Computer

Windows Bermasalah??

2011-05-06T15:20:00.000-07:00

Gw minta tolong nih ama para senior.

Gw menggunakan windows XPProfessional 2002 SP2 + PCMAV 1.92 build2/Clamav dengan permasalahansebagai berikut:

Masalah 1 :

"The drive not ready for use, Its door may be open. Please check driveand make sure that a disk is inserted and then drive is closed" (pada saat booting awal)

Masalah 2:

"Registry has been disabled by your administrator "(pada saat masuk regedit)

Masalah 3:

"Task manager has been disabled by your administrator"(pada saat masuk task manager/Ctrl+ Alt+Del)

Masalah 4:

Hidden files and folder : setelah dirubah ke "show hidden files andfolders", tapi secara otomatis berubah kembali ke "do not show hiddenfiles and folders"

Gw udah coba beberapa cara yang gw temui di web tapi hasilnya tetap sama.
Terimakasih. ...

Jawabnya:

Sebelumya, Saya bukan seorang ahli windows or IT.
Tp cm seorang mahasiswa Komputer Akuntansi saja..

Menurut pengalaman saya, saya banyak menangani keluhan2 seperti anda dari laptop teman2 saya dan menurut saya itu karena ulah Virus.
Apalagi melihat anda cuma menggunakan PC MAV aja.

Untuk Antivirur sebaiknya gunakan Antivirus Internasional aja.
Krn antivirus lokal biasanya hanya menangani virus2 lokal saja.

Coba Instal Kasperky, Avira, atau AVG, trus Update.. (saya sendiri menggunakan NOD32) lalu coba scan full, lalu restart windows anda.
Untuk mengembalikan settingan Registry komputer anda, bisa gunakan Fasilitas Killer Machine.

Mudah2an berhasil.

Printer Driver Download

2011-02-08T07:08:00.000-08:00

HP 2000 Professional Series Printer Driver Downloads
HP 2000C Professional Series Printer Driver Downloads
HP 2000CN Professional Series Printer Driver Downloads
HP 2000CSE Professional Series Printer Driver Downloads
HP 2000CXI Professional Series Printer Driver Downloads
HP 2500C Professional Series Printer Driver Downloads

Untuk Lebih Jelasnya Klik Disini

HP Photosmart Drivers
Below are the most serached HP Photosmart Drivers:

HP Photosmart 1215 driversHP Photosmart 7350 driversHP Photosmart 1115 driversHP Photosmart 1000 driversHP Photosmart 7150 driversHP Photosmart p1000 driversHP Photosmart 7550 driversHP Photosmart 320 driversHP Photosmart 7260 drivers

HP Laserjet Drivers
HP Laserjet Drivers are among the most popular printer driver downloads.
Select your HP Laserjet Driver here:

HP Laserjet 1000 drivers
HP Laserjet 1010 drivers
HP Laserjet 1012 drivers
HP Laserjet 1100 drivers
HP Laserjet 1200 drivers
HP Laserjet 1300 drivers
HP Laserjet 2100 drivers
HP Laserjet 3100 drivers
HP Laserjet 5l drivers
HP Laserjet 6l drivers

2010-03-16T01:02:00.000-07:00

Di jual laptop accer new grnsi resmi acer hrg 5,5jt net.di toko 6jt- 6,5jt..Accer extensa 4630 intel centrino core2 duo t6570,intel gma 4500,14 in.1gb,320gb hdd,dvd,blutut,cardreder,wifi,cam...stok banyak... beli lebih dr 1 nego
serius hub 085643116738/081931190605

Beasiswa

2009-01-28T15:38:00.000-08:00

PROGRAM BEASISWA S2 & S3 LUAR NEGERI DEPKOMINFO TAHUN 2009

Departemen Komunikasi dan Informatika pada Tahun 2009 kembali membuka kesempatan dan menyediakan beasiswa pendidikan S2 dan S3 di luar negeri bagi PNS di lingkungan lembaga pemerintah, karyawan/karyawati di lembaga pendidikandan industri teknologi informasi dan komunikasi (TIK), serta masyarakat umum.

Persyaratan :

1. Lulusan sarjana S1 untuk pendidikan S2 dan lulusan Sarjana S2 untuk pendidikan S3.

2. Memiliki IPK minimal 2,75 (dari skala 4)

3. Memiliki nilai Institutional TOEFL (ITP) minimal 550 atau IELTS minimal 6.5

4. Memiliki nilai Tes Potensi Akademik (TPA) minimal 550

5. Mendapat rekomendasi dari pejabat yang berwenang

6. Diutamakan :
a. Memiliki pengalaman kerja minimal 2 tahun
b. Berusia maksimal 35 tahun untuk pendidikan S2 dan 40 tahun untuk pendidikan S3.
c. Belum memiliki gelar dan tidak sedang menerima beasiswa lain dan/atau sedang mengikuti program pendidikan S2 (bagi pelamar program S2) atau S3 (bagi pelamar program S3)7.

Pendaftaran dan penyerahan berkas lamaran beasiswa paling lambat tanggal18 Februari 2009.

Persyaratan dan formulir beasiswa dapat di download di: http://www.depkomin fo.go.id/ program/beasiswa -s2-s3-luar- negeri-depkominf o-2009/

KNX Protocol Vs IP Protocol

2009-01-28T15:35:00.000-08:00

Saya mau tanya. Apakah System yang berbasis KNX Protocol bisa dibacaoleh sistem yang berbasis TCP/IP Protocol? Mengingat di project saya,suatu product lighting control nya memakai sistem / peralatan yangberbasis KNX Protocol tetapi Building Automationnya menggunakan basisTCP/IP Protocol. Mohon bantuan dan sarannya.

Jawabnya:

Kemungkinan besar bisa, biasanya suatu industri mempunyai standardtertentu untuk berkomunikasi. Kalau hardwarenya beda diperlukanadapter untuk menghubungkan kedua sistem tsb. Bisa atau tidaktergantung ketersediaan adapter tsb.

Sama halnya Serial-to-USB adapter untuk menghubungkan peralatan serialke PC karena PC notebook sekarang kebanyakan tidak punya serial port.

Kalau KNX standard di bidang ini, mungkin juga building automationpakai message KNX yang dibungkus TCP/IP supaya lebih murah karena bisadikirim via jaringan LAN yang ada.

Coba minta bantuan vendornya,
semoga berhasil.

Salam,
Daud

Tutorial Excel Macro - Laporan keuangan

2009-01-28T15:26:00.000-08:00

I.>>>

VBA untuk excel macro sangat membantu, dan minimal logika pemakai cukup baik dalam menyelesaikan urutan pekerjaan yang berkaitan dengan transaksi data yang ada baik itu dalam bentuk form format excel (sering ditemui bagi starter user) untuk diterjemahkan kedalam laporan tabulasi format excel juga sampai nanti dibentuk neraca.

Kelemahan umum : elemen transaksi data yang tidak konsiten mudah dirubah walaupun sudah closing, serta terkenan virus.

Proteksinya : validasi elemen transaksi data dengan VBA macro juga tentunya dan memberikan highlight bila ditemukan kesalahan, hentikan proses selanjutnya sampai didapat clean data.Untuk virus macro tentunya banyak anti virus yang cocok.

Selamat mencoba
SM

II.>>>

excel macro dan vb mempunyai dialek bahasa yang mirip

script vb di macro excel biasanya untuk otomatisasitugas2 pengoperasian excel

sedangkan vb adalah tool pemrograman

III.>>>

Untuk flowchart dan arus transaksi secara akuntansi saya sudah ada Pak,Masalahnya bgmana saya menuangkannya ke excel macro (kalo nggak salah ada VBnya yach dari hasil google – CMIIW)

Apabila ada contoh or sample program or script kira bisa menjadi pencerahan buat saya karena keterbatasan saya di excel macro or VB.

