Coding on a 1980s business minicomputer [video] | Hacker News Reader

Coding on a 1980s business minicomputer [video]

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68 pointsxupybd11 comments

The author has a whole video series on restoring this particular mini-computer.

I really enjoyed watching them all, as he clearly explains all the obstackles that he encounters, and how he navigated them.

The contagious bursts of laughter are a great bonus too.

He is fun, he explains everything very clearly indeed but also knows how to tell a good story.

I am loving this series. I feel like this computer landed in exactly the right hands from a preservation aspect.

So... obviously "Centurion" was an also-ran historically. No Great Ideas were embodied by this machine, nor conceived by those using it. It was an encapsulation of ideas from other areas assembled for a more specialized purpose and aimed at an economic niche. It's a VIC-20, not an Apple II.

But what's most striking is how it embraced some areas (Teletype-style interaction) at the expense of new ideas. And... that's not wrong. The ultimate expression of hackers using TTYs to do productive work with a minimal interaction paradigm is still with us today. It showed up on PDP/11 and VAX hardware and not Centurions, but... it might have given a different quirk of history.

That development environment is indeed terrible and awful. But if you give Ritchie and Thompson and Joy one of these for a few years...

Just learned about Usagi Electric from this post. Cool stuff. Also... there are plenty of loose threads on the intarwebs to pull on to learn more about this machine. The 70s was a great time for computing. We all know the stories about microprocessors being developed at Intel and TI (and Motorola and MOS.) The micro guys were building something as beefy as they could from the ground up. But this is the story of the mini guys trying to find a way to compete with IBM and DEC (and Harris and Prime and ...) and cutting costs down while maintaining the core of mini-ish functionality.

I love this stuff. Props to David for restoring this beast. Thx @xupybd for posting this here.

Looking at that beauty, I notice that I kinda miss woodgrain right now, makes me wonder whether I'll miss translucent plastics in another 10 years.

For a modern take on PC with wood(grain), take a look at the Fractal Design North PC case [0]. It's a matter of taste of course, but I like it a lot.

[0] https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/ch...

System76 offers woodgrain sides in multiple colors on their Thelio desktop line [0]. I've been running one for six months as my employer-provided machine and it's been fantastic.

[0] https://system76.com/desktops

The Northstar Horizon computers (Z80, CP/M) had a woodgrain cabinet. I had a client back in those halcyon days who bought them because of that. He thought it looked better with his component stereo gear (don't ask...).

Yes another Usagi fan.

His restoration of the Centurion mini computer has been epic. Highly recommend to watch this video series.

He als got help from the community and people who worked at Centurion back then.

Also the backstory about the Centurion is wild.

https://youtu.be/0Gk1b4j0ls8

I'd also highly recommend viewers new to Usagi to lop around and watch the in-progress Wang Writer and PDP-11 series.

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