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What was your Favorite/Most cherished CPU/Processor?

offensive_Jerk said:
ibm16201.jpg


Is this the computer in question?
Wow, I cannot even imagine trying to work on one of those. Of course i'm alot younger than most of you on here (27).

I'm just curious what kind of tasks people would do on something like that.
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Oh man, a debugger built right into your desk, now that is something I wish I had today. (well I do, visual studio is pretty nice, but less appealing)

Seriously though, there are times after a crash of the OS where it would be nice to go in and probe registers and memory with a few switches.
 
I think my Cyrix 5x86 (M1SC).

cyrix-m1-small.jpg


Took me a while to find a motherboard that really supported it (not just 'tolerated' it) - then it was suprisingly fast.

First cpu I ever bought myself: 6502 my C64.
 
pontus said:
Oh man, a debugger built right into your desk, now that is something I wish I had today. (well I do, visual studio is pretty nice, but less appealing
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If it were built today, I suspect the desk would be made out of stainless steel with a granite top. :)

The "emergency stop" red pull is also pretty cool.
 
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6809, definately - as first encountered in the Dragon 32 (a Tandy CoCo clone for the US audience). I remember programming in machine code, writing it out long hand in a notebook, then hand assembling it, and entering the hex.

Things have moved on a little since then!
 
Chuck(G) said:
During the early-to-mid 60's, I'd venture that the 1620 was probably one of the most popular computer used by schools fortunate enough to be able to afford one.
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I learned FORTRAN on one in a college math class around 1965. During off hours, one could wait in line and load the deck of cards. I think you could actally start the job yourself under the watchful eye of a 'computer protector'. As I recall the output had to be a card deck so one would have to wait in another line to get a printout of the deck from the line printer. I forget exactly what happened if there was an syntax error in the code. Maybe alarms and red lights came on, and the deck was spit out on the floor and everyone laughed at you.
 
During the early-to-mid 60's, I'd venture that the 1620 was probably one of the most popular computer used by schools fortunate enough to be able to afford one.[/QUOTE]

Hi Chuck
I have one of those manuals, obviously intended for schools, on the 1620.
I enjoy reading it as it did truly create an interesting method for running
code that was more friendly than most other machines. Even though the
P and Q fields were wasteful, when used they made sense. It is just that
today, when we fetch a single instruction, we expect that most instructions
are a single memory fetch while the 1620 required several even though it
may not use all the fields. The flag bit was unusual as well. Even the excepted
formats for numbers didn't often make sense form an endian point of view.
I looked at the add tables and can't make any sense out of how it worked.
There are simulators on the web so maybe I'll have to play with these to
make some sense.
Dwight
 
offensive_Jerk said:
Of course i'm alot younger than most of you on here (27).
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Really? And your FIRST computer was a Pentium III? My first(when I was 2) was a 198.....OH SNAP! It's been so long since I've used my AT&T PC 6300, I cant recall the year.....Wait....1987. Pretty sure. Anyway, my first was an 1987 AT&T PC 6300 when I was 2 (In 1994). Still have it!

Hmm....Well, I really like the 8086. It is quick enough for most of my needs to be met. As a matter of fact, the only thing it can't do that I need is the Internet. It can do BBSes and such, though, and send e-mails. Well, I guess it could do text-based Internet browsing, but I've never tried it.

Second best is the 386, for the huge improvement it was over previous processors. I'm with the others that the 486 is too new to be fun.

--Ryan
 
dave_m said:
I learned FORTRAN on one in a college math class around 1965. During off hours, one could wait in line and load the deck of cards. I think you could actally start the job yourself under the watchful eye of a 'computer protector'. As I recall the output had to be a card deck so one would have to wait in another line to get a printout of the deck from the line printer. I forget exactly what happened if there was an syntax error in the code. Maybe alarms and red lights came on, and the deck was spit out on the floor and everyone laughed at you.
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If you didn't have a disk drive, compilation of FORTRAN was awkward with cards. You read the first pass of the compiler in, then your source program, then the second pass and an object was punched. You then loaded the runtime, your program and the library deck and your program ran.

GOTRAN (quick compile-and-go) was very popular on the 1620. Saved time, paper and cards, at the expense of a simpler language and lower size limits.

If you had a 1311, life could be sweet, if not leisurely--I believe that the 1311 positioner was pneumatic--at least you could hear a hiss when the heads moved.

The odd thing about the disk Monitor was that there was no file system per se. You loaded the disk drive and things were placed in pretty much fixed positions. The first 24 or so cylinders (out of 100) were deemed "work cylinders" and that's where compilers left their output. But no files. At one time I found this so frustrating that I wrote a small file manager to stuff files in the upper cylinders of the work area, along with a directory. If I was lucky, when I came back the next day, the data would still be there. Saved a lot of time.

