While I wrote programs from 1970 while training in electronics, my first commercial work started in the beginning of 1974. I bought my own in 1977, an 18 month old mini.
While you may have heard that they computers back then were the length of a garage, I can assure you this is no joke. Mine was housed in my garage, suitably lined and air-conditioned of course. It was still fully operational when I sold it for scrap in 2000.
Here is a pic of part of my 1975 vintage Friden/Singer/ICL System Ten mini-computer. Processor not shown - was about 5ft wide.
Four Model 40 10MB removable disc drives shown, each about 30" wide. In 1975 they were worth $10K each - ouch!
Computer to the right of the pic is a later model 110, with a video terminal on top of it.
How many propeller chips would it take to emulate the PDP-10 and have some real user power?
Discovery
It looks like the PDP-10 clock speed varied between about 9MHZ and 30MHZ depending on the model so I suppose it would be difficult to create a full speed version on an 80MHZ Propeller.
The VERY first thing you need to do is get a program like Drive Image or Ghost and backup the entire hard disk to a flash drive. That way no matter what you do trying to fix things, you cant make it worse.
My Eee PC laptop computer is used to develop .ide and .cpp programs for a propeller micro controller that runs a factory. Yesterday, the PC encountered a problem and produced a blue screen with white lettering stating that the computer encountered a problem and the machine must be restarted. If the machine does not restart then get the system administrator to check the problem.
The computer restarted fine but when I started Simple IDE, only the Welcome and Blank IDE files were shown. Using the IDE open command produce nothing. There should be about fifteen project files listed but there were none. I searched the computer but could not fine them then I recalled that Simple IDE stores project files in HIDDEN files. Why that is done is beyond me.
I had a software GURU try to open the hidden files but could not do so. He thinks that there may be a difference between Windows 7 Starter that is on the Eee PC as opposed to regular Windows 7.
Do you know how to unlock the HIDDEN files where Simple IDE stores the project files that it generates? This is a major problem for me since it is not possible to make any changes to the factory propeller operating code.
If the problem is Windows 7 Starter, can another version of Windows be downloaded onto the machine and regain full Simple IDE function?
The computer was stripped down by a Guru so that it has no...
I start to realize why this machine is hosed
I strongly advise that you try to recover your files by booting a Linux live CD before sending it off to some other "gurus" for repair. It's better to try and get your files off of there and backed up first. Before someone wipes and re-installs the OS.
Long ago I worked as a PC tech. When people would come in with a PC they desperately needed the data recovered from, the Owner would tell us to just reinstall the OS, then tell the customer that nothing could be recovered and charge him a extra 2 hours for the data recovery efforts. Let the customer beware.
A couple years ago, one of my two HP laptops, identical machines, made a strange noise and the screen went blank...then a line was printed stating in effect the hard drive failed. A Guru told me that nothing can be done. I took the hard drive out of the machine and removed the cover to fine that a piece of metal that was part of the swing arm mechanism was broken and the pivot was no longer perpendicular to the surface of the disks. This particular HP laptop never left the bench in the shop. I have the hard drive as a reminder that hard drives do actually fail.
10 years ago or so all the traffic lights in Helsinki were being monitored by a Data General Nova minicomputer from the late 1960s/early 1970's.
The city started to think about replacing it when it's hard drive, a 19 inch rack mount affair that weighed 100 Kilos and all of 10Mbytes, started to make noises like a concrete mixer full of gravel.
Two years later we had a new central server system software written for them and installed on some horrible Windows server.
The Nova's hard drive now sounded like it was full of rocks, but was still working!
Comments
An interesting inconvenience is that spin supports Hex, Quad, and Bin notation, but not Octal. (Naughty Chip!)
All octal input at the keyboard, for machine language programming.
The third (1980) were the Z80 based Heathkit H89, it also had an octal input interface for the built in monitor programm.
I miss them, sometimes...
Henrique
While you may have heard that they computers back then were the length of a garage, I can assure you this is no joke. Mine was housed in my garage, suitably lined and air-conditioned of course. It was still fully operational when I sold it for scrap in 2000.
Four Model 40 10MB removable disc drives shown, each about 30" wide. In 1975 they were worth $10K each - ouch!
Computer to the right of the pic is a later model 110, with a video terminal on top of it.
Boxes were stored on top after decommissioning.
Discovery
Long ago I worked as a PC tech. When people would come in with a PC they desperately needed the data recovered from, the Owner would tell us to just reinstall the OS, then tell the customer that nothing could be recovered and charge him a extra 2 hours for the data recovery efforts. Let the customer beware.
Discovery
The city started to think about replacing it when it's hard drive, a 19 inch rack mount affair that weighed 100 Kilos and all of 10Mbytes, started to make noises like a concrete mixer full of gravel.
Two years later we had a new central server system software written for them and installed on some horrible Windows server.
The Nova's hard drive now sounded like it was full of rocks, but was still working!