LGR - Strangest Computer Designs of the '70s
video description
Date: 2022-04-14
Related videos
Comments and reviews: 10
Sincerely
You missed quite a few other eccentric microcomputers of the 1970s. My personal favorite was a Z-80 machine sold by a company that called itself Kentucky Fried Computers until 1977 when a lawsuit from KFC forced them to change their name to Northstar Computers. Their signature product, a Z-80 microcomputer called the Northstar Horizon, was a full-featured 8-bit microprocessor about the size and shape of a large stereo. It had a huge linear power supply built onto a steel frame with a plywood top, ran on a 4 MHz clock and came with 16K of RAM upgradable to 64K. The disc operating system (Northstar DOS, located on a ROM chip, occupied the 4K of space between 56K and 60K. The Horizon also came with an S-100 bus, CPU, serial I/O and disc I/O boards, and it could store up to 360 kB on each of two DD 5. 25- hard-sectored floppy disc drives. A 5 mb HDD could be purchased for $550 but that was beyond my budget. For the monitor I chose the Hazeltine 1500, a 72 char x 25 line text monitor with its own built-in keyboard. The best part was that both machines came as full kits with bags containing hundreds of pass-through components and chips giving hobbyists like me a golden opportunity to practice our soldering skills on a real live computer. Yes, it could play games, including Chess, Life and Star Trek, as well as run Northstar's word processor program called NorthWord, which looked a lot like the DOS version of WordStar, the most popular word processing program of the day. It also ran a slightly non-standard form of BASIC called NS-BASIC which I liked a lot because it reminded me of my high school days. I eventually put CP/M in the computer but that was as far as it would go with the operating systems of the day. That computer went around the world with me in 1987 and worked great until 1993 when I reluctantly replaced it with my first 486 machine.
reply
You missed quite a few other eccentric microcomputers of the 1970s. My personal favorite was a Z-80 machine sold by a company that called itself Kentucky Fried Computers until 1977 when a lawsuit from KFC forced them to change their name to Northstar Computers. Their signature product, a Z-80 microcomputer called the Northstar Horizon, was a full-featured 8-bit microprocessor about the size and shape of a large stereo. It had a huge linear power supply built onto a steel frame with a plywood top, ran on a 4 MHz clock and came with 16K of RAM upgradable to 64K. The disc operating system (Northstar DOS, located on a ROM chip, occupied the 4K of space between 56K and 60K. The Horizon also came with an S-100 bus, CPU, serial I/O and disc I/O boards, and it could store up to 360 kB on each of two DD 5. 25- hard-sectored floppy disc drives. A 5 mb HDD could be purchased for $550 but that was beyond my budget. For the monitor I chose the Hazeltine 1500, a 72 char x 25 line text monitor with its own built-in keyboard. The best part was that both machines came as full kits with bags containing hundreds of pass-through components and chips giving hobbyists like me a golden opportunity to practice our soldering skills on a real live computer. Yes, it could play games, including Chess, Life and Star Trek, as well as run Northstar's word processor program called NorthWord, which looked a lot like the DOS version of WordStar, the most popular word processing program of the day. It also ran a slightly non-standard form of BASIC called NS-BASIC which I liked a lot because it reminded me of my high school days. I eventually put CP/M in the computer but that was as far as it would go with the operating systems of the day. That computer went around the world with me in 1987 and worked great until 1993 when I reluctantly replaced it with my first 486 machine.
reply
Johan
The computer in a book sounds practical, but at the same time a bit self-defeating. My grandmothers computer (which was also from the 70s) had a tab you could pull out with a list of all possible error messages. Super handy for whenever something goes wrong and the internet is down (or hasn't been invented! Now imagine that, but with the entire programmers guide, AND the entire computer, all in just one small package. Sweet.
The self-defeating is that it would be almost impossible to fit both a keyboard and a monitor, while still maintaining ergonomics and practical use. You would have to make some kind of trade-off. That said, I am currently taking a university course in android programming and I suppose a touchscreen device could fit. Could work as a sort of devkit in conjunction with a PC, or perhaps if you're technologically illiterate a users manual or something along those lines. I suppose it could also be used to make you seem more cultured, carrying a book instead of a phone: P
reply
The computer in a book sounds practical, but at the same time a bit self-defeating. My grandmothers computer (which was also from the 70s) had a tab you could pull out with a list of all possible error messages. Super handy for whenever something goes wrong and the internet is down (or hasn't been invented! Now imagine that, but with the entire programmers guide, AND the entire computer, all in just one small package. Sweet.
