1980 Atari 800 ad: “It will never become obsolete”
bookofjoe.com
bookofjoe.com
By using the word "obsolete," the communicator is being--intentionally or unintentionally--intellectually shallow. Even if the word serves their purpose, they are also wrong in a big way.
The fact is, this machine still does what it started out to do, technically speaking. If you look up the dictionary definition of obsolescence though, you'll find some really terrible news: "no longer useful." An Atari 800 is no longer useful? That's arguable, to say the very least.
The best way to communicate obsolescence with accuracy, precision, and rationality is with a reference point, like a market: "This tool no longer serves its original target market with the efficacy that it once did." This is much more precise. However, it opens the door to another depth question: Which markets or sub-markets might it _still_ serve, and even speak to rather loudly?
IMO the discourse of obsolescence is a curse on modern civilization. We are missing out on some huge _qualitative growth_ lessons until we learn to think in a more nuanced way about how technology serves us all.
What I'm saying is, think about the long tail and the extraction of value from this technology. It's far from incapable. I don't know about you, but I could plan a global economic takeover on an 800; still can. I can also teach someone else to do so. In fact, it's easier to stay focused. There's no malware and comparatively little practical need for encryption.
We waste a lot of qualitative profit as we march forward in search of breadth. Here we are robbed blind by the obsolescence model, which imparts heavy bias to our thinking.
But it will be painfully slow, unreliable, and potentially expensive compared to more modern alternatives.
No one is really being robbed here - because there's a point where incremental changes in technology mean that a product becomes qualitatively different. Not just faster, but able to do things that an older product can't.
In this example the qualitative differences are obvious. You can't make calls, watch videos, browse the web, develop modern software, play modern games, write modern documents, or print them with a modern printer.
You can still do some very simple programming on it, but you can't share the code without hard-to-find extras.
So - obsolete. It's capable of some extremely limited applications, none of which are particularly useful. And it's quite useless for anything else.
I'm sure that machine will still power on after in 20 years. Try that with today's flimsy throwaway junk.
I can't think of any modern machines that will be unusable in 5 years. Even my smartphone is 7 years old and still perfectly fine.
Until a few years back, I regularly used an old Cromemco System III computer that was built in 1979 (it has since been donated to a computer museum).
Please don't take this as sneering -because I'm genuinely interested in late 70s micros!- but what did you use the system 3 for? Can you tell me about it as a computer? It's not a computer I know much about and I'm interested in what you would've used it for, especially recently.
I forget the system clock speed, but I think it was around 2 MHz. The thing was made of steel, weighed over 100lbs, and contained 4 8-inch floppy drives (combined capacity for all four was about 2.5 megs, I think, but it may have been 5). The one I had contained an insane 512 megs of RAM. If I remember correctly, the one I had was purchased new for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 (1979, which is about $35,000 today). This was, at the time, serious hardware. It even did high-resolution graphics that would (barely) still be considered high-resolution today.
Turning it on literally made my lights dim momentarily and sounded like a jet engine spooling up. It was glorious.
Nothing about it is practical in today's terms, of course.
I had fun doing things like writing compilers and software to use it as the coordinator for a crazy project I was engaging in at the time: I had networked 10 Kaypro IIs together with it and was using the entire combined system as a single multi-CPU computing machine.
What I mostly did with it, though, was to experiment with hardware. The System III was an S-100 bus machine, and did not even have a motherboard as we think of them these days. It had a backplane that you installed cards into to provide all functionality. This made it really fun and easy to experiment with changes that would, in a modern machine, have required altering the motherboard.
Actually, not only you can use an SD card as mass storage without much effort, thanks to the many people who build modern peripherals for the SIO bus, but you can probably telnet and ssh as much as you want from it (smart modem-like network interfaces). If I wanted, my Atari XE (mostly an 800, slightly modernized) could easily be used for light local text editing.
Think of an Atari 800 as a small cluster of specialized computers each doing its own thing, connected through a serial bus. BTW, other computers of the time, most notably the C64/128, also did that.
I spend my weekdays in front of a computer that has two displays daisy-chained through a serial bus. The hard drives are on other serial buses, just because I have a couple extra ports.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
Some people are taking classic cars and converting them to electric power, without changing the fact that they are basically un-aerodynamic deathtraps and without even getting rid of the manual transmission. That may not be what you consider optimum, but it is logical given some peoples' values.