Apakah excel macro itu identik dengan VB ?Atas bantuan dan pencerahannya saya ucapkan terima kasih

Regards,
Firmanel Awwal
Master of Management FEUI

Mengubah Welcome Screen

2009-01-28T15:24:00.000-08:00

Saya pakai Win xp sp 2, tapi udah 1 minggu ini tampilan Welcome scren saya tiba2 kok berubah sendiri menjadi tampilan clasic yg ada kolom username harus diisi manual?

Saya udah coba masuk ke Control Panel, User Account untuk mengubahnya lagi menjadi tampilan Fast User Switching (Menu: Change the way user log on or off), tapi ga bisa...

Muncul warning yg katanya ada file bernama ginamsi.dll di System32 yg mengubahnya.Kemudian saya masuk ke folder system32 dan memindahkan file tsb ktempat lain, Laptop malah ga bisa booting.

Baru bisa boot kembali setelah sy kembalikan file tsb lewat save mode.Saya juga udah coba mengganti tampilan WelScreen via Tune Up Xp,tp tetap tidak berpengaruh. ..

Apakah ada yg pernah punya masalah yg sama dan bisa memabantu saya?Terimakasih sebelumnya.

berkarir di IT

2009-01-28T15:12:00.000-08:00

I>>>>

Menarik kiranya bila kita menyimak latar belakang para profesional dibidang IT, ada yang melenceng jauh dari sasaran awal, Tapi itulah realitas hidup.

Kalau kita perhatikan perubahan yang terjadi dibidang IT secara umum termasuk cepat, dari jaman komputer "dinosaurus" dari blue group, berubah kepada kelompok "kijang" dan saat ini menjamur kepada komunitas "virus" yang jenisnya semakin beragam dan semakin luas. Sehingga saking banyaknya kita lebih banyak jadi tukang "koprek" saja saat ini, dan mungkin sedikit sekali yang sudah melakukan inovasi dibidang IT, nah bagaimana yang menemukan "alien" baru bidang IT/komputer khususnya, tentu sangat-sangat sedikit. Keseluruhan perubahan itu tentunya tidak terlepas dari dukungan para professional IT/komputer untuk sampai ketahap sekarang.

Tentunya Pak moderator mempunyai bahan berdasarkan statistik para peminat SAP, latar belakang, alasan berprofesi dibidang SAP, serta pandangan kedepan nya, dan itu bisa dijadikan bahan bagi mereka yang ingin berkarir dibidang IT.

Sebagai gambaran lain demikian, kalau kita saat ini melihat kendaraan bermotor yang ber BBM, pada beberapa dekade mendatang akan berubah kearah "Hybrid". Maka seirama dengan perubahan itu bidang IT/komputer juga akan berubah seperti gaya "Hybrid". Barangkali nanti komputer akan sekelas "nano" yang mudah untuk dipasangkan pada manusia, hewan atau barang, sehingga setiap pergerakkannya sudah dapat diterka. Kalau saat ini data sebelum di "enter"/"gesek" kedalam sistem komputer maka data transaksi tersebut belum menjadi bagian dalam sistem aplikasi komputer itu, nanti tentunya lain cara prosesnya. Contoh pemakaiannya bila ada "C-nano" tadi bila dipasangkan di kuping sesorang sebagai KTP yang berisi identitas nya, maka pihak imigrasi sudah dapat mengetahui bahwa ada warganegaranya yang keluar atau masuk kenegaranya begitu melewati scanning gate atau karena adanya pancaran radar yang mendeteksinya.

Sebagai programmer dari jaman "Kartu lubang" sampai "OOP" yang saat ini juga masih jadi tukang "oprek" "VB" untuk mencari rejeki, hanya bisa menyampaikan untuk generasi muda yang ingin berkarir dibidang IT/Komputer perlu optimis bahwa IT bidangnya sangat luas. Apakah karir di IT hanya karena alasan jasa yang kisarannya 3-28 Jt/Bln menurut Kelly Service untuk Indonesia th 2008 kemarin , atau karena minat dan bakatnya dibidang IT, seperti Marko Calasan dari Skopje yang berusia 8 th sudah menjadi programmer.

Rezeki sudah ada yang mengatur tinggal yang bersangkutan untuk berusaha sekuat tenaga dan akal pikirannya, agar nanti muncul "C-Indo" yang mengglobal dan sebagai "Trend-setter" .

Salam dan selamat memilih.

II>>>>

Saya Sarjana Pertanian

waktu kuliah semester 2 udah terlanjur suka sama komputer.
wkt kuliah sudah bawa2 buku komputer.
Karena terlanjur suka sama dunia IT, semua yang berhubungandengan komputer saya pelajari.

Termasuk OS wkt itu DOS hingga Windows,Networking, Novell Netware, Windows Server

Jadi nggak heran kalau sayabisa jadi Asisten Lab komputer.
Waktu kuliah juga sudah ngajar kursus komputer.
Tamat Kuliah (Sarjana Pertanian), saya hanya melamarpekerjaan yang berhubungan dengan komputer.
Saya pernah jadi IT support, Network Admin, Programmer di perusahaan.
Sekarang saya wiraswasta ngajar Kursus Visual Basic,Bikin Software dan Website.

salam,
Hartoto, Ir.

III>>>>

Saya juga mulai kuliah IT seumur anda karena keadaan ekonomi sayakerja dulu baru kuliah setelah dana cukup.

Tujuan saya untuk dapat S1karena banyak perusahaan masih mengandalkan ijazah.
Waktu itu matakuliah cukup berat lebih mengarah ke science.
Kuliah dan praktekprogramming sedikit kalah sama yang kursus.

Tergantung tujuan anda, kalau ingin jadi pengajar IT ya kuliah IT,kalau untuk berkarir di IT saya sarankan ambil pelatihan bidang yanganda minati karena IT terlalu luas.

Beberapa point penting ke dunia IT :

1. Paling baik kalau anda punya dasar elektro, kalau belum pelajarisaja teori dasar elektronika, teknik digital dan kalau bisa teorimicroprocessor.
Hal ini berguna untuk trouble shooting PC atauperalatan digital.
Sekarang banyak yang jual Robotic kit dan jugadilombakan, ini bagus untuk praktek programming.
Kebetulan dulu sayahobby elektronika sehingga sangat membantu pekerjaan saya.

2. Wajib kuasai salah satu bahasa Programming (bahasa C, Java, VB, dll) dan teknik-teknik pemrograman.
Sebaiknya pelajari yangmultiplatform spt Java supaya bisa jalan di OS mana saja.
Kalau bidanganda mesin-mesin industri kebanyakan pakai C atau assembler, aplikasipakai C++, Java, PHP atau VB (untuk lingkungan Windows).

3. Database management dan bahasa SQL (misal MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL,dll). Pelajari salah satu saja dan bahasa SQL standard untuk semuadatabase.

4. Teori Networking WAN/LAN.

5. Operating System terutama server.

Demikian info dari saya, semoga membantu.

Salam,
Daud

Just In Time System

2009-01-28T15:04:00.000-08:00

Mengenal Sistem Produksi Tepat Waktu (Just In Time System)

I. Sistem Produksi Barat

Sistem produksi yang paling banyak dipakai saat ini adalah yangberasal dari Eropa dan Amerika. Sistem produksi tersebut dikenalsebagai sistem produksi western. Ciri-ciri dari sistem produksi iniantara lain:

* melakukan peramalan dalam menentukan kuantitas produksi,
* melakukan optimasi dalam penjadwalan produksi, penentuankebutuhan bahan,penentuan kebutuhan mesin, pekerja, dll.
* terdapatnya departemen pengendalian kualitas,
* terdapatnya gudang receiver dan gudang warehouse sebagaipenyimpanpersediaan , dll.

