Ten beautiful computers | Hacker News Reader

Ten beautiful computers

gadgets.boingboing.net

39 pointspmjordan13 comments

I loved some of these - that Cray "Bubbles" picture is classic, and even though I never saw a ZX Spectrum, the color scheme is awesome 80's. Some are a miss, though - the CPC 464?

If I were making a list, I'd add the Connection Machine CM-2: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/parts/connection-machine... Now that's what a supercomputer should look like, not all these boring racks of commodity systems we get nowadays.

There should also be something from SGI - a bunch of pics are here: http://www.geocities.com/sgipics/

I'd also add the Tera MTA, a supercomputer system I'd bet few people have seen: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6270/su-tera.jpg

I'm surprised they omitted the NeXT Cube, the original Macintosh, Silicon Graphics Indigo, and the Be Box. Oh well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I remember lusting over a Sam Coupe as a cool upgrade to our Spectrums as a kid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SAM_Coupé.jpg

Also some of the Amstrad machines were quite beautiful in their ugliness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amstrad_PPC512_open.jpg

Without getting into computer nostalgia, I'd like to mention the Amiga 600. Although I can't say I ever gave much thought to the looks of it as a kid, I think it would still look great on my desktop today.

http://www.amigau.com/aig/a600.jpg

ugh, I remember how we used to mock 600 - mostly because of the specs, but it was kind of ugly too. 1200 on the other hand had the specs and the looks out of all amigas.

Nice... but to me there's nothing like the stark retro-futurism of the Commodore 8032-SK: http://www.1000bit.it/lista/c/commodore/8032sk/8032sk_mio2.j...

My dad's first computer was a DAI. So rare that I never heard anyone else mention it. It still looks good though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DAI_Personal_Computer.jpg

Wow - we had once of those at school - 2mhz 8080 w 48k. ISTR it had some interesting bugs in the BASIC interpreter that would trigger a stack overflow. The first clue was the screen RAM filling with the runaway stack - on it's way to overwrite the as yet unsaved program.

It did a very good job of highlighting just how good the newly released BBC micros were that displaced it.

ah! According to the Wikipedia page, the BASIC interpreter was written from scratch and quite rapidly. It was apparently much faster than the contemporary MS Basic. Wouldn't be surprising if it was buggy, although my dad did a lot of programming on it and without to much trouble as far I remember.

This made me laugh:

"D-Wave Systems of British Columbia announced a prototype quantum computer in January, 2007. It can play Sudoku."

Woohoo!

Yeah, but it can play every game of Sudoku ever - all at the same time!!!!

Nice, I have a ZX80 and a 48k Spectrum (as well as a ZX81) on my bookcase. They are as nice to look at as they were to play with.

Not a computer system but a Holographic Modulator looks pretty nice: http://bayimg.com/CaPEMAAbL

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