What's Your Favorite Computer by Decade and Why?

[MCollins]

Hello everyone!
Since I'm still fairly new, and am most accustomed to computers from the 90s, I thought it would be fun to ask what your favorite computers are from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and why. Whether it's specs, nostalgia, cool factor, case design, quirks, overall design, operating system, or something else, I'd love to hear your opinions!
Thank you!

 

[lowen]

70's: TRS-80 Model I, the little computer that could.

80's: a tough choice, but Tandy 6000, running a real Unix, Xenix System III. Runner up: TRS-80 Model 4, the computer on which I learned to really program on the bare metal, hand-assembling programs and entering them in hex in the debugger, later writing a Z80 disassembler as a spare time project.

90's: hmm, also a tough choice. I would have to go with the very late 90's Sun Enterprise X500 line, specifically the E6500. 512-bit centerplane bus, fully modular CPU/RAM/IP design, more Unix goodness. My favorite that was within reach of individuals? That's even tougher, because it will never be a PC; the CPU280 of the mid 90's. I have one of those now: 16-bit Z280 CPU, 4MB RAM, expandable bus design. UZI280 for much unix-like goodness.

 

[classicguyphilly]

As a child of the 80's my computer experience started with Apple II's in elementary school, the IIe being the most common. Oregon Trail anyone?

The first computer my family owned was a Mac Classic. This little guy was my digital sidekick for high school and the first half of college. Below is a disaster of a 1994 dorm room with Classic on my desk and StylerWriter printer on shelf above.

 

[junodotexe]

Hello everyone!
Since I'm still fairly new, and am most accustomed to computers from the 90s, I thought it would be fun to ask what your favorite computers are from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and why. Whether it's specs, nostalgia, cool factor, case design, quirks, overall design, operating system, or something else, I'd love to hear your opinions!
Thank you!

the imac g3 is such a cool computer, it did pretty well in sales and also was just a beautiful computer.. plus it came in tons of colors, thats from the late nineties. my favorite computers from the eighties are the macintosh 2gs and the macintosh II. im mostly into computers for how they function and how they look lawl.

 

[johnx993]

60's: PDP-8, or possibly the HP9100 programmable calculator
70's: Altair 8800 (obviously)
80's: Apple II, Mac (rising popularity made the computer accessible for the less technically adept users)
90's: Computers were ubiquitous, hard to pick a single best example.

 

[jlang]

60's too early for me. I was into electronics but computers as a hobby was not a thing.
70's SWTPC 6800 It was the lowest cost system that could actually do computer things. I had access to a ASR-33 at work so it stayed at work a lot.
80's PDP 11/05 I got a great deal on a parted out system. I made a memory board for it and got it running. 56k SRAM in a 11/05 The only one in the world!
90's the world was moving rapidly to the PC. nothing of interest to see here. Boring sameness.
I mostly did home brew from here on.

 

[MikeI]

70"s PDP-11/34 Loved RSX-11M, doing Sysgen's, knew all the in's and out's of setting all those switches on every add on card, doing overlay's in Fortran, tweaking RL-01 and later RL-02 drives with an oscilloscope to get the heads to move just right , went to DEC school and they taught how to look at the microcode on the processor ( I remember nothing )
80's Symbolics 3600 ... started learning LISP .. back when AI stuff was really "out there"
90's SGI's ... 4D-25, 30, 35 .. then Indigo's in all sorts of flavors
and always an AppleII+, a Mac Plus, so many different models, maybe the 7200 as a favorite

 

[Eudimorphodon]

70's: TRS-80 Model I, the little computer that could.

1970's: I'd strongly second that one. Not because it's an objectively great machine, the opposite really, but you can say the same thing about the Ford Model T or the Volkswagen Beetle. It was cheap and cheerful in all the right ways. In second place I'll put the Atari 800. It's actually a tough call whether this should *really* count for 1970's or 1980's, but it did originally come out in 1979, and for that period it was amazingly ahead of its time. (I still consider it a better computer than the Commodore 64, which came out three years later.)

If I could have a working example of *any* 70's microcomputer I would probably pick the Sphere 1, simply because it's such an enigma. (To be clear, I'm talking about the phantom machine that people were getting tantalizing glimpses of around August 1975, where in terms of the promised specs it was the better part of a year ahead of its time.) Practically it would be a pretty useless doorstop, of course.

