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Which defunct/disappeared computer manufacturer would you bring back?

1. Commodore, the Jack Tramiel era. YES, he was an ass. YES, he did alot of questionable decisions. YES, his marketing sucked and after he nearly killed Commodore, he certainly killed Atari when they had the Falcon 030 and the 64-bit Jaguar console system and at least hardware-wise, was poised to take over the world. But you gotta admit - he certainly kept things interesting, and you never knew what kind of gem would come out of his companies!

2. "Apple." 'nuf said.

3. Sinclair. The more that I read about the Speccy's, the more that I really, really want one. I'm just not going to pay an arm and a leg to import one, and the ones that I really like seem to have non-standard floppy disks.
 
1.DEC- without them, computers would not be like they are today.

I'm curious what you're referring to in that statement. I never really thought of them as an innovator other than the Alpha line of processors which were insane speeds during the 386/486 era. I remember reading an ad in a magazine and their systems were running at speeds that were jokes (impossible) to us end users.
 
I'm curious what you're referring to in that statement. I never really thought of them as an innovator other than the Alpha line of processors which were insane speeds during the 386/486 era. I remember reading an ad in a magazine and their systems were running at speeds that were jokes (impossible) to us end users.
There are others whom I'm sure are more qualified to comment, but I'll just point out that the PDP-10 was a major touchstone in early hacker culture (which was a formative influence on Usenet and early Internet culture,) and the PDP-11 directly influenced the design of the Motorola 68000, which powered everything from arcade machines to the Mac.
 
I'm curious what you're referring to in that statement. I never really thought of them as an innovator other than the Alpha line of processors which were insane speeds during the 386/486 era. I remember reading an ad in a magazine and their systems were running at speeds that were jokes (impossible) to us end users.

The Alpha architecture pioneered a lot of things. The implementations featured insanely long/deep pipelines compared to other architectures at the time, which gave them their high clock speed. To avoid stalls in the pipeline they needed to improve branch prediction.

Another thing to keep in mind that a lot of work on "simultaneous multithreading" was done by Susan Eggers (University of Washington) using Alpha as the baseline implementation. (Eggers and her colleagues extended Alpha through the use of simulation.) That pioneering work in the mid 90s came what is known today as hyperthreading.


Mike
 
I'm curious what you're referring to in that statement. I never really thought of them as an innovator other than the Alpha line of processors which were insane speeds during the 386/486 era. I remember reading an ad in a magazine and their systems were running at speeds that were jokes (impossible) to us end users.
CP/M kind of grew from DEC operating systems like OS/8 and RT-11. There are quite a few identically named commands even.

And did DEC invent the filename extension concept? I've always wondered about that.

Oh, and for Chuck, the Hazeltine 1400 was just a dumb terminal, and a cheap and unreliable one at that. The cassettes I mentioned earlier were only available on the original Hazeltine 2000's I believe.
 
hmm, i think gateway 2000 is still around, just as gateway, but would love to see something with gateway 2000 on it, i would love to see IBM back in the PC business, like maybe a retro computer, being a modern machine in an XT case *modernized of course*
isn't heathkit zenith? Hell, is zenith even around still?

I would also care to see Tandy make a come back
Oh, and Seattle Computer, Washington state needs a good local computer part manufacturer again.
 
Anything with a monochrome TTL monitor would be nice to see again. I love text screens. What a treat it would be to walk into a computer store and just see green or amber monitors . . . no nasty, garish, colour monitors, and no GUIs in sight. YES!
 
Gateway is now a subsidary of Acer, which just makes Gateway look worse.

I have a "Video Professor" video from the early 90s. It shows around a computer store in that time. I could spend days in that store looking at all the name brands and clones.
 
Anything with a monochrome TTL monitor would be nice to see again. I love text screens. What a treat it would be to walk into a computer store and just see green or amber monitors . . . no nasty, garish, colour monitors, and no GUIs in sight. YES!

I like your thinking :-D
 
Over the years, there's been many changes in names and the different innovations of products that come and go with time. So which company would you wish to see put their products back on the shelves?

My favorites are:
1. Leading Edge
2. Sperry
3. AST
4. Gateway 2000
5. Packard Bell
6. PC Brand

I for one would also like if the companies came back, that they would get their old BBSs up and running again.

With the exception of PC Brand which I have never even heard of I would add Tandy to the list but only if they would open up plants here in the U.S. to at least assemble them and better still, manufacture most of the parts here. I don't feel there is any shortage of (no offense) China based manufatured sytems today.
 
I know that I'm going to get jeered for this, but I wish that Coleco had never died... they were a strange company. Cheaply built hardware, but they were pushing the edge of the low-end market a fair bit.

From what I've read in several ex-employee interviews, some of their proto hardware was going to advance the home market several years ahead of where it ended up. Could have been interesting.
 
-IBM
-Compaq
-Sun

:)
Agreed, they were all good machines in their day (well, compaq's retail machines were pure crap, but the business line was good).

Lenovo makes a good computer, it actually lives up to the Thinkpad name (at least the X and T series that I work with do), but it still isn't quite the same without the three famous letters "IBM" on it :-/

Same with HP's "Compaqs", their business line is still a solid machine, but it is lacking some of the old school Compaq engineering style and flare.
 
Sun? Sun is still around, which system are you referring to returning? Lenovo makes me nervous these days. I don't have any experience with them first hand but they've started to become the cheapest laptop during sales at local stores.
 
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