Secara garis besarnya adalah masih terdapatnya unsur- unsurprobabilistik dalam melakukan keputusan untuk masalah-masalah sistemproduksi. Filosofi dasar dari sistem produksi western adalah bagaimanamengoptimalkan unsur-unsur sistem produksi yang tersedia. Hal inimemungkinkan karena negara-negara barat waktu itu masih memilikiresourcess yang cukup banyak.

Pada tahun 1970-an terjadi krisis minyak bumi yang sangat mempengaruhiindustri-industri barat sebagai consumer terbesar. Sedangkan Jepangtidak begitu terpengaruh krisis tersebut karena Jepang sudah biasahemat dalam menggunakan resources khususnya minyak bumi. Akibatnyaindustri-industri barat mengalami kemerosotan sedangkan sebaliknya diJepang justru mulai muncul.

Pada tahun 1980-an sistem produksi jepang mulai menunjukkankeunggulan-keunggul annya sedangkan barat justru baru mulaimerekonstruksi dan merestrukturisasi sistem produksinya baik melaluiteknik-teknik produksinya maupun manajemennya.

Pada tahun 1990-an Jepang nampak berkembang pesat dan jauh meninggalkan Eropa ataupunAmerika.

II. Sistem Produksi Jepang

Sistem produksi Jepang dikenal dengan nama Sistem Produksi Tepat-Waktu(Just In Time). Filosofi dasar dari sistem produksi jepang (JIT)adalah memperkecil ke mubadziran (Eliminate of Waste). Bentukkemubadziran antara lain adalah

Kemubadziran dalam Waktu, misalnya ada pekerja yang menganggur (idletime), mesin yang menganggur, waktu transport dalam pabrik tidakefisien, jadwal produksi yang tidak ditepati, keterlambatan material,lintasan produksi yang tidak seimbang sehingga terjadi bottle-neck,terlambatnya pengiriman barang, banyak-nya karyawan yang absen, dsb.

Kemubadziran dalam Material, misalnya terlalu banyak buangan (scraps,chips) akibat proses produksi, banyak terjadi kerusakan material ataumaterial dalam proses, banyaknya material yang hilang, material yangusang, nilai material yang menurun akibat terlalu lama disimpan, dll.

Kemubadziran dalam Manajemen, misalnya terlalu banyak karyawan kantor,banyak terjadi mis-informasi antar departemen, banyaknya overlappingdalam penugasan, pelaksanaan tugas yang tidak efektif, sulit dalamkoordinasi, dll.
Jepang melakukan eliminate of waste karena jepangtidak punya resources yang cukup.
Jadi dalam setiap melakukanpengambilan keputusan terutama untuk masalah produksi selalu menganutkepada prinsip efisiensi, efektifitas dan produktivitas.

Untuk dapat melaksanakan eliminate waste Jepang melakukan strategi sebagaiberikut :
- Hanya memproduksi jenis produk yang diperlukan.
- Hanya memproduksi produk sejumlah yang dibutuhkan.
- Hanya memproduksi produk pada saat diperlukan.

Tujuan utama dari sistem produksi JIT adalah untuk dapat memproduksiproduk dengan Kualitas (quality) terbaik, Ongkos (cost) termurah, danPengiriman (delivery) pada saat yang tepat, dan disingkat QCD.

Tujuanutama ini bisa dicapai jika ketiga unsur berikut dapat dilaksanakansecara terpadu, yaitu Melakukan pengendalian kuantitas dengan baik.

Untuk dapat menentukan kuantitas yang tepat maka diperlukan sisteminformasi yang baik. Sistem informasi untuk memproses produk tersebutdi Jepang dikenal dengan istilah Kanban (kartu berjalan). Pelaksanakanpengendalian kuantitas akan berjalan dengan baik jika didukung olehsuplier dan consumer yang pasti dan tepat waktu. Jika hal ini dapatdilakukan maka kita akan dapat mengeliminir waste dalam materialsehingga konsep Zerro Inventory dapat dilaksanakan.

Melakukan pengendalian kualitas dengan baik.Dalam melakukan pengendalian kualitas di Jepang dikenal dengan istilahTQC (Total Quality Control). Tujuannya adalah untuk dapat memenuhikonsep Zero Defect. Didalam sistem produksi di jepang tidak adadepartemen pengendalian kualitas, tetapi yang ada adalah QualityAssurance (jaminan kualitas).Konsep zero defect tersebut akan dapat berjalan dengan baik jika parapekerja diberi kewenangan (otonomi), agar tidak memberikan hasilproduk yang tidak baik ke rekan kerja berikutnya sehingga tidakmenyusahkan pekerja lainnya.

Menjunjung tinggi harkat kemanusiaan karyawan. Didalam sistem produksidikenal 5 faktor produksi yang penting agar produksi dapat berjalandengan baik yang dikenal dengan istilah Lima M, yaitu Man, Machine,Material, Money, dan Method. JIT tidak ingin menganggap Man hanyasebagai salah satu faktor produksi saja, tetapi lebih dari itu yakniingin mengangkat harkat karyawan sehingga karyawan tersebut merasamemiliki sebagian dari perusahaan.

Untuk dapat melakukan ini ada 3cara, yaitu :

a. Otonomi (kewenangan) .

Karena karyawan sebagai pelaku dan penentu dalam proses produksi makaperlu kewenangan sehingga dapat mengambil keputusan-keputusan sesuaidengan batasan tugas dan tanggungjawabnya.

b. Flexibility

Karyawan perlu mengetahui dan bisa melakukan pekerjaan- pekerjaan laindiluar pekerjaannya. Hal ini dilakukan agar dapat mengurangi kebosanan(boredom) atau kejenuhan dan dapat melakukan subtitusi kerja lainnyajika karyawan yang ber-sangkutan absen.

Ditinjau dari segi manajemen adalah menguntungkan dalam segipengkoordinasian karena setiap karyawan mengerti akan keterkaitannyadan tugas-tugas rekan kerjanya yang lain. Dengan cara tersebut akandidapat karyawan yang bersifat multifungsi. Jika karyawan diarahkankepada pekerjaan yang bersifat Spesialisasi saja maka akan munculhal-hal negatif antara lain adalah kesulitan dalam mengkoordinasikarena timbulnya blok-blok atau pengkotakan antar job-nyamasing-masing, tidak ada sifat gotong-royong dalam bekerja, antarakaryawan tidak ada sifat kepedulian, dll.

c. Creativity

Jika wewenang, tanggung-jawab, job, dan flexibility sudah dimilikisetiap karyawan tetapi kreativitas belum tersalurkan maka akan munculkejengkelan atau unek-unek dari karyawan tersebut. Untuk itu perluadanya penyaluran kretivitas apakah dalam bentuk Urun rembug,brainstorming, atau yang lainnya. Dengan demikian akan terbentuk suatuDemokrasi dalam sistem produksi.

Sebagai penutup dapat dikatakan bahwa JIT sebenarnya berakar padailmu-ilmu barat. JIT dapat berjalan dan berhasil di Jepang karenadidukung oleh budaya jepang yang sesuai. Jadi secara tidak langsungJepang dapat memilih dan membudidayakan budaya asing yang baik untukdisesuaikan dan dikembangkan menjadi budayanya.