1980s: I'm going to pick a weird one: The Tandy 1000 TX. It's objectively one of the dumbest computers ever made because it's basically an IBM PCjr (infamously one of the most ill-conceived PCs of the 80's), but with all the worst bugs miraculously fixed PLUS an 8 Mhz 80286 accelerator built into the motherboard. It's great. Stupid, but great.

In the "if I could pick anything I never got to see in real life to play with" category I'll put the Micro Craft Dimension 68000. (With every accessory CPU card and emulator software package they ever sold for it, of course.) I don't think they ever got it to work that *well*, but you have to admire the ambition it took to build that thing and get it to work *at all*.

1990's: Yeah, who cares. After catching the Linux bug a few years into the decade I really *wanted* to play with "real" UNIX workstations, as glamorously depicted in movies like Jurassic Park, but when I finally got to in the latest 1990's and early 2000's it was kind of a "never meet your heros" experience. PCs were leapfrogging up the power ladder so fast through the 1990's machines that looked positively futuristic in 1994 were getting blown away by run-of-the-mill PC desktops in 1998.

 

[Gary C]

60's for me ? None as I was only 3
70's CBM PET
80's BBC Micro
90's Amiga 500
After that its just beige boxes.

 

[1944GPW]

40s: CSIRAC
50s: IBM 650
60s: IBM SYSTEM 360-40
70s: Fairchild F8
80s: Amiga 1000
90s: IBM PC clones
00s,10s,20s: Machine unimportant, just software

 

[cjs]

Pre-1977 (which is a much more obvious boundary than 1980):

• North America: SWTPC 6800. Not as good a processor as the 8080 from a programming point of view, but it was a well designed machine with lots of accessories available, and gets to be upgraded to 6809 (probably the nicest of the 8-bit processors) in 1979.
• Japan: NEC TK-80, of course, for all the obvious reasons (you can read up on the history on Wikipedia). Though the Toshiba EX-80 gets an honourable mention for having a simple video output on board.

1970's: I'd strongly second [the TRS-80 Model I]. Not because it's an objectively great machine, the opposite really, but you can say the same thing about the Ford Model T or the Volkswagen Beetle. It was cheap and cheerful in all the right ways.

I disagree; I think it was not only cheap and cheerful, but was an objectively great machine for its year, at least for certain purposes. I wrote a long article about this, but the TLDR is that a) I find a 64x16 display more useful than a 40x24 display (which is always wrapping lines when I program); b) Z80 processor is significantly nicer to program that the 6502, and code is more compact; c) proper keyboard (unlike the PET) that you can fully customise with software because it's scanned by software (unlike the Apple II). It helps that it's also significantly cheaper than the PET or Apple II.

1977-1980:

• North America: TRS-80 Model I (see above).
• Japan: NEC PC-8001. Really a no-brainer. Compared to the Sharp MZ-80K and the Hitachi Basic Master it had a full 80-column screen available and much better design and expandability overall. And colour, even, if you could afford a colour monitor.

1981 onward:

• North America: I can't really say, since all the 8-bitters are kinda crap compared to the Japanese ones and the IBM PC and clones are just bleh. Maybe a TRS-80 Model 16, or Model II with the 68000 upgrade when that becomes available, since at least that gets you a decent processor and Xenix. But that was quite expensive.
• Japan: Fujitsu FM-8/FM-7 series. 6809 processor, Z80 processor available, full bitmap 640x200 graphics in 8 colours (later models in the series at 640x400 and many more colours), excellent keyboard, and overall really nice design in a series that kept up well with the 16-bitters until the mid-80s.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I disagree; I think it was not only cheap and cheerful, but was an objectively great machine for its year, at least for certain purposes.

The “not great” proviso I threw in there was just an acknowledgement of the fact it did have some annoying hardware weaknesses (that missing video ram, a kind of flaky unbuffered expansion connector, etc), and you could also argue it wasn’t particularly “innovative” in the hardware category since architecture-wise it was *very close* to being a copy of two machines that came out a year earlier, the Polymorphic Systems Poly-88 and the SOL-20. (Its video system in particular is a near clone of the Poly-88.)

