
The private computer museum of Max Burnet has every bit of computing nostalgia imaginable, ranging from the first UNIX PDP-7, a classic DEC PDP-8, the original IBM PC, a string of old Apple's including the Apple Lisa, a
Spectrum Sinclair (doh!) ZX81, Bill Gates' personal favorite the MITS Altair 8800, a DEC VT100 terminal, and a range of IBM mainframe consoles from the 1960s and 1970s. If you have never seen what this old stuff looks like,
this slideshow offers a snapshot of the past. And if you thought PCs became fashionable with the Apple iMac, then you haven't seen the lime green or powder blue consoles of some of DEC's machines from the 1970s.
Member since:
2006-01-10
I was kind of shocked not to see a few of Atari or more of Commodore's computers there. He has a C-64, but most of his stuff from that era were Apples.
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The whole time I was looking at the slides, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, if you took all of those computers, somehow clustered them together, it still wouldn't even be as fast as my quad core CPU is.... but then after putting Vista on my quad core, the cluster would easily out perform it
It's sad really, that when you look at the software that was made for the 8-bit and 16-bit era computers, and how the programmers just squeezed every bit of performance out of them, that we now are in the state of affairs, where the computers are so fast and have so many resources, that the software just isn't as optimized as it could / should be, so we really don't see any difference in the speed that things run.
Honestly, the first reaction I had when I went from a 16Mhz Atari Mega STe to a Pentium 75Mhz with Windows 95 was "It unzips things fast." Everything else seemed way slower.
Modern Operating Systems are so bulky and complex these days that I tend to spend more time playing around with settings than I do actually using applications. Of course, I'm weird like that, and like to explore the way the OS works, which is probably why I like reading OSNews so much
But there is a part of me that longs for the day of the slim OS that is just there to run the Applications, instead of needing the time to set it up and keep it working. Windows is horrible in this regard. Linux is a bit better, but then I still always tend to switch Distributions all too often, looking for that perfect mix. Although for the first time ever, I think Fedora 10 is going to keep me away from a Debian based distro! But that is for a different topic....
Too bad DEC went away, they made some cool stuff....