What is this? Post Photos of Mystery Items Here (vintage computers only)

[westveld]

Anyone recognize this character set?

I have a few of these mask ROMs - National Semiconductor MM52116FQU/N INS8316

 

[macindan]

Hello vintage computer enthusiasts and experts!

I joined this forum with the promise to only post when there was something I had to contribute. I have thought for a long time and there are those here with far more knowledge than I.

So for my first post I submit the following:

In 1990 Season 8 of the TV show Night Court episodes 4, 5, 9 & 15 Judge Harold T. Stone is shown using a portable computer. I have googled off and on for a few years to figure out what it was to no avail.

Can anyone identify it? Pictures:




Thanks

 

[HoJoPo]

As Harry Anderson was a big mac user, I'd imagine it's some kind of macintosh conversion?

Macintosh conversion - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[macindan]

As Harry Anderson was a big mac user, I'd imagine it's some kind of macintosh conversion?

Macintosh conversion - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Oh my gosh! That was just the hint I was looking for. I followed your Wikipedia link, did a internet search for WalkMac, and guess what I found in image search.

Outbound Laptop​

I have searched a long time for this, every time I saw it on Night Court. Even did a google image search uploading a picture of it. I think my mistake was thinking it had to be a DOS portable.

Thank you a bunch.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

It’s an Outbound Systems 125, also called the “Wallaby” in some markets. It’s a third party Macintosh clone that relied on harvesting ROMs from a real Mac Plus. (Since Apple wasn’t licensing their OS to third parties.)

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Here's a challenge: Can anyone identify all of the hardware on Dennis Nedry's desk in the original Jurassic Park film?

 

[HoJoPo]

A couple of Mac Quadra towers and an SGI Crimson, if I remember right.

 

[NeXT]

Two Quadra 700's and a Crimson on the floor.
But there's also a stack of...something. They are branded by PLI but they are way too large to just be disk boxes.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

What about his screens? I'm curious what those monitors are.

 

[NeXT]

One was a Supermac and another was one of the SGI OEM's of the time. I forget the other one that was also running MacOS. The 90's was still somewhat of a magical time for tech continuity and far less subtle marketing.

It's still weird now that this all predates Apple's rule about "No evil individual/company/organization shall display an Apple logo, product name or similarities to the GUI" which came into effect not long after.

 

[Chuck(G)]

The drive stack are probably SCSI hard drives. PLI was a re-packager, taking other vendors' products and sticking them in boxes.

 

[macindan]

Two Quadra 700's and a Crimson on the floor.
But there's also a stack of...something. They are branded by PLI but they are way too large to just be disk boxes.

The stack of devices on his desk are PLI (Peripheral Land Inc.) MiniArray, see below from Mac's Place 1993 Spring Catalog page 36:


Also on his desk is a Motorola Envoy, circled in red below:


Lastly, the blinking lights computers that I had always thought were just a fake prop are real. They are Thinking Machines Corp. Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) parallel supercomputers.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

The CM-5 wasn't a "prop" but was certainly being used like one. Still looked very cool. Super computers today have no elegance.

 

[jafir]

In the book they had a Cray X-MP

 

[hunterjwizzard]

In the book they had a Cray X-MP

Wasn't it 3 or 4 Cray X-MPs?

The movie made a reasonable switch to CM-5 since the X-MP was obsolete by then.

 

[krebizfan]

The Connection Machines may have looked amazing but blinking light props controlled by a gear shaft (like the Star Trek props) would have been just about as useful. One client had a CM sitting unplugged in the basement because they couldn't get it to do anything.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Any supercomputer designed by a guy who goes by "Danny" is suspect.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

The Connection Machines may have looked amazing but blinking light props controlled by a gear shaft (like the Star Trek props) would have been just about as useful. One client had a CM sitting unplugged in the basement because they couldn't get it to do anything.

Thinking Machines more less resorted to turning them into blinking light props near the end. The iconic red LEDs on the front? They are supposed to indicate when a processor is in use in order to give the operators a vague idea of system utilization. But everyone for whatever reason expected them to be activity lights, so operators resorted to writing programs that did little more than turn the lights on and off in impressive sequences so it "looked" like the machine was working really hard.