So nostalgic to see this, I'm old enough to remember my high school all networked like this. Some how back in the day I saved to floppy disc the network menu software and still have it at home in my beeb now..... it crosses my mind if its the last surviving copy from my high-school as the econet network and all the beebs were stripped out and replaced decades ago now.... and I assume the hard ware all eventually binned....what a shame.
Old ads have a kind of naiveness to them that is fascinating to watch. They are not aware that they are making an Ad that is meant to fool you, and so the ad seems so honest. We live in kind of sad times because now ads know they just want your money so their tone is always happy and they try to distract you from their true intentions. Or maybe I am seeing things.
maybe because of the bitterness. Great presentation if you take out the negativity but understandable. Arm success is simplicity and rightly required a big name. Its only now some decades on where its being surpassed. Impressive feat considering it was started in the 80's
Didn't Commodore sue because the Amiga did have reasonable business/home office/personal productivity applications? I definitely remember doing DTP on an Amiga.
As a former Technical Manager for CommunITel, it's nice to see some of my software still in use :) I think I still have some of the original source code somewhere. I used a Model B for development work at home and a Filestore with Master Compact in the office.
Why do people keep saying that we have lost all of this ability to program stuff and that things are too complicated? In this day and age you can buy an ARM chip for a few quid including RAM and ROM and do low level programming. You can make something cheaper than a BBC micro and be able to do exactly the same.
An excellent feature to add, if you all don't have it already, would be a display to teach people how the fundamentals of computers work. Our lives are so dependent on this technology, but only a slim fraction of people know how transistors and such do their thing. This is something which should be taught to all schoolchildren. And because schools aren't doing that, museums like yours would be a great place to do that. Maybe even better than in schools because you can give people the immersive hands on experience while being surrounded by these vintage machines. Here are examples of demos that help to demystify how computers work... Marble Adding Machine: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-GcDshWmhF4A.html Marble Binary Counter: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vf4_i-sBebU.html Turing Complete Rule 110 Marble Computer: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QKnSRw_X2w4.html Then to demonstrate how mechanical states can be duplicated with electronics, this set of demos can walk a visitor through a setup which shows how electro-mechanical relays work as switches, and then transition to demos which show how vacuum tubes and transistors can do switching entirely electronically, with no mechanical action necessary. And water analogs can be shown alongside the electrical displays. Like using light switches to demo on/off states, but also show how something like a dimmer switch can be used as an amplifier. A weak signal drives the rotation of the dimmer, and the output is strong. Then drive the dimmer switch in a bang/bang fashion into its non-linear regions and the amplifier gets clipped and starts to function as a gate. This would go a long way toward teaching how transistors work. And an adjacent water analog would be a great way to help visualize how the flow of electrons work. This set of demos would build upon each other so that the visitor learns: - Amplification, - Binary switching, - Gates (AND, OR, XOR, etc), - Counters, - Adders, and eventually - Computers. Before getting into any of the marbles, light switches and water analog demos, there would be an explanation of the binary theory going back to Gottfried Leibniz's epiphany about how everything can be constructed with binary numbers, that this system of ones & zeros are at the root of all we experience in existence. A beautiful thing to have on display would be the coin he designed which commemorated this breakthrough from the early 1700s. And displays from the I Ching would show how the importance of understanding binary goes back thousands of years. Then major steps from Leibniz into modern times could be given brief explanations. Your museum looks fun and amazing. My personal fantasy is to have a computer museum that has all this aspect of fun, and also incorporates this set of displays where a person can leave at the end of the day and know that computers are not mysterious. That they are perfectly understandable machines. - History, - Education, - Entertainment. These would be the three major aspects I would want in my ideal Computing History Museum experience. You could go so far as to have a playful mascot for the museum, like Tranny The Transistor.
This is seriously cool. If I had the level of knowledge I have now as a kid I'd have been all over this - had I been given resources to do so. We had BBC Model B's in infant/junior school then later A3000's but there was no Econet.
