knowledge? It seems consistent with his conspicuous consumption of iDevices.
  • If he is clearly incompetent and displays little interest, what is he still doing, nominally teaching? It's not like he seems to derive much joy out of that.
  • Is he really an incarnation of Wally, but more lucky?
 

ttabbal

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I can't compete with the sheer oldness of some of the gear, I haven't physically seen an MFM drive in a good while... But I can offer this oddity.

uploadfromtaptalk1467431270474.jpg


A Syquest 105MB removable cartridge HDD. Anyone want to raise me a 20MB Bernoulli? [emoji1]
 

jgreco

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I have a nice six CD-ROM SCSI disk changer around here somewhere.
 

Mirfster

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Kinda funny (maybe not so much to Robert.. :P) how this thread went a different route towards who has the oldest stuff.... Maybe a thread for "My stuff is older than yours" would be nice.

Would be funnier if only devices that are currently In-Use are allowed to be submitted... I can see people scampering to add janky devices to their system all in an effort to "one up" each other. ;)
 

Robert Trevellyan

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It's my own fault for highlighting my 80GB SATA drives. Found a 10GB IDE later...
:rolleyes:
 

jgreco

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Ahh... got me to click on that... Click-Baiter... :p

You know, if you hover your mouse over a link, usually your browser will tell you what that points to. It's a great thing to do before you go clicking on some link that infects your computer with something nasty. Most of us professionals do it out of habit. :tongue: :tongue: :tongue:
 

Jailer

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You know, if you hover your mouse over a link, usually your browser will tell you what that points to. It's a great thing to do before you go clicking on some link that infects your computer with something nasty. Most of us professionals do it out of habit. :p :p :p
And some non professionals as well. ;)
 

Mirfster

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Yeah, but all I really derived from:
You know, if you hover your mouse over a link, usually your browser will tell you what that points to. It's a great thing to do before you go clicking on some link that infects your computer with something nasty. Most of us professionals do it out of habit. :p :p :p
Is not to trust links posted by you... ;)
 

Jailer

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Mlovelace

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I had a commodore VIC-20 and a commodore 64, moved to a 80286 with 1 MB of RAM and later installed a 20287 math coprocessor. The huge upgrade was going from ega to vga graphics in that 286... ah the good ol' days.

At work I still have an original and functioning IBM XT.
 
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