I showed up kinda late on Sunday, so everyone was packing up to leave by the time I started taking pictures. I think these photos were taken over about 90 minutes. I need to go to bed now, so I can't tell the story of all this yet. I'll come back and edit this later…
.... Well, that was porn. I played with those computers, growing up. My dad used to work at Digital, back in the day. Thanks for sharing those! They translate as "warm fuzzies" for me. ;)
From left to right, those buttons are 'power', 'start', 'select', 'option', and system 'reset'.
The start button was used for starting games, and the option button for setting options (like one or two player, or accessing menus in certain applications). I also recall something about holding down the option button when booting the machine to cause it to not load BASIC to free up a little more RAM. I used to have an Atari XEGS, but it's been a couple of years since I used it for anything other than the odd boot to play Ballblazer (and show off the case mods).
The one I'm most intrigued by, though...is that an actual mockup of Babbage's Difference Engine? (Or at least the smaller Analytical engine?) It looks incredible.
I remember some of this stuff from a computing museum at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab when I was growing up. So weird that this technology's still young, and yet so old...
I think you have that backwards. The Difference engine was smaller than the Analytical engine by a good deal. The analytical engine was only ever described by Babbage, but he never managed to get it built. The difference engine was a simpler arithmetic solver, a calculator. The Analytical engine was a proper computer in the modern sense, and had he managed to get the support to build it the world would have had it's first general purpose computer 100 years before WWII cryptologist hot for automation would look back to Turing's paper "Computable numbers" and realize that they were wasting a lot of time with columns of figures when they could be counting with electrons instead of their fingers.
Ahh, yeah. I didn't look it up ahead of time, was just going on memory. I was getting confused with Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling's novel 'The Difference Engine', which describes a steampunk Victorian England with exactly that premise: Babbage completes his Analytical Engine and computers made of oiled brass gears are all over.
Such memories... Riding my kid brother's BMX bike to Rat Shack every day after school to teach myself BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I (that year my birthday cake was in the shape of a Model I, complete with -- stickler for detail -- GRAY frosting (don't ask)). Then the first PETs, some sort of minicomputer which booted from 8" floppies and ran a PASCAL *interpreter* (not compiler)... On to hacking the Apple ][ long before a c or an e was added... I sometimes wish I'd stayed a geek in that sense. I'd probably be living in a ten million dollar house riding a Bimota or something.
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Oooooh...
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The start button was used for starting games, and the option button for setting options (like one or two player, or accessing menus in certain applications). I also recall something about holding down the option button when booting the machine to cause it to not load BASIC to free up a little more RAM. I used to have an Atari XEGS, but it's been a couple of years since I used it for anything other than the odd boot to play Ballblazer (and show off the case mods).
The keyboard has a 'help' button, also.
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The one I'm most intrigued by, though...is that an actual mockup of Babbage's Difference Engine? (Or at least the smaller Analytical engine?) It looks incredible.
I remember some of this stuff from a computing museum at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab when I was growing up. So weird that this technology's still young, and yet so old...
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nostalgic *sigh* ... lovely! Thanks for posting those.
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Such memories... Riding my kid brother's BMX bike to Rat Shack every day after school to teach myself BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I (that year my birthday cake was in the shape of a Model I, complete with -- stickler for detail -- GRAY frosting (don't ask)). Then the first PETs, some sort of minicomputer which booted from 8" floppies and ran a PASCAL *interpreter* (not compiler)... On to hacking the Apple ][ long before a c or an e was added... I sometimes wish I'd stayed a geek in that sense. I'd probably be living in a ten million dollar house riding a Bimota or something.