LGR - Strangest Computer Designs of the '70s 

$40000. $40000 is how. That's about $220,000 in 2017 dollars. Remember the old adage: "Fast, cheap, and good -- pick any two!"

no he weaseled it out of them with stock promises... hes an extortionist

Better programmers and less wasteful software. Modern programming is so far away from Assembly that many programmers aren't trained engineers like you had from 1965-1990 but secretaries and game power users that just like home computers and hack their way into a profession. Scripting like Java really wastes clock speed and memory resources for no real end gain, vs proper 2gl and 3gl compiled programs. Thus the Apollo era computers could do the job with slower computers but more robust electronics and tighter software.

S Tho Aegis for the win!

I was once a NCR-500 computer repairman used primarily for logistics 800 words of iron core memory, the programs were loaded via 80 column key punched cards.

Whisper that! Don't give Clint any ideas about cladding his 486 in real wood...

Barry Manilowa Well, they did elect Trudeau. LOL

Pretty much what Apple did with their first computer, too.

@@MarkTheMorose i THINK clint would already have done this if he wanted to, he likes the look of FAKE wood

Gotta go flintstone style and make a computer made out of rocks

...and $40k was more like $80k in todays value

About $180,000

The price tag of the products, and their management saw their corporate mission as producing printed documents, not sending them from place to paper without printing them. Fortunately, IBM didn't see their corporate mission as producing time clocks and butcher scales (Hobart), and Remington didn't see theirs as just guns (so they went into typewriters and later the Univac computer).

In all honesty, it was because the companies who made them only had the elite and businesses (and possibly colleges) in mind. They weren't thinking of the average consumer at the time.

@@allanrichardson1468 we used to have a Remington hairdryer. Not sure if it's the same company though lol.

I could buy at least 10 high end computers today for some of these computers. 40 thousand for a computer, no thanks.

jthedog for a computer with like 100KB storage and 10KB ram lol

40K in 75 is something like 120K today. A system with an intel 7700K, a 1080ti, and 32GB of DDR4 (so not the highest you can go but it should crush whatever games you throw at it), can be build for something like 1200 dollars. so you can build 100 of those!

An Apple 1 is sold for $100K- $500K these days.. still more than a modest house, not much has changed :D

yet you can probably build one your self for a fraction of that, since it's all off-the shelf parts. or use a FPGA chip and run one. or use Rasberry pi and emulate one.

Simon Christensen and 640K is more than enough.

Lmao RU-vid considers this a top comment. Have a second like

Have a fourth

Have a 14th

Maybe the houshold budget or to keep recipes..

Thanks, looks interesting. I've always found the Also very interesting and was very disappointed when I started working at Xerox, and it turned out that they didn't have one stashed away in the basement :-(

Yeah, I'd be bummed too. Such an incredible machine for its time.

I just found the video where they overhaul an Alto's ancient hard drive. 😃

To be fair, many interesting APL programs fit in a single line.

Imagine programming without display like on Altair 8800, with just a row of switches. :)

Sharp, Casio, and TI had pocket computers with one-line LCD screens that ran BASIC in the 1980s. Tandy also marketed various re-badged Sharp and Casio models. I never had one but they were kinda neat I guess. I suppose one of course would have to write down their programs before they typed them in and hoped for no typos.

surprisingly enough apl the language used for that machine is very presice a hello world in apl is litarlly just 'Hello World'

Made a simple boxing game for a one liner display.. you pick to swing high low or mid and it picks to block/swing like rock paper scissor with fists. And of course the number guessing game "Higher Lower"

Because of the hit and miss of innovation or something else??

Yeah, and they cost as much or more than a mid to high end luxury car of the same era! They better be interesting!

Of course you would, HAL.

That's because you look like a computer from the 70s. Lol

+Vintr The difference is that 70s computers are very capable of errors.

ATM machine, HDD drive, PIN number.. it's all part of RAS syndrome 😋

@@mrburns366 Correct, though not necessarily a problem, in some cases necessary, and can help a reader who is unfamiliar with the acronym.Consider: "We use IBM machines and like to use the BCPL programming language". Yes, the redundancy could be avoided and you could just say "We use IBM and BCPL", but more readers would think "IBM for what? and what the heck is BCPL anyway" than with the first version.