The self-defeating is that it would be almost impossible to fit both a keyboard and a monitor, while still maintaining ergonomics and practical use. You would have to make some kind of trade-off. That said, I am currently taking a university course in android programming and I suppose a touchscreen device could fit. Could work as a sort of devkit in conjunction with a PC, or perhaps if you're technologically illiterate a users manual or something along those lines. I suppose it could also be used to make you seem more cultured, carrying a book instead of a phone: P
reply
Rob
I never worked on any of these computers. I did tinker with a Hewlett-Packard HP-87. Or maybe it was an 85 or 86. This was at the electrical engineering section of the university I studied at back in the late 1980's, 1986 or so. Granted, these HP's were made in the early 1980's, but their case design did reflect that old integrated CRT & keyboard architecture of the 1970's terminal, as well as TRS-80's Model III-IV's. It was nice, it had advanced high level Basic, so I could use it to map out graphics charts using graphic commands & not pokes & peeks for EE homework. I kept one of the little programming booklets to this day. There was also some mainframe at the university, which I can't recall what it was, but it was what we had to use to study the Pascal language. I still also have Commodore 64's, three of them, the 1st one bought in 1983. I also had a chance to buy a KIM-1 kit that I spotted at a store in the early 1980's but never bought it, but I don't really care to anymore.
reply
I never worked on any of these computers. I did tinker with a Hewlett-Packard HP-87. Or maybe it was an 85 or 86. This was at the electrical engineering section of the university I studied at back in the late 1980's, 1986 or so. Granted, these HP's were made in the early 1980's, but their case design did reflect that old integrated CRT & keyboard architecture of the 1970's terminal, as well as TRS-80's Model III-IV's. It was nice, it had advanced high level Basic, so I could use it to map out graphics charts using graphic commands & not pokes & peeks for EE homework. I kept one of the little programming booklets to this day. There was also some mainframe at the university, which I can't recall what it was, but it was what we had to use to study the Pascal language. I still also have Commodore 64's, three of them, the 1st one bought in 1983. I also had a chance to buy a KIM-1 kit that I spotted at a store in the early 1980's but never bought it, but I don't really care to anymore.
reply
Lucius
I'd like to find out about a unit that wasn't in this video: In 1975, the school I was in (Paidea in Atlanta, GA if this rings a bell for anyone) got a visit from a thing made by HP or TI (I can't remember which, and not 100% sure it was either one, but these ring a bell for me) that I think was called a calculator, but actually had a BASIC interpreter and a 4) line display (with not very long lines) as well as a narrow format thermal) dot matrix printer built in, and was roughly the size of a medium-sized PC case (and was definitely portable. It had a derivative of a QWERTY keyboard (with full-sized keys) that had a bunch of BASIC statements printed on the keycaps (I can't remember how many of them were separate keys and how many of them were shifted from QWERTY keys -- if I remember correctly it had some of both -- either way, I think the work of tokenization was done when you pressed these keys, although the BASIC statements did appear as multiple characters on the display.
reply
I'd like to find out about a unit that wasn't in this video: In 1975, the school I was in (Paidea in Atlanta, GA if this rings a bell for anyone) got a visit from a thing made by HP or TI (I can't remember which, and not 100% sure it was either one, but these ring a bell for me) that I think was called a calculator, but actually had a BASIC interpreter and a 4) line display (with not very long lines) as well as a narrow format thermal) dot matrix printer built in, and was roughly the size of a medium-sized PC case (and was definitely portable. It had a derivative of a QWERTY keyboard (with full-sized keys) that had a bunch of BASIC statements printed on the keycaps (I can't remember how many of them were separate keys and how many of them were shifted from QWERTY keys -- if I remember correctly it had some of both -- either way, I think the work of tokenization was done when you pressed these keys, although the BASIC statements did appear as multiple characters on the display.
reply
amremotewatching
Blimey, I'm a dinosaur. In the late 60s / Early 70s, I built numerous devices with ECL, and DTL and RTL logic families. Then along came TTL, and some years later CMOS. In around about 1979, the company I worked at had a slow Z80 / S100 based system doing general office admin stuff, and it clocked along at a whopping 1MHz, but to my astonishment we had a geek engineer who said he could replicate the exact Z80 functionality with a giant board of TTL, and he did eventually do it! The thing I remember was that it managed to run at about 25MHz and that was dramatic back then, but getting it talk to other boards like ROM RAM and bus control. was a nightmare. And it consumed hundreds of amps and heated up the room! Ahh, the good ol' days.
