Commodore USA have just announced the lanuch of the Amiga Mini. Very like a Mac Mini this little power house is aimed at PC users that want to relive their Amiga days.



Here are the official notes:-

The Best Things Come In Small Packages

The wait for our first Commodore AMIGA model is finally over, and it's been worth the wait. The new Commodore AMIGA mini is a tiny powerhouse, featuring one of the fastest i7 Quad Core processors on the market. Made of 100% aluminum and presented in silver or black, it is slick and eye-catching in appearance. Equally as good sitting beside a computer monitor on your desk as it is in any living room, the new AMIGA mini is perfect for use as either a Home Theater System, a Workstation or as a gaming machine.

Dimensions of the New AMIGA mini

The new Commodore AMIGA mini case is ultra small and is made of 100% all aluminum housing, finished by sandblasting and anodic oxidation. It also includes a slot load Blu-Ray drive and internal space for two 2.5" hard drives. It measures 7.5 inches square, with a height of only 3 inches. There is no end to its placement possibilities.
(see Technology)

The AMIGA mini includes an engraved AMIGA logo (front) and Commodore logo (top) as well as a metallic Commodore badge on the front.

The Commodore AMIGA mini comes with:

A massive 16 Gigs of fast DD3 memory.
Integrated nVidia Geforce GT 430 Graphics with 1 Gig of DD3 memory.
The ability to drive 3 monitors displays.
HDMI, 2-Dual DVI and DisplayPort output. (includes VGA adaptor)
7.1 channel high definition sound.
6 Gb/s SATA for incredibly fast HD reads.
4 USB 3.0 and 4 USB 2.0 ports for exceptional external data access.
A slot loading Blu-ray drive that can also write DVDs.
2 WiFi antennae for outstanding signal reception.
A 1 Tb Hard Disk to store video and personal data.
Optional 300 or 600 Gb SSD drive for lightning quick load times.



Lets hope they can keep it cool

THE SOUL OF AN OLD MACHINE

Clive B. Dawson 1984

I started work for the University Computation Center in 1975 as a systems programmer for the DEC-10, just a couple of months after it arrived on campus. My previous experience with a DEC-10 had ended when I graduated from Stevens Tech. Since then, I had spent four rather painful years doing graduate work on a CDC 6600 system for which I had to learn how to keypunch again. I welcomed the arrival of the 10 with the joy of someone being released from prison. I can't begin to count the hours I spent on that system--well over 10,000 connect hours-- developing software for it, fixing bugs, and helping users. In turn, it helped produce dissertations for both my wife and me, and was an endless source of fun and relaxation as well. (It was also responsible for extending my graduate school career by at
least four years!)

The KI processor had served the campus well for seven and a half years. Now the user population was drifting over to the two new DEC-20's, and it was only a matter of time before the rising maintenance costs could no longer be justified. A flurry of last-minute rescue efforts followed the announcement that the system would have to be shut down. It seemed incomprehensible that a perfectly good machine would be removed from service given the chronic state of saturation common to most computer systems on most university campuses. The efforts failed, and on October 31, 1982, the DECsystem-10 at the University of Texas at Austin was turned off for the last time.

The event did not pass without due ceremony. We held a farewell party on that Halloween Sunday, well attended by current and ex staff members as well as a few users. Many brought cameras to record a vanishing breed--they don't make 'em with lights anymore. In one of the stranger moments we cranked up the PTP: and had paper tape (might as well use it up) and scratch magtape draped all over the place. The laughing and joking helped. Many of us on the staff had built up an extremely close-knit group over the years which had slowly drifted apart as new machines and new responsibilites came along. This "wake" had a good cathartic effect, bringing us together at a time when we needed to share feelings that had hit us harder than we might have cared to admit.

I wondered about the users--all the faceless people scattered throug out dozens of small offices and terminal rooms throughout the campus--the complete opposite of our small, close-knit staff. Were they feeling the same emotions? If so, who could each of them share with?

