My dad subscribed to Popular Science magazine when I was a child,. and I credit magazines like this and TV and radio programs like CBC's Quirks & Quarks & Bits & Bytes (with Luba Goy & Billy Van) for nurturing my love of science & computing at a young age. Seeing the magazine cover in the intro to this video brings back some happy memories!
I was born in March 1979. I don't think I've touched most of these computers (probably not any of them besides the PET and Apple II). Really fascinating machines, these were produced just before home computers became mainstream. Anyone buying a home computer in 1979 would be an early adopter.
I was only a young boy, but it was such an exciting time for computers. They were so new and the possibilities seemed endless. I remember watching the movie Tron with my family and immediately after telling my parents I needed a computer for Christmas. Unfortunately, that same excitement doesn’t exist much today.
My guess for the "majority of addons" thing at 9:33 is that the Sol is a S-100 bus computer, so it accepted the "majority of addons" available at the time. And from what I've seen on ebay listings for them, expansion was common and you could get some surprisingly varied expansions for those. (The Sol is one of the few S-100 machines I'm interested in owning someday, but that day will have to be in the distant future...) I did not know the VideoBrain used APL, though... assuming there was never a NTSC Jupiter Ace I'll have to look into putting that on my radar (I think all the ones I've seen so far have been broken though...) The "E8" CPU is a misprint - it's really the Fairchild F8, which was the 8-bit CPU in the Channel F.
made in Japan computers are still missing there such as the Sharp MZ-80K (had been around since 1978, unveiled Oct 1979 in the U.K. as a ready-to-run) which was the first computer I got in touch with. It was a "clean computer" concept, so you had to load stuff like the BASIC interpreter from tape.
Two things not related to comping that I find amazing about this magazine content: The magazine is from 1979 and is accurately depicting how the space shuttle would deploy cargo for space-structure-construction. The first orbit mission of the space shuttle was in 1981, and the assembly of the ISS began in 1998! The cover photo is from people named Winston and Salem -- subliminal ads for smokes are everywhere! :)
Fantastic Video Robin! How I remember searching the library magazine collection for articles like these at age 11 dreaming of owning my own computer. How excited I was when the $99 Sinclair came around - also made know to me by the magazines in the library. All paper route money instantly diverted from comics to zx80 fund - lol.
10:40 The Interact Computer was relatively succesfull in France. There it was named the Victor Lambda. It almost became my first computer. My brother, coming back from his military service, where he had discovered computers and that one can play games on them, was extremely entusiastic to buy a computer. He managed to get me interested too and we started to read all the magazines we could find, French and German (we lived near the border). We almost bought the victor lambda because of the very persuasive ads, we had already filled out the order and written the check. My dad vetoed and told us to wait. He didn't think it was a good idea. We were very disappointed but I think, we dodged a bullet here as that machine was far from being good, horrrible keyboard, 12x17 text, 4 colors 112x78 blocky graphics, no expansion possibilty and almost no software. Later models (Hector HRX) were much better, but not very popular.
Don't leave us hanging. What did you end up getting? And when? (My first computer was probably 1983 or so, the Atari 400 and tape drive, which was fun to program on, but quickly had to switch to the Commodore 64 with 5.25" floppy because it wasn't very useful being the only person who couldn't trade software with their friends.)
@@delusionnnnn We bought a TI-99/4A in february 82. We were happy for a time but quite disappointed by the lack of (affordable) expandability. After a short year, we sold the TI and bought an Apple II clone. This had then an affordable floppy and much more software available (cheap ;-) ). I still have it and I even bought a Saturn compatible RAM extension recently.
@@galier2 That's cool - in the Rust Belt, Apple IIs were everywhere in education, but nobody I knew had them at home. In my limited experience, people who had them at home were either a higher economic class or their parents were more involved with computers themselves. I will say, the Atari had a really powerful BASIC, and the C64 had a BASIC so bad it pretty much forced a lot of people to learn Assembly, which created a generation of gifted programmers. I think the only place I saw the TI-99/4A was in Sears.
