this was such a lovely watch. really relaxed and reverential look at some old computers by people who remember them. SO cool! Loved Jon dropping all the knowledge
Finally the video of all RCE videos is here, been waiting for this! That lovely old gentleman has an amazing collection and I'm sure he was happy to be able to show it to someone who appreciates it. Now all he needs to do is to sell all of it during Grandma's Attic, then we can truly see how far Junt is willing to go when it comes to flea market purchases.
I love this. I live in Rhode Island and I'm kinda obsessed with older computers so this is amazing. I found out about the RICM just a few months ago and now its sign grabs my eye every time I drive by. I knew they had some really nice stuff but I hadn't know the scale of it, a whole warehouse of computer history is incredible. My high school has partnered with them before, offering the electric car PLT they mentioned every year (though I'm not a part of it, I'm in the Offshore Wind Engineering one instead).
My dad was a HUGE computer nerd, I wonder if he knew about this place and ever visited. I can just imagine him geeking out over all the historical pieces here!
I used to work at EDF and heard the stories about trying to buy obsolete computer equipment, new old stock floppy discs and control system cards. They would hire companies to manufacture new control cards but even the subcomponents on the board were becoming impossible to source.
It's like 'puter smith on the road! Thank you so much! All those clips you sourced just added so much to the video. Great job on the video! It's like a summer special 😊
I live in Warwick, RI (the town where this is located) and I've been wanting to check this place out! It's not often our little state gets such a cool exhibit.
We would love to have Jon do a weekly Puter Smith show at the museum. It would be fun & educational. We always help people learn how to repair thier own computers. We have a wealth of knowledge with all the volunteers we have.
It was a big edit and it came after some unboxings and the wrestling BoxMac and of course non stop podcast clips (which about 75% are done by our editors but I still do about a quarter of them).
26:18 Oh Man, that RJE Terminal was my first computer job in 1980! no monitor, just had to send mainframe spool commands blind, and you could drop in jobs via punched cards, good times. Our company didn't own a mainframe at the time, we timeshared at a service bureau (today, a Cloud provider) in Charlotte. Think it usually came out to about $25K a month. like 16 dumb terminals and that RJE chain printer and card reader, all of it over a single 9600 baud modem.
You would think in the Hudson Valley NY, being the home of IBM (and at one time IBM was the largest employer) there would be a museum like this. But as with many other interests, no one can be bothered.
We had a Data General Dasher terminal and keyboard in our basement. Don't know what grandparents used it for. It had a beautiful screen and the iconic blue keyboard. I think both were made in Southboro. Industrial tank quality.
Golly, for a second I thought all the "Puter Smith" references were to Putter Smith -(I know this is a touch obscure). Putter Smith Played "Mr. Kidd" on the Bond film "Diamonds are Forever" in 1971. He was one half of a villian couple - the other was Bruce Glover (Crispin's dad) as "Mr. Wint." Their performance was memorable and at times hilarious. Anyway, my brain's rando-gland gave me just for a second the possibility that Putter Smith had somehow ended up opening up a computer museum years later. I think what did it was the facial hair - though your tour guide is much younger and shorter. Ah well . . . still a fun 20 seconds of Charlie Murphyesque yarnboarding. LOL
Another wonderful episode of 'Puter Smith! Even though I'm not really knowledgeable on the subject, I've always appreciated the aesthetic of old pre-90s computers.
Got my first rig? An OSI Superboard II, with the 24KB expansion board, with 48x 2114 512byte memories chips. Or my old Fav? PDP-11/03 with a DecWriter, 8" floppies, and old skool VDUs - running RT-11 BASIC, Fortran, or Pascal!
Loved this, and I know next to nothing about computers. The tech info was conveyed in a way I could understand, without seeming like it would alienate somebody who's really into PCs either.
I need to visit that place, i won a Retro Recipes "RR" badge that gets me in to computer museums around the world... I had a great uncle who was the Zenith TV guy in Fall River, his shop was on Bedford st i believe.... my memere still had a b&w tv with vacuum tubes in it in the 80s.... and we used to listen to the red sox on a tube radio. I've restored a few tube radios and wish there was stuff worth listening to in AM these days...
@rty1955 even better ;) My first computer was a TI99/4a back in 83, I was 7, i had no peripherals, no software, other than the manuals and magazines, i learned to type and learned basic quickly, lol.... i still have that machine and it still runs!
Thanks for this one! A real treat! My first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 MC-10. I didn't know a lot of BASIC but did managed with help to load in a game or two. I also used to sneaky-use it as a calculator to do a bit of my elementary school math homework - though by the time you punched in the code, you should have just done the problem and showed your workings. Would get it set up and then I just had to turn off the CRT TV I used for a monitor if my parents came back upstairs!
The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe Platinum in the Chicago Public School system! We played games like Reader Rabbit and Number Muncher. I still would like to buy one to keep on display!
Yay, been waiting and excited for this since it was first mentioned as even being a possibility however long ago. Time to dig in! EDIT: It did not disappoint! So much amazing stuff and cool history to feast your eyes on. As a reseller who's sold some vintage computers and electronics I just kept seeing $ signs and thinking about how much that collection has gotta be worth, some of it seems so rare its basically priceless and impossible to even conceive a value for it. Cant wait for part 2!
I think another big reason you don't see so many of the old IBM machines is because a lot of businesses didn't buy them, they leased them and when they got old and the customer no longer wanted to lease them, I guess IBM just came in and took them away to be scrapped.
Great Content Fellas! Big fan since 2023. Retrogaming will never die! Thanks Frankie, Junt, others. Lol feels like a Christmas special with the jackets and light piano music tho lmao
This video could have been at least an hour longer and I'd still have been mesmerised. RELEASE THE DELETED SCENES! Also... Where'd they get that Harrier from? Is it a movie prop or something?
Awesome a new 'puter smith. Always enjoy seeing john and the whole red cow family. another great vid guys.( when was this filmed? you are all wearing jackets. its 110 degrees here. im sweating watching you guys lol.) have an awesome day. ps john looked like he had a blast. hope you all had fun.
Funny to think how a screenwriter just has to type "old computer" into the script, and then it's up to various members of the production team to figure out what kind of computer would make sense for that setting, and see if they can source it. I remember the first computer I bought for myself was a Mac Mini in 2005, since it was a simple, all-in-one media-production station. It was good at what it did, but if I'd known it wasn't gonna play any games or run 99% of the software I wanted to run on it, I might have gone with a Windows-based computer instead.
Hey John! Need some help with an imagewriter one that I have. Trying to get it to work on a windows 11 computer. Any suggestions or ideas how I can do so? Guides ect?
DEC Rainbow~! One of the bricks in the road that led to Digital's death. Even that extra option that let the thing operate as a VT was a debacle. Love the Tandy computer desk. For whatever reason a lot of companies decided to be furniture manufacturers too. Wang was very bad about it. I do miss a lot of the varied form factors, microcomputing today is just very boring.