Dwight, the addition tables are very simple Take a digit of each of the addends; use one in the 10's address position and the other in the unit's position, with 300 being in the hundred's place. The digit at that location gives you the sum, with a flag signifying a carry. Things get a little more complicated if you have a carry from the previous position--the 1620 has a hardware incrementer to take care of carry-in conditions. Subtraction uses a hardware 10's complementer. If you tinkered (intentionally) with the addition tables, you could do arithmetic in any base 10, or lower.

I know it all seems very Victrola-and-Dynaflow school today, but it was very cool back then.
 
Yzzerdd said:
Really? And your FIRST computer was a Pentium III? My first(when I was 2) was a 198.....OH SNAP! It's been so long since I've used my AT&T PC 6300, I cant recall the year.....Wait....1987. Pretty sure. Anyway, my first was an 1987 AT&T PC 6300 when I was 2 (In 1994). Still have it!


--Ryan
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The first computer I bought with my own money was a PIII. Was around when I was 19 and had a factory job where I could afford it.
My father had a 286 (I think) when I was a young lad.
I believe later on he upgraded it to a 386. I had to play DOOM on the lowest detail when that came out, and it was still laggy. He had HDM on it and I messed around in DOS and played Commander Keen and other fine products.
I was super jelous when I went to my uncle's house after he got a new Tandy. He had a sound card and it was way better than the PC speaker in Wolf3d.
 
Intel iAPX-432

Intel iAPX-432

I find them all fascinating, all the way from the 4-bit Intel 4004 to the latest Azul 1000-core Java engines (JCA).

But my most cherished since it epitomizes the computer industry's successes and failures over the last 40+ years, I cast another vote for the Intel iAPX 432 (Micromainframe) from 1981:

  1. The first 32-bit microprocessor
  2. Capability-based security
  3. High-level language orientated with hardware supported garbage collection
  4. Incredibly ambitious with much complexity and a plethora of "features" (hardware fault-tolerance, bit-aligned variable-length instructions and on and on...)
  5. But...
  6. Intel now seems to want it erased from history
  7. A commercial failure although it did live on partly in the later i960
  8. Mysterious and with a poorly documented history; hardly any (none?) have been found intact; software is mostly missing (Ada compiler, Smalltalk, iMAX).
An astonishing device given the period it was introduced.
 
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I have a soft spot for the Z-80 primarily because it was the processor in my first computer and it was the only one I learnt some assembly programming for. It's an enduring 8-bit microprocessor, used in many systems even today.

Tez
 
nigwil said:
But my most cherished since it epitomizes the computer industry's successes and failures over the last 40+ years, I cast another vote for the Intel iAPX 432 (Micromainframe) from 1981
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The 8086 was supposed to be stopgap product, something like the 6809 until the 432 could be brought mainline. But it was multi-chip, in a very unusual package and very expensive and delivered performance something on the order of a 4MHz Z80, which at that time, cost less than $5.

No wonder it flopped--and Intel wants to forget it.

So we're stuck with the x86 architecture. Deja vu, part II: the Itanium 64-bit architecture. Looks like Intel would like to forget that one too.

If you haven't already, take a look at the NS320xx (xx=16,32) from the same time. If it would have been an Intel product, we'd probably be running our PCs on them today, but sadly, it was National--and few people trusted National when it came to microprocessor support. National farmed the design of the NS32 chips out, so they actually can't claim responsibility for what is really a phenomenal design for the time.

Actually, NS micros haven't been mentioned much here; the IMP-16, SC/MP and PACE were all National products.
 
My first "real" computer was the ibm 5150 (which I still have an use) that originally had the intel 8088 (now a v20)

My favorite is the i486 DX4-100, my main vintage gaming rig.
 
My first computer was a 486 (and it was long past obsolescence by the time I got it, too).

My second computer is the first one I learned how to rip apart...examine its insides, learn how it works. It was powered by a Pentium Pro at 150MHz.

That CPU, though I wouldn't settle to use one today, is certainly one of my favourites. It actually helped teach me an important lesson that's stuck with me to this day: clockspeed != speed. That thing kicked the crap out of Pentium MMXs of higher clockspeeds (at the time, I didn't know why...I've come to learn the importance of bus speeds, instruction set support, cache, and all those goodies)
 
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Ole Juul said:
How could it be past obsolescence then when it is not obsolete now? AFAIK they are still making them. :)
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Lol, a good point I suppose.
How about..."a few years since superior CPUs had been developed?"

I got the thing in like...1999? I think? all this computer stuff has been a part of my life for a relatively short time.

Just realized that was 10 years ago...wow.
 
kishy said:
Lol, a good point I suppose.
How about..."a few years since superior CPUs had been developed?"

I got the thing in like...1999? I think? all this computer stuff has been a part of my life for a relatively short time.

Just realized that was 10 years ago...wow.
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Yes, I was a bit harsh. :) One could certainly say that it was obsolete for "desktop use". Actually, after I said that, I went and checked, and one can certainly find boards or cards for embedded use, but I'm not 100% sure they aren't using old stock on the processors. I think Chuck(G) mentioned a source in another thread, but I can't remember it.
 
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