I still have an Amiga 3000 buried in my antique computer graveyard in the basement – unless my wife found it, concluded its decomposing carcass was junk and threw it out – and now, as a reminder of the Halcyon days of display lists, blitters and 6800 assembler code, Commodore has risen from the ashes with new versions of the 64, VIC-20 and Amiga.
They are not the real thing, of course: their processors are Intel, graphics Nvidia and OS Linux.
Still, a pleasant nostalgia moment.
The link didn’t work when I clicked on it. *sniff*.
The site seems to be going up and down like a toilet seat; as of the moment of typing this comment, it is back up.
This article may also be of interest to old techno-geeks with long memories:
http://technologizer.com/2011/04/01/osborne-computer/
Someone I worked with actually had one of those.
A few years later I remember seeing the first Toshiba colour screen on a laptop at a computer show – it was a $10,000 option as I recall.
When I started in this strange business, RAM was called CORE and it consisted of tiny ferrite rings threaded on wires. The first machine I worked on had 64k (same as a C64) of it because a Mbyte of it cost over $1m.
Not sure about that, Collins Radio put in the mainframe for Air Canada/Richardson (1968) and a 1 Mb core memory was about the size of a old desktop and definitely not that pricey.
I was going by memory (neurons, not core), but according to this it was > $2.5M for a 360/30 MB in 1965. Here is a photo of a floor standing cabinet that housed the core:
There is picture of a C-System rack at this eBay ad. They were built in standard aviation ATR cabinets.
http://cgi.ebay.com/1970-Collins-C-System-Computer-System-Photo-Print-Ad-/150580217423
I could switch out modules faster in 1968 than I can get into a modern PC.
I had a Sony version, colour, very robust carrying handle, weighed a ton. Early xx86 processor, accepted AT cards, 10 meg memory was a long card. Sold it at flea market for $20
I had a C64 back in 1982. I found a box of cassettes a while back and there was a cassette program in it, after all these years. BTW it is still in use by Amateur Radio operators as a stand alone Radio Teletype terminal. I cut my BASIC programming skills on this baby.