This is one of my dreams! I own an awesome 67 Pontiac wagon which is a lot of fun, but after decades of riding in modern vehicles you just can't help noticing how much louder and smellier everything is with an old carbureted v8. It's wonderful to be able to pop open the hood and make sense of what's going on in there, but I'd still trade that engine in a heartbeat for a quiet electric in the same exterior.
So, I'm saying you can't forget that any computer is probably more useful than you think, given suitable software. These days, it should be easier than ever to make an interface for something weird, given the resources for hobbyists like FPGAs. I remember 15-20 years ago, when I had access to a "Fat" Mac 512K which had pretty much no software including an OS, and I wondered if I could do something with it, because I had recently been learning about Linux. I didn't go very far with the experiment, but I copied some minimal hand assembled bootstrap code to the boot sector of a floppy (avoiding any problems with the drive being unreliable at reading large amounts of data) and then I rewired a Mac printer cable to connect it to the PC serial port, and I got the Mac to download an image to its framebuffer. I didn't have the motivation or stick-to-it-ivness to continue, but I had the vision at the time of a Mac as a terminal for Linux.
Obsolete (Adj.): no longer used or needed, usually because something newer and better has replaced it.
It doesn't matter whether the Atari 800 still does something. It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option. We live in a world where a 32-bit microcontroller costs about the same as a banana. $10 buys you a single-board computer with roughly the same performance as a mid-00s desktop.
Human effort is worth something. So is energy, so are raw materials. Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap. Melt down the old stuff for scrap metal, burn the plastics for fuel and use that material and energy to do something more useful.
I'm not sure this is true. At the very least, it's not hard to imagine circumstances where it's the best available option for recreational use (hacking on, programming for, etc.)
> Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap.
It isn't a good use of your resources. But it can be a perfectly fine use of resources for someone else. It all depends on what turns your gears.
I would tend to define obsolescence based on the task. (Arguably this is just the "micro" definition corresponding to your market-based "macro" version.) Obsolescence is when another alternative exists for doing the task, that improves on the previous alternative to a sufficient degree that you prefer it, and don't see yourself ever willingly going back to the previous alternative.
Just to pick some random domain, from outside computers: Steelmaking/metallurgical technology at the turn of the 20th century tended to produce a relatively high carbon-content steel, which was more brittle, especially at low temperatures, and could cause a ship to crack, take on water, and sink. As steel tech improved, and new ships were built with the newer steels, those failures started happening less often. Steels that were less "hard" but more "tough" made navigation safer.
On the other hand, and maybe to your point, most of those older ships of the higher-carbon steel, that didn't sink, were still able to serve out their service lives. Maybe if you found a way to put them on routes in warmer waters, you could've extended their lives even more. Which, translating to your conception, would be adapting to the new market or sub-market.
So hey, at least for shipbuilding, your model seems to fit!
The idea of obsolescence reflects an often unquestioned bias toward, or belief in, progress. If that which is newer or came later is always better, and if we're always (or mostly) moving forward in a more-or-less unbroken arc of steady unalloyed progress, then of course older things are obsolete. When in fact it's usually more complex than that. For example when moving to a newer technology, there's often something else desirable that has to be sacrificed, or that gets ruined, in order to get the improvement. So progress is rarely unalloyed (no pun intended given the steel talk above), and obsolescence is also, rarely unalloyed.
Machines wear out. If I can't get service manuals or replacement parts, then it's no longer useful, even for its original purpose.
I've thrown out more than a couple pieces of computer hardware, over the years, which were almost certainly 99% fine, but unrepairable.
On ebay right now, I see 6 "Atari 800" machines. 1 is advertised as "working".
The best way to understand this thinking is to look at people who already employ it. Look at the people using fountain pens and Gregg shorthand in 2019. And did you hear about the Polish auto shop that was using a C64 well into the 21st century?
We junk really, really good standalone ideas because human psychology determines that they don't fit into an emerging network of systems. This creates literal tons of waste at a personal and individual-business level and forces humans to think in unsustainable ways about what technology is and how it's used. We need new models to help us address the qualitative problems within the tech world.
I was happy with my C64, but the 1541 drive kept failing (even 25 years ago). As a user, I'm able to ignore network effects for the device's use. That's merely an inconvenience. I can't ignore network effects for repair and maintenance. That will turn it into a fancy paperweight.
It's not like a pen and shorthand. Those I can use even if no company wants to support me. I could even make my own pen, without too much trouble, if somehow all pen companies went out of business next week.