I still have the Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P that my dad bough second hand from my uncle when I was around 5 years old. It stills powers up but would need some TLC to work fine. Ours had a ram extension to 8K. I learned basic programming on that machine and It does have a special place in my heart. To answer your question, as far as I know, it doesn't do bitmap, only 24x24 characters. But it's got a very interesting character set that can produce lines that can appear plotted by math functions. It also has some characters that represent people, planes, trees, houses, cars, tanks and turrets at different angles. It also had pairs of characters that let you draw submarines, battleships, Tie Fighters or Starship Enterprise. Needless to say that character set was put to good use by 10-12 year old me trying to make games in basic.
@@simontay4851 ok it’s a superboard 2 to be exact. I’ll have to get it back out and see if they are socketed or not and try to find some new ones to swap out.
I'm fascinated with how the author tried to describe how computers worked to an audience that had largely never seen a computer before-except possible in the Bat Cave.
0:46 That's so true. These were special times with almost a new computer popping up every week. Jupiter ACE with Forth as standard language, Dragon 32, TI-99, the Australian Microbee, the BBC Micro, the Oric-1, the ABC 80 Personal Computer from Sweden (my country of birth) introduced in 1978 and so many, many more.
Lovely video as usual. There is something so relaxing watching and listening to you reading a magazine and talking about the contents. It's also very interesting to see all these old computers compared like this. I never had the opportunity to experience this myself at the time. I just used whatever I had access to.
2:09 - Wow that space shuttle sure looks exciting. I hear that they're going to be able to refly them like every two weeks, and since it's reuseable it's going to be like the most economical space flight system ever!
I read part of the original specifications. What we got is not what was proposed. It's really kind of silly because manned excursions to space are kind of pointless. Very little data has come from the ISS for example.
@@richardwicks4190 There is now some commercial interest in doing manufacturing in the microgravity of low Earth orbit, and , arguably, things are finally cheap enough for some of this to happen. NASA has expressed willingness to sell part or all of the station (which they are planning to abandon anyway by 2030 or thereabouts) as well as the fact that some companies are designing their own station modules. So we'll see.
@@remo27 I'm doubtful. 30 years ago they were talking about building crystals in microgravity - a graduate student demonstrated the same crystals could be grown in the lab, but growing them in the lab. Maybe an AMORPHOUS substance that would otherwise separate out solution in a gravity well might be able to be constructed in microgravity and nowhere else? All I've seen from the ISS is basically a waste of money, and a very large waste at that. The superconducting super-collider was cancelled for that.
Also if I remember the reason the Sol had to have basic loaded and not in a rom was it was suppose to be a terminal and the designers decided to turn it into a real computer and the deal they made for financing or something said it could only be a terminal.
I saw the CompuColor in the computer store back in the day it was a stand out because it had 'crisp' color graphics (not fuzzy like the Apple), also those cool color keys on the keyboard (wow it meant business on being color!). It was priced accordingly ($$$$) so never looked further, but it was probably the Cadillac of computers by just looking at it, it exuded prestige.
This is great Robin. I’m with you and this is really interesting in that the home computer segment was just getting figured out. All of the computers regardless of popularity were ground breaking in their own way. Thanks for the video.
I would have coveted the APF PeCos. I was a Battlestar Galactica fan (at seven years old in '79). This reminds me of the computers in those old 70's Sci fi shows. Love the Tron reference, thanks Robin!
Thanks! Fun to revisit the Cambrian explosion of early home computers. Surprised to see that the Rockwell AIM-65 didn't make a showing in the Popular Science bake off.
13:14 PeCos appears to be based on a programming language from the early 60s called JOSS. Like BASIC, it's an interpreted English-based programming language. No, I never used this computer (or this variant) but doing some research on a hunch led me to the manual for the machine. And yes, it's far more wordy than BASIC ever will be but both filled the same niche.
This was very interesting! Loved the advert for battery powered bikes. I assumed these didn't come on the scene until the last decade or so, but there they are in this magazine, the year before I was born!
I learned to program, at least partially, on the TRS-80. Loved that computer. It had an interesting way to do graphics with characters as well, with 2x3 blocks per character that made it relatively simple to create with. I owned a TRS80 model 1, but I always liked the TRS80 model 2 with dual floppy drives the best, for both look and function.