I feel in some cases the acronym ends up trascending it's original meaning and becoming a category of it's own. For example, yes, "an ATM machine" literally would mean "an Automatic Teller Machine machine", but could also be interpreted as "a machine of the ATM type". "An LGR review" = "A Lazy Game Reviews review" or "A review by youtuber LRG".

But "TT Logic" sounds strange. Kinda like Technology Connections saying "LC panel", even when that's warranted because what he's actually talking about is literally a homogenous panel rather than a display. But "LC display" would also sound odd, vs the technically incorrect "LCD display".

Great examples of tautology.

Steve Jobs basically stole the concept. Him and some Apple engineers went to study the Alto in exchange for Xerox getting stock in Apple but the outcome of that was Apple basically claiming the concepts as their own and turning Apple into a billion dollar company. Xerox got a raw deal, imo.

Honestly, they probably could have reworked the concept to be more mainstream if they had wanted to, but the Alto itself was priced at the cost of ten very nice cars at the time, making it more of a machine aimed at universities or publishers than consumers. The engineering required to take the concepts of the GUI + mouse and work them into a a consumer-affordable machine (the original Macintosh, after failing with the more powerful and much more expensive Lisa), was a real credit to Apple's engineers. Today, we often take for granted that the concepts demonstrated by the Alto can be easily surpassed in quality and usability by a humble Raspberry Pi, but the Alto itself was a major work of engineering that was probably well worth its ridiculous (to us today) price. It took the passage of years (making more powerful components cheaper) + more engineering to "steal" those ideas for the Mac (and Windows, and X, etc.).

Bell-bottoms, Apple tech being *good,* afros, the 70s certainly were weird.

What about the 80s?

deleted comment.

Apple WAS a good company...then Steve Wozniak left

Hey, I lived through the 70's, and I ain't that weird . . . .

That's where you store the coal.

Papa Bear You need room for those pixies to dance

oooooh BEER STORAGE

Coincidence? I think not! .... Thankfully, we now have better technologies, so defeating iit shouldn't be a problem.

Nep-Nep

Xerox also didn't really see any future in a "paperless" office, so they shut down PARC, which was only a demo project anyway (and workstations that would have cost a hundred grand today made it unfeasible for customers). They did, however, use the "back end" of the xerographic technology to make the first laser printers, and their patents were copied when they expired to produce all of today's laser printers. In the mid-1970s, IBM produced a high speed printer with that technology for mainframes which used giant reels of perforated forms the size of newsprint rolls, able to print almost as fast as a newspaper printing press, and to produce graphics, variable type fonts and orientations, even pre-signed checks. So Xerox got some mileage out of that even after their patents expired. (By "back end" I mean that rather than exposing an existing document to put the electrostatic image on the drum to produce the copy, a laser printer uses a laser beam and high speed mirror optics to scan the drum, and thus "copy" each page from digital data to paper.)

I like how the screen makes today´s non-wide screens look pretty wide.

Also, they pioneered object oriented programming with a “little” language called Smalltalk. Well, one of the first to implement OOP in a real environment. The operating system was written in Smalltalk, too.

A friend on mine in the 1980s had previously worked at PARC in the accounting department back in the late 1970s. She said the technology developed in that place was at least a decade ahead of what could become mainstream in the business world. She amusingly told me that in the late 1970s, PARC had color copiers that were so good that the employees would copy one-dollar bills and run them through the change machine in the lunchroom, so the coins could be used to buy snacks and beverages from the coin-operated vending machines. Every week when the vending machine route driver serviced the lunchroom vending machines, including re-stocking the change machine, he'd come into the accounting department with around 20 bogus one-dollar bills, and have them exchanged for legal tender out of PARC's petty cash fund. What was very peculiar was that no one voiced any objections of that practice; as it was accepted as doing business in the high-tech world. xD

Curious Marc has an awesome set of videos on the Alto. It was/is an amazingly modern PC.