Repairability is dependent on your skillset and interest, though. Aside from machines that used custom chips and those chips failing (and even then, you can usually replace those with modern tech combined with effort and ingenuity), I can't think of any old-school machines (and very few modern machines) that are actually unrepairable.
This iterative evolution continues to this day on PC with the existence of Bluetooth being on motherboards now instead of being a PCI card or USB dongle you would install.
And there is a great example of going too far in the console gaming space: the Sega MD at the end of its lifespan, with the 32X and CD modules, was a hulking beast with a tangled mess of cables and power cords.
I love making old hardware do new tricks, but I sure as hell wouldn't use it to watch YouTube or debug software on. Not even 'sceners do that.
Comparisons to YouTube while amusing are more like a smoke screen. Obscures value, sure. But also there's not much to it. It's not a substantially deep commentary on the Atari; it's a commentary on the market reference point. And my point is that you've got to understand the Atari first; the unique market part comes after.
I wouldn't recommend watching YouTube on an Atari either. :-)
Modern hardware that I've got:
1. Mid-2015 13" Macbook Pro, mostly idle, battery charged, screen fully dimmed: 11W (16W with screen at full brightness)
2. My 2011 i7-2600K desktop: ~100W idle (packed away right now - but it's about that)
I happen to have my old Acorn junk set up right now, so here's some measurements from that:
1. BBC Master 128: 12W
2. BBC Micro model B: 25W
And some other Acorn peripherals. Add these figures to either of the above:
1. Acorn 6502 second processor: 5W
2. 5.25" disc drive: 2W (when in use)
3. Ancient early-80s monitor of unknown provenance: 50W
4. Acorn-branded CM8833: 85W
Looks like my favourite Acorn-branded monitor is actually pretty bad :( - however it's not actually drawing a huge amount more than the 2 x 27" monitor setup I have with my Macbook Pro, even though the pixels per watt isn't quite as good.
In fact: the overall power draw for BBC Master 128 setup vs Macbook Pro setup, both period-authentic, both (if not cutting edge for the time) up to the task of a good range of period-authentic workloads, is about the same! - and even if I was certain 1000x was an overestimate, this is still a bit of a surprise...
Move to the microcontroller world, though, and 1000x is a vast underestimate. The main core in a current project of mine runs at 24 MHz and draws around 1.2 mW without even entering sleep. This system could probably emulate a Master 128 just fine in real time, for about 1/10,000x the power.
The Master 128 runs at 2MHz. For each emulated microsecond you need to (broadly speaking) do at least 2 CPU updates, 2 VIA updates, and 16 bitmap bits/1 teletext glyph. 24MHz = 24 cycles per emulated µsec :( - good luck even squeezing the video output into that, let alone the other stuff. Rather you than me!
(This also ignores handling the FDC, ADC, and ACIA. The devices accessed via the VIA will also take a bit of time to emulate...)
My macbook pro is only drawing 15W because it also includes a monitor and keyboard and happens to be plugged in. Otherwise I can emulate a data center worth of these machines without drawing ANY additional power ;)
The debate is that he is of the opinion that tabletop games (particularly ones with complex scoring or recordkeeping) should be computerized. I am of the opinion that they should not, because when you change the form factor, you are changing the game even if all the rules remain the same. We are humans, and as humans, physicality matters to us.
I think that the same thing comes into play with old-school hardware. The hardware itself is important, and no amount of emulation can really replace it.
My friend and I will never agree on this with tabletop games, and that's OK. You and I may equally never agree about old-school hardware, and that's also OK.
Except mercury delay line memory is completely uninteresting except as a footnote to computer history, which doesn't change the fact they're heavy, expensive to run, and quite fragile. And I don't consider "It's a museum piece!" to mean something isn't obsolete.
Depends on what your definition of "obsolete" is, I suppose.
Not surprising IMHO. These machines had 30+ years to be thoroughly analyzed, obscure hardware tricks found, undocumented features documented, etc. We have internet now and all this knowledge is relatively easy to access. Back then you had perhaps a magazine, two books and a limited social circle to work with.
Not to mention how much easier everything is when you have a powerful computer to develop on. You can precalculate complex things, there are decent text editors, graphics editors, assemblers, disassemblers, emulators, etc. Compare that to the fact that for a lot of micros in 1980s the edit-run-debug cycle included a pencil and a notebook.
