Dinosaur Sightings: Computers from the 1970s

When Soviet engineers were stealing DEC intellectual property, on the CVAX processor the DEC chip-designers etched the words: "when you care enough to steal the very best" in Russian as a message to the Soviet engineers who were known to be both purloining DEC computers for military applications, along with reverse engineering their chip design.

The vast majority of these systems, as well as those in the 1980-1983 display, are systems targeted at the home / hobby user, with the exception of some of the IBM models.

There are some serious omisisons. In 1979 Digital Equipment Corporation, then the world's second largest computer company, launched a line of desktop computers based on its industry-leading LSI-11 microprocessor and its single-user operating system, RT-11. The top of the line was the PDT-150, which had dual floppy diskettes and a VT100 terminal. It could run not only BASIC, but also FORTRAN and DIBOL (a DEC derivative of COBOL). However, through a quirk of DEC internal politics, the PDT-150 had been funded by the marketing group whose charter restricted them to selling the product to OEMs in lots of ten or more, so it could not be marketed to individuals.

This proved near-tragic, according to DEC folklore, when a guy in a plaid shirt and a ponytail showed up at the OEM group's headquarters in Marlboro, Mass. and wanted to buy a unit to develop an application that he had in mind. The suits in the OEM group blew him off, since he wasn't going to buy ten of them and re-sell them, and he didn't look like a serious businessman. It turns out that the guy's name was Dan Bricklin, and he ended up calling his program Visicalc - the firt "killer app" for PCs. Had this gone the other way, and the PDT-150 not been a political prisoner, the PC revolution might have run on PDP-11s and RT-11 instead of Intel and CP/M, then MS-DOS.

HeathKit released this computer in conjunction with Zenith in 1978 as I remember. I ordered one that had two 7" floppy disk drives. I remember the model as a HZ89 (Heath Zenith model 89). The processor was an 8088 and the memory board came pre-assembled with either 64 or 128K of memory. This computer was in my hands at least two years before the IBM PC came out. At that time it was part of a mail order training program that walked a person thru all of the logic theory first. The training came with a breadboarding system and a series of logic chips. When the logic training was finished, you could order the computer for assembly. The logic board and high voltage module were pre-built, but everything else was assembled and soldered by hand.