In the cretasic era, we paired sticks and stones... wow. Must be another universe with those

I worked for one of those companies. Late 70s, Datapoint 2200 / 16k memory / 10Mb disk. Datashare language (like cobol but less 'wordy'), 6 dumb screens around the factory running Sales, inventory & planning. Sub-second response times. This was my start into IT. Now people talk about digitizing their companies ....

As I looked at it in the video, I was skeptical the CTC 2200 could be made even by a creative programmer to function as a general purpose computer disconnected from its mainframe. Although...when I used a keypunch that could read the previous card, I used to fantasize about making that the basis for a self-executing sequence, so....

I was also a tech, for CN Telecommunications, and maintained several of them. They didn't have a hard disk, so the cassettes were used for loading the program. Also, IIRC, there was a BASIC interpreter for them.

Justen J Well, having great ideas is one thing, realising their potential and impact is a completely different kettle of fish - the difference between Xerox and Steve 🤭

"Steve Jobs is better because he stole someone's real ideas" is not the hot take I was expecting to read today.

The Apple screen from the earlier models sure looks like the Alto screen.

You should have told your professor about Xerox stealing the GUI and mouse from Douglas Engelbart. At least Jobs paid Engelbart... (which happened to be the only money he ever saw from it). The Alto was never a commercial product, and it was also not very polished. While it had a lot of useful functions, they weren't implemented as well as on the Macintosh. You must remember that Apple hired about two dozen people from Xerox PARC to work on their systems so they could refine the ideas and simply make a better product. The Macintosh was a product you could buy so it's not surprising that this is the product that gets the attention and not a prototype that had little exposure.

Nope, they sparked imagination to make it happen, science fiction was just about that, fiction.. when u try to translate it to real world u find a few pieces missing so u fill the gap (mouse)

FancyThat Sci fi didn't predict future technology, it's more that technology was inspired by Sci fi and tried to make products that were like what they saw in these shows and movies. Like when the first flip phone was developed, they specifically tried to make it like the one from star trek. That's not a prediction coming true, its something different

I personally believe that "Science Fiction" was just based on what they knew we had already simply because all of these so called "Futuristic" gadgets that seemed like "Science Fiction" Government intelligence agancies had decades before it ever bacame public knowledge that they existed and the Government intelligence agancies got this incredibly advanced technology from the Alien beings that are literally milennia ahead of us in terms of technology

FancyThat The mouse? “How quaint. Hello computer!”

Who the duck need mouse when you can touch everything or imagine by thinking in science fiction.

Haha

Such an underrated comment

I could see a Joke SCP in this somewhere.

Hahahahha

@@jasonmitchell9411 Eh, when you get down to it, it could just be a sibling to 079 or 713... Though it might be fair to consider 86-DOS and its successors as an SCP in their own right.

moosemaimer why not a plain hdmi cable

My new HDTV has a VGA input

It took a while for televisions to catch up to computer monitors for specs. Especially resolution.

First tv i had with a VGA port was in 2007, and my lifestyle was ideal for hooking my pc to the tv then. Slightly different but my pc is hooked up to another tv via hdmi, but living room tv is smart tv with miracast. The jump in technology seems crazy

I actually use a 50" VIZIO 1080p LED as a monitor.

Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying!

Lots of different manufacturers in the UK (possibly 50 by the early 80's?). Acorn Atom of ~1978 was about the best. Superseding the US Commodore Pet as the most desired for home use.

And not just computers... basically almost everything. We're in the hands of China, whether we like it or not...

And Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, USSR, Poland, GDR, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Greece, Italy, France, Belgium, Netherland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Australia, and so on. The world was full of weird and wonderful computers :) The computer variety went away simultaneously with the arrival of generally accepted standards - first the IBM PC (and more local ones - CP / M, Apple II, Macintosh, ZX Spectrum), and then Android / iOS. The country of origin is not so important here - after all, China produces smartphones and PCs for companies around the world (developers are located in the USA, Japan, Korea, etc.), and these companies, Apple, Samsung, etc., have always been the largest manufacturers of phones, although it must be admitted that in recent years they are being overtaken by large Chinese corporations - Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo ...

Don't you love outsourcing?

