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The computers had a C compiler and Pascal interpreter made by Watcom out of Waterloo. QNX was the OS, which is also out of Waterloo I believe. So overall, the
by thijson 2y ago
The computers had a C compiler and Pascal interpreter made by Watcom out of Waterloo. QNX was the OS, which is also out of Waterloo I believe. So overall, the system supported a few Ontario based companies.
There was a trackball integrated into the case. Some buttons on the keyboard acted as buttons for the mouse cursor.
One of the most popular programs on these computers was a program called FGED. It would save animations that could be played back later. Some people would spend hours creating them, then later play them back for their friends.
Later version of the ICON supported DOS games. I remember playing "scorched earth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game)
- AstroJetson 2y agoThey had the entire suite of Watcomm products: APL, Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal. The Watcomm tools were great, there was some magical linker that let you connect Cobol and Fortran tools together. Burroughs was always big on being able to network computers together. Their B20 line was awesome on the amount of sharing you could do between systems. Lots of sites had one or two machines with disks on them, the rest would use the network to get to the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_B20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_B20
- thijson 2y agoI used the sharing ability to run the fake login program on another node. The syntax was something like: [12] fake_login Where 12 was the remote computer I wanted to run it on. The networking was definitely ahead of what was possible with PC's.