Missing computer company's

[hayden]

A lot of members were in IT so I thought this might interest some.

Major computer company's gone out of the computer business or bought out since I started maintaining computer equipment.

Unisys, Sperry Rand, Burroughs, Telex, RCA, NCR, CDC, DEC, Wang, Memorex, National Semiconductor,.....Who else?

Commodore, Altar, IMSA, SwTPC, Compaq, IBM (PCs), Radio Shack, Gateway. Probably lots more.

It may be easier to count the ones that are still around. Apple, HP, and IBM (non PCs) are probably the only originals.

 

[dstig1]

I guess we are not going to see any T&A, only T's and A's
Nice car collection.
FIL had a model T, scary taking turns, but it was a lot of fun to drive and weird with the shifting and pedal layout.

Perhaps I was a little too obscure in my pun, but ken got it....

 

[kenmbz]

I really need to get back to enjoying the cars… came close a few times finding the ideal property where they could be displayed.

2019 was the last time any were on the road…

Can I volunteer my place ?
Bit of a drive though.

 

[ultrarunner]

Can I volunteer my place ?
Bit of a drive though.

As a teenager I bought a 1968 stock 32,000 mile Z28 and drove it home with stops along the way from Air and Space to Yellowstone… looking back I regret not making more trips.

The attic at the hospital became a bone yard for computers and printers chronologically documenting the evolution of computing…

During the pandemic it all went to e waste…

I briefly thought about taking one of the Osborne 1s home.

 

[kenmbz]

Commodore, Altar, IMSA, SwTPC, Compaq, IBM (PCs), Radio Shack, Gateway. Probably lots more.

It may be easier to count the ones that are still around. Apple, HP, and IBM (non PCs) are probably the only originals.

I still have a SWTPC 6800 in my garage.

Altair, IMSA forgot about those, pretty big in their time.

for those interested, have talked to these people a few times, but never got time to visit.

Home

computerhistory.org

 

[WinterDeere]

I think I've mentioned him here before, but one of my primary undergraduate computer engineering professors was one of the engineers who designed and built ENIAC at U of Penn. The ENIAC was the world's first general purpose electronic computer, both Adam and Eve to every computer you've ever known.

He was old as dirt by the time I had him for my microprocessors, mini computers, and personal computers classes, which was pretty rare in itself, most computer engineering professors in the 1990's being very young guys. His perspective on everything he taught us was amazing, in that he knew the complete history and reasoning behind why each bit of hardware worked the way it did. Unfortunately, most of that was lost on a bunch of 20 year olds.

In any case, for those who've somehow never heard of ENIAC:

ENIAC

Inventing the Future

www.seas.upenn.edu

 

[kenmbz]

and UNIVAC , ah the good old days of running around changing out tubes at a prescribed time to stop the machine from crashing , luckily I never had to maintain one.

Also missing Cray and Next.

A local defense company had a Cray- my friend had access and we tried to run a chaos theory equation-but forgot the offset to stop it from divide by 0 or going infinite.
Cray crashed and a lot of people got very angry, he was no longer allowed access.

My cousin worked for Next for a few years.

 

[5030]

Unless it was named and I overlooked it, Kaypro, Non Linear Instruments no longer exists. My first 64 K machine was a Kaypro. Floppy discs and all.

 

[WinterDeere]

and UNIVAC , ah the good old days of running around changing out tubes at a prescribed time to stop the machine from crashing , luckily I never had to maintain one.

Also missing Cray and Next.

A local defense company had a Cray- my friend had access and we tried to run a chaos theory equation-but forgot the offset to stop it from divide by 0 or going infinite.
Cray crashed and a lot of people got very angry, he was no longer allowed access.

My cousin worked for Next for a few years.

I believe UNISYS came out of UNIVAC? I remember a lot of my parents friends, and a lot of my friends parents, working for UNISYS in the 1980's into 1990's.

I hadn't realized Cray was bought by HP in 2019, but I guess they still produce product out of the same group, now under the HPE name? They were the high water mark, at least in terms of my limited exposure to mainframe computers, in the early 1990's.

The 36-core Intel Xeon Dell PC sitting neatly on my desk next to me, and plugged into a regular wall circuit with no liquid cooling, is surely more powerful than any of those older liquid-cooled Crays, that filled multiple 19" floor-to-ceiling racks and required multiple dedicated 240VAC circuits for computer + cooling plant.

 

[garry1p]

In the AF when our computer system (Air Defense Command) went down we would get a call's from the HQ every 20 min wanting a progress update.
Even though we had a backup system we switched on line if we did not have the system up in 1 hour we would turn out all the lights and went cabinet to cabinet pulling dead vacuum tubes This would net us 8 to 10 dead tubes and the system would come up.
I wonder how many know the difference between a Pentode and a Triode vacume tube.

Burrough's charged the AF $28 for a Triode available at any TV shop for $6.

 

[WinterDeere]

I wonder how many know the difference between a Pentode and a Triode vacume tube.

Would that be equivalent to enhancement mode versus depletion mode? Or n-channel versus p-channel?