@@DinnerForkTongue its not outsourcing per say. Its one economy specialising in one thing. Its also why most cars are built in the us and Germany or why most olive oil is produced in greece and Spain

She's a beauty.

That's what Steve Jobs thought, too. I remember seeing this at a COMDEX show back in the day, and my boss was very excited about it, how cool it was, the icons on the "desktop" (though that term had not yet been coined). I was used to typing commands, and basically went pffffh at the whole idea. Guess I was wrong :-/

indeed

Jedi Lennon ! It also had Ethernet!

+lucas rem "That Xerox Alto i used in 1986, to DTP the Dutch Atari User magazine" How did you get hold of a Xerox Alto? As far as I know they where never sold to any company. And DTP software running on the Alto? Maybe you're confusing it with the Xerox Star?

32 GB ROM? or RAM plus SSD? ROM is for the startup logic and the subroutines you don't want the OS to be able to change after booting up, so kilobytes would be more reasonable than megabytes, much less gigabytes. Most early PCs had 32 KB or 64 KB of ROM to hold the BIOS and power up logic, so the OS could boot up into RAM.

Sadly as memory is so cheap these days, it allows for a lot of bloat.

William TOAD Actually, you have probably missed the most important contribution made to computing during the 70s: virtual memory. Original development was at IBM, but it was the technical success of the Prime 100 that made smaller computers competitive with large machines and launched the minicomputer business.

Oh mamma

:O Thank you so much!!

same old tech looks so cool

Same :) And I have a big heart for old hard drives. Especially those with a capacity of around 2gb. They make lovely noises. Old Akai Mpc audio samplers also made cute clunky sounds which you should definitely check out.

I own a PS Vita, but I use my PSP for PSP Games because of the drive :D It feels nice and the console is purring like a happy cat.

You mean less than a dollar per BYTE, not K ;D

Like two bytes per Dollar

Might want to try the math again.

It's just 5.2 cents per bit. Still a bargain.

lol imagine that pricing. Today I just ordered a kit of 64GB of RAM LOL

and Xerox thru it out.. Apparantly managment was pissed off at the results, they wanted a new computer not this...this thing!

That's because it's a SCP

This was the comment I was looking for

That was the first question that entered my mind when I saw it. I always thought the computer book was simply a gimmick created for the show.

Yes, but it couldn't access a wireless network (Penny could access almost ANY computer's network).

Daehawk Yeah, I wrote some code for a guy back then... I didn’t want to give it back! It was the first colour computer thar really served a purpose.

Not completely foreign. It was designed so that assembler sources (not binaries) could be automatically translated.

Actually, the instruction set was similar, though the op codes were different. Back in those days, I bought some software, editor, assembler, monitor and "SCELBAL" BASIC from Scelbi. They came with books of code listings in both octal and hex, which I entered by hand into my IMSAI 8080, as I had no other means to do it. I'd then save to cassette. The SCELBAL listing had both 8008 and 8080 code and the source was almost the same.

It's a foundation front company

Sato What do you mean? Pasta is a type of food, computers are electronic devices and are not food. They have nothing to do with pasta.

Sato here, in case you don't believe me en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasta In some countries pasta is eaten extensively, maybe every day. I don't know if your country has pasta, but you should seek it out and try it, it's delicious :-)

we get it man, the pasta joke isn't that funny

Totally possible.

Or what about the very first electronic digital computer, Atanasoff Berry, and the sneaky efforts by the Eniac team to ignore it and try to take the spotlight for inventing the computer. Only because of an investigative young patent lawyer did they finally get recognition. There's a great documentary about it, could easily pass as a Grisham thriller.

Road trip to Iowa State University!?

What was the first computer to have a monitor? I'd like to know that.

Also the Digital PDP mini computers.

Mariner1712 Imagine how I feel, born in the 50s, and used half these machines !

really they are getting much cheaper. You can get a computer for like $200 and it is like 100X better than what a top of the line computer could have gotten like 20 years ago.