I mean, the paintings at Altamira are still admired today, 36 thousand years after they were made.
But I think what I liked best about it was the memory banking. There was RAM installed in the same address space as the system ROMs. You could always write to the RAM, and could choose whether reading would happen from the RAM or the ROM.
This meant that you could easily modify the system by copying the ROM contents into the underlying RAM and then edit them to your heart's content. Or just turn the ROM off entirely and write machine code utilizing the full 64K.
It was tons of fun.
Also, although this is not C64 specific, I loved the floppy drive because it was a real standalone computer in its own right, which you could program. This let you do multiprocessor stuff back when multiprocessor systems were expensive niche things.
I did that! Got a trip to the International Science Fair for it.
There is entropy, then there are social actors whose material interest clash with a life of sustainability adding to the drama we already must face in society.
Here's the part of the script comparing the simple lives of the native bushmen of the Kalahari desert to "civilized man":
These Bushmen have never seen a stone or a rock in their lives.
The hardest things they know are wood and bone.
They live in a gentle world, where nothing is as hard as rock, steel or concrete.
Only miles to the south, there's a vast city.
And here you find civilized man.
Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment.
Instead he adapted his environment to suit him.
So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery.
And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices.
But he didn't know when to stop.
The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier...
...the more complicated he made it.
Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn...
...how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat.
And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings...
...now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt...
...every hour of the day to his self-created environment.And patriarchy was never contingent on those things anyhow. It's just a cultural choice that got stuck because it was woven into the form of citified civilization.
> Childbirth works better squatting.
I would like to see citations indicating that these statements are true to a significant degree that modern improvements are of little value.
I can't even find data on maternal mortality before 1800.
The point was "knowing when to stop".
Civilization creates these juggernauts that start moving and when they reach their goals their momentum carries them past need and reason.
How many laws do we need? Do we need more roads (or lanes)? Should taxes increase? in percentage!? Do we need to "add value" to every product ever? Do kids need more homework? Do you need another iPhone?
Douglas Adams wrote: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
I like to look at classic car ads, and I saw one for a car from the 60s or whatever, and I forget the exact phrasing, but it said it had had a modern type of stereo installed, which had AM/FM and a CD player. Which I thought was funny, because that kind of pinpoints the assumed age/generation of a buyer. Going by Adams, someone who thinks car CDs are new, but good, could have been up to 35 in 1985 when the first car CD players came out. Which is exactly the age to remember mid to late 60s cars as desirable as a teenager. But now they are close to 70 years old, and that's why the prices of such cars are trending down.
I'm not sure that it's inevitable that you hate new things as you get older. Maybe it's more that people feel insecure about their ability to choose which new things they like, because it becomes a disorienting flood.
Actually, the question is still not easy to answer, even if you'd those same fundamentals. Both because effects of stuff like a $15 minimum wage on evolutionary fitness are incredibly hard to predict and out fitness function is theoretically steady a "1" until the last leaf dies. We have to make guesses based on highly incomplete data. But there are some predictions we can be quite confident in based on life on earth: Improving the ability to accumulate knowledge and manipulate our environment (or even yourselves) seems like a highly effective strategy. We should keep moving it forward as best as we can. If that is in the form of millions of man hours "wasted" playing computer games and generations of obsolete graphic cards so those cards could become cheap and highly capable, in the process giving mankind tools to boost AI research, then so be it. Even if it makes life more complicated. Even if we need to learn a lot. Even if it requires tons of collaboration. I'm eager to witness all the other stuff we will come up with by mastering additional technologies.
Freezing or significantly slowing down technological progress in the name of what's natural seems crazy to me. I suppose we at least all agree to "only" have like 5b years to get off this rock. But waiting that long and in the mean time relying on subsistence farming doesn't seem like an optimal survival strategy...
Most problems we currently face are not a result of civilization itself. Count of laws or roads doesn't seem very material to me. Adding value treadmills just indicate some failure points of capitalism. But everything else we had before was even worse.
What is the purpose of this exposition? We have many problems to fix, but none of them will get fixed by going backwards.
Interestingly, I found the following link which mentions that there is a form of tumor in humans (that may or may not be benign) which produces horn-like protrusions. Obviously this is not generally considered attractive, but if it were, society would change!
https://www.quora.com/How-can-natural-selection-explain-the-...
> planned obsolescence
It amazes me that people keep using this term -- which was associated with washing machines in the 1940's -- to rant about buggy software and engineering improvements.