At home very late that night, I felt the urge to dial up one last time. As I went through my normal routine of checking mail, the Bboard, and the various system mailboxes, I discovered something completely unexpected. During the last few hours users had logged in and sent mail to the bboard and to other system mailboxes like Operator. The curious thing is that these people had no way of knowing that anybody would ever be around to read these messages. They were, in the best way they knew how, sharing
their feelings directly with the machine. Some of the messages are reproduced here as I found them, with only the senders' names altered.


. From: R. B.
. Subject: Dec10
. To: GRIPE
Farewell DEC10 and thank you!


. From: [4435,244]
. Subject: The death of a friend
. To: Bboard
Goodbye, DEC-10, you've been a great friend and co-worker. I'm
going to miss you for a long time. I feel worse than when they
killed Hal in 2001.


. From: B. J.
. Subject: November the 2 is too late
. To: Bboard
it feels like this is the end of an old friend. who says
computers haven't got any personality?


. From: GVCE333
. Subject: Good-Bye old paint
. To: Bboard
The glue factory beckons... Sigh!


. From: [1276,1]
. Subject: Good-bye, DEC-10
. To: Bboard
As a well-spent day bring happy sleep,
so life well used brings happy death.
Leonardo Da Vinci, 1452-1519
Notebooks [c. 1500]

DEC-10, you've been a good and faithful (for the most part)
servant and companion. Farewell.


. From: BSAB553
. Subject: bye
. To: GRIPE
This is last "bye" to the DEC 10; too bad. I liked the DEC 10
better than the DEC 20. I find it hard to believe that this
system could not have been supported to some extent... So long
forever!


. From: LSDT141
. Subject: Bye
. To: OPERATOR
BYE BYE FAITHFUL FRIEND - THE DEC-10


. From: C
. Subject: Farewell
. To: Operator

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...


The next day, one more message appeared on the DEC-20 Bboard:

Date: 1 Nov 1982 2133-CST
From: P.M.
Subject: the death of the dec-10
To: bboard

I was there till the bitter end. First, the one or two
faithful logged on via the micom were detached and
automatically logged off. As the only telephone hook-up, I
was privileged to be at his side a little longer. I fondly
reread the last farewells of those who had cared enough to
write a bboard message. Then I, too, was detached and logged
off. But even then the DEC-10 lingered on. Systat and help
functioned for several more minutes until the operator sent
the last message I or anyone will ever receive from the
DEC-10:

Time sharing is over permanently! Good-bye.

The stone has been rolled in front of the grave, my friends.
The DEC-10 is no more.


---------------------------------------


About six months later in St. Louis I heard DEC announce the end of the 36-bit systems. I wondered then how many times in the next few years the events told here would be repeated.

Recently I had occasion to visit the machine room where the old KI had stood. On one side of the room was a shiny new VAX 11/780. The other side of the room had boxes of IBM PC's stacked to the ceiling. Someday these machines would be old too. But somehow I knew that they would never have a day for themselves like Halloween of 1982. They don't make 'em with souls anymore.

----------------

Contributed by:
Clive B. Dawson
Advanced Micro Devices
Austin, Texas

I used an email address to try to contact the author, but it dead ended, so I hope you do not mind me reposting this, as it is one of many stories from back in the day that has so much meaning for those that were there and experienced the " New Tech " of that era and felt a loss when it was deemed that their day was over. Thank you, Clive, For sharing this.

To those of you reading this whether or not you lived through " Back in the Day ", or not, I hope you sense the feeling that was there for the beginning of what we have today.

Below is how wikipedia describes the DEC10

PDP-10
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



KL10-DA 1090 CPU and 6 Memory Modules
The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer family[1] manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". The first model was delivered in 1966.[2] It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, the most notable of which were MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer Center Corporation (CCC), and Carnegie Mellon University.
The PDP-10 architecture was an almost identical version of the earlier PDP-6 architecture, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are unique, most notably the "byte" instructions, which operated on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive according to the general definition of a byte as a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits.

In 1989 they said the system was too old to do a conversion... 22 years on
here it is.
Wow, that took a lot of hard work - awesome effort.



I think it is one of my all time favourite games.

Grace Hopper was an amazing woman and a cornerstone of all modern computing. We owe her a great deal. This interview in 1982 by 60 minutes is a superb watch and only entices you to want to know more. Watch this and then go find your own info and post some more.