Could the Frinkiac-7 be used for dating?

ha ha the simpsons

An early computer executive around 1950 predicted that someday there could be 40 or 50 computers in the world. Asimov went the other way in his fiction, turning the trade name Univac which was well known in the early 1950s into the worldwide computer Multivac. Since he didn't specify the kind of technology that would be used, he didn't rule out many processors, so in a way he predicted the Internet and World Wide Web (except that Multivac's input had to be translated for it, and its output had to be translated by humans, by highly trained programmers; I think his concept was punched papertape).

a perfectly cromulent prediction...

Actually, some large offices could have used that system, given its economy of scale, if they needed to route human-type documents such as business letters among dozens of employees. Large newspapers, for example; sending stories from reporters into a queue for editing, then to a typesetting system. But that would also cut into the Xerox copying business, so they dropped it. They kept the xerographic printing technology, producing their own printers that allowed mainframe and minicomputer systems to print on letter paper rather than 11x14 or 8x14 fan-folded paper, and licensed the technology behind it to other companies, and when the patents expired, other companies just copied the design.

Daniel Silveira Didn't he write a book, published a long time ago, with a nicer back/forward navigation design than RU-vid?

Thanks for mentioning Douglas Engelbart. He was a wonderful man and so much ahead of his time. I'm glad the demo is available here for everyone to see.

@@johnfrancisdoe1563 i think he wrote a few books but don't recall the name. I ended up doing a documentary on him that talks a lot about what he did. It's on RU-vid now and called The Augmentation of Douglas Engelbert. Check it out :-)

@@dm8579 I agree. He's a hero to me. I did a full documentary on him and it's on RU-vid and Amazon prime. The Augmentation of Douglas Engelbart. You should check it out!

A lot of flat screen monitors can be rotated for Portrait Mode nowadays (I think mine as well).

Widum Boise I fantasize about one with circular monitors. Idk but something about those old circular monitors and thinking of one's that are flat screen just seem cool to me

Circular monitors would change a lot. Everything would be based on polar coordinates instead of X and Y.

Electroduck's Gaming Videos Not necessarily. Look at the apple watches.

Yeah, it's not strictly necessary, you could use regular X/Y with massive amounts of invalid (not drawn) space, but polar would be much more efficient for circular displays.

I used to play a version of this in the 90's that was connected to the internet called MTREK...

And similar objections were made to FORTRAN and COBOL by professional programmers, especially scientific programmers, who claimed that compiler generated code would be too inefficient. FORTRAN's early compilers "dumbed down" the language FOR THE MACHINE, so that the compiler would generate reasonably efficient code, and run reasonably efficiently on the 701 and its successors. Then the industry realized that a FORTRAN program written by the engineer or scientist who needed the calculations done, running correctly in 3 or 4 attempts, was a lot more efficient than a machine language program written by a programmer FOR that user, running correctly in 30 or 40 attempts (the last 10 tries to get that last few microseconds out of it). With COBOL the main purpose was to develop commercial programs which would be able to run together in an entire corporate system, be easily updated over their lifetimes as business needs changed, and be reviewable to some extent by intelligent non-technical managers (we're still waiting for THOSE to be developed, LOL). Business computing is more about how many units (customers, employees, inventory units, parts, and of course dollars) you can keep track of, and thus how many data records you can push through per operating shift, with a modest amount of calculating per record, than about CPU cycles anyway.

toomdog I think my dad still has his mouse on the left. And no, he’s not left handed. He worked for UNIVAC starting in the 1960s - Naval Defense Systems. By the time he retired, the building he worked at was owned by Lockheed Martin, and his job title at retirement was that of Webmaster. Mom’s job at UNIVAC did not need/have a mouse until later... her mouse is on the right

It doesn’t matter... a mouse is a relative movement input device, unlike for example, a pen tablet. You move your hand, lift, reposition... the mouse doesn’t care ‘where’ it is. Only if it moves from A to B That’s exactly why the mouse gained popularity so quickly.

Raichu Railfan Productions ur not alone

atur chomicz no those were amazing

Well get over it, that era is over now. ;)

the 70's killed my father. i have nightmares about the 70's.

Well shag carpeting was a nightmare as was most 70s home decor, nothing but dirt sponges everywhere.