Stop perpetuating the myth. There is zero truth to it. (And before you say it: Slowing down older phones to account for battery decay and balance battery life is intentional and it PROLONGS the device ... exactly the opposite of planned obsolecense).
Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. I use an Ipod Mini from 2004 when I work out at the gym. It is 15 years old and works FINE. My iPhone 7 crashes weekly. Prior to that I used an iPhone 4 for six years until I kicked it down a storm drain. (Long story.)
> software bloat
OK. Two. This is due to technoculture determining how technology can be used. New features are added before old features are optimized, and software bloats and breaks. This is a result of pushing the boundaries of tech. Some features will survive the evolution, some will not. But it is not intentional, it is a side effect of insanely rapid development and productization due to customer demand.
No one has a gun to your head making you buy they latest tech. As long as people demand the latest and greatest, the industry will rush to provide. This is a consequence of accelerated innovation.
Running on an upgraded late 2008 MacBook and running Mojave, but only thanks to people keeping it compatable as a hobby. According to Apple, this setup is obsolete and incompatable with Mojave.
For example, I have an old iPad2 (last Apple device I bought) that is working perfectly (the hardware). But I'm not able to install anything "new" on it because iOS 9 is no more supported by applications. Why Apple doesn't open specifications so i can install Linux on it to extends its life for many years to come?
I take an example from Apple but it's applicable to ANY companies.
How long is it reasonable?
One of the reasons I have heard about people buying Apple hardware is that it has great resale value.
So the answer is: Long enough to keep this true.
If Apple keeps its current path, people will stop buying Apple hardware and it will hurt Apple's bottom line.
But yes, I concede they have the money to make mistakes for about 20 years. So they do make the mistakes.
In this case, they bothered to make this thing with decent build quality and for that I thank them. It is even easily upgradable and the battery is accessable.
However, if I want dev tools to work on it, Apple requires me to use their recent OS, which they claim will not run on this hardware.
Now if they had a good point economically and it was a massive ballache requiring a lot of resources, then fair enough. But the patching utility appears to be the work of one person in their spare time, which in the grand scheme of things, especially since Apple is hardly strapped for cash and resources, does look like Apple have decided to economically obsolete this machine for reasons that have very little to do with it being technically obsolete.
Sandy Bridge laptops are not supported by Mojave and up, but will probably be softwarematically fine while continuing to get more features while running the latest versions of Linux or Windows. Amazing technologies like changing your wallpaper over the course of the day (GNOME in the '00s onward) or making your screen yellow are all supposedly not functional on macOS on those Sandy Bridge laptops.
That's why I put more ram in it.
The yearly cycle of education means that the next time I do something might not be until a year later. This is plenty of time for link rot or for an edtech start-up to go out of business (or even for a surviving company to break things in incompatible ways). This makes me reluctant to rely of technology in the classroom. Of course, a year is a long time in the tech world so these things are reasonable. In education, though, it feels like “I can’t believe I only used this website twice (I.e. two years) and they already went out of business.”
I have an HP2420dn laser printer. I have had it so long I can't even remember when I bought it, but it has probably been around 20 years. Every 10 years or so it needs maintenance to replace the wear parts. Nowadays I can't find anyone who will do this work because new printers are so ridiculously cheap that the maintenance market has collapsed. So my perfectly serviceable printer is probably going to end up in the landfill. Sometimes I despair at the state of "civilization".
Contra the "firmware bloat is deliberately making old devices useless" argument, a 3GS on the original firmware is miserably sluggish and laggy. With modern eyes, you become painfully aware of how Apple used animated UI transitions to disguise a fundamentally very slow device. The original iOS 3.0 firmware is also strikingly primitive - at launch, the exciting new feature was copy and paste.
3G connectivity is woefully, miserably slow when you're used to 4G. A 480x320 LCD is visibly pixelated, even when it's only 3.5". It feels like peering through a broken telescope. There's no front-facing camera, the main camera is terrible, the battery life is atrocious even with a new battery, the GPS receiver takes an eternity to get a location fix.
Try one out for ten minutes, try out the cheapest of contemporary Chinese smartphones and I guarantee that you'd prefer to keep the no-name Android phone.
It all depends on exactly what software you're running on what hardware.
Even for programmers, the fact that many are still living in vim/emacs shows how little the core operations of computing have changed.
