Beige pencil stockists on high alert as 'Colouring Book of Retro Computers' hits the crowdfunding circuit Neil Thomas, host of the RMC vintage computing and gaming YouTube channel, is crowdfunding a colouring book of vintage computing hardware. Covering the 1970s through to the early 2000s, Thomas's latest nostalgia-grab – following a compact hardback collecting interviews carried out for his YouTube channel – asks backers to keep …
When I worked for ICL in Reading in the 1980's, the servers were all in the big computer hall in Bracknell. A colleague called up the service desk about a problem on one he was using and was asked to identify it. He gave the reference, and the service person asked:
"Is it the blue one in the corner?"
I genuinely don't know.
Sorry.
I hang my head in shame, and will wear sackcloth and ashes for eternity*, and ring a bell whenever I dare go 'outside' shouting "Unclean! Unclean!" to warn people wherever I go of my transgression.
Can you ever forgive me?
*Or until I get bored.
Trigun: "you might frighten the children"
Children treat me with utter contempt, as a resource to be exploited. They take one look at me and decide that I am both harmless and malleable.
TRUE STORY:
I was in a shop, harmlessly looking at a low level display of various stationary items (staplers, I think). A man and small boy entered the shop. The man goes to a different display across the floor, the little boy walks immediately over to me and stands between me and what I'm looking at. I hold out my hands to usher him sideways so I can make my choice of stapler, and he literally grabbed hold of my hands and started walking up my legs.
I mean, WTF???
I had never seen him before in my life. I don't even look like Mr Bean.
in the 80's that may have been the only blue box left in that data hall as that would have been a 1900 series machine, for the 2900 series we went 'Hot Tango' I did visit one user site after they upgraded and they were strident in their complaints that the new colour clashed with the data center decor/
About half way through my time at ICL, I recall being told that they had decided to go 'multi-coloured', on the finding that getting a replacement panel just the right shade of faded beige* to go with the old kit on their customer sites was well-nigh impossible. And that if all the machines were different colours it didn't matter.
*Or, indeed, 'just the wrong shade of pink'. ;o)
I really hope this succeeds. The biggest barrier I've encountered when teaching ICT is the short vision of its history the students have - typically the last decade at best, and that leads to a fallacious view that "everything is changing so fast". In fact, the core principles of computer technologies haven't really changed much in half a century, and the circle has been run round several times in many cases.
Don't know why you were downvoted, the channel is great and he's clearly living the dream.
I had a Tandy dot-matrix printer that had just 7 pins. OK for text but nothing more. I persevered for a while and wrote a routine that could print a screen dump from a BBC or Electron. It was an assembler routine called up in BBC BASIC (which, those of a certain age will recall, whilst BASIC was an interpreted language, it was able to compile blocks of assembler on the first pass). Did what I needed but soon swapped the Tandy out for a Star color one. Had that for several years, only replaced when the Laserjet III made anything better affordable.
I persevered for a while and wrote a routine that could print a screen dump from a BBC or Electron.
I, in an attempt to vibrate the table to pieces wrote a routine to print images using the full stop and micro-positioning in a Diablo daisy-wheel printer.
It was slow, noisy and of inevitably low resolution but kind of worked. In a way it was a one pin matrix printer.
I've still got an 8-pin Epson in the Dead Format Museum! Along with an RCA Selectavision player, Philips N1700 vcr's, BBC computers, a Nixie voltmeter, Atari computer, original Laserdisc players, etc etc. Young uns don't appreciate how difficult and expensive it was to do anything such as store & replay media then.
I have a couple, even one in the common multimeter form factor, about the same size as an Unigor (of which there are also a few around).
The electronics lab at the University had digital counters/frequency meters with four or five digits (not sure there), with columns of numbers showing the value by lighting a filament bulb behind the number for that digit.
It always amused me that the Apple ][ series came in beige but the HiRes mode could only produce black, white, purple, green, orange, and cyan. Adding to that, selecting purple/green or orange/cyan was at the byte level so they could not be blended. Single pixels always produced a color.
Having an Apple ][ show a picture of itself required some creative coloring and shading.
PDPs weren't that wild, but the 8 and the earlier 11 models would have the filler front panels in black, the topmost panel half red, half purple, and of course the CPU panel with a row of red and purple toggle switches. The DEC10 and early VAXes were mostly light beige but with blue accents, the DEC20 was beige with reddish orange. Later VAXes were beige/brown (ugh). And then Bob (spit) Palmer changed the filler colour in the [D][I][G][I][T][A][L] emblem squares from blue (and it had been black before that) to burgundy (more ugh).
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