4 ms·

Heathkit had the H11 in 1977: http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm

by buescher 5y ago

rbanffy 5y ago
It’s a shame they didn’t out-PC the IBM PC. Such a nice machine. Imagine if everyone had Unix instead of PC-DOS…
- kragen 5y ago
  Heathkit was kind of shitty at designing computers. I grew up on an H89, a contemporary of the Apple ][, but without sound, color, or a memory-mapped character generator, and vastly slower in software. It actually had a 9600-baud serial link between the computer and the screen, which was run by a separate CPU you couldn't reprogram without an EPROM burner. Heathkit's HDOS (on the H89, no idea about the H-11) was a clone of RT-11, not Unix. It wasn't a bad clone but it lacked Unix's power and generality.
  - pinewurst 5y ago
    The H-100 was really very nice, but it was already too late for anything not PC compatible.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Yeah… the H100 is one I’d love to play with.
      - kragen 5y ago
        I spent a fair bit of time with a Z-100. It was indeed pretty great; MS-DOS ("Z-DOS") was a big improvement over HDOS, but the graphics were the biggest draw for me, being roughly EGA-class. It lacked speed and compatibility, though, and IIRC sound. Also, my dad's monitor was monochrome, so it lacked color, too. I hated that green.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        Just by running MS-DOS and not having that garish CGA font makes it already a winner. A lot of companies thought that making a better computer was enough, but the PC was so poorly designed that people had to write software that directly used the hardware to make it run at bearable speeds. This nullified any advantage those who built better PCs had.
        kragen 5y ago
        Not sure what was so wrong with the design; I recall people would bypass BIOS calls for speed but I never understood why. I guess there was no BitBlt or set-multiple-pixels call, so you incurred call-and-return overhead for every pixel drawn? Later I ran AutoCAD on a PC-XT with a CGA and an MDA. The graphics were on the CGA, but all the text was on the MDA screen, which had, I think, a slightly nicer font; the lack of a shadow mask made the letterforms break up less, although it was the same shitty green phosphor as the Z-100. Even bypassing the BIOS, line drawing was slow enough that when you erased a line it would just draw the line in the background color, leaving spaces wherever it intersected anything else; periodically you would have to type REDRAW and wait a second or two, which would have been unbearable if you had to do it after every erasure. Games got by with blits to small parts of the screen, commonly with XOR (a trick AutoCAD used for drawing the crosshairs and rubberband lines, and ended up having to pay a patent troll for). Some, like ASTROTIT (nsfw), managed to draw a fixed background with sprites on top of it, redrawing it when they passed. This was the era when 3-D CAD systems still used "calligraphic" displays from Evans & Sutherland (called "random stroke CRTs" in less pompous times), like the vector displays used in the arcade games Tempest and Star Wars, but so expensive I never saw one in my life. You could do 3-D on a CGA (3-DEMON was a super fun first-person CGA Pac-Man clone, like an FPS but with no shooting) but at its shitty resolution, 640x200 (or half that if you wanted color), and updating the whole CGA screen was, as I said, noticeably slow. The same 16 kilobytes of RAM used for a vector display would have been enough to put 5000 lines on a 4096x4096 "calligraphic" display, and you could move any of them whenever you wanted --- or change the camera matrix.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > It actually had a 9600-baud serial link between the computer and the screen, which was run by a separate CPU you couldn't reprogram without an EPROM burner. Such a missed opportunity… it’d be easy to set up a memory-based terminal to be read/written at QBUS speed… It could have a serial keyboard, as those were relatively abundant, and a composite monochrome output. It’d make a world of difference. And they could sell it to DEC customers who used PDP-11’s as technical workstations. If there were companies using IBM 1130’s connected to 2250’s, there has to be someone who used PDP-11’s…
    - kragen 5y ago
      I don't think the H-89 had a QBUS, and you couldn't have sold it to DEC customers who used PDP-11s, because it wouldn't have been able to run either their software or their peripherals. I don't know what kind of display hardware the H-11 used. Terminals of that epoch were full of missed opportunities. Woz was smart enough to see them and avoid them, but most companies didn't even have a position where someone would have been in a position to do what Woz did. And that's a major (necessary but not sufficient, of course) reason that Apple is bigger than Datapoint, Olivetti, Tandem, Heath, Kaypro, and Hewlett-Packard today.

Heathkit had the H11 in 1977: http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm

rbanffy 5y ago

It’s a shame they didn’t out-PC the IBM PC. Such a nice machine. Imagine if everyone had Unix instead of PC-DOS…

kragen 5y ago
Heathkit was kind of shitty at designing computers. I grew up on an H89, a contemporary of the Apple ][, but without sound, color, or a memory-mapped character generator, and vastly slower in software. It actually had a 9600-baud serial link between the computer and the screen, which was run by a separate CPU you couldn't reprogram without an EPROM burner. Heathkit's HDOS (on the H89, no idea about the H-11) was a clone of RT-11, not Unix. It wasn't a bad clone but it lacked Unix's power and generality.
- pinewurst 5y ago
  The H-100 was really very nice, but it was already too late for anything not PC compatible.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Yeah… the H100 is one I’d love to play with.
    - kragen 5y ago
      I spent a fair bit of time with a Z-100. It was indeed pretty great; MS-DOS ("Z-DOS") was a big improvement over HDOS, but the graphics were the biggest draw for me, being roughly EGA-class. It lacked speed and compatibility, though, and IIRC sound. Also, my dad's monitor was monochrome, so it lacked color, too. I hated that green.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        Just by running MS-DOS and not having that garish CGA font makes it already a winner. A lot of companies thought that making a better computer was enough, but the PC was so poorly designed that people had to write software that directly used the hardware to make it run at bearable speeds. This nullified any advantage those who built better PCs had.
        kragen 5y ago
        Not sure what was so wrong with the design; I recall people would bypass BIOS calls for speed but I never understood why. I guess there was no BitBlt or set-multiple-pixels call, so you incurred call-and-return overhead for every pixel drawn? Later I ran AutoCAD on a PC-XT with a CGA and an MDA. The graphics were on the CGA, but all the text was on the MDA screen, which had, I think, a slightly nicer font; the lack of a shadow mask made the letterforms break up less, although it was the same shitty green phosphor as the Z-100. Even bypassing the BIOS, line drawing was slow enough that when you erased a line it would just draw the line in the background color, leaving spaces wherever it intersected anything else; periodically you would have to type REDRAW and wait a second or two, which would have been unbearable if you had to do it after every erasure. Games got by with blits to small parts of the screen, commonly with XOR (a trick AutoCAD used for drawing the crosshairs and rubberband lines, and ended up having to pay a patent troll for). Some, like ASTROTIT (nsfw), managed to draw a fixed background with sprites on top of it, redrawing it when they passed. This was the era when 3-D CAD systems still used "calligraphic" displays from Evans & Sutherland (called "random stroke CRTs" in less pompous times), like the vector displays used in the arcade games Tempest and Star Wars, but so expensive I never saw one in my life. You could do 3-D on a CGA (3-DEMON was a super fun first-person CGA Pac-Man clone, like an FPS but with no shooting) but at its shitty resolution, 640x200 (or half that if you wanted color), and updating the whole CGA screen was, as I said, noticeably slow. The same 16 kilobytes of RAM used for a vector display would have been enough to put 5000 lines on a 4096x4096 "calligraphic" display, and you could move any of them whenever you wanted --- or change the camera matrix.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > It actually had a 9600-baud serial link between the computer and the screen, which was run by a separate CPU you couldn't reprogram without an EPROM burner. Such a missed opportunity… it’d be easy to set up a memory-based terminal to be read/written at QBUS speed… It could have a serial keyboard, as those were relatively abundant, and a composite monochrome output. It’d make a world of difference. And they could sell it to DEC customers who used PDP-11’s as technical workstations. If there were companies using IBM 1130’s connected to 2250’s, there has to be someone who used PDP-11’s…
  - kragen 5y ago
    I don't think the H-89 had a QBUS, and you couldn't have sold it to DEC customers who used PDP-11s, because it wouldn't have been able to run either their software or their peripherals. I don't know what kind of display hardware the H-11 used. Terminals of that epoch were full of missed opportunities. Woz was smart enough to see them and avoid them, but most companies didn't even have a position where someone would have been in a position to do what Woz did. And that's a major (necessary but not sufficient, of course) reason that Apple is bigger than Datapoint, Olivetti, Tandem, Heath, Kaypro, and Hewlett-Packard today.