I would love an OS that focuses on offering stable, well integrated, well designed functionality and interfaces, and does not change every 12 months because the marketing/design people were bored. Releases would instead focus on stability, performance, and bug fixes. Adding support for new data formats as they appear would be required, but not in a way that needs to change anything on the end user side of things (your photo editor can now open/export HEIC, great!).
I know that most of my family would be happy with something like this, because I hear them complain all the time about how some software update changed where everything was, or even worse - removes functionality they needed.
In a weird way, I think the closest thing to this that exists today is Mathematica - reading interviews with Stephen Wolfram about how he uses it is fascinating. I’d want that, but for everyday users, not geeky mathematicians :)
(Luckily, MAME runs Atari M.U.L.E. beautifully under Linux.)
M.U.L.E. Is still one of the best games ever made. They had another game called Seven Cities of Gold. It was pretty fun too. I doubt you could make that game today but it was fun to play with friends on the reservation.
His main argument was that the memory and CPU limitations helped curtail software feature bloat. When asked about the possibility of advanced Multimedia features becoming more desired among consumers, he shrugged it off, saying an expansion peripheral would do the job just as well as buying a new machine, without having to learn a new machine entirely.
Now that we have cartridges for the C64 that allow for massive data storage and 32+ Megs of RAM, maybe he was right. We could have all been using C64s or Amigas with a ton of expansion cards/carts installed.
When I started viewing computing in terms of connectivity, the device categories and developments made a lot more sense. We were fine with switches and printouts - except that we wanted to input and retrieve things faster, so we ended up with display, keyboard and mouse, storage media and networking, etc. The Turing Machine parts are important, for sure, but they are most important in pushing the I/O to capacity, and only sometimes get to exercise abstract computing prowess.
I think there's some truth to this - if you have a limited amount of RAM, you can't just throw RAM away and do the easy thing. You have to be careful with it. The flip side of that is of course one man's feature bloat is another man's valuable feature, and some things just _won't_ fit in the limited amount of RAM.
And that's just for text! It's stunning to me how inefficient text can be when every byte counts.
I've never owned an AIO, and I'm not sure I'll ever "get it." But then I'm just not the target audience for that particular niche market.
I'd even prefer my laptops to be more "upgradeable", but lately they come with LPDDR3 soldered on, and if I'm really lucky, I can maybe install a SATA or M2 drive.
It also reminds me of a Brother computer/typewriter/printer I used for a while. Thermal built-in printer and a 3-row LCD display.
With all the brand new tech in the house, whenever friends or kids visit, the first things they play with are the tunrtable and the typewriter that's nearing a century old.
In contrast to the IBM-compatible PC form factor, the idea that you'd want to embed the computer into the monitor or keyboard, or replace the tower enclosure with a hockey-puck sized amalgamation of microscopic, proprietary, ESD-sensitive parts held together with glue, is a little crazy.
I admit there's a place for laptop computers, but I don't think that most of those use cases require aerospace-grade thinness and lightness to the extent that it precludes serviceability. Or maybe I'm just bitter over the fact that my high-end E-ATX silent case now houses a mini-ITX board with a single graphics card and onboard M2 storage, and I can't find a replacement that I like for my aging Thinkpad...
(I plug in two monitors, keyboard, mouse, ect.)
I can understand needing a standalone, modular computer, if you're actually doing things that require a very powerful computer.
At that point I was thrilled that I could get rid of a KVM.
I mean, drinking soda and gaming is practically a meme at this point, so goodbye to all those customers. And anyone else who wants a beverage while they edit photos or do their taxes.
I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm just concerned for the longevity of your computing hardware.
The keyboard was terrible, but I am nostalgic for it. Those raised bumps that surround each "key", the on-trend brown and yellow scheme. That thing was built like a tank.
Also, same typing feel as a 2019 Macbook, but with better dust resistance!
"Unicomp was started in 1996 when we purchased keyboard technology from Lexmark International and IBM. You may recall that Lexmark manufactured the high quality Model M keyboards for IBM computers and terminals prior to 1996. Many of the same people, who in 1995 helped produce millions of keyboards for Lexmark customers, continue to manufacture keyboards for us today. Our goal is to build on our heritage and continue to provide our customers with the highest quality keyboard products."
In any event, I've been very happy with their products. It's like 1988 all over again for me.