There are few heroes in the world, Grace Hopper is most definitely one of mine.
Enjoy.

I just now received this in my mail box, with no link to where it originated, but found it amusing , whether or not it is a fake or true. I am trying my hardest to try to confirm or add this as wishful thinking on someone's behalf.

In the mean time, enjoy.



Update :

Fake Sean Connery letter to Steve Jobs is Twitter sensation - Faster ...
Washington Post, June 21, 2011.

I may get news slowly, but it did create a stir last year, A google for " Sean Connery letter to Steve Jobs " brings up at least 10 pages of results. That in itself may be more interesting than the above letter.

A Description of the First days of CBBS by Randy Suess and Ward Christensen (1989)

------------------------------------
The Birth of the BBS
By Ward and Randy (1989)
------------------------------------



I met Randy prolly late '75 at Cache - I went to most meetings starting with the 2nd which was Sept '75. He and I worked with Tarbell cassette exchanges for a while - built-in assembler, editor, etc.

Saved stuff to cassette by a speaker and microphone on a 300 baud acoustic coupler.

Met Rob't Swartz - now of Mark Williams company fame - he had CP/M in '76. I bought a license in Jan '77 and took my diskette to his house. He showed me the CP/M editor and assembler and I wrote a program to "beep" the contents of my floppy to cassette via a modem. (the modem wouldn't generate the carrier without hearing another, and Bob happened to have a cassette of modem "stuff" around, so we played it into the modem to get
it to generate the tone). Used 128 byte blocks and a checksum - the bare essentials for XMODEM though I didn't think of it as a protocol at the time.

Sometime around there Randy also got CP/M, but HE got the "real thing" - IBM format 8" diskettes.

I needed a way to swap stuff with Randy and others - so on late summer '77 wrote MODEM.ASM and tossed it into the CP/M users group.

That program became the singly most modified program in computing history due to the many hardware environments in which it had to operate (no standards - no "IBM" to say where serial ports should be addressed, etc).

Dave Jaffe wrote a routine "BYE" to allow remote users to call in to your CP/M system and operate it. I put up a 70K/diskette Northstar system with BYE and my modem program. Keith Peterson would call from Michigan and fill the diskette in one night or so. I got tired of that and took it down. Turns out that was - as others say - the first "remote CP/M system" since apparently Dave never put up a system for any length of time.

Keith thought there should be an easier way to run MODEM than having to remember to use a "Q" option (Quiet - i.e. don't chatter about block numbers to the console) so he stripped MODEM down and called it XMODEM. Since that was a more "recognizable" name, that stuck as the protocol name.

Others hacked MODEM/XMODEM to add CRC, multi-file transfer, etc. Chuck Forsberg wrote it in C, and for Unix became RB and SB, YAM, etc.

Chuck's 1K protocol as implemented in rb/sb needed a name, so I suggested he call it "Ymodem" which he did. He later wrote Zmodem, a protocol to send continuous blocks with asynch ACKs
to allow max transfer throughput.

================

There was a group called PCNET mostly out of California who were doing a lot of talk on ARPANET about building a network of microcomputers. They were great at planning - something I've always been terrible at - but they weren't putting any HARDWARE/SOFTWARE together. I was frustrated by the lack of DOERS and lost interest.

January 16, 1978 was a very snowy day. Couldn't get dug out, so called Randy. I had the CACHE message recorder phone line in my house, and Hayes had "invented" the hobbyist modem.

I called Randy and talked about putting up my Vector machine (a 2nd S-100 box I'd bought to take around when asked to give talks on microcomputers) on the CACHE line as a way for people to call in with newsletter articles.

Randy said "no" - "you're in the burbs, I'm in the city - we'll put it in my house - and forget the club, a committee project will never be done - just the two of us - you do the software I'll do the hardware. When will the software be ready?" heh heh.

Without Randy's drive and ambition, it would never have seen the light of day.

I prototyped a bit of a dialog in Basic, patterned after (1) the cork board bulletin board at CACHE meetings, and (2) the kind of BB you see at the Jewel - you know, garage for rent, dog grooming, etc.

