Many computer operating systems throughout history have shipped with at least one free game — Solitaire and Minesweeper are some of the most famous examples. Knowing this, I thought I’d take a stroll through history and examine other OS pack-in games.
I ended up with an amusing collection of over twenty games from 1971 to the present. The resulting gallery is up now on Technologizer. I hope you enjoy it.
The Portrait Display Labs Pivot 1700
When I was a kid, I found myself wondering why all monitors didn’t rotate from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. I thought I had invented the idea myself. Turns out, at least one company actually did make a monitor like that — the Pivot 1700 — and you’re looking at it now.
Full-page displays were something of a marketing fad during the rise of the desktop publishing revolution from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. They were designed with a vertical orientation so that someone could read or edit a full 8.5″ x 11″ letter-sized page on screen at one time.
I have no doubt those displays came in handy for certain document designers and secretaries, but their high price and specialized function limited them to a small market. To this day I have never seen one being used in the wild, although I have encountered a few full page displays out of service in my collecting adventures.
In more recent years, I’ve seen some LCD monitors that can rotate on their base to change orientations rather easily. There’s no doubt that it’s a much easier trick to pull off considering the small size and weight of LCD panels verses their bulky CRT counterparts. Now whether anybody needs it or not with today’s super high resolultion 30″ displays, I don’t know.
Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the largest CRT computer monitor you’ve ever used? How big is your monitor (any kind) now?
Periodically, I visit my parents’ house and pick through the material vestiges of my childhood. Old toys, broken knickknacks, and drawings rendered in crayon litter their dusty attic. My mom, being the mother she was, tucked them away as small monuments to her child’s journey through life. I’m happy she did.
During one of these visits in 2008, I ran across this curious artifact of my early education. It’s one of my kindergarten spelling workbooks, still filled out in my meandering 5-year old hand all these years later.
As I flipped through its pages, memories of my kindergarten year — 1986 — began to bubble up from the deepest corners of my brain. I remembered the workbook’s contents surprisingly well: it contained simple words with letters omitted, replaced with blanks in which I scrawled awkward glyphs.
I recalled having my spelling knowledge put to the test on primitive PCs of the day, which I had always assumed were Apple IIs in retrospect. But when my eyes fell upon the famous IBM logo printed on the cover, a strange realization washed over me: IBM taught me how to read.
[ Continue reading [ Retro Scan Special ] IBM Taught Me How to Read » ]
Commodore first shipped the legendary Amiga 1000 in July of 1985 — twenty-five years ago. In honor of the Amiga’s birthday, I did what comes natural to Benjs of all sorts: I took one apart. And I did it for PC World, making this the tenth entry in my “workbench series” of tech autopsies.
Giving the Amiga 1000 its place in the limelight is only fair because I took apart its arch-nemesis, the Atari 1040STf, back in March (the ST series also turned 25 this year).
I hope you enjoy it. When you’re done, I encourage you — no, urge you — to share your fondest Amiga memories in the comments below.
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Here are my previous workbench teardowns, if you’re interested: Atari 1040STf, Atari 800, Commodore 64, Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Famicom, Apple IIc, IBM Model M Keyboard, TRS-80 Model 100, and Macintosh Portable.
You remember Mr. Wizard’s World, right? It was a light science show for kids that aired on Nickelodeon in the 1980s. On one episode, Mr. Wizard took a peek inside the Atari 1200XL with his usual juvenile accompaniment. Here’s a clip.
The real fun begins as Mr. Wizard tries to explain the function of a row of eight chips on the motherboard around 1:40 into the segment. He quickly lapses into apparent nonsense:
You see these eight all here? This is an eight bit computer. You’ve heard of that? OK. Each one of these sends a, uh, byte off to the screen and, uh, each little dot has to have a signal from each one of those.
I probably don’t have to tell you this, but that’s not how the Atari 1200XL works. This is Internet, though, so I’ll explain it. Those eight chips are RAM chips, and their exact quantity in any computer is mostly independent of the CPU’s word size (i.e. 8-bit, 16-bit).