====
IPOMS

Panduan Install SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (Linux)

2009-01-28T15:02:00.000-08:00

Panduan Install SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (Linux)

SAP NW2004s for Linux hanya tersedia untuk x64,
sebelum menginstalanda harus punya:
- PC dengan processor 64 bit, misalnya AMD64 atau X2 atau Intel Core 2 Duo- Linux 64 bit (Suse atau Centos).

cara nginstalnya sama saja dng versi yg dulu.
Saya sudah berhasil mendownload SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (2004s)
- Trial Version on> LinuxÂ .
Bagaimana cara menginstallnya?
Adakah file panduannya? Karena dulu>
saya mendapatkan file panduan utk install SAP NetWeaver 2004.

Belajar Bahasa Inggris

2009-01-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

Mari belajar bahasa Inggris gratis

Rekan-rekan,
Mohon bantuannya untuk memforward ke rekan yang lain.
Jika ingin belajar bahasa Inggris gratis,
silahkan mengirimkan email keFree-English- Course-subscribe @yahoogroups. com
atau mendaftar melalui web:http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/Free- English-Course/
Mendaftar ke web lebih dianjurkan untuk mempercepat proses pendaftaran.
Milis ini dibuat bukan hanya untuk orang yang ingin BELAJAR bahasa Inggris tapi juga untuk rekan-rekan yang mengerti bahasa Inggris dan ingin MENGAJAR atau MENYUMBANGKAN ilmunya bagi perbaikan nasib bangsa kita.
Di milis itulah tempat orang Indonesia belajar dan kursus bahasa Inggris gratis online atau murah meriah.
Milis itu dari, untuk, dan oleh sesama anggota.
Ingin maju dalam bisnis dan karir?
Mau sekolah ke luar negeri?
Ingin sukses wawancara beasiswa?
Mau belajar Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) atau tes masuk lainnya?
Bahasa Inggris lah kuncinya!
Banyak juga sekolah di luar negeri yang memberikan beasiswa dalam bentuk teaching assistantship (TA) ataupun research assistanship (RA) asalkan Anda memiliki nilai TOEFL, GMAT (Graduate Management Admissions Test), atau GRE (Graduate Record Examination) yang tinggi.
Sayangnya, nilai TOEFL, GMAT, dan GRE orang Indonesia biasanya lebih rendah dari pada nilai orang India dan China sehingga sedikit orang Indonesia yang mendapat beasiswa langsung dari sekolah di luar negeri.
Beasiswa langsung dari sekolah itu tidak memerlukan syarat-syarat khusus (misalnya menjadi pengajar di sekolah luar Jawa) dan kewajiban untuk bekerja di sekolah pemberi beasiswa setelah lulus.
Karena itu, setelah Anda bergabung, Anda akan mendapat file gratis cara jitu belajar TOEFL, GMAT dan hal-hal lain tentang belajar ke Amerika sepanjang 37 halaman.
============ ========= =
Untuk meningkatkan kemampuan kita dalam berbahasa Inggris, secara teratur kita akan membahas soal-soal TOEFL ataupun materi lainnya seperti terlampir di bawah.

1. The oldest tree in this part of the world is the redwood, __________thousands of years old.
A. which may be
B. its age
C. and which
D. it is

2. The oncologist studied the results of the biopsy and decided __________additional tests.
A. should order
B. to order
C. he should ordering
D. ordering

3. That carcinogenic substances __________ in many common household itemsis well-known.
A. are contained
B. contained
C. containing
D. are containing

4. Porpoises, which __________ actually mammals because they breathe airthrough an orifice in their heads, are playful and intelligent.
A. is
B. be
C. being
D. are

5. Whereas Internet proponents say that someday all computer programs anddata will reside on an Internet server instead of individual computers, manyindividuals __________ afraid to lose control over their own documents.
A. are
B. being
C. also
D. very much

printer ngadat

2009-01-28T14:55:00.000-08:00

printer ngadat

just sharing aja, sy pk ip2000 ,sore masih bisa ngeprint, malamnya tiba2 nggak bisa nyala. besoknya bawa ke service centre nya canon, 2 hari kemudian dikabari kerusakannya, control unit, head dan bantalan tintanya bocor estimasi biaya 1,4 jeti (padahal belinya aja nggak nyampe cetiau) terus ditawari trade in dg ip3500 cuma nambah 750 rb, sempet nanya2 jg ke mg2 harga baru ip3500 cuma 880 rb ...:-(

Sederhana tapi menjengkelkan saat dibutuhkan ngadat, itu sering terjadi pada para pemakai produk bidang IT, bagaimana tidak seandainya sdr Adi sedang dikejar untuk menyelesaikan tugas penting dan hasilnya tinggal mencetak, eh printer yang untuk mencetak tiba-tiba tidak beroperasi sebagaimana mestinya.

Pengalaman sdr Rajlay dapat dipergunakan sebagai acuan, bahwa secanggih apapun peralatan IT/sistem komputer, perlu kiranya dimengerti bahwa perangkat itu mempunyai keterbatasan, perlu perawatan dan jangan lupa ketersediaan backup. Kalu terbiasa 'koprek" perangkat apapun maka kebiasaan untuk mengkutak katik ala "Indonesia" menjadi akan bermanfaat bila terjadi hal mendadak seperti itu. Jadi jangan lupakan Contigency plan bahasa kerennya.

Untuk printer tersebut, jangan terlalu sering untuk di-suntik catridge nya, kasihan kalau terkena head nya, bandingkan harga tinta suntik hanya 15-20 rb service gantinya kira2 100-150 rb, hampir setengah harga belinya yang berkisar 400-500 rb.

NET200 SAP Web Application Server: Developing BSP Applications

2009-01-28T14:49:00.000-08:00

NET200 SAP Web Application Server: Developing BSP Applications

Are you ready to challenged high demand SAP Jobs?, the IT Jobthat accepted anywhere in the world, don't missed this opportunity.

In this course, you will become familiar with the architecture of theSAP Web Application Server and learn how to program a Web applicationusing Business Server Pages. You will first set up the layout of abusiness server page using HTML and use the ABAP scripting language togenerate some dynamic parts of the layout. You will also learn how toinclude MIME objects in the application, provide BSP applications inmultiple languages, and use topics to adjust the layout of BSPapplications without making modifications.The course also discusses how to include data from SAP systems bycalling BAPIs in the system and how to log on to the SAP WebApplication Server You will learn how BSP extensions can be used todesign the layout. The use of the BSP extension HTMLB is covered inparticular detail.

Duration- 5 Sessions

Target Audience
This course is intended for the following audiences:
- Developers who want to create Web applications based on BSPapplications

Course Prerequisites
Required Knowledge
- Basic knowledge of ABAP (BC400 – ABAP Workbench: Foundationsand Concepts)
- Basic knowledge of HTML and HTTP

Recommended Knowledge
- NET050 - Web Application Development: Foundations
- Knowledge of object-oriented programming (preferably ABAP Objects)
- Knowledge of transaction programming

Software Component(s) and Release(s)
- Netweaver 7 (2004's)

Course Goals
This course will prepare you to:
- Describe the system architecture of the SAP Web Application Server
- Develop Web applications that are based on the Business Server Pageprogramming model

Course Objectives
After completing this course, you will be able to:
- Describe the system architecture of the SAP Web Application Server
- Describe the request/response cycle
- Name the components of a Business Server Page and a BSP applicationand describe their use
- Develop Web applications based on Business Server Pages
- Implement the layout of Business Server Pages using HTMLB elements
- Implement language
-specific BSP applications
- Explain how to assign a desired corporate identity design withoutmodification by assigning a topic
- Use data from other SAP systems by calling BAPIs in your BSPapplications

MSY
Komputer & Teknologi
Tingkatkan SDM IT Indonesia

Windows Bermasalah

2009-01-28T14:47:00.000-08:00

(Tolong) Windows Bermasalah

Gw minta tolong nih ama para senior. Gw menggunakan windows XPProfessional 2002 SP2 + PCMAV 1.92 build2/Clamav dengan permasalahansebagai berikut:

Masalah 1 :
"The drive not ready for use, Its door may be open. Please check driveand make sure that a disk is inserted and then drive is closed" (pada saat booting awal)

Masalah 2:
"Registry has been disabled by your administrator "(pada saat masuk regedit)

Masalah 3:
"Task manager has been disabled by your administrator"(pada saat masuk task manager/Ctrl+ Alt+Del)

Masalah 4:
Hidden files and folder : setelah dirubah ke "show hidden files andfolders", tapi secara otomatis berubah kembali ke "do not show hiddenfiles and folders"Gw udah coba beberapa cara yang gw temui di web tapi hasilnya tetap sama.