reply
Blimey, I'm a dinosaur. In the late 60s / Early 70s, I built numerous devices with ECL, and DTL and RTL logic families. Then along came TTL, and some years later CMOS. In around about 1979, the company I worked at had a slow Z80 / S100 based system doing general office admin stuff, and it clocked along at a whopping 1MHz, but to my astonishment we had a geek engineer who said he could replicate the exact Z80 functionality with a giant board of TTL, and he did eventually do it! The thing I remember was that it managed to run at about 25MHz and that was dramatic back then, but getting it talk to other boards like ROM RAM and bus control. was a nightmare. And it consumed hundreds of amps and heated up the room! Ahh, the good ol' days.
reply
Pete
I was working at a radio station which was using a Datapoint 2200 to do the daily commercial scheduling and monthly billing. When the IBM PC came out, and software for those functions arrived, I wound up with the 2200 as a play toy. Datapoint sold me the assembler and the BASIC language tapes and I wrote some fun toys in its whopping 16k of memory. I distinctly remember that you had to be careful with the stack. It was done in hardware with a pair of 7489 16x4 TTL RAM chips.
reply
I was working at a radio station which was using a Datapoint 2200 to do the daily commercial scheduling and monthly billing. When the IBM PC came out, and software for those functions arrived, I wound up with the 2200 as a play toy. Datapoint sold me the assembler and the BASIC language tapes and I wrote some fun toys in its whopping 16k of memory. I distinctly remember that you had to be careful with the stack. It was done in hardware with a pair of 7489 16x4 TTL RAM chips.
reply
Donald
In 1978 I bought a Radio Shack computer it was all in one, a keyboard, a b&w screen, and two 5- floppy disk drives. I could even attach to Compuserve. (an AOL type service) It was only $2, 500. I also bought a daisy wheel strike printer also $2, 500. It would display a full line of type about 80 characters and about 40 lines. The Apple product at the time would only display 40 characters. It had a word processor program and a spreadsheet program.
reply
In 1978 I bought a Radio Shack computer it was all in one, a keyboard, a b&w screen, and two 5- floppy disk drives. I could even attach to Compuserve. (an AOL type service) It was only $2, 500. I also bought a daisy wheel strike printer also $2, 500. It would display a full line of type about 80 characters and about 40 lines. The Apple product at the time would only display 40 characters. It had a word processor program and a spreadsheet program.
reply
Laceykat66
The Radio Shack 1400 LT weighed in at 14 pounds well over a decade later, so the MCM/70 was pretty advanced for its size.
As you see from this fine post, computers were first designed by engineers who did not think of the home use of their machines.
Only as the decade came to a close did sales and marketing get into the design of a home computer that people would actually think of using.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane.
reply
The Radio Shack 1400 LT weighed in at 14 pounds well over a decade later, so the MCM/70 was pretty advanced for its size.
As you see from this fine post, computers were first designed by engineers who did not think of the home use of their machines.
Only as the decade came to a close did sales and marketing get into the design of a home computer that people would actually think of using.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane.
reply
END
In 1980, my best friend, from Middle School, got a home computer, but I couldn't relate. Why the heck do we need this? In about 83 my new best friend got a home computer. I found it interesting but DOS was such a pain in the neck that I just forgot about it soon afterwards. By 1990 me and my Bandmate were using a Mac SE in our Band. By 1995 I began using my Windows PC as a Recording Studio and it just got better from there!
reply
In 1980, my best friend, from Middle School, got a home computer, but I couldn't relate. Why the heck do we need this? In about 83 my new best friend got a home computer. I found it interesting but DOS was such a pain in the neck that I just forgot about it soon afterwards. By 1990 me and my Bandmate were using a Mac SE in our Band. By 1995 I began using my Windows PC as a Recording Studio and it just got better from there!
reply
Jonathan
Nothing on the Wang 2200 T? My school had one. AFAIK TTL logic and core memory, from 1975. System unit was a green terminal-looking thing, with 16K of RAM, a built in BASIC interpreter including the rarely implemented MATrix operations, a cassette drive, and on the side a 7 pin for matrix printer that took 13-7/8- paper. That's not a typo, it was nonstandard width. All that for a mere $10, 000.
reply
Nothing on the Wang 2200 T? My school had one. AFAIK TTL logic and core memory, from 1975. System unit was a green terminal-looking thing, with 16K of RAM, a built in BASIC interpreter including the rarely implemented MATrix operations, a cassette drive, and on the side a 7 pin for matrix printer that took 13-7/8- paper. That's not a typo, it was nonstandard width. All that for a mere $10, 000.
reply
Add a review, comment
Other channel videos