1979 was when my dad got his Apple II. I was there with him while he shopping around and when he finally purchased it. There was a big variety back then and interoperability was almost nonexistent. When you chose a computer you were locked into that ecosystem, for better or worse. I remember seeing those computers advertised then, and even saw many of them in stores.
Fascinating trip back in time! Hopefully I can get to one of those vintage computer fairs one day. And I certainly wouldn’t mind these kinds of videos in future.
Hi Robin, Commodore did ship the original PET with 4k of ram. I actually got my PET for Christmas in 1980. It was the best present ever. I learned basic on an Apple II+ in high school and the Commodore basic on the PET. It came in handy about 2 years later. I had to take a BASIC course in college and the had Commodore PETs in the lab. Needless to say I was bored to death and told the instructor to just let me know when the tests were. Our final test was write a program of 25 lines that did something! I dug around my drawer for a hangman game I wrote 2 years before as my final project. It used petscii graphics.. When he saw it he said "you wrote that?" I said yes about 2 years ago, that's why I couldn't sit through class! I owe a lot to that 4k PET!
At school we had three computers that looked extremely similar to the Exidy Sorceror (might have been the II) ... above the Return key there are two reset keys. You need to press them simultaneously as some kind of safety measure. Alas, they could boot CP/M via RS232 at whooping 19200 bauds from an S100-based Z80 CPU server with a roughly 20 (or 30) MB S100-bus connected harddisk. And instead of a ROM cartridge they had RAM expansion, 32KB IIRC. That was in the early 80's. We got our own drive partition to store files, and we could log into a second partition at boot, copying files using the infamous PIP. Thank you very much for bringing back fond memories of this system. Albeit my father had already gotten me a ZX81 plus 16KB...
The line about the Sol Terminal Computer "accepts a majority of add-ons" likely refers to the fact that the Sol used the S-100 buss which in 1979 was fairly standard and ubiquitous. I think it may have even worked with some peripherals designed for the Altair and Imsai computers.
Hello Robin! So many strange machines, thanks for going through this. The PET 2001-4 (4k) did ship, but was quickly cancelled. Also, the PET 1, 2, and 3, given the year, are almost certainly the PET 2001-8N, 2001-16N, and 2001-32N
Love the channel. I know of one collector who owns a boxed Compucolor as well as other rare late 70's systems. I have only seen the box as the computer likely has not been out in years!
In 1978 I briefly worked for Ohio Scientific while a student at Hiram College. They also had the Challenger IIP (which had a polled keyboard instead of one that had to be decoded by the monitor program), and the Challenger III, which had 2 or 3 processors (depending on the options); I think one of them had a 6502, Z80, and an Intersil 6100, which was a PDP8 on a chip. The Ohio Scientific word processor was very similar to their macro-assembler (for a reason) as far as the markup was concerned. Later I worked for a small software house in Hiram ("Simplexity Software"), where we had several early home systems shown in the Popular Science magazine. I wrote a rather sophisticated word processor for the Apple][ while there which sold well at some Computerland stores in Cleveland, Akron, Erie PA, and other larger cities in the region. We also had a PET, RadioShack Model 1, Exity Sorcerer, and at least one other. The thing I was always amused by with the Sorcerer was the cartridge; it was an 8-track take cartridge with the insides removed (I think with a hot wire in some places) and a circuit board mounted inside. There were a few other home computers around those days, though some were out of the range of most homes - the Alpha Micro was a 16-bit S100 machine, for example. There was one short-lived home machine that used FORTH as the primary programming language; I don't recall what chip it used anymore. The advantage of that system was that programs took up very little memory relative to BASIC, and the interpreter was quite small, leaving enough ROM for an assembler and debugger (sort-of). I believe that APL/S was a subset of the APL programming language. ("APL" stands for "A Programming Language") It is an algebra system that used operators that were not found in the typical 7-bit or extended ASCII, and were usually made by composing multiple characters (the display would show a unique glyph when the composition was complete); the character generator probably took up a lot of the ROM in the machine that offered that language. You can look "APL" up in Wikipedia for details. In 1981 I graduated from Hiram and went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation (dec) in Maynard, MA, and stopped playing with quite so many 6502 and Z80/8080 based systems.