That said, that analysis does ignore what *was* great about the TRS-80 compared to its predecessors. Both the Poly-88 and SOL-20 were sold as *relatively* inexpensive turnkey bundles intended to take hobby computing definitively beyond the Altair “Front Panel” paradigm, IE, trying for the same formula as the TRS-80, but they still dropped you into just a machine language monitor and forced you to load higher level languages from tape. The TRS-80 may have cut some hardware corners uncomfortably tight, but in exchange it gave you a positively luxurious BASIC interpreter at the flip of a switch while only costing half as much. So… yeah, it is *also* a great machine. Not perfect, but nothing ever is.

The Apple II was the most innovative Trinity machine, and other than the rotten keyboard the PET was better built, but the TRS-80 massively outsold both of them through 1980 for a reason.

And yes, 64x16 is a highly underrated screen format. The only issue with it is it’s almost as bad to try to display clearly on a TV quality monitor as 80 column is, so once video ram was cheap enough to afford 2k instead of one it didn’t really have a good argument for either high *or* low end applications.

 

[trs80modelIII]

Hello everyone!
Since I'm still fairly new, and am most accustomed to computers from the 90s, I thought it would be fun to ask what your favorite computers are from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and why. Whether it's specs, nostalgia, cool factor, case design, quirks, overall design, operating system, or something else, I'd love to hear your opinions!
Thank you!

80s: TRS-80 Model III. First computer that started it all.
90s: DEC Ultrix (unix), Sage IV (P-system Pascal), HP-UX, IBM PCs, BBSes
00s: HP-UX, Solaris 2.5,7,8
10s: Linux (Redhat 5-9), Windows 2000, Solaris 10
20s: Virtual Machines, Docker/Podman, Vsphere

 

[Quagmire]

70's TRS-80 Model 1 (for sure)

 

[Abmvk]

60's: I wasn't born most of the time, but IBM S/360 always had a magical sound to me
70's: TRS-80 model 1. My entrance to nerd paradise
80's: IBM AS/400. The greatest machine I have ever worked with
90's: Anything Next
00's: MacBook Air
10's: Spectrum Next

 

[whartung]

80's is hard, things moved so fast.

Toss up between the Atari 800 and the original Mac.

90s, it was the NeXTStation.

2000's, probably my behemoth Mac Pro. That case is amazing. The MacBook air up there, just because it was so solid, yet light and tiny. And the Dandelion Mac just stole hearts away. I was ][ close to pulling the trigger on one of those, but waited and got the Mac Pro instead.

2010s, I liked my Trash Can Mac Pro. Unpopular, but it's absolutely silent.

2020s, the modern Mac M series laptops. Extraordinary machines.

 

[jlang]

The TRS-80 was not a great system but it was "good enough".
IMHO the primary reason for the success of the TRS-80 was visibility. It was in every RadioShack store. Thousands of locations.
What other home computer were you going to see in person? Were you going to see a Poly-88 or a SOL-20? Not where I live.

 

[Gary C]

The UK was truly an island during the late 70's early 80's and we did tend to stick to 'our' machines.
ZX series and Acorn plus a host of valiant failures.
Never saw a TRS-80 or an Apple ][ in anyone's home. Did see some at the earls court computer fair in about 1982 but we were all Cassette tapes and BBC's if you were well off, or ZX's if you were less so.

Used to dream of owning a PET before I got my BBC.

Happy days.

 

[cjs]

The “not great” proviso I threw in there was just an acknowledgement of the fact it did have some annoying hardware weaknesses (that missing video ram, a kind of flaky unbuffered expansion connector, etc)....

Ok, that's fair enough. I give them a bit of a break on this because the whole system was cheap, and I think that they did a quite good job of those trade-offs, actually.

...but in exchange it gave you a positively luxurious BASIC interpreter at the flip of a switch while only costing half as much.

Well, if you waited a bit to buy one and spent an extra $100 on the Level II BASIC. Level I BASIC was not at all "luxurious," and in fact was quite annoying since it made it rather difficult to get to machine language stuff if you weren't so concerned about BASIC. (I suspect the easiest thing to do was to replace the ROM, actually.)