Began writing the real bulletin board program (Called CE.C by Randy - egotistically, the "Computer Elite's project C - Communications"). Randy put together the hardware.

Very early in Feb, started testing. No one believed it could be written in 2 weeks of spare time so we called it "one month" and to this day declare Feb 16 as the birthday.

================

The PCNET people became very interested in CBBS - and they wanted a copy so they could start talking about PCNET by using CBBS (heh heh). Conversation with Dave Caulkins went like this: "I guess I'll charge $25 for CBBS - to keep people from bugging me (if it were free), yet making it cheap enough for anyone to buy". "No,
that's crazy - charge at least $50". OK, so $50 it was. I was concerned about "conflict of interest", so let Randy get all the money (what, 200 sales or so, Randy?) He had after all put up all the money - all I'd put up was time. (Uh, I seem to recall from the Nov '78 BYTE article that I did buy a bit of the hardware also).

That's about it. XMODEM was born of the necessity of transferring files mostly between Randy and myself, at some means faster than mailing cassettes (if we'd lived less than the 30 miles apart we did, XMODEM might not have been born). CBBS was born of the conditions "all the pieces are there, it is snowing like @#$%, lets hack".

Hope you don't mind this long monologue. (I thought it was monolog, but my Word Finder Plus screen checker said monologue).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


(randy's narrative)

The original CBBS consisted of a S-100 motherboard picked up at some fleamarket. This was a "kit" of course, so I had to solder all the connectors. (lotsa soldering done in those days, such as 8 k memory boards filled with 1kX1 chips)

It was mounted on a BUD chassis with a single density 8 inch floppy drive. On the motherboard was some 8080 cpu (upgraded to a Z80) a Hayes 300 baud modem card, a 3P+S board with the parallel port used for control signals, a Processor Technology VDM video display card, and an 8k memory board. There was also a card with
8 1702 EEPROMS that held the CP/M BIOS, video display drivers, and debug code, all written by Ward. I had a EPROM burner, and Ward made sure all the BIOS variables and experimentor stuff ended up in the last 1702. Musta re-programmed that sucker 10 times a week for a few months.

The floppy drives of that time had 117vAC running the spindle motor, and the drive would wear out quickly. So I built a circuit on a prototype board that would turn on the system power when a ring signal came in from the modem card and do a reset of the computer. By the time the drive spun up, the software had answered the phone and booted CPM and CBBS from the floppy. (simple power fail system!) The circuit board also had some 555 timers, so when the caller went away, the drive motors would continue to spin for about 10 seconds to
flush out any data, then shut the system down. I had an old Heath chart recorder I hooked across the floppy drive motor and set up the chart speed for 2 days per sheet. Was able to determine the calling patterns from the chart.

From the 173k single density single sided floppy, we went to a pair of them, then to double density double sided drives. Bout a year later, moved CBBS to a NorthStar Horizon cabinet with a 10 meg seagate hd. Both those systems are still sitting around someplace. It is now running on a PC clone motherbard still running CP/M with the original 8080 assembly code! The clone board has a V20 chip, which fully supports the 8080 op
codes. Ward wrote a wrapper around CP/M-CBBS, and CBBS has been running that way for over 15 years.

An Atari 810 Disk Drive For MicroSD – Built To Scale




Those of you who are old enough will remember the Atari 400 and 800 systems, with their separate disk drive, the 810. This Rossum character has put together a working replica of the 810 that takes MicroSD cards – at about a hundredth the size.

Yes, it’s not a novelty card reader, it’s a working Atari disk drive. The enclosure was made using fabrication service Shapeways, though unfortunately it was necessary to emulate the hardware, as shrinking it wasn’t an option. So there’s a microcontroller that mounts the file system and checks for disk files, and then “mounts” them, sending the appropriate information to the Atari.



Add a little paint and the look is complete. Rossum will be putting the source, 3D model, and everything up on Github soon, so if you want to replicate it, it’s just a little elbow grease standing between you and a tiny drive.

For full story and how to visit: http://rossum.posterous.com/a-little-atari-810-disk-drive

This article was published in "I/O - The Magazine of the Atari Home
Computer Club" in issue 3 - Summer 1983. The magazine was the official
mouthpiece of Atari UK. The article was not attributed to any one person.
The words are thiers, not mine.