I really enjoyed this video. I was in kindergarten in 1979 and our classroom had a PET. It was my first experience with a computer and I thought it was absolutely the coolest thing! I also had the Basic Programming cartridge and keyboard controllers for the Atari 2600 and you really couldn’t do much with only 64 bytes of memory available.
I can easily say in 1979 I barely knew what a home computer was. I probably saw articles in magazines of the time, not that I was able to read it, as I was 6-7 years old that year, but seeing the photos of the computers, likely the TRS-80 or Apple II. Until 1981 my knowledge of home computers remained very limited as I never encountered one in the flesh. Then at the end of 1981 my father bought a TI-99/4A which introduced me to home computers. But in 1979 there was no way our family could afford those machines available at the time, not even the TRS-80, where that would have been most easy to get a hold of given they were readily available at Radio Shack while the others it was mail order or specialty dealers. Then of course the arrival of the Atari 8-bits near the end of '79 would have left all those machines in the dust in terms of graphics and performance (we did get an Atari 8-bit but it was an 800XL in 1985, but it was cheap being discontinued to make way for the XE series).
This is so cool and I love your videos and you do a great job explaining about different stuff and my dad used to build his own computers and I still remember that
I wanted an Apple II so bad!! I got to use my mom's boyfriend's TRS 80 (model 2 I think), and had classes in "LOGO" on the TI-99 4a My mom finally purchased a TRS 80 CoCo, and I had a lot of fun w/ that!
I've actually laid hands on a CompuColour II - there were I think only two actual models, the retroactively-labelled 1 which I've never seen, and the one that actually shipped in some numbers, the II, which had the disk drive and colour CRT. And yes, it had problems! Particularly with that disk drive. The drive being in the same cabinet and on the same power rail as the CRT were at the core of it. They quickly became infamous for disc corruption, not just from the magnetic fields from the monitor, but there was an apparently semi-common power rail issue that could cause a big magnetic pulse out of the head at power-on which corrupted whatever part of the disk happened to be under the head, and even - reportedly, if it was bad enough - could punch the head forward in such a way that it would physically damage the floppy. (I never saw that, but I was told this by someone who claimed to have seen it happen.) So it was very important not to close the floppy latch before powering on the monitor! I'm under the impression there were other reliability issues too, but that was the big one. If you paid that much for a computer system, you really didn't want to learn all those rules. The only reason I've ever seen/touched one is that my school had bought one when it came out, and never threw it away, and I found it while helping clean out a store room that was going to become a club room, and one of the faculty advisors had used it personally and told me these stories.
In the summer of 1980 I worked at the store called HW Electronics (later Hobbyworld Computers) in Northridge California. The Compucolor was a system they sold. I was working as a technician and remember soldering memory chips onto it upgrading to 16K.
That issue of PS was very familiar to me. I subscribed for six years starting at age 9. (With the June 1977 issue). Although this issue had a photo on the cover, it often had awesome painted illustrations.
This just goes to show how many systems flooded the market back then and how many of them ended up in the digital graveyard. Overall this is a good thing because if we had dozens of incompatible systems out there, each one would have limited software and it would probably be substantially more expensive because of the limited market for that particular system. Still interesting to see, and a bummer that some of the better ones didn't make it either.
@@vadnegru MSX came about 4 or 5 years after this wave, but it had the right idea: Create a standard that everyone can follow to allow a large software base. 3DO tried to do the same thing but they had the price *WAY* too high and ultimately failed (plus it was a console only, with no keyboard).
Very fun. I happen to have this issue as well. Based on this Popular Science guide, I would have been torn between the Apple II and the PET. Although I was four then, I may show this to my Dad to see what he thinks. I probably didn't have $1000 in 1979...
Love the video! The unexpected part that made me have a flashback was the layout of the magazine. I had forgotten about all of those odd dashes and wierd justified text! Then the line "all data are lost." They still thought of data as a plural and not as always a singular, like we do today. Also have a Lotran article to read up. Thanks for sharing your hobby with us! saves me so much in not collecting every computer I heard of!
I'd describe the modern usage of "data" as more of a mass noun, like "soup" or "science". Neither singular nor plural because it's stuff rather than any number of things.
