It's time to move to the popular vote deciding elections

Walt said:
The Altair 8080 was the first mass produced PC, produced a good three years before Tandy produced the TRS-80. Tandy did distribute their computers through their Radio Shack stores, but it was the Tandy Corporation that developed it.

Altair was out of New Mexico. The TRS-80 was designed by a Californian in the process of moving to Texas. Everyone involved with both were swirling around Homebrew Computer Club, and its predecessor in Menlo Park, California.
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Uncensored2008 said:
Not correct.

The Wang 2200 and Parc Alto were both released in 1975. Both based on the Intel 8008. Both pre-date the Altair.

In 1976, the Apple 1 was released.

It was three years later that the TRS-80 based on the immensely powerful (for the time) Zillog Z80 - in 1978. Apple followed quickly with the Apple II - based on the MOS 6502 (I wrote a compiler for that chip)

It's astounding really how short the 8 bit era was. 1979 brought the Motorola 68000 - a 16 bit chip. In 1980 Intel followed with the venerable 8086 and began their long dominance.
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I programmed them all back then. The Motorola 68000 series was by far the better chip, but the Intel was cheaper so most people bought those when true PC's came along while businesses went with the TI and the better OS, also expensive for its day. The earlier ones weren't sold in any great numbers for personal use until the Trash 80 came along. Apple's first PCs didn't do much either. I have versions of all the earlier ones, and the TRS 80 and the TI's are the more useful and mass produced in larger numbers. The 8086's made a splash because of the low price; the chips themselves were clusterfucks of design and programming, and the DOS OS was garbage as well, and so was Windows, which didn't get really stable until a few oem versions of 98 came along, and it took Windows 7 to become a decent OS. the only reason the PC industry didn't take off in Texas is Charles Tandy got cold feet and didn't want to risk the massive investment in what was then a rich kid's hobby horse.
 
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Into the Night said:
DOS is a transposition of CP/M to the x86 world, and added one new feature. CP/M derived from ISIS, not Unix. Unix first appeared in the Boston area. AT&T did NOT write Unix. They wrote a predecessor called Multix.
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UNIX is an operating system developed by Bell Labs in 1969. It is the foundation for the majority of networked systems and the most widely-used operating system in the world.
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AT&T was the primary developer of Unix, via Bell Labs. Both Apple and Windows stole heavily from it in developing their software.

PARC never went anywhere. Xerox was great at innovating new tech, but in this case sucked at follow through in product development.

And, PC stands for 'personal computers',not mainframes and servers.
 
Into the Night said:
All in all, the SDTC is manufacturing less and less, they whine more and more, and are losing more and more of their population, fleeing the tyranny of the dictatorship there.
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It has only been there this long because it's where the CEO's and developers wanted to live, near a college town. They can no longer get skilled people to move there and work given the exorbitant cost of living and now even the green card demographics have gotten the word. You can do better driving a truck in Amarillo than moving to California for less than $100K a year back in the 1990's. and it only got worse after, but of course the zillioniares and managers are completely oblivious to how the other half lives.
 
Uncensored2008 said:
PARC Wally.

Palo Alto Research Center, Massive innovation came through PARC. It is what created Silicone Valley. Xerox led the revolution from big iron to the world we know today.

en.wikipedia.org

PARC (company) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory is what created Silicon Valley. I really do not know what created "Silicone Valley", but I would assume it has to do with breast implants.

It all happened 15 years before PARC. I actually saw one of the Traitorous Eights signed bills.

In fairness, Stanford University was trying to support research even before Shockley, but Shockley was the beginning of private enterprise research.
 
Uncensored2008 said:
How would the Altair ship with a monitor? Lacking a video processing unit, as it did? There was a teletype option.
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At the time, no one was shipping with a monitor. The monitors were TVs, which meant you could only get 40 columns of text. People were buying graphics boards to hook up Altairs to TVs before the TRS even was released.
 
EdwinA said:
I programmed them all back then. The Motorola 68000 series was by far the better chip, but the Intel was cheaper so most people bought those when true PC's came along while businesses went with the TI and the better OS, also expensive for its day. The earlier ones weren't sold in any great numbers for personal use until the Trash 80 came along. Apple's first PCs didn't do much either. I have versions of all the earlier ones, and the TRS 80 and the TI's are the more useful and mass produced in larger numbers. The 8086's made a splash because of the low price; the chips themselves were clusterfucks of design and programming, and the DOS OS was garbage as well, and so was Windows, which didn't get really stable until a few oem versions of 98 came along, and it took Windows 7 to become a decent OS. the only reason the PC industry didn't take off in Texas is Charles Tandy got cold feet and didn't want to risk the massive investment in what was then a rich kid's hobby horse.
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I have to agree with you there. The Motorola 68000 was a decade or two ahead of anything from Intel. IBM's engineers said they would be crazy not to use the 68000. But IBM's business people realized they had more control over Intel, so went with them. Since then, Intel has put crazy amount of engineering to make the x86 work well.

DOS was not a modern operating system, and did not try to be one. It was what it was, a disk operating system(DOS), mainly just trying to run a disk. I get the feeling you realize that the programming basically had 100% control over the computer, and usually ignored DOS after they were loaded (except for accessing the disk).

Windows up until 95 was just a nice interface onto DOS. Windows 95 began to be a modern operating system. Not a great one, but a real one.

Silicon Valley had the critical mass nowhere else had. That is just a fact. Traditionally, you could breakdown the computer industry into three equal parts: Silicon Valley, the rest of America, and the rest of the world.
 
Walt said:
States like California and New Jersey do not get as much of their highways paid for by the federal government as states like Wyoming and Texas. I can understand Wyoming, it is a big state with few people. Why exactly does the rest of the country need to subsidize Texas?
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why are you subsidizing illegal immigrants?
 
EdwinA said:
I programmed them all back then. The Motorola 68000 series was by far the better chip, but the Intel was cheaper so most people bought those when true PC's came along while businesses went with the TI and the better OS, also expensive for its day. The earlier ones weren't sold in any great numbers for personal use until the Trash 80 came along. Apple's first PCs didn't do much either. I have versions of all the earlier ones, and the TRS 80 and the TI's are the more useful and mass produced in larger numbers. The 8086's made a splash because of the low price; the chips themselves were clusterfucks of design and programming, and the DOS OS was garbage as well, and so was Windows, which didn't get really stable until a few oem versions of 98 came along, and it took Windows 7 to become a decent OS. the only reason the PC industry didn't take off in Texas is Charles Tandy got cold feet and didn't want to risk the massive investment in what was then a rich kid's hobby horse.
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As @Into the Night already pointed out, DOS was a ripoff of CP/M. There were actually references to CP/M directly in the code Gates sent to IBM.

The 8086 was a very good chip, the problem is that it was expensive. So Intel brought out the crippled 8088, an 8-bit variant that was far cheaper, but could only address 64K of memory. To compensate, Intel added the insane offset system of dword+nibble to address a full 1mb of RAM. Then Gates and Allen set DOS to only address 256K - later expanded to 640K.

I had a TRS-80 in the day, but found the Apple II a far better machine. the 6502 was a far more elegant chip when working with assembly. I had Rodney Zaks "Programming the Z-80" as a Bible for the Trash 80, but never truly felt confident with it. The 6502 fit like a well worn glove. Everything in the address space was logically laid out and made sense. The registers were simple and logical. Once the Comadors came out, the 6502 was everywhere. Though vastly inferior to the Apple, they were cheap and every small business in the Southland had one. Kept me fed for a lot of years.
 
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