Minivac 601 | Hacker News Reader

Minivac 601

en.wikipedia.org

55 pointsnanna10 comments

From chaper 3 of Marketing That Works: How Entrepreneurial Marketing Can Add Sustainable Value to Any Sized Company by Lodish et al. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2007)

Many colleges and some upper socioeconomic high schools also bought the MINIVAC as an educational aid. However, no one in the third segment, the corporate sector, bought the product. The entrepreneur interviewed some target customers to try to find the problem. He found out very quickly. The typical description of the MINIVAC by the corporate types was: "Oh, that—it's just a toy!"

The entrepreneur was creative and he listened carefully. He also understood marketing. His next product was the same basic kit—with the switches upgraded to higher tolerances and the machine color changed from blue and red to gunmetal gray. The name was changed to the MINIVAC 6010 and he increased the price from $79.95 to $479. The MINIVAC 6010 sold very well to the corporate segment at $479.

Well, that may be jumping to conclusions. Maybe the corporate types weren't reacting to the change in color at all. Maybe they were doing a rational cost benefit analysis - 6010 is 10 times better than 601, and 479 is only 6 times the price. Clearly the value proposition has been noticeably improved!

Are there new versions of kits like these? I'd love to build up a machine that was PDP-8 or PDP-11 compatible out of modern digital circuits.

http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8

http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11

Perhaps combine the PiDP-11 with this: http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/PDP11%20V2%20Bo...

Created by none other than Claude Shannon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

There's something about physical interaction with these old computers that emulation just cannot satisfy.

There's also something amazing about working on a very low powered system... There's so much of the universe of computing you don't have to worry about. To this extent one of my favourite projects was the build your own Apple I. And learning C on an original Raspberry Pi.

I read often about this concern that we have offloaded so much responsibility to China that we are losing the fundamentals in the West. I wonder if this desire for nostalgia and simplicity will compel many of us to get in touch with our engineering roots.

Was watching someone getting a Altair to run basic via a teletype and a paper tape. The amount of bit flipping just to get the initial bootloader ready made me appreciate the work Woz and like did to make later systems boot straight to a prompt on a CRT.

On a different note, those old systems had a RAM and CPU clock that was basically synced. Thus my understanding is that one could "cycle count" ones way to high performance code.

The CPU was faster than the memory by the mid to late 70s (though they did start roughly equal at the start of the decade). You would insert a number of "wait states" with an external counter to ensure your memories' timing was not violated.

At that time RAM was asynchronous, you put an address in the A bus and by the specified delay time you would have your result on the output. Later on memories were pipelined and that is when they got their clock.

> something about physical interaction

I know! Not quite like driving a real car vs. playing a racing game, but still...

> something amazing about working on a very low powered system

The amazing thing is that they did not feel like low powered. Usability-wise, 1 million instructions per second was nothing to sneeze at, and nor was 1 megabyte of core memory.

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