After all that information, I still don't know which home computer to get. I've been hearing great things about how easy the BASIC language is to program, so I should probably get a machine with that built in, and 8K should be enough memory to last me for years! I think I'll just hold off until that VIC-30 comes out...
I decided it's probably better just to build my own, based on a Ben Eater design, but with a dozen small changes so my architecture is unique and can't be programmed by anyone besides me. Imagine if everyone did that!
Oh man, that brings back memories. I had a compucolor, and a Sol. The picture of the Sol makes it look small - it wasn't - it got tall and fat past the top of the keyboard. Ended up later with an IBM 5100, really regret getting rid of these, but who would have guessed forty years later they'd be so collectible.
Robin, where are you? Its been 10 days and no new content. I need my fix. For the record I'm still waiting for your Karateka Drive Kill code analysis from back in 2019. You have the most fascinating & fresh 8-bit content.
Great content. Google books has this magazine minus the buyers guide. Was wondering if you could scan the buyers guide pages. For all of us. Thanks again for your content. One retro to another.
Wow, I remember that issue. I think I had it for a long time. I ended up with a PET 2001 (Still own it) it was a good choice because it was much cheaper and the schools here all used PETs
I don't think I've ever seen a Compucolor, but I thought they looked really cool at the time. I think they had a weird optical keyboard that reduced the amount of circuitry needed by using optical sensor beams blocked by keys your pressed.
Oh Adrian^H^H^H Robin! I can't believe you skipped right over article/advert on the Sinclair hand-held TV - love to hear more about what that article is about.
I love this stuff! It harkens back to when I was a kid learning BASIC on a ZX-80 and C-64. Would love to be able to go back in time and play with these machines during their heyday. I had no idea that Exidy ever made home computers! That would be a real prize. Coincidentally, just yesterday (the day this video was posted) I was reading a bit about H.R. Kauffman, the founder of Exidy. Also, is that an Altair hidden away in the cover photo? Definitely past its prime by 1979, but still very photogenic!
The TRS-80 was sold here in the UK but then the late great Sir Clive Sinclair came on the scene with a computer for under 100 UK pounds! I miss those Tandy stores
22:34 Oh hey, Chip-8! I remember that. It's a very straightforward, opcode-based, interpreted language, and also one of the easiest systems to write an emulator/interpreter for - so it still sees some use for both of those reasons.
How many ads in that magazine are from Minneapolis? I can't believe there was someone selling prefab homes from my old neighborhood (16:40)! Then there's Du-Er tools (18:40) and Foley (19:03), which I've at least heard of. Was PS based in Minneapolis at the time?
I played with a Compucolor in the store back in the day and wanted one really badly. Now I have one, but have yet to try to get it working (or maybe it works, but need to go over it before I try turning it on).
In 1982--83 I was attending an elementary school in Eugene, Oregon that had PET computers. Thankfully they were the 1979 revised version with the standard keyboard and not the awful chiclet keyboard. At home I had a TI-99/4A which was superior because it was full color, three voice sound (with a fourth devoted to noise), actual graphics and sprites, and bitmapping, which I knew nothing of then but later finding out that the 99/4A had it and not the original 99/4. But with the PET I noticed it couldn't do graphics or sound. It did have tons of characters to make it appear to have graphics.
My first hands-on BASIC programming as a kid was at a day-camp site that had a Sol or Ohio Scientific computer that had a printer. I wish I remembered better which machine it was! I think this would have been in the summer of 78.
9:20 I remember using PET computers in elementary school here in Northern Ontario. It was well known that because of "glitches" in CBM BASIC, even simple arithmetic problems that were trivial for a calculator produced different results in a PET. For example, in a division math problem where the answer was expected to be a perfect 3, instead the computer might output 3.00000001 . Programmers had to write BASIC code able to deal with these slightly erroneous math results.
APF was mostly based in NYC, but the PeCos system was set up as PCS - Personal Computing System - PeCos sounded easier and more user friendly as the market shifted. They went out of business around 1983 as the video game market crashed and only the best systems survived.
