Interesting fact about the PDP-8/S, which was the horrendously slow serial version.
It was supposedly the first computer sold to a private individual instead of business or academia. The purchaser was composer Peter Zinovieff, who used it in the electronic music studio he was building in his home. He paid for it by pawning his (aristocratic) wife's tiara. (They later divorced.)
Here it is in the racks at the back, next to a PDP-8/I which he bought later, and some of the synths and other products the company he created started selling soon after.
This was 1971. Computer control of analog synths, sampling, and video-to-sound with real time FFTs (from additional hardware) were years ahead of what Rest of World was doing then.
nickdothutton 12 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know what that characteristic smell is DEC equipment has? It's different from the characteristic smell of (for example) Sun equipment. Rainbow's smell like VAXen.
forinti 8 hours ago [-]
Funny you should mention this. Every time I see something related to MSX, I can sense the smell of the plastic.
bigfatkitten 11 hours ago [-]
It’s what I imagine a former wool mill in Maynard, MA would smell like.
skinwill 5 hours ago [-]
Brominated flame retardant?
leoc 2 hours ago [-]
> Shortly afterwards, in 1974, developers squeezed a reduced PDP-8/A logic board into a VT50 terminal and demonstrated it as one of two potential personal computer products to Olsen. To their disappointment (including a young David Ahl), he vetoed them also on the advice of management concerned it would cut into existing product lines, making the infamous observation that no one would want a computer in their home.
This effort was led by Tom Stockebrand, who had previously worked on a number of MIT Lincoln Labs and/or Wes Clarke machines, such as the LINC, which are celebrated for looking a bit like personal computers if you squint. (See Digital at Work, Jamie Parker Pearson ed., ISBN 0-13-213489-6 https://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/_media/pdf/dec.digital... pp. 90-1 :
> “One version was going to have a PDP-8 built into this slot in the back, along with a cassette tape drive that could be used like DECtape. The cost goal was $600. Even in 1971, that was dirt cheap for what would have been the first personal computer.”
Overall, this may have been one of the most important turning points in the history of the personal-computer market, and it's surely one of the biggest omissions from the usual telling of that story. The capabilities and form factor weren't all that new—the Datapoint 2200 and the Wang 2200 had already launched that decades, two bright red warning flares for the industry—but anything like a $600 price would have been quite something for the time.
> Barely a month after, the emergence of the IBM PC 5150 in August and its rapid sales sent a shockwave through the industry, causing Olsen to abruptly reconsider his negative opinion of the personal computer segment.
There's probably quite a lot of dramatic irony in this. I suspect that Digital's and Olsen's long-term ambition was usually for DEC to grab IBM's mainframe crown. That was probably the default long-term ambition for anyone in the computer business before the 1990s, but moreover the history of DEC—from Olsen coming out of his secondment from SAGE to IBM manufacturing muttering that he could do much better, to Gordon Bell's "VAX strategy" which aimed to put byte-addressed VAX-instruction-set machines in nearly every product category in a notably System 360ish way, to the decision to charge IBM's mainframe guns with the VAX 9000—mostly seems to suggest that that was the dream. To see IBM then tonk Digital and transform the whole industry with an IBM microcomputer must have set their heads spinning. Small consolation to them that it turned out to be the beginning of the end of IBM's dominance, too.
mrandish 52 minutes ago [-]
> To see IBM then tonk Digital and transform the whole industry with an IBM microcomputer must have set their heads spinning.
Indeed. Perhaps it's a mercy that DEC didn't know at the time that the thing that 'tonked' them was really an "almost didn't happen" skunk works sponsored directly by Thomas Watson over the objections of most of his staff. While there were probably a few wild-eyed true believers in the Boca Raton ranks, to IBM senior management the 5150 was much more a small experiment to learn about these emerging desktop systems and perhaps a tiny hedge against low-end encroachment than any belief the future of computing would be desktop micros.
It's ironic that the 5150 PC that took out the minis then escaped and turned on its creators, unleashing the margin-eating barbarian horde. I've always interpreted IBM's failed PS/2, OS/2 and micro-channel efforts as an attempt to recapture and tame the monster their little experiment had accidentally unleashed. The fascinating question is: if IBM senior management had really believed the PC would become huge, how would the 5150 have been different? And would that less OTS and more proprietary machine have launched the PC juggernaut at all?
ErroneousBosh 10 hours ago [-]
> It started at $27,000 [in 2026 dollars about $282,000], a surprisingly low cost for the era, and about a thousand were sold.
To give you a sense of scale, in 1963 when the first PDP8 was launched at $27k, here in the UK the very first JCB 3C backhoe loader was launched at around £2500 - roughly a quarter of the price of a PDP8 in real terms, or about three year's salary for its driver.
So think in terms of how much "You know what? It'd save us so much time and money to just buy ourselves one of *these* things" you could buy yourself with the money :-)
alchemist1e9 7 hours ago [-]
I was also thinking about the prices and what problems they were being used for to motivate the investment.
