The magazine in question was Scientific American and the object of my lust was the IMSAI 8080. I never did get my hands on one - though I did my fair share of toggling bootstrap loaders into similar machines (mainly a PDP-8 with core memory and rather worn out front-panel switches.)
The Obsolete Technology site provides a fascinating journey through the first 18 years of personal computing. With lots of photos, information, specifications and old adverts that bring the memories come flooding back. I was amazed to find that I had owned or extensively used thirteen of the featured machines… and spent hours daydreaming about a lot more besides.
2 comments:
you didn't miss anything with the switches. it was pretty boring really and very tedious.
True, toggling the boot-strap loader into the PDP-8 could be rather tedious - especially as it was so old that some of the toggle switches had to be waggled a few times to get the lights to come on - but it felt more 'real' than modern computing.
Most of the programming I do these days is in Java running in a virtual machine on top of a massive operating system on a server cluster that I've never even seen. Somehow loading individual registers bit by bit still has a certain appeal...
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