Ahhh those geek memories...

Circa 1977-8 or so, I worked for a little company that had pioneered microprocessor-based process control systems with the very first Intel 4004 chip. Yep, as the number implies, less than half an 8080. I programmed it in 4 bit assembly language (anybody here grizzled enough to recognize "LDM FIM WMP WMP"?). Second generation was 8085-based (refined 8-bit 8080), and using my employee discount and easy payments deducted from my paycheck, for the intimidating sum of $3000 I lugged home to my living room:

A 36" high 19" steel equipment rack, which fit into a steel frame the size of a desk, atop which was mounted a custom fibreglas work surface that included a sculpted housing for the guts of an ADDS glass teletype--a dumb terminal--and an integrated keyboard. In the equipment rack was a bus and backplane arrangement for boards built to the Intel Multibus industrial standard (the popular S-100 bus used in personal computer kits was for sissies). I had me an 8085 CPU board that ran at something like 2MHz. I had four, count 'em four, 2K memory cards. There was an I/O card that connected to the Centronics line printer, a heavy-duty sucker on its own steel stand that could spew green-and-white fanfold across the room. The disk controller was connected to two 8" floppy drives in a sliding drawer. Yep, my floppies were 8-inchers...sorry Slick. But no hard drive.

Here's the best part: The operating system was CP/M, and CP/M was distributed as a kit with customization instructions, mainly having to do with--get this!--writing your own BIOS, in assembly language. I had some partial code my company did, but each computer in those days was unique (the invention of on-board BIOS chips for peripherals lay in the future, and at the time the BIOS had to match the entire hardware configuration). I'd write some of the assembly code at work and burn it into EPROMs and take it home and try it; sometimes I'd borrow the EPROM burner and lug it home too. Classic bootstrap--I had to build that thing from the metal up through the silicon and into the bits.

I eventually donated the thing to some junior college. Early last decade I was browsing through Weird Stuff Warehouse, a surplus store in Silicon Valley and (you can see it coming), there was, if not my particular computer, another one from that company, virtually identical to it. Off in a dark corner covered by a dusty fly-specked plastic tarp, dirty and obsolete and unwanted.

Last year I built my present server from "scratch" (defined in year 2K terms). Came home from the shopping trip and went from box o'parts to first light on the CRT in a day. Mount the motherboard in the case, insert the 800 MHz Pentium III, snap in the 512 MB memory strip and a cheap video card; all the other I/O is on the motherboard. Connect two 18 gig SCSI and two 45 gig IDE drives. Plug it in, and load the self-configuring OS from CDROM. All for about the same $3K.

Geek nostalgia is made of this.

--Robert