It then occurred to me that loaded Mac Studios and DGX Stations have some comparability in CAPEX scale. Here are some other prices for example:
> The VT278 started at $6,795 [$23,700].”
> This was sold as the DECmate III+ for $5145 [$15,400] alongside the standard III.
> The VAXmate finally hit the market in September 1986 starting at $4045 [$12,100].
> For the back end DEC announced a turn-key MicroVAX II system with 5MB of RAM, Ethernet, 16 ports and a 30-seat ALL-IN-1 plus WPS wordprocessing starting at $81,160 [$243,000].
→ [https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=144]
It was supposedly the first computer sold to a private individual instead of business or academia. The purchaser was composer Peter Zinovieff, who used it in the electronic music studio he was building in his home. He paid for it by pawning his (aristocratic) wife's tiara. (They later divorced.)
Here it is in the racks at the back, next to a PDP-8/I which he bought later, and some of the synths and other products the company he created started selling soon after.
https://historyofinformation.com/images/Screen_Shot_2020-09-...
This was 1971. Computer control of analog synths, sampling, and video-to-sound with real time FFTs (from additional hardware) were years ahead of what Rest of World was doing then.
This effort was led by Tom Stockebrand, who had previously worked on a number of MIT Lincoln Labs and/or Wes Clarke machines, such as the LINC, which are celebrated for looking a bit like personal computers if you squint. (See Digital at Work, Jamie Parker Pearson ed., ISBN 0-13-213489-6 https://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/_media/pdf/dec.digital... pp. 90-1 :
> “One version was going to have a PDP-8 built into this slot in the back, along with a cassette tape drive that could be used like DECtape. The cost goal was $600. Even in 1971, that was dirt cheap for what would have been the first personal computer.”
Overall, this may have been one of the most important turning points in the history of the personal-computer market, and it's surely one of the biggest omissions from the usual telling of that story. The capabilities and form factor weren't all that new—the Datapoint 2200 and the Wang 2200 had already launched that decades, two bright red warning flares for the industry—but anything like a $600 price would have been quite something for the time.
> Barely a month after, the emergence of the IBM PC 5150 in August and its rapid sales sent a shockwave through the industry, causing Olsen to abruptly reconsider his negative opinion of the personal computer segment.
There's probably quite a lot of dramatic irony in this. I suspect that Digital's and Olsen's long-term ambition was usually for DEC to grab IBM's mainframe crown. That was probably the default long-term ambition for anyone in the computer business before the 1990s, but moreover the history of DEC—from Olsen coming out of his secondment from SAGE to IBM manufacturing muttering that he could do much better, to Gordon Bell's "VAX strategy" which aimed to put byte-addressed VAX-instruction-set machines in nearly every product category in a notably System 360ish way, to the decision to charge IBM's mainframe guns with the VAX 9000—mostly seems to suggest that that was the dream. To see IBM then tonk Digital and transform the whole industry with an IBM microcomputer must have set their heads spinning. Small consolation to them that it turned out to be the beginning of the end of IBM's dominance, too.
Indeed. Perhaps it's a mercy that DEC didn't know at the time that the thing that 'tonked' them was really an "almost didn't happen" skunk works sponsored directly by Thomas Watson over the objections of most of his staff. While there were probably a few wild-eyed true believers in the Boca Raton ranks, to IBM senior management the 5150 was much more a small experiment to learn about these emerging desktop systems and perhaps a tiny hedge against low-end encroachment than any belief the future of computing would be desktop micros.
It's ironic that the 5150 PC that took out the minis then escaped and turned on its creators, unleashing the margin-eating barbarian horde. I've always interpreted IBM's failed PS/2, OS/2 and micro-channel efforts as an attempt to recapture and tame the monster their little experiment had accidentally unleashed. The fascinating question is: if IBM senior management had really believed the PC would become huge, how would the 5150 have been different? And would that less OTS and more proprietary machine have launched the PC juggernaut at all?
To give you a sense of scale, in 1963 when the first PDP8 was launched at $27k, here in the UK the very first JCB 3C backhoe loader was launched at around £2500 - roughly a quarter of the price of a PDP8 in real terms, or about three year's salary for its driver.
So think in terms of how much "You know what? It'd save us so much time and money to just buy ourselves one of *these* things" you could buy yourself with the money :-)
It then occurred to me that loaded Mac Studios and DGX Stations have some comparability in CAPEX scale. Here are some other prices for example:
> The VT278 started at $6,795 [$23,700].”
> This was sold as the DECmate III+ for $5145 [$15,400] alongside the standard III.
> The VAXmate finally hit the market in September 1986 starting at $4045 [$12,100].
> For the back end DEC announced a turn-key MicroVAX II system with 5MB of RAM, Ethernet, 16 ports and a 30-seat ALL-IN-1 plus WPS wordprocessing starting at $81,160 [$243,000].