Posted on 07/04/2015 7:11:01 PM PDT by ShadowAce
I know a guy who keeps a DEC PDP-12 in his basement. The thing pulls about 25 kW, so he doesn’t turn it on very often.
“Amiga was once a top-of-the-line machine—a successor to the Commodore 64.”
As I recall, the Amiga was Atari. The Commodore 64 was not.
The Amiga was Commodore...
There are many geeks that revel in maintaining old hardware.
IMO there will always be a way to read old media. And once it is transferred to more stable media and backed up multiple times it is essentially eternal.
What is really sad is all the old 35mm silent films on nitrate stock that have disintegrated :-(
The Library of Congress required that films be submitted as paper copies..each frame on a strip of photo paper. In many instances old films have been painstakingly restored from these paper copies.
I’ve worked with vintage Ampex AVR 2 and 6(?) 2 inch VTRs. The machines have held up better than most of the tapes I was sent.
The plan was to archive hundreds of quad tapes to digital beta. The digital beta format was dropped in favor of DVC pro. When (if ever) the digi beta deck at my former place of employment goes, who will care? No one cared about most of that old quad stuff.
Digital beta was to me much better overall than DVC Pro.
You mean the broadcast-grade ones? With the air bearings? Whoa.
They made a beautiful sound when they were running in sync, as I recall. That high-pitch vertical-retrace frequency, or some integer fraction of it.
I used to be able to hear that when I was a kid. Now I couldn't, but no one else can either. It's gone.
“What is really sad is all the old 35mm silent films on nitrate stock that have disintegrated”
I read something like 3/4 from the silent era are gone.
Occasionally they find copies of movies from private collections supposedly lost up until then.
The only pristine copy of Howard Hughs’ “Hells Angels” was found in John Wayne’s basement in his private collection.
M4L ‘history’
I don't know why but I can't stop laughing.
I didn't know what a DEC PDP-12 was so I looked it up:
Digital data may not degrade, but much of it is encrypted using long-forgotten passwords.
I used to build gizmos for a private investigator back when I was a kid.
He used Super 8 cameras that I modified with an intervalometer and shot a lot of old U-Matic and reel-to-reel video... ancient gear!
I mostly built sound-controlled switches, shutter intervalometers, telephone dial-pulse recorders, transmitters and time-stamp devices for him.
I have noticed that on Star Trek and other sci fi movies of that period and newer often have mention of “tapes” in hundreds or thousands of years in the future when we already have gone away from them.
Speaking of copyright, I once owned broadcast copies of the original New Coke commercials. Long after Coca-Cola dropped the product.
I made the mistake of bringing them to the attention of a Coca-Cola Bottling exec.
Didn’t even get a thank you. Wonder what that could be worth to a collector.
I have an Amiga, and a bunch of floppys filled with work. I need to try and boot her up.
In a way your both right... i had an Atari 800 as my first PC my second was Amiga 1000.... so here the deal... the Amiga 1000 was design by the same designer as the Atari 400, 800 and was meant to be their replacement
the Atari 400/800 for famous for their custom graphics chips and the Amiga 1000 was the next generation with the next generation chips but for some reason Atari declined to build it want to do their own in-house a project instead .... so original designer took it to Commodore.
a lot of the original 400-800 Atari guys went to the Amiga including because was really just the next generation of the 400/800.
Commodore really had very little to do with the machine design other than buying it
Dear God, let it die.
They had a polarized plastic cover that went over the face of the CRT, so it all blended into the trim in a very snazzy way.
Also, the one I'm talking about had two bays to the right of the section shown in that picture. It cost almost $50K new, although I guess it had some extras.
I know it had 4096 words of core memory. The words were 12 bits long too, plus a parity bit.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.