It's somewhat odd that the magazine didn't use the current computers for that issue. Heathkit released the H89 that year and my father and I built it together on the living room floor. Took us several weeks to solder all the components and luckily I still have it in working order. Green phosphor in all its glory!
Seems the H89 wasn't released until near the end of 1979, about the same time as the Atari computers, and this article was likely written at the very beginning of 1979. That's great you still have it, especially in working condition!
@@8_Bit I'm fuzzy on exactly when we got it. It may have been my mother's early Christmas gift to us. But it was definitely in use by year end. I remember we had to program the ROM ourselves before we could use it and had trouble at boot because we programed for hard sectored disks but we had the h37 soft sector controller.
Haven't heard of the Compucolor for many years. Don't know if I ever saw one in real life. Well I read some articles and I did see one back in the day. For a very brief period around 1981 my local Kmart in Australia had a computer section. I used to go there and type in my avoid-the-scrolling-asteroids game on the TRS-80 model 2 and ogle the CompuColor. They may have let me try it out once but I can't remember. I am now sure that I have confused it over the forty years with the Hitachi Peach, another dream computer with hi-resolution colour graphics at the beginning of the '80s that now looks slow and clunky even compared to a Speccy.
FWIW , the coleco Adam loaded basic from tape. The rom was dedicated to the word processor, which was probably more sensible for their target customer. Many machines sold in the eighties were just word processors with no programming capability provided.
I know nothing about PeCos as a language. The only thing I could find was a picture purporting to be PeCos. It looked a little like early Turbo Pascal but with a lot of extra structure built up around it to complicate things. Best guess?
At the time, when speaking of bytes kilo meant 1024 but often was said as 1000 because average people understood it especially in countries using the metric system. The US was pushing the public to use the metric system at the time, so the term would be familiar. However, today kilo does NOT refer to 1024 bytes. In December 1998, the IEC addressed the dual usage issue and changed the naming to provide clarity. 1024 now has the term kibi (kibibyte for 1024 bytes). Most OS platforms realize this, but MS Windows won't relent and I believe Apple's Mac OS and iOS won't either. You will see Linux use the new terms as well. The additional terms: kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi, exbi, zebi, and yobi at the respective multiples of base two.
IIRC - the RCA WAS a KIM I. The TRS-80 "graphic" screen was really characters presenting a 2 (hor) x 3 (ver) tall-squares. Accessible as CHR$(n) prints.
The RCA was a very similar concept to the KIM - a single-board computer with keypad. Definitely the same class of computer. But it used the RCA 1802 processor which was completely incompatible with the KIM's 6502.
AFP PeCos One is just so ugly that it is beautiful. WOW ! And PeCos (the programming laguage this machine supports by default) is apparently "a constraint-based language, built on the object-oriented module of Le-Lisp.". The PeCos manual says "Till now, the computer language barrier had clearly been the major problem in translating the myriad capabilities of the computer into a meaningful product for personal use by consumers. The advanced PeCos One system is'launching a new breed of computer, which talk to the user in a non-technical, easily-mastered language-English. The computer language used in PeCos (Personal Computer System), is actually a variation of the popular JOSS, language developed by the prestigious Rand Corporation, for those who needed direct access to a computer, but had neither the time nor interest to learn conventional, and highly complex-computer language. APF, has refined its version of JOSS even further." And, the manual says "If you feel that you have been successful in mastering, and programming PeCos, we are interested in hearing about any programs written on PeCos" and they provide an address (in Madison Ave, New York) for customers to send letters, telling AFP about their PeCos programs. Amazing times. Never seen an AFP PeCos One in real life, but sure wish I could have a play on one / program one.
There was absolutely no such thing as too much RAM from these days given the limitations of the 16bit address space limited you to 64k. For example, if you want to write, 64k (not to mention the program, the screen ram etc) is TINY. An average uncompressed book in txt format is about a megabyte. So after subtracting the program itself and its needs, you might have 50k available. A typical page is about 80x66 characters. That's over 5k per page. Granted, not every single cell wiill be taking up space, but it is going to be close. That's maybe 15 pages of single spaced text.
Intelligent Systems Corporation, the maker of the Compucolor, is still around. They trade on NASDAQ under their new name CoreCard Corp, sym: CCRD. the computer died a quick death