In my world, there are tube guys and FET guys, and I was always a FET guy. The microprocessor guys still use MOSFETs, I assume with shorter and shorter gate lengths, but the high frequency stuff I work on is all HEMT (High Electron-Mobility Transistors)... just another special type of FET. In simplest terms, FETs are classified by channel type (positive versus negative conduction layer) and enhancement mode versus depletion mode (i.e. whether you apply a gate voltage to turn it "on" or "off".

The trouble with tubes, at least when talking high power amplifiers, is the voltages. If you like to stick your fingers into circuits to tune or adjust, stay the hell away from high power tubes... high impedance = high voltages.

 

[ultrarunner]

Seems like every grocery store had a tube tester with tubes available to sell in the 60’s

 

[WinterDeere]

Seems like every grocery store had a tube tester with tubes available to sell in the 60’s

I lit my 3-year old ass up pretty good, with a TV tube tester at our local Woolworth's department store. It may be my earliest memory, either that or the one of by mom telling me to be quiet when the "Breaking News" of Elvis's death popped onto the TV.

In any case, there I am at Woolworth's ca.1977, and mom is at the customer service desk either returning or ordering something, when this cool looking cowboy guy comes in with his stylish belt buckle and Stetson, and starts plugging tubes into a podium. He's hitting buttons, things are lighting up... everything that would fascinate any little kid.

So after he finishes and leaves, I go over the podium, which was too tall for me to really see what was going on. I start blindly sticking my fingers into holes and hitting buttons, and at one point must've had my finger in a high-voltage socket when I pressed a test button, because all I remember is it just about knocking me off my feet.

And when I came to my senses, they were yelling at me! Different times...

 

[Jaybr]

Add me to the list of tractor owning geeks. I can’t think of any that haven’t been named, but I am familiar with most of them. Started working with computers in the USAF in the 80s, the OS on our equipment was Atlas. Contracted to DEC for a while working with their clusters, Pathworks LANs, and Alpha servers. Spent close to 20 years at the evil empire from Redmond, and the last 10 as a solution architect at a cloud service.

 

[BravoXray]

The trouble with tubes, at least when talking high power amplifiers, is the voltages. If you like to stick your fingers into circuits to tune or adjust, stay the hell away from high power tubes... high impedance = high voltages.

When I was working for P & H Electronics in my college days, one of the techs working on a radar system got a finger in the wrong place and got it cooked pretty badly.

 

[CliffordK]

Perfect Writer and Perfect Software
Novell Networks
CP/M
Sinclair
Atari (noted for games, but they also had a computer).

I think WordPerfect has been traded around a little bit, and is now all but defunct. Latest release 3 years old.

Symantec swallowed up a bunch of smaller companies.
pcAnywhere was originally Dynamic Microprocessor Associates, swallowed up by Symantec, and now that product line is defunct.

Quattro Pro hasn't had a release for 3 years now, and is hardly dominating the market as they once did.

Corel is now Alludo

NeXT

Nextel (push to talk) Probably a bunch of phone companies.

ENIAC... does that count?

BSD Unix
AT&T Unix
Apollo Computers
Tektronix (after a few mergers, they may still be around, but not doing PC computers).
CompuServe
AOL, now a subsidiary of Yahoo

 

[BravoXray]

Stearns Computers, they were in Minnesota, I believe, and made PC's that were somewhat IBM compatible, ran a proprietary version of DOS. One of my customers had one, said he had paid over $10K for the computer, keyboard, monochrome monitor, tape backup and an Okidata 132 column printer. It ran some proprietary accounting software on 256K of ram and a 20 MB HD, and they had problems with it crashing and corrupting data.
I sold him four new PC systems for way less than that.
That was in the early '80s and I still upgrade, repair and sell new systems to the company that is now run by his son.

 

[ultrarunner]

Why is it my Apple//e has never crashed and still works perfect nearly 45 years later but drives in my newer non apple only seem to last a few years?

I've got files backed up by Iomega tape on I win 98 and plus a laptop with lots of photos I can no longer access...

Never got into cloud storage so nothing there.

Funny, at work we were told every keystroke and site is archived forever so be mindful.

Now legal says 2 years and auto delete as archiving data is a liability?

 

[Tomtint]

Digital Equipment went out in the 90s / early 2000s

 

[CliffordK]

Why is it my Apple//e has never crashed and still works perfect nearly 45 years later but drives seem to last only a few years?

My Apple IIe hasn't crashed for decades either. But I suppose it hasn't been booted up for quite some time. I have no idea if any of my floppy disks are still good.

Long gone are the days when one had to memorize printer control codes to do things like italics, bold, or change font sizes.

My word processor and spell checker were two different applications. So, boot up the word processor and type one's paper. Then save it on the floppy disk. Unload the word processor and load the spell checker. If it picked up a word it didn't recognize, one could change one letter in the word to an asterisk, and then resave the file. Now boot back into the word processor and search for one's asterisk symbols. If one wasn't sure how to spell the word, then grab the paper dictionary and look it up.

Oh, those were the days!!!!

None of this computers thinking for a person.