It looked something like this
lol.
I was very happy to finally get the Tandy 386 home.
Posted on 04/01/2012 6:21:36 AM PDT by Stoat
I won't tell anybody....your secret is safe with me ;-) "snicker"
Back in the ‘80s, when they were starting to roll out PCs to the rank-and-file at work, my sister was training a gentleman on how to use his new toy. It had a boot disk for the program (remember those?) She told him he had to treat it carefully and not lose it, as he could not run the program without that disk.
So he stuck it on the side of his file cabinet with a magnet.
...not to mention that RPN used to drive them crazy, leading to various wars fought purely out of frustration.
Motorolans from that era still speculate on “what might have been” if they had done a sales job on these couple of California geeks putting together a little computer for personal use: the Apple.
But those geeks were little more than faces in a large crowd of early techies, and the most lucrative potential customers were the ones with the obvious big pockets: the auto companies. So, that was the main prize that Motorola went after; as a result, they were for many years the prime supplier of MPU/MCUs to the automakers.
Those two geeks, Jobs and Wozniak, chose the 6502 chip,which was manufactured by a company called MOS Technology, as a direct competitor to Motorola with its 6800/01 series. In fact, its chief designer was Chuck Peddle, who had walked out of Motorola after helping design the 6800 with its plans under his arm. Motorola later won a settlement against MOS Technology for misappropriation of trade secrets.
Later on, when it came time for the Lisa and the MAC, Jobs realized he needed more horsepower than most 8-bit chips could provide (with the possible exception of the Motorola 6809, the chip chosen for the Tandy Color Computer). So Motorola was able to sell him on the 68000, which had 16-bit data bus and 24-bit address bus (expandable to 32 bits). The regularity of the 680x0’s addressing scheme and also its instruction set won the day for Apple for several years, until the adoption of the PowerPC, which was a joint effort of Apple, Motorola, and IBM.
The 8086 was an upgrade to the original strictly 8-bit 8080 design. It utilized various clever tricks to extend its capabilities into the 16-bit domain; but these tricks left the architecture clunky, and with significant limitations.
However, the IBM PC and its clones, using the 8088 and 8086 were astounding successes. Along with the from high volume sales of RAM and other support chips, Intel realized unprecedented revenues and profits. They plowed these into design of ever-faster versions of the 8088, and also significant architectural upgrades resulting in 3 GHz Pentiums and their descendants.
Even Apple finally decided to go with Pentium-class designs in their most recent computers (not the small portable products, though).
I haven’t kept up with the details of the recent Intel and AMD designs, so I don’t know how much of the 8086 architecture is still present in their MCUs.
If you have kids, I suppose they get a kick out of that pic. I do!
≤}B^)
Indeed...LOL!
Back when I was starting out with micros, 300 baud modems were of course around, and they always made a point to mention that they also supported the older 110 baud standard. 9600 baud modems were available (and that used to still be the limit on fax machines for a long time thereafter I believe) but cost the Earth and were business techology. 1200 baud was available, and the BBS around here were about half and half 300/1200 (and the 1200 supported the slower speeds). Next thing I knew, 2400 baud, then (for about a half second) 4800 baud (Motorola offered an upgrade to us haughty 2400 baud owners), then 9600 for the home. The phone lines around here wouldn’t handle anything over 1200 baud (on a good day), too much noise.
Z-modem protocol was a necessity for transfers, mainly because CPUs would only do one thing at a time online, and downloads took a while; Z-modem would pick up where it left off if there was an interruption.
Then the 14400 came out.
Then, 28800.
Then, 37something (I don’t feel like doing the math or looking it up).
Then, 56K, which only runs at something like 48K anyway.
It’s interesting, because in the mid-1980s in one of the now-long-defunct computer monthlies (either Personal Computing or Popular Computing, I think) the cover story was about the AT&T proposal for the 56K protocol over the existing phone network. Took ten years, or a bit more.
It looked something like this
lol.
I was very happy to finally get the Tandy 386 home.
I’m too busy saving up $12,000 for an 80Mb hard drive. :)
Great post. It reminds me of the Zevon song “Networking”.
Lord, flashbacks...
The good old days...
That was cheap verses a few years before...
I had no idea that DAK was still around. I have fond memories of reading their catalog as a youngster.
I bought my first Walkman-type cassette player (a KLH Solo) from there in about 1983. I thought I was the Man!
I had a work-study job at the tech. college I attended, and sometimes I helped the computer admin. One day she gave me a precious 5.25" diskette that I was to insert into every PC in the lab, run a series of updates off of it, and then return to her. She had spent a bunch of time crafting this diskette so it was very important that I be careful with it.
Once I completed the task, I carefully peeled the label off her diskette and applied it to a blank that I had (the original diskette was safely tucked away in my locker). I then wrote a note: "All machines in the lab updated!" and affixed both the note and the diskette to the steel door of her office with a powerful magnet.
A few hours later a very excited computer admin pulled me from class. Luckily she had a good sense of humor when I retrieved the real diskette and gave it to her. LOL!
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