Star Private Computer Museum Offers Glimpse Into the Past
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 24th Nov 2008 14:55 UTC, submitted by Ward D
Hardware, Embedded Systems 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.
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RE[3]: Impressive!
by sbergman27 on Tue 25th Nov 2008 01:44 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Impressive!"
sbergman27
Member since:
2005-07-24

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.

It goes back further than that. I moved from a 64k (well, 60K + 4k bank-switched) Apple ][+ running an 8 bit 6502 at 1Mhz to a 10MHz NEC V20, which was an 8088 clone, with 640k. The Apple was instant-on. The MS-DOS box had to POST and boot. Once up, the MS-DOS box was, for the most part, faster. But not much faster. 16 bit vs 8 bit, 10x the clock, over 10x the memory... and not much faster. I think I've actually spent *more* time waiting on each successive generation of machines I have owned since then. I guess that's just progress...

Edited 2008-11-25 01:45 UTC

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