The fact the Atari’s CPU is 8-bit and that it contains eight RAM chips is a coincidence that apparently confused Mr. Wizard. The 1200XL had 64KB of RAM, so those are likely 8KB chips (8KB x 8 chips = 64KB). To make up the same amount of RAM, Atari could have used (for example) four 16KB chips or sixteen 4KB chips.
The rest of his explanation for those eight chips doesn’t make any sense either. But hey, it’s Mr. Wizard! Other than that, he does a pretty good job showcasing the 1200XL in a kid-show context. The joystick-sans-stick demonstration is classic Mr. Wizard fare — he’d always change things around and make you think about an issue in an unexpected way. That was his genius.
I loved Mr. Wizard’s World dearly as a kid. In fact, I learned many basic physics principles from that show. We could really use someone like him again.
P.S. If you like Mr. Wizard as much as I do, watch him on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1982.
Apparently Paul Revere owned a secret power plant in 1775.
Discussion Topic of the Week: How fast was your first modem? What year did you get it?
“Discover a new way to ‘Reach out and touch someone!'”
AT&T launched the VideoPhone 2500 in 1992 with high hopes that it would finally bring video calling to the masses. Ultimately, it fared no better than AT&T’s previous attempts at commercial video phones, all of which exited the market quickly after their introduction.
For $1599.99 ($2,486.19 in 2010 dollars), you received a single phone unit that could send audio and color video (at up to ten frames per second) simultaneously over a regular phone line. It worked its magic through a 19.2 kbps data stream, which is minuscule by today’s standards, but was state of the art in 1992. Unfortunately, the video functionality of the VideoPhone 2500 was useless without another $1599.99 phone to interact with — perhaps the fatal flaw in AT&T’s plan.
If you’re interested in learning more about the history of video telephone technology, check out my latest Technologizer slideshow, 132 Years of Videophones.
Discussion Topic of the Week: If you owned an easy-to-use videophone device — and everyone else had one — how often do you think you’d use its video functionality?
Like comparing Apple IIs and Oranges+Twos
There was a time in the early 1980s when one could find ads for many different unauthorized Apple II clones in the back of just about any computer magazine. The ads promised inexpensive reverse-engineered copies of the Apple II computer hardware designed to use Apple II software and peripherals. Apple wasn’t too happy about the illicit machines and even managed to win some import bans on them in the US, but many remained on the market.
Some folks, like my father, even bought underground replicas of the Apple II motherboard, copied the Apple ROMs onto EPROMs, and built their own Apple IIs from scratch. It was a lot cheaper than buying directly from Apple, so many people with the technical know-how chose that path.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned or built an unauthorized Apple II clone? Tell us about it.
[ Memory Dump is an irregular series wherein Benj dives into his garage, pulls out a random technological artifact, and describes what he knows about it for your entertainment. ]
I own a garage full of history. Literally. It’s dark, dusty, and sometimes damp, but that space houses most of my computer and video game collection. It’s almost a crime not to dive in there and share it with VC&G readers more often. And believe me, the guilt of not doing so has tortured me for years.
That task is an overwhelming one, though. It’s hard to know where to start. The sheer mass of history crammed in the place is enough to give one a panic attack on sight. For the sake of the Internet’s safety, I dare not publish a picture of my garage’s contents larger than 200×200 pixels. Anything larger and mass hysteria may erupt.
IT”S HERER AHH1!!
This scan of an American BBC Microcomputer ad might be of particular interest to our British friends, who may be curious as to how one of the UK’s most famous early PCs was received in the United States. The truth is that the BBC Microcomputer is virtually unknown here. I’ve never seen one in person, and I’d never even heard of it until the Internet era. I suspect US sales of the BBC Microcomputer were limited in part due to the low market footprint of importers like “Fourth Dimension Systems,” as seen in this ad.
I know very little about the BBC Microcomputer (although I’d love to have one, if anyone wants to send a unit over). If any readers out there are familiar with the BBC Micro, I’d be interested to hear some history and trivia about the machine in the comments.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned a British-designed PC? If so, tell us about it. If many, tell us your favorite.
