
Minivac 601 - nanna
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minivac_601
======
jloughry
From chaper 3 of _Marketing That Works: How Entrepreneurial Marketing Can Add
Sustainable Value to Any Sized Company_ by Lodish _et al._ (Upper Saddle
River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2007)

 _Many colleges and some upper socioeconomic high schools also bought the
MINIVAC as an educational aid. However, no one in the third segment, the
corporate sector, bought the product. The entrepreneur interviewed some target
customers to try to find the problem. He found out very quickly. The typical
description of the MINIVAC by the corporate types was: "Oh, that—it's just a
toy!"_

 _The entrepreneur was creative and he listened carefully. He also understood
marketing. His next product was the same basic kit—with the switches upgraded
to higher tolerances and the machine color changed from blue and red to
gunmetal gray. The name was changed to the MINIVAC 6010 and he increased the
price from $79.95 to $479. The MINIVAC 6010 sold very well to the corporate
segment at $479._

~~~
perl4ever
Well, that may be jumping to conclusions. Maybe the corporate types weren't
reacting to the change in color at all. Maybe they were doing a rational cost
benefit analysis - 6010 is 10 times better than 601, and 479 is only 6 times
the price. Clearly the value proposition has been noticeably improved!

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gravypod
Are there new versions of kits like these? I'd love to build up a machine that
was PDP-8 or PDP-11 compatible out of modern digital circuits.

~~~
jonjacky
[http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8](http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8)

[http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11](http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11)

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tomcam
Created by none other than Claude Shannon
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon)

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Waterluvian
There's something about physical interaction with these old computers that
emulation just cannot satisfy.

There's also something amazing about working on a very low powered system...
There's so much of the universe of computing you don't have to worry about. To
this extent one of my favourite projects was the build your own Apple I. And
learning C on an original Raspberry Pi.

I read often about this concern that we have offloaded so much responsibility
to China that we are losing the fundamentals in the West. I wonder if this
desire for nostalgia and simplicity will compel many of us to get in touch
with our engineering roots.

~~~
digi_owl
Was watching someone getting a Altair to run basic via a teletype and a paper
tape. The amount of bit flipping just to get the initial bootloader ready made
me appreciate the work Woz and like did to make later systems boot straight to
a prompt on a CRT.

On a different note, those old systems had a RAM and CPU clock that was
basically synced. Thus my understanding is that one could "cycle count" ones
way to high performance code.

~~~
slededit
The CPU was faster than the memory by the mid to late 70s (though they did
start roughly equal at the start of the decade). You would insert a number of
"wait states" with an external counter to ensure your memories' timing was not
violated.

At that time RAM was asynchronous, you put an address in the A bus and by the
specified delay time you would have your result on the output. Later on
memories were pipelined and that is when they got their clock.

