[Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer:
> My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back
> then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people.
> At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a
> MITS Altair

The first desktop I ever ran across was in my math teacher's class in
Arlington, VA in 1977:  an HP 9830A (you can find pics of it via Google). 
Anyone else remember those?  It had 4K of RAM, kept your programs on a
cassette tape, printed out (quickly) on an 80-column wide thermal printer. 
You programmed it in BASIC; I remember writing a banner printing program and a
biorhythm chart generator.

Being exposed to bigger mainframe computers starting around '72, I never
thought of these micro things as anything other than toys.  So when the TRS-80
and Apple ][ came out, they held little interest for me--my first
factory-built (i.e. not cobbled-together) home computer was a 1982 DEC surplus
PDT-11/150; it ran RT-11.  The first "real" home computer, that rivaled
mainframe performance, came along about 10 years later:  the Intel 486. 
That's when speed-of-light constraints came to favor microchips over the
"frames" containing CPUs in multiple circuit boards spread across a backplane,
and transistor density has accelerated ever since.

By the time of the 486, Linux was available: today's supercomputing clusters
usually run Linux.

-rich