Recent content by bnelson

I call it Windows Entropy (tm). Every version of Windows I can remember started out working reasonably well performance-wise, then turns to crap over time.

My definition of vintage is anything before IBM came out with their PC. :)

When I started work in 1979 we had a terminal room with about 8 IBM 3278 terminals and I remember how annoying sitting in that room was. The terminals seemed to be just slightly different on their flyback frequency and it seemed like they would go in and out of phase with each other and the...

I think there were several factors in addition to the price of a built-in video display. The idea of what a computer was and how it worked, particularly in the mini-computer world and also somewhat in the mainframe world had been moving to timeshared systems with serial connections to...

I am pretty sure this is the museum I was remembering while I read this thread that I really enjoyed quite a few years ago. I remember standing inside the "horseshoe" of a Cray-1 while we were there. While it was strictly a display machine, still very cool for a machine that was THE machine...

In college (late 70s) my roommate got a Selectric and interfaced it to his SWTPC 6800 system. Seems like it was relatively simple, a parallel interface card, maybe some glue in the Selectric like opto-isolators? That and a printer driver for Flex made it easy to use. Made for very nice...

I am kind of wondering if the "IBM xx" notation might be the Fab line that the particular chip was manufactured on.

The 3274s look like they used a similar plastic cage (search for '3274 cluster card' on eBay for some photos) so that isn't a bad guess for sure. I don't see any out there that have the backplane connectors on both the front and back of the card like yours have though. I still remember the...

Those cans were the packaging used by IBM in that timeframe for the ICs they produced. I used to have one I ripped open that had the IBM microprocessor that we used on my first project, there was no epoxy under the lid, just a chip mounted on the substrate. I may have to look to see if I still...

Series/1 is another machine that might have used that backplane, I can't recall for sure.

Those silver cans on the card are all ICs. That was a pretty standard 'backplane' used by a lot of IBM equipment. It could be from a mainframe, S/36 or S/38 era computers, or even internal IBM equipment. I worked on an IBM internal factory-floor communications box that hooked up to a S/370...