How Atari Got It's Name
-----------------------

The name Atari actually comes from Japan. And yet the company is most definitely American. Every wondered why? It's an interesting story and one well worth telling.

In 1972 three friends decided to invent and market the first commercially feasible video game. They were Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney and Larry Bryan.

To become a partner each man had to submit $100 to the project - a remarkably small sum when you consider the company's success! The next step was to find a name.

Drinking beer and thumbing through the dictionary one day, the three friends came across an interesting entry under "S". The word was Syzygy, or "the straight-line configuration between three celestial bodies". What
a perfect name they thought, for three such astronomically talented people!

Now they could get on with the business of inventing games. Their first, Computer Space, was produced and all seemed to be going well.

But then things started to get a little shaky. Larry Bryan decided not to ante up his $100 and pulled out, leaving Bushnell and Dabney to go it alone.

The set up a shop in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated the business. A little later they invented Pong(r).

Busnell and Dabney applied for the name Syzygy to the Office of the California Secretary of State, which regulates Californian corporations, but were told that they were too late. The name was already taken.

Following unsuccessful attempts to buy the rights to the name from the first Syzygy corporation, which appeared to be inactive, the friends' solicitor pressed them to think up an alternative.

This proved difficult. BD Inc and DB Inc were tested and then rejected in turn: the first bore too close a resemblance to Black & Decker, the second to Dunn and Bradstreet.

Inspiration occurred at last, once again in an informal atmosphere. Bushnell and Dabney were both keen players of Go, a Japanese strategy game, and their best brainstorming always occurred over a good game and a bottle of beer.

This time, they decided to make a list of several Go words to see if one of them would fly as the new corporate name.

First choice was "Sente", which means "the upper hand" - something that greatly appealed. Second and third choices were "Atari", which has a similar meaning to the English word "check", and "Hanne", an acknowledgement of an over-taking move.

Busnell and Dabney submitted the list once again to the Office of the Californian Secretary of State, which approved "Atari". The rest is history.

When the company name changed, Bushnell and Dabney decided to update the logo too. They incorporated the "S" from Syzygy and the "A" from Atari into the new design.

It was not until later, as the company became increasingly successful, that an advertising agency designed the slicker and now famous Atari logo - the "fuji" or stylised "A" design.

AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS

By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976

An Open Letter to Hobbyists

To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?

Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.

The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.

I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.



Bill Gates

General Partner, Micro-Soft


I have just two short comments on this letter.

The first being, I wonder if he ever gave any thought to this theft when he himself was being the pirate?

He has more than his ten programmers and billions of dollars and still, to this day has failed to deluge the market with good software.

Husky



Owner: Jon Westly - Husky Computers
Location: England

According to Jon:

In 1980 we designed a computer called the Husky. It was first manufactured in around April(?) 1981 and measured 9 1/2" x 8" x2"(24cm x 19.5cm x 4cm) max. It weighed 2 Kgm with batteries.

I would like to think that it constituted a number of firsts - but this will depend on definitions.

The first portable computer ..... (The Osbourne I was portable - but, as you say, "portable?". The Husky was/is REALLY portable.)
The first laptop computer ..... (Byte described it as a 'lapheld' in 82 I think - but the expression laptop had not been created.) The issue here is whether a Laptop has to be a clamshell. Husky have never made a clamshell because we make rugged computers (see below) - and hinges create weakness. Notebooks clearly implicate a hinge.
The first handheld computer ....
The first rugged computer .....
Secret History

My thesis, baldly stated, is that in 81 something happened that created a two tier history of computing. IBM effectively took computers to the mass indoors market (the rest is history).

Husky, in distinction, took computers to the outdoor market - their being waterproof against accidental immersion and rugged - the original Husky could be safely driven over, ensured their take-up by e.g. the military and the water utilities.

In niche markets Husky is as well known as IBM (geo-technical rugged field service, emergency services), but the general consumer is likely to be unaware.

The result is that Husky is absent from the pages of computer history - part of a lost or secret history. I would like to change that!

Source : obsolete computer museum

We have helped spread the word, Jon, here at TOC.