Tech Week, November 30, 1998

 

Ghosts of Fry's Past
David Becker

 

Collectors still have a soft spot for the technically obsolete computers of the not-so-distant past.

"Old" and "useless" are pretty much synonymous in the computer industry, where today's marvel is tomorrow's salvage material.

Not so for a handful of Silicon Valley types with a historical bent. For them, 20- and 30-year-old computers are far from worthless. While technologically effete, each of the aged machines offers a fascinating lesson in technology, history and the marketplace.

"There's something to learn from just about every machine in here," says Sam Ismail, waving his hands around the garage of his Livermore home, crammed floor to ceiling with relics from the early days of home computing.

"If you take a look around, see what features were incorporated into modern computers and what flopped, I think you can really get a sense where things are headed. "I don't think many people realize the chaos the modern PC came out of."

Ismail, a middle-aged programmer, started collecting computers when he was a teen-ager and couldn't part with his obsolete but still cherished Apple II+. Before long, he had a motley but interesting assortment of Commodores, Ataris, Altairs and other detritus of the home computer industry's 1970s infancy.

One person's trash

"People would buy a computer, realize they had no idea what to do with it and give it to me," he explains. "I ended up with the big pile of crap in my bedroom.

"I guess that's when I officially became a collector, because there was really no rational reason for me to have these stupid old computers. I thought I would be the only one stupid enough to collect stuff like this."

After years of cruising thrift shops and flea markets, though, Ismail started to find like-minded techies through Usenet discussion groups and mailing lists. He discovered enough of a collectors' network that two years ago he started the Vintage Computer Festival, an annual chance for collectors to network and show off their treasures.

Ismail says it's hard to explain the allure of old computers, but a lot of it has to do with personality. From early portables, some with screens smaller than drink coasters, to home-built specials purchased from Popular Science ads, each of the dozens of machines in his garage is markedly different. There's not even a standard shade of beige.

Valuing diversity

"Today, a PC is just a bland box that sits next to your desk," Ismail says. "It's just not interesting. With these old computers, there's so much diversity. And you could literally open it up and see every component that went into the machine. That's a big allure for a lot of the old hardware hackers--these are inherently hackable."

Ismail's collection--which ranges from old copies of Byte magazine to a functional Apple Lisa--is fairly anarchic at this point, but he hopes to eventually have everything organized, running and on public display. He's also working on creating a Web-accessible archive of the antiquated software and instruction codes needed to run such machines.

"There's still a lot to be learned from this stuff," he says.

While Ismail's plans to create a vintage-computer showcase are still developing, a few computer historians at Moffet Field are well on their way to creating one of the world's foremost displays of historic computers.

New local repository

The Computer Museum History Center is an offshoot of the Computer Museum, a hands-on science museum in Boston. NASA recently donated a chunk of Moffet Field land for construction of a $30 million museum that will display a small portion of the organization's huge collection of computing artifacts, some dating back more than a century. Organizers expect fundraising and construction to take five to seven years. For now, a representative portion of the museum's collection is on display for weekly tours (reservation details are at the Web site).

Unlike private collectors, who usually focus on the first few generations of microcomputers, the History Center has the storage space (amazing what you can cram into a spare hangar) and resources to showcase the behemoths that dominated the early decades of computing. Along with a portion of ENIAC, the first digital electronic computer, there's a fully upholstered Cray supercomputer once known as "the world's most expensive love seat," an 1890's punch-card reader and SAGE, the vacuum-tube monstrosity that ran the military's air defense system during the 1950s.

Brute force

"This is about 1 percent of the whole CPU," says Dag Spicer, manager of historical collections, pointing to a SAGE console the size of a modest motor home. "Both CPUs took up the equivalent of two football fields. The maintenance guys were on roller skates to get from one end to the other."

All that for a system with computational power equivalent to a couple of modern digital watches.

"The typical reaction is to laugh at the enormous size and miniscule power of these machines," says Spicer. "Especially if you show this stuff to kids, it's hard for them to get that this used to be state-of-the-art. I showed an 8-inch floppy disk to a bunch of kids recently, and they almost peed themselves laughing.

"But when you think about the decades of really difficult work that went into getting from this to where we are now--it's really quite amazing."

The collection also illustrates some of the common themes that continue to drive the industry. Take a look at the built-in refrigerator on the Control Data 6600, the most powerful computer in the world for most of the 1960s, and you're looking at the roots of the heat-dissipation challenges that still help drive today's laptop development.

Learning from mistakes

Other machines point to the trial-and-error nature of progress. Nieman Marcus tried to sell a gargantuan "kitchen computer" in the early 1960s but couldn't convince homemakers it was worth hours of programming work and data input just to store a recipe. The computer industry still hasn't figured out a way to make computers a desirable kitchen appliance.

"Most of the mistakes you could make in designing a computer were made during these years--some they even learned from," Spicer says. "I think it helps people understand how we got to the point we're at today to look at what worked and what didn't work early on. The road we're on is paved with lots of bad decisions, mistakes and errors in judgment--and a lot of hard work."