Terimakasih. ...

Jawabnya:

Kena virus/malware tuh..!!
Coba pake ini Norman Malware Cleaner

Just For Fun

2009-01-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

Just for fun...

Doctor: Please come in.
Patient: Thank you.
Doctor: What's your name?
Patient: atejadag.
Doctor: That's your name?
Patient: Yes. It's my user name.
Doctor: Ok. Where do you live?
Patient: SE38.
Doctor: SE38?
Patient: Yes. That's where I spend most of my time.
Doctor: Ok. What places have you visited?
Patient: Oh. Last week I was at SE37...SE80. ..SmartForms and ST22... :-)Doctor: Did you just lay down your head to the left and smile?
Patient: No. I just smiled.
Doctor: Ok, never mind. Do you have any kids?
Patient: Sure. I got two.
Doctor: Great. What are their names?
Patient: R/3 and NetWeaver. NetWeaver is the younger.
Doctor: Ok. Those are very unusual names.
Patient: I'm a very unusual guy.
Doctor: Yeah...I can tell.
Patient: ...
Doctor: I know why you are here...But can you tell me why you are here?
Patient: Sure. I suffer from short dumps.
Doctor: You're what?
Patient: My sy-subrc are always more than zero.
Doctor: Ok. I just hear enough. You really need my help. Please comeback next week.
Patient: Ok, thank you very much. /NEX
Doctor: And now...What you're supposed to do?
Patient: I'm trying to end this session.../NEX. ..But it doesn'twork...You may need to call your Basis guys.
Doctor: ...Don't worry, I'm going to do it...

Hope you like it -:)

Tentang IE7 lagi

2009-01-28T14:35:00.000-08:00

wehehehe... berarti saya beruntung karena installer yang saya sebutkan tidak melakukan konfirmasi/koneksi ke internet everything goes smoothly soalnya kalo ngga pasti saya lebih banyak gagal tapi saya ngga pernah gagal install IE7 meskipun pada komputer yang offline :), saya download itu installer dari msdn.microsoft. com, searching aja pake keyword IE7, tuh installer ngecek genuine windows juga ngga soalnya saya gagal melulu install Media Player 11 yang ngecek genuine windows meskipun sekarang dah bisa diakalin sih :))

habis install installer-nya hajar pake updatenya, soalnya produk M$ emang rata-rata buggy gitu

soal browser comparison saya juga sudah pake Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, Maxthon, Flock, Armorsurf (hehehe jadi ngelist browser.. coba googling ada situs yang didedikasikan memberikan list browser non IE), memang saya juga tetap pegang FF as primary browser dan IE saya pakai untuk kompatibilitas pada saat develop webapp aja, jadi supaya tampilan di browser IE enak dilihat dan di non-IE enak dilihat juga :)

Kalau dibilang terlalu lambat saya rasa IE7 ngga juga, saya pernah compare buka web di localhost yang lumayan "penuh" yang paling cepat buka FF terus Opera terus IE7 baru Safari

anyway emang paling enak sih pake FF dan Konqueror di Kubuntu :))
Best Rgds,

rajliay_david@ yahoo.co. id wrote: Saya sendiri juga sudah sangat sering menginstal IE7 dan jg WMP11 di Win xp b*j*kan. Pada saat kita instal, aplikasi tsb sllu berusaha mengecek windows kita..
Dan yg saya herankan, (sy srg mginstal/format ulang laptop tmn2 kampus) kadang2 ada yg brhasil, tp kadang2 ada jg yg gagal (ga bs krn trdetect ketidak aslianya).. Padahal setiap laptop tmn2 yg sy Instalkan mggunakan CD win xp yg sama.

Sampe skrg sy jg krg tau apa sebabnya, benar2 aneh.

*) Menurut saya, IE7 itu lemot, kebanyakan security.. Sy lebih mengandalkan Monzila, si Rubah Api. Sy jg sudah mencoba Google Chrom, safari, dan Opera. tp tetap Om Rubah api itu the best (menurut pengalaman saya).

Mendefragmenter

2009-01-28T14:33:00.000-08:00

Menurut pengalaman saya, ada beberapa hal yg menyebabkan kegagalan dalam mendefragment hardisk.

1. Hard Disk hampir penuh.
Untuk melakukan defrag, diperlukan free space minimal 10%.
Jadi, solusinya, back up dan pindahkan sebagian data anda ketempat lain, atau partisi yg lain yg tidak ingin di defrag, kemudian ulangi defragnya.

2. Ada virus, malware, spyware dikomputer.
Solusinya bersihkan dahulu komputer anda dg menggunakan tool2 anti penyakit tsb.
(diposting sblmnya ada yg menyarankan product norman)Solusi alternatif lainnya, gunakan defrag tool lainnya..
Misalnya fasilitas defrag yg ada di Tune Up XP, atau coba kunjungi www.scanwith. com disana juga ada freeware untuk defrag hardisk.

MySAP hanya untuk Bank

2009-01-28T14:20:00.000-08:00

Hari Jum'at di koran Suara Pembaharuan ada komentar yang mungkin bisa dibahas lebih lanjut.
Salah seorang anggota BPH Migas memperingatkan Pertamina untuk tidak terlaluterburu berpindah ke MySAP.
dengan alasan sumber daya.
Kenapa sumber dayaMySAP adalah system canggih yang banyak di pakai di Bank.

Komentar saya;

Sumber daya, sepertinya negara kita gak punya expert di bidang SAP.Perpindahan system tidak ada effek samping.
Terus terang tiap migrasi pastiada kendala, maka project manager lah yang harus memastikan bahwa kendalatersebut harus tidak mempengaruhi bisnis process di perusahaan tersebut.Kendala sumber daya juga merupakan tanggung jawab project manager, owner dankonsultan.

SAP bukan hanya untuk BANK.
Mungkin beliau harus mengecek di perusahaan lainsebelum berkomentar.

SAP ABAP Course Level

2009-01-28T14:16:00.000-08:00

SAP ABAP Course Level:

Level 1:
SAP20 Fundamentals/ Overview

Level 2:
BC400 Introduction to the ABAP Workbench

Level 3:
BC401 ABAP Objects
BC402 Advanced
ABAPBC405 Programming
ABAP Reports
BC406 Advanced Techniques of List Processing
BC407 Reporting with QuickViewer, SAP Query, and InfoSet Query
BC410 Programming User Dialogs
BC412 ABAP Dialog Programming using EnjoySAP Controls
BC414 Programming Database Updates
BC415 Remote Function Calls in ABAP
BC416 ABAP Web Services
BC417 BAPI Development for Accessing SAP
BC420 Data Transfer
BC425 Enhancements and Modification
BC427 Enhancement Framework
BC430 ABAP Dictionary
BC440 Developing Internet Application Components
BC460 SAPscript Form Printing and Text Management
BC470 Form Printing With SAP Smart Forms
BC480 Creating PDF-Based Print Forms
BC490 ABAP Performance Tuning

Partition magic

2009-01-28T14:13:00.000-08:00

notebook toshiba m305d, dengan siste operasi vista 64 bit,
gimana sih cara partisi hardisk tanpa partition magic atau di dos...
kalau tidak salah bisa melalui disk management dan di shrink terlebih dahulu yah...
tapi kok gak bisa nsudah dicoba...