> I built myself a custom PC inside one of my favorite mechanical keyboards, a dampened Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional Type 2 S
I don't know how they find these folks, but the interviews can be absolutely awesome. Sometimes people who's names I never knew, but who's companies or products I absolutely remember give detailed background on the goings on of early computing in a way that's just really amazing. There's hundreds of interviews now.
Their non-interview shows are mostly about the three hosts talking about the modern Atari 8-bit scene. New hardware, new software and so on. Devices for using the internet, SD cards and such on these ancient machines.
I never had one of these boxes, and only ever saw one a couple times, but I've grown to deeply respect the thought and engineering that went into these machines.
https://bookofjoe.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5dea53ef01a73dea5... [IMG]
I recalled the MAME thing and the idea of installing a modern PC platform in a retro arcade cabinet, i think and old borked atari cabinet with a harddrive dock in place of the rom port would be a cool looking place for a gaming[mame-ing] PC.
The BBC Micro itself was used to design the first ARM, and the 6502 was a strong influence on that RISC design.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_te...
The Atari 800 is in some ways an ancestor of the ARM platform, realizing that ARM itself adapts wildly in efforts to maintain a dominant position in mobile computing (i.e. the Thumb variable-length "RISC" instruction set, massive 64-bit architecture changes).
How do you figure that? The 6502 was itself based on the Motorola 6800, and is a pretty typical accumulator architecture. It could hardly be any more different from the ARM.
The development of the ARM architecture was carried out on 6502-based systems -- but only because they were conveniently available, not because there was anything special about that processor that guided development.
I'm sure I read somewhere that the 6502's low interrupt latency was also an influence (the 8-bit Acorn stuff was IRQ-heavy, no DMA), but clearly it wasn't in the above PDF, so I've no idea where this came from :( - but this might not be 6502 influence necessarily, as the Z80's IRQ latency looks OK, maybe just a desire not to fuck it up like the 68000.
ARM SBC is like 6502 SBC, just an ADD with inverted input... so... maybe that counts?!
The 6502 influence is indeed not all that visible in the programming model or instruction set, but I don't think this is a bad thing.
On the flip side: it also means that the processor can't run any faster than memory, which is not great.
Anyways, the 6502 uses a rather narrow 8-bit data bus with no cache, so instruction fetch takes up the majority of memory accesses -- in fact, I'm not sure you can get under 50% of memory accesses used for instruction fetch without pathological instruction sequences. It's incredibly inefficient by modern standards; even 68000 was an improvement in this regard.
I think that particular lie (and it was always a lie) came up so often because technology was advancing at an incredible rate, and it made people reluctant to buy computers because they knew that it was going to be obsolete in less than a year. The old "joke" -- funny because it was true -- was that a computer was obsolete the minute you took it out of the box.
The pace of hardware change has slowed considerably since then -- now advances are more along the lines of "the same thing, but faster and/or smaller". Worthy advances, to be sure, but nothing that makes last year's machines garbage.
Since it's not always (ever?) connected to the internet, malware is much less of a problem.
Games probably work fine as well, as they are stored on rugged cartridges and don't depend on cloud services, internet-connected DRM, or game servers which tend to be shut down after a year or two.
I really like the aesthetics of the Atari 400/800 and not for the logo or the case design but just for the colours. The browns/yellows/oranges are quite inspiring for a bit of modern day UX.
I know they didn't sell these machines for people to steal the colour scheme from 40 years later, but I really like lots of aspects of the design including the colour or the units.
The retro tech scene I find a little weird. It is surprisingly strong and there are Youtube videos of someone changing the capacitors on these things and getting views in the millions. It is as if retro computing is the new model railway hobby or 'Airfix' of our times.
The Atari 800 is better in virtually every other respect. It has an actual OS instead of a KERNAL, the SIO bus is what modern USB was based on and is better than the IEC bus as it is not crippled to tape speed like the IEC bus is and supports a tape drive and modem in addition to floppy drives and printers. It has a 256 color palette and more video modes. The 6502 CPU is faster. The DOS is easier to use with a menu instead of arcane commands. The BASIC is friendlier with sound and graphic commands, although slower. It can autoboot from tape and disk.
I had a C64 as a teen but today I appreciate the Atari 800 much more. It's an amazing system and the designers went on to design the Amiga, which was effectively a 16-bit version of the Atari 800 utilizing the same 3 custom chip design.
The C64 was more popular because it was less expensive and better for playing games, but it wasn't a better computer.
Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set blew my mind and I probably became a programming tool developer because of it.