The Apple II was the most innovative Trinity machine...

Without question. And even ignoring the innovations, if you wanted graphics, it was the way to go. Not only high resolution for the time, but even colour.

And yes, 64x16 is a highly underrated screen format. The only issue with it is it’s almost as bad to try to display clearly on a TV quality monitor as 80 column is....

This doesn't sound right to me. After all, the monitor shipped with the TRS-80 Model I was an actual TV (with the RF circuitry removed). And in my experience, using RF vs. CVBS makes very little difference; not nearly as much as, e.g., a B/W vs. colour display. Even there, I've done 80 column on my 240 TVL Sony 9042Q, and while it wasn't great, it was livable. (Don't be fooled by this being a PVM: 240 TVL was much lower than typical PVM resolutions—600 to 800 TVL—and I am pretty certain lower than black and white TVs since the '60s. I don't know about colour, but were they really lower than that even in the '70s?)

80's is hard, things moved so fast.
Toss up between the Atari 800 and the original Mac.

Well, these are five years apart.

90s, it was the NeXTStation.

I'd totally forgotten about this. I actually had to make a choice around 1990: buy a NeXT or do a working holiday abroad. I chose the latter, and it was the better choice; by the late '80s you already had home Unix (or Coherent if you were cheap) on PCs, and homogeny between workstations and PCs was only a few years away at that point.

The UK was truly an island during the late 70's early 80's and we did tend to stick to 'our' machines.
ZX series and Acorn plus a host of valiant failures.

Well, not a single island (and I'm not talking NI here)! Apparently the Sharp MZ-80K and its successors (including the MZ-700) were fairly popular there. And even PC-8001 made some inroads. And I think, later on, a bit of MSX, too? Or was that just Europe?

 

[Eudimorphodon]

This doesn't sound right to me. After all, the monitor shipped with the TRS-80 Model I was an actual TV (with the RF circuitry removed). And in my experience, using RF vs. CVBS makes very little difference; not nearly as much as, e.g., a B/W vs. colour display.

Not going to get into another pointless argument here, I’ll simply going to point out that the “RF circuitry” they removed from the Model I’s monitor included the sound trap which effectively low-pass filters *all* broadcast modulated television signals to a hair over 4.5Mhz bandwidth. That’s why for the first few years of any popular computer magazine in the 70’s (and into the 80’s, including the definitive US TRS-80 publication, 80 Microcomputing) they were regularly running DIY articles on how to hack your TV for direct input despite the fact that RF modulator kits were available at your local Radio Shack.

Some TVs have more sophisticated filters than others and if the stars align you might get readable 64 column on a B&W TV, but realistically a pixel clock north of 10 mhz is much too high for RF. (So is the ~7mhz of an Apple II, but at least it’s only ~50% too high for the trap, not ~110%) Or all those articles back in the day that expressed disappointment at having to use 32 columns through their Sup-R-Mod were just whining. *shrug*

Obviously these problems go away if you have a composite input on your monitor, but TVs in the US rarely had those until the late 80’s, meaning the low end of the new Home Computer market was kind of shackled to what you could get through an RF modulator into the early 80s. (And of course color compounded the problem because even with composite you still have that issue of effectively being limited to a maximum of 227.5 full color transitions per line with NTSC, non-negotiable. So color is basically right out for 64 columns, it barely works with 40.) And that’s why everyone did 40 (or 32) columns for years for computers that weren’t sold with a monitor paired with it.

Anyway. Radio Shack had the corporate sway to find a cheap TV to pre-gut and offer alongside the TRS-80 for significantly less than the price of a new monochrome monitor in 1977, which is another thing that separates them from the likes of Polymorphic Systems. It is worth noting, however, that right around the time the TRS-80 came out the first generations of 64x16 terminals and S-100 video cards were *already* giving way to 80x24 *because* the price of a monitor capable of displaying either clearly was essentially the same. 64x16 was a really good format mostly because it’s efficient in terms of RAM (fits perfectly into 1K, no waste) and it being a power of 2 both ways makes setting up the address counters for it slightly easier, but by 1978 2K didn’t cost much more than 1K and CRTC chips were starting to be a thing so… again, 64x16 was great at the time, but it’s understandable why it didn’t last.