Jawab:

Setau saya partition magic tidak kompatible dengan vista, coba pake "Paragon Partition"

SAP Netweaver 7.0 prerequisition

2009-01-28T14:11:00.000-08:00

Prerequisites Install NW7 Windows version sbb:

System Requirements
• Operating System: Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2) orWindows Server 2003
• NTFS-File systems
• Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher or Firefox 1.0 or higher
• At least 1 GB RAM
• Intel Pentium III/1.1 GHz or higher (or compatible)
• 22 GB hard disk space temporary during installation - 10 GB permanent
• High-resolution monitor (1024x768 or higher, 256 colors)
• Make sure that no other SAP system is installed on your computer
• The file <%WINDIR%>\system32 \drivers\ etc\services must not includean entry for the ports 3201, 3601 and 8000. A possible entry can beexcluded by using the hash symbol (#).
• If no DHCP server is available on your network (which dynamicallydetermines the IP address) or your computer is not connected to anynetwork, you need to install the virtual interface adapter MS LoopbackAdapter. See installing the MS Loopback Adapter.

Tidak Bisa Defragmenter

2009-01-28T14:08:00.000-08:00

Komputer tidak bisa di defrag?? Gimana solusinya??

Jawab:

ada beberapa hal yg menyebabkan kegagalan dalam mendefragment hardisk.
1. Hard Disk hampir penuh. Untuk melakukan defrag, diperlukan free space minimal 10%. Jadi, solusinya, back up dan pindahkan sebagian data anda ketempat lain, atau partisi yg lain yg tidak ingin di defrag, kemudian ulangi defragnya.
2. Ada virus, malware, spyware dikomputer. Solusinya bersihkan dahulu komputer anda dg menggunakan tool2 anti penyakit tsb. (diposting sblmnya ada yg menyarankan product norman) Solusi alternatif lainnya, gunakan defrag tool lainnya.. Misalnya fasilitas defrag yg ada di Tune Up XP, atau coba kunjungi www.scanwith. com disana juga ada freeware untuk defrag hardisk.

Anak 8 Tahun, Profesional Microsoft Termuda

2009-01-28T14:01:00.000-08:00

Anak 8 Tahun, Profesional Microsoft Termuda

Rekor sertifikasi profesional Microsoft termuda kembali pecah. Seorang anak usia 8 tahun menggeser pemegang rekor sebelumnya yang berusia 9 tahun.

Ia adalah Marko Calasan dan usianya baru 8 tahun. Dengan usianya yang masih sangat muda, ia telah meraih gelar Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator.

Dikutip dari Telegraph, Kamis (22/1/2009), anak brilian itu lahir di Skopje, Macedonia. Minggu lalu ia memecahkan rekor dunia sebagai orang termuda yang mendapatkan sertifikasi Microsoft tersebut.

Sebelum Marko, rekor dipegang anak perempuan India usia 9 tahun bernama Lavinashree. Sebelum Lavinashree, rekor dipegang Arfa Karim dari Pakistan yang mendapatkannya pada usia 10 tahun.

Marko disebut sudah terbiasa dengan bidang IT karena seringkali membantu masalah teknis di sekolah komputer yang dijalankan oleh kedua orangtuanya. Cita-citanya sekarang adalah menjadi ahli komputer dan menciptakan sebuah sistem operasi baru.

Training SAP WEB

2009-01-28T13:58:00.000-08:00

KomTek , Setelah sukses ditraining Basis pertama SAP Web as AdministratorKTAD100 (ADM100), dan karena demand yang luar biasa, maka training basisfundamental ke dua, Basis KTAD100 kita buka lagi.
kepada Anda yangsebelumnya belajar ABAP dan atau functional, tetep sebenernya Anda lebihtertarik ke Admin maka Training ini sangat cocok buat Anda.
So rekan-rekan yang mempunya minat atau ingin mendalami duniaadministrator, khususnya SAP.
Segera daftarkan diri Anda sebelum kehabisanseperti angkatan pertama.
Berikut sedikit gambaran dari training SAP Web as Administrator KTAD100Objective :
Implementation of basic administrative tasks in a production environmentAudience :
SAP system administrators, technology consultants, employeesresponsible for IT, and employees involved in SAP system administrationContent :
- Starting and stopping an SAP system
- System configuration options
- Configuration of online documentation
- Configuration of periodic, automated work with a database, for example,scheduling backups
- Transport functions in SAP systems
- Importing support packages and add
-ons
- Scheduling background jobs
- Definition and integration of printers
- Fundamentals of user administration
- Setting up remote connections
- Using system monitors
- Fundamentals of SAP document archiving
- Structured error searches
- Fundamentals of system security

Biasaya training ini sebesar Rp 300.000,-

How to start carrier in SAP

2009-01-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

How to start carrier in SAP

To all Experienced personnel in SAP,I am BE (mech) and having 12 years experience in Production and PPC.Recently I completed cource in SAP-PP module from M/s Growel.
I ameager to start my carrier in SAP but all the requiremnts calls for"aleast 1 life cycle" experience.
I have worked on MRP module in my present organization and carries lotof experience of implemeting "eficient systems".
I was also a teammember for the "process re-engineering" project.Now, after knowing all this background, can anybody suggest me1) Can companies like Wipro,TTIL,Satyam etc.
considers this experienceand offer atleast interview call?2) Shall I join any small/medium scale company who is in SAPimplementation?
Can somebody suggest names of such company?
Your guidance will help be to guide my carrier in SAP

Thanking you in advance
AAK

tentang IE7

2009-01-28T13:47:00.000-08:00

Tentang IE7.

Komentar2:

Kalo menurut saya, windows xp harus melalui pengecekan oleh serverMicrosoft apakah dianggap genuine ato invalid.
Kalo invalid maka gak akanbisa instal update windows yang terbaru.
Tapi kalo ama server dianggapgenuine maka update apa aja akan bisa di install di windows tersebut.
Windows yang ada sekarang ini kebanyakan dari satu sumber.
Solusinya klo modianggap genuine, cari aja serial number yang terbaru yg lolos dari testgenuine lalu pake Keyfinder dang anti sn lama dengan yang baru trus cek pake WGA Tools. (Archi)

Saya sendiri juga sudah sangat sering menginstal IE7 dan jg WMP11 di Win xpb*j*kan. Pada saat kita instal, aplikasi tsb sllu berusaha mengecek windowskita..Dan yg saya herankan, (sy srg mginstal/format ulang laptop tmn2 kampus)kadang2 ada yg brhasil, tp kadang2 ada jg yg gagal (ga bs krn trdetectketidak aslianya).. Padahal setiap laptop tmn2 yg sy Instalkan mggunakan CDwin xp yg sama.Sampe skrg sy jg krg tau apa sebabnya, benar2 aneh.*) Menurut saya, IE7 itu lemot, kebanyakan security.. Sy lebih mengandalkanMonzila, si Rubah Api. Sy jg sudah mencoba Google Chrom, safari, dan Opera.tp tetap Om Rubah api itu the best (menurut pengalaman saya). (David)

kalo nggak salah bukannya nggak bisa tapi untuk install ie 7 harus confirmke website mikocok untuk memastikan windows anda asli (need internetconncetion). Lalu baru ie 7 mau diinstall. Ini pengalaman saya krn sayadapat cd update ie 7 dari mikocok .Tapi ie 7 juga nggak terlalu bagus banget(lambat) terlalu banyak security kaleeee. (Mr.A)

Wehehehe..
nyengir saya baca IE7 hanya bisa diinstall di XP Ori, lha wongsejak pertama kali M$ ngeluarin update IE6 jadi IE7 saya sudah install di XP(ori maupun bajakan), Win2000, W2K3 tanpa masalah sama sekali, ini pakeinstaller ori lho bukan crack-an,
karena secara aplikasi installer IE tidakakan bisa mengenali apakah Windows anda aseli atau bajakan, nih namainstaller IE untuk XP dan update-nya silahkan di cari di MSDN.
Microsoft. com,
- IE7-WindowsXP
- x86-enu.exe (Installer)
- KB938127-v2- x86-ENU.exe (security update)
- KB956390-x86- ENU.exe (security update)
Untuk masalah Mas Yudha, dijelaskan error-nya apa biar rekan-rekan bisamemberikan kemungkinan masalah yang Mas hadapi tanpa harus jadi peramal :)Satu-satunya aplikasi yang sulit diinstall karena memeriksa genuine Windowsadalah Media Player 11 tapi ternyata cuma butuh satu trik supaya MP11 inibisa diinstall. (HTH)

Syarat install SAP NW7.0

2009-01-28T13:42:00.000-08:00

Apa persysratan minimum (hardware & Software) untuk> bisa install SAP NW7.0?

Jawab:

> Prerequisites Install NW7 Windows version sbb:
>> System Requirements>
* Operating System: Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2) or
> Windows Server 2003>
* NTFS-File systems>
* Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher or Firefox 1.0 or higher>
* At least 1 GB RAM>
* Intel Pentium III/1.1 GHz or higher (or compatible)>
* 22 GB hard disk space temporary during installation - 10 GB permanent>
* High-resolution monitor (1024x768 or higher, 256 colors)>
* Make sure that no other SAP system is installed on your computer>
* The file <%WINDIR%>\system32 \drivers\ etc\services must not include> an entry for the ports 3201, 3601 and 8000. A possible entry can be> excluded by using the hash symbol (#).>
* If no DHCP server is available on your network (which dynamically> determines the IP address) or your computer is not connected to any> network, you need to install the virtual interface adapter MS Loopback> Adapter. See installing the MS Loopback Adapter.

Ada yang pernah diundang interview oleh PT Maxgain?

2009-01-28T13:35:00.000-08:00

Ada yang pernah diundang interview oleh PT Maxgain?

- Sekedar info, modus perekrutan mereka berawal salah satunya dari arsip lamaran.arsip2 ini mereka beli dari kantor pos, dengan sasaran yang alamat po.box orelse.. (ramos)

- Saya pernah mengikuti interview dan training hanya ikut 1/2 hari padahari pertama (boring banget), walaupun saya merasa tidak pernah applyjob kesana.
Beberapa bulan kemudian, selama hampir setahun saya lebih dari 4xmendapatkan telepon lagi oleh PT.MG untuk interview oleh orang-orangyang berbeda, padahal saya tetap tidak merasa apply.
Kemudian sedikit analisa dari beberapa job yang saya apply dariinternet, asumsi saya sampai saat ini adalah PT. MG menggunakan namaPT lain untuk menjaring calon karyawannya, karena biasanya telepon itudatang sehari setelah saya apply job di internet. <irwantonia@gmail.com>

- setahu saya maxgain itu trading company yang digedung IDX, saya pernahditelp untuk interview katanya dari manager HRDnya...
namanya Pak Raka, sayajuga lupa kalo pernah apply ke perusahaan tsb, yang jelas mereka tidak maumenyebutkan nama perusahaan...
biasanya mereka hanya menyebutkan dari gedungIDXjakarta.
Mereka (alasan) mencari pegawai untuk ditraining sebagai marketing atautrader tapi yang terjadi mereka nyuruh kita, keluarga, teman dll tuk investasi.
banyak investor atau bahkan karyawan sendiri yang ngeluh karena investasimereka gagal & uang puluhan bahkan ratusan juta hilanh gitu aja. Dulu disudirman ada graha finesa berjangka, perusahaan tsb sama denganmax gain, bahkan banyak yang curiga kalau kedua perusahaan tsb sama bahkanpegawainya pun sama.
Graha finesa berjangka tsb kemudian ditutup pemerintah dengan alasanpenipuan, berita bahkan santer di media.
itu saja mungkin info dari saya. <Akhdy_badari@yahoo.com>

- Adik saya pernah mengalaminya.
Dia terima telepon yang ngakunya dari perusahaan MG International untuk posisi Finance Manager.
Yang nelpon ngakunya dari bagian HRD, dan minta adik saya langsung datang dengan tanggal dan jam yang ditentukan dan bawa CV ketemu dengan HRD Manager.
Sewaktu datang dengan tgl dan jam yang ditentukan adik saya bilang mau ketemu HRD Manager, tapi kata mereka tidak ada di tempat, lalu diminta ketemu Business Manager, adik saya curiga karena tidak ada hubungannya Business Manager meng-interview Finance Manager, kalau Finance Controller atau level Director bolehlah...
Waktu 'interview' dengan Business Manager tidak ada hubungannya dengan job description posisi Finance Manager.
Pertanyaan manager tersebut lebih kepada berapa banyak orang yang dikenal, dan apakah bisa mendaptkan banyak investor.
Adik saya langsung ambil kesimpulan perusahaan ini memang nepu!!
Sudah habis energi, buang2 waktu dan uang...
akhirnya adik saya langsung minta diakhiri interview.
So, teman2 jangan sampai tertipu dengan gaya perekrutan mereka.
Mereka selalu merekrut posisi2 yang bergengsi tetapi dengan permintaan kriteria yang tidak nyambung.
Sudah banyak yang tertipu, bukan hanya tertipu dalam perekrutan tetapi tertipu habis duit di bisnis mereka. (janner)

Software Developer Solution - XBasicPro

2009-01-28T13:32:00.000-08:00

saya mahasiswa semester 7 jurusan Informatika di UBAYA.yang hendak mengambil Tugas akhir namun masih binggung tentang apa...mungkin kawan-kawan ada masukan untuk saya. saya lebih berminat kepadawebsite. namun saya juga sedang belajar mengenai linux (masih newbybanget tapi...).mohon bantuannya.. terimakasih sebelumnya

"Software Developer Solution - XBasicPro"

job vacancy lg

2009-01-28T13:26:00.000-08:00

Siapa tahu bermanfaat buat kenalan, saudara, teman, dsb.

Harian Bisnis dan Investasi Kontan membuka kesempatan bergabung untuk Anda yang dinamis dan kreatif sebagai :
Webmaster
* Pria / Wanita
* D3/S1 Teknik Informatika/ Ilmu komputer
* Menguasai Framework CodeIgniter
* Memahami konsep OOP
* Menguasai HTML, PHP , CSS dan Mysql
* Bersedia bekerja Shift

Kirimkan lamaran Anda
ke:HRD Harian KontanGd.
Kontan, Jl. Kebayoran Lama No.1119 Jakarta
atau email ke: hrd@kontan.co. id

Virtualization dan dua operating system

2009-01-28T13:23:00.000-08:00

Ms virtual di install dii home tapi procesornya virtual lannya virtual.
caranya supaya pakek fisiknya gimana?
mau konek ke pc lain tidak bisa. Gimana caranya??

Jawab:

Untuk MS Virtual PC 2007 SP1 (versi terbaru-nya) , memang ditulis diwebsite-nya MS tidak bisa untuk Win Vista Home. Tapi, saya pernah cobainstal, gak ada masalah. Win XP bisa running di dalam-nya, tanpa adamasalah. Memang saat awal instalasi Virtual PC, akan ada warning,kalau OS host-nya (dalam hal ini Win Vista Home) tidak di-support olehMS. Abaikan saja "peringatan" itu, dan lanjutkan instalasi sepertibiasa.

PT Maxgain

2009-01-28T13:18:00.000-08:00

Ada yang pernah diundang interview oleh PT Maxgain?

Komentar:

Jangan coba2 sama perush yang satu ini...
dulu namanya FIKASA INTERNATIONAL FUTURE ganti nama jadi MAXGAIN sekitar Maret 2005

gw tahu dari pengalaman pribadihari 1-2 di traininghari ke3 diminta list calon investor yg kita kenalselanjutnya disuruh cari investorsetelah dapet, teken kontrak.

Trus kita disuruh njalanin (jadi broker), padahal pengetahuan minim banget..
hasilnya...

dijamin bangkrut dalam waktu ga ada sebulan..

Ada temen yang bisa bertahan sampe 3 bulan (pinter ni anak ??)habis itu bangkrut.

kebetulan dapat investor yang agak preman...

sampe 6 bulan masih diuber uber diancam ditembak MATI...

ga tau nasib dia sekarang...padahal temen gw tu mantan wartawan Jawa Pos, belum sempet dia ekspose ttg perush ini, dah dikejar kejar preman (kasiyaannn)makanya jangan coba2kalo emang mau jd broker, cari jalan legal aja dehyg jelas statusnya (kualifikasi lolos uji)

News

2009-01-28T13:15:00.000-08:00

Adik saya pernah mengalami,Dia terima telepon yang ngakunya dari perusahaan MG International untuk posisi Finance Manager.
Yang nelpon ngakunya dari bagian HRD, dan minta adik saya langsung datang dengan tanggal dan jam yang ditentukan dan bawa CV ketemu dengan HRD Manager.
Sewaktu datang dengan tgl dan jam yang ditentukan adik saya bilang mau ketemu HRD Manager, tapi kata mereka tidak ada di tempat, lalu diminta ketemu Business Manager, adik saya curiga karena tidak ada hubungannya Business Manager meng-interview Finance Manager, kalau Finance Controller atau level Director bolehlah...
Waktu 'interview' dengan Business Manager tidak ada hubungannya dengan job description posisi Finance Manager.
Pertanyaan manager tersebut lebih kepada berapa banyak orang yang dikenal, dan apakah bisa mendaptkan banyak investor.
Adik saya langsung ambil kesimpulan perusahaan ini memang> nepu!! Sudah habis energi, buang2 waktu dan uang... akhirnya adik saya langsung minta diakhiri interview.
So, teman2 jangan sampai tertipu dengan gaya perekrutan mereka.
Mereka selalu merekrut posisi2 yang bergengsi tetapi dengan permintaan kriteria yang tidak nyambung.
Sudah banyak yang tertipu, bukan hanya tertipu dalam perekrutan tetapi tertipu habis duit di bisnis mereka.

Komentar:

Apa Polisi/aparat penegak hukum tidak bertindak yaa ....terhadap perusahaan-perusaha an yang seperti itu ...atau belum tahu :)

SAP Netweaver 7.0 prerequisition

2009-01-28T13:11:00.000-08:00

SAP Netweaver 7.0 prerequisition

>>>> FYI,
>>>> Prerequisites Install NW7 Windows version sbb:
>>>> System Requirements
>> * Operating System: Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2) or
>> Windows Server 2003
>> * NTFS-File systems
>> * Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher or Firefox 1.0 or higher
>> * At least 1 GB RAM
>> * Intel Pentium III/1.1 GHz or higher (or compatible)
>> * 22 GB hard disk space temporary during installation - 10 GB permanent
>> * High-resolution monitor (1024x768 or higher, 256 colors)
>> * Make sure that no other SAP system is installed on your computer
>> * The file <%WINDIR%>\system32 \drivers\ etc\services must not include
>> an entry for the ports 3201, 3601 and 8000. A possible entry can be
>> excluded by using the hash symbol (#).
>> * If no DHCP server is available on your network (which dynamically
>> determines the IP address) or y

Bedanya mysap dgn sap ides r/3 sap ecc 6

2009-01-28T13:08:00.000-08:00

- Apasih bedanya mysap dengan sap ides r/3 sap ecc 6??

Jawab:

Hari Jum'at di koran Suara Pembaharuan ada komentar yang mungkin bisa dibahas lebih lanjut.
Salah seorang anggota BPH Migas memperingatkan Pertamina untuk tidak terlaluterburu berpindah ke MySAP. dengan alasan sumber daya. Kenapa sumber dayaMySAP adalah system canggih yang banyak di pakai di Bank.

Komentar saya;Sumber daya, sepertinya negara kita gak punya expert di bidang SAP.Perpindahan system tidak ada effek samping. Terus terang tiap migrasi pastiada kendala, maka project manager lah yang harus memastikan bahwa kendalatersebut harus tidak mempengaruhi bisnis process di perusahaan tersebut.Kendala sumber daya juga merupakan tanggung jawab project manager, owner dankonsultan.

SAP bukan hanya untuk BANK. Mungkin beliau harus mengecek di perusahaan lainsebelum berkomentar.

Install Ms Virtual

2009-01-28T13:04:00.000-08:00

- Ms virtual aku install dii home tapi procesornya virtual lannya virtual.
- Caranya supaya pakek fisiknya gimana?
- Mau konek ke pc lain tidak bisa.

Jawab:

Yang dimaksud processor virtual dan LAN virtual iniyang mana ya?
Apakah yang sedang dipergunakan oleh Guest OS saat running di dalam VPC-nya?Kalau ingin konek ke komputer lain, dari dalam Guest OS-nya, minimalya harus ada LAN Card di komputer dimana VPC tersebutdi-instalasi- kan.Kalau untuk dapat menggunakan fisik LAN Card, jadi dedicated LAN Carduntuk Guest OS-nya, sepertinya harus menggunakan software virtualisasiyang khusus untuk server (seperti MS Virtual Server, VMware Server,VMware ESX Server, MS Hyper-V), dan tidak software virtualisasi untukworkstation (seperti MS Virtual PC, VMware Workstation) . Begitu jugauntuk dapat menggunakan dedicated processor bagi Guest OS-nya.

Mengunci Desktop

2009-01-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

- Apakah ada yg tau software pengkunci desktop lain yg tidak memiliki bug mengubah welcome screen?
- Software pengunci desktop laptop ketika laptop sdg mendownload banyak,agar bisa meninggalkan laptop diruangan tanpa takut dibuka2 oleh orang lain

Jawab:

pakek screen saver aja. tinggal password protectednya di centang. waktu dikasih 5 menit. 5 menit tidak disentuh langsung mengunci.

Cara Login ke SAP

2009-01-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

Adakah caranya untuk login ke SAP selain menggunakan SAP GUI, terutama> untuk ECC5 atau ECC6 (misalkan menggunakan Browser), apa saja yg harus di> setting (kl ada tutorialnya boleh juga)?

Jawab:

Nggak perlu di setting lagi sudah otomatis waktu install coba ke URL sbb:http://localhost: 8000/sap/ bc/gui/sap/ its/webgui

SAP IDES & SