5 ms·

That this 8008 computer from 1972 should have 16KB of RAM sounds unlikely. I haven't been able to find any real info stating this - still, the headline on tomsh

by Tor3 3y ago

That this 8008 computer from 1972 should have 16KB of RAM sounds unlikely. I haven't been able to find any real info stating this - still, the headline on tomshardware says "16KB". That's very hard to believe. Static RAM of that size would have been extremely expensive at the time, the much much later Altair 8800 didn't get past 4KB without a dynamic RAM board (which was also very unreliable). The Q1/Lite, a Z80-based computer from 1974 (correction - 1977!) - well, that I can kind of believe. I wonder if the article author is confusing the theoretical max memory address space of the 8008 (which is 16KB) with actual RAM size of the 1972 model Q1?

actionfromafar 3y ago
The headline is probably wrong, the article text just says "capable of" 16 kilobyte. I also think it's unlikely it had 16 installed. On the other hand, doesn't the screen look like a flatscreen, not a CRT? So the screen itself was probably very expensive in itself. (Probably plasma screen?) Edit: Look at the image and the bank of 3 * 8 socketed chips: https://www.peel.dk/Q1/img/SN615-03.jpg https://www.peel.dk/Q1/img/SN615-03.jpg If these are the Intel 2102 [1] or something similar, then it would have 3 kilobytes of SRAM. 1: https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Intel_2102 https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Intel_2102 Edit 2: the computer in the picture is another model, ignore me.
- Tor3 3y ago
  That picture appears to be from a Q1/Lite, which is a different beast (and used 4116 DRAM according to the schematics)
  - Tor3 3y ago
    And.. the original article's picture is also a Q1 Lite, as far as I can tell. Introduced 1977. That one used NEC 4116 dynamic RAM. And did not use the 8008. It's very difficult to find anything about the original Q1. Even the "First Q1 Brochure" from TheByteAttic is actually a Q1 LMC, which was the second model.
- troupe 3y ago
  Probably not a plasma screen in the 70s. It looks like a bunch of individual characters. They are probably vacuum fluorescent like what was on calculators and the Speak & Spell educational toy from that period.
  - balazer 3y ago
    It appears to be a Burroughs Self-Scan plasma display. The display in action on a Q1: https://www.1000bit.it/lista/q/q1europe/q1microlite.png https://www.1000bit.it/lista/q/q1europe/q1microlite.png Close-up shot in a Q1: https://www.peel.dk/Q1/img/SN615-05.jpg https://www.peel.dk/Q1/img/SN615-05.jpg Brochure: https://archive.org/details/TNM_Self-Scan_II_panels_for_data_terminals_-_Burr_20170922_0484/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/TNM_Self-Scan_II_panels_for_data... There are videos of the display being demonstrated on YouTube. Search for Burroughs Self-Scan.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html Looks like it is plasma but with characters, not a pure bitmap display.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      Yes, it is pretty certain that no bitmap plasma displays existed at that time, because the drivers for them would have been more expensive than an entire desktop computer (due to the high number of rows and columns). It is said that the display was an unusual plasma display and not a vacuum fluorescent display, which were much more frequent in the desktop calculators of that time, but it must have been an alphanumeric display with segments, perhaps with 16 segments per character.
      - Turing_Machine 3y ago
        What we think of as "plasma screens" were invented at UIUC for the PLATO project in (checks) 1964, by Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson. They had a resolution of 512x512. They started cranking them out in bulk in 1972. These were monochrome orange vector displays. They didn't use segments.
reacweb 3y ago
maybe a confusion because 16 kilo bits is 2 kilo bytes.
rsynnott 3y ago
From the actual article: > They use the Intel 8008 CPU, an 8-bit CPU capable of processing a whopping sixteen kilobytes of memory Which is correct. As you say, highly unlikely that the computers had that much, though. I'm not sure how Tom's Hardware does things, but it's well-known in the _newspaper_ industry that the headlines aren't written by the person who writes the article, and misinterpretation happens from time to time. I suspect whoever wrote the headline just got confused, here. Of course, because of the plague of LLMs which now lies over the land, anyone trying to find out how much RAM such a machine had in 2050 will be confidently, incorrectly told 16kB by GPT47, even though it's obviously wrong, due to this headline...
- thfuran 3y ago
  Surely by 2050 they'll have figured out how to associate a credibility measure and attested provenance with every bit of knowledge to prevent that sort of thing. What a time to be alive.
tdeck 3y ago
This thing was released after the datapoint 2200, which essentially has an 8008 made of discrete TTL chips. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 The 2200 type 2 (1972) was indeed expandable to 16k. Yes it cost $14,000, but you could buy it. Remember: this was an expensive piece of business equipment, the Altair was a cheap (for the time) kit for hobbyists. Companies buying these machines were choosing between them and a minicomputer like the PDP/11 which cost $20,000.
gumby 3y ago
14 year old me in 1978 had a whopping 4K of RAM in my S-100 system (a whole card full of 2102s) and I couldn't have had that much without my parents helping me out. A full 16K six years before seems unlikely, especially given the size of programs back then.
- linker3000 3y ago
  We're of a similar age. I had to make do with 1152 bytes on the school's Acorn System Ones - until the CBM (PET) 3016 arrived.
  - gumby 3y ago
    You could do quite a lot with a small amount of RAM. And if you were using the front panel switches (not on the acorn I suppose) you didn't want a large program!

by Tor3 3y ago

actionfromafar 3y ago

The headline is probably wrong, the article text just says "capable of" 16 kilobyte. I also think it's unlikely it had 16 installed. On the other hand, doesn't the screen look like a flatscreen, not a CRT? So the screen itself was probably very expensive in itself. (Probably plasma screen?) Edit: Look at the image and the bank of 3 * 8 socketed chips: https://www.peel.dk/Q1/img/SN615-03.jpg https://www.peel.dk/Q1/img/SN615-03.jpg If these are the Intel 2102 [1] or something similar, then it would have 3 kilobytes of SRAM. 1: https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Intel_2102 https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Intel_2102 Edit 2: the computer in the picture is another model, ignore me.

Tor3 3y ago
That picture appears to be from a Q1/Lite, which is a different beast (and used 4116 DRAM according to the schematics)
- Tor3 3y ago
  And.. the original article's picture is also a Q1 Lite, as far as I can tell. Introduced 1977. That one used NEC 4116 dynamic RAM. And did not use the 8008. It's very difficult to find anything about the original Q1. Even the "First Q1 Brochure" from TheByteAttic is actually a Q1 LMC, which was the second model.
troupe 3y ago
Probably not a plasma screen in the 70s. It looks like a bunch of individual characters. They are probably vacuum fluorescent like what was on calculators and the Speak & Spell educational toy from that period.
- balazer 3y ago
  It appears to be a Burroughs Self-Scan plasma display. The display in action on a Q1: https://www.1000bit.it/lista/q/q1europe/q1microlite.png https://www.1000bit.it/lista/q/q1europe/q1microlite.png Close-up shot in a Q1: https://www.peel.dk/Q1/img/SN615-05.jpg https://www.peel.dk/Q1/img/SN615-05.jpg Brochure: https://archive.org/details/TNM_Self-Scan_II_panels_for_data_terminals_-_Burr_20170922_0484/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/TNM_Self-Scan_II_panels_for_data... There are videos of the display being demonstrated on YouTube. Search for Burroughs Self-Scan.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html Looks like it is plasma but with characters, not a pure bitmap display.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Yes, it is pretty certain that no bitmap plasma displays existed at that time, because the drivers for them would have been more expensive than an entire desktop computer (due to the high number of rows and columns). It is said that the display was an unusual plasma display and not a vacuum fluorescent display, which were much more frequent in the desktop calculators of that time, but it must have been an alphanumeric display with segments, perhaps with 16 segments per character.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      What we think of as "plasma screens" were invented at UIUC for the PLATO project in (checks) 1964, by Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson. They had a resolution of 512x512. They started cranking them out in bulk in 1972. These were monochrome orange vector displays. They didn't use segments.

reacweb 3y ago

maybe a confusion because 16 kilo bits is 2 kilo bytes.

rsynnott 3y ago

From the actual article: > They use the Intel 8008 CPU, an 8-bit CPU capable of processing a whopping sixteen kilobytes of memory Which is correct. As you say, highly unlikely that the computers had that much, though. I'm not sure how Tom's Hardware does things, but it's well-known in the _newspaper_ industry that the headlines aren't written by the person who writes the article, and misinterpretation happens from time to time. I suspect whoever wrote the headline just got confused, here. Of course, because of the plague of LLMs which now lies over the land, anyone trying to find out how much RAM such a machine had in 2050 will be confidently, incorrectly told 16kB by GPT47, even though it's obviously wrong, due to this headline...

thfuran 3y ago
Surely by 2050 they'll have figured out how to associate a credibility measure and attested provenance with every bit of knowledge to prevent that sort of thing. What a time to be alive.

tdeck 3y ago

This thing was released after the datapoint 2200, which essentially has an 8008 made of discrete TTL chips. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 The 2200 type 2 (1972) was indeed expandable to 16k. Yes it cost $14,000, but you could buy it. Remember: this was an expensive piece of business equipment, the Altair was a cheap (for the time) kit for hobbyists. Companies buying these machines were choosing between them and a minicomputer like the PDP/11 which cost $20,000.

gumby 3y ago

14 year old me in 1978 had a whopping 4K of RAM in my S-100 system (a whole card full of 2102s) and I couldn't have had that much without my parents helping me out. A full 16K six years before seems unlikely, especially given the size of programs back then.

linker3000 3y ago
We're of a similar age. I had to make do with 1152 bytes on the school's Acorn System Ones - until the CBM (PET) 3016 arrived.
- gumby 3y ago
  You could do quite a lot with a small amount of RAM. And if you were using the front panel switches (not on the acorn I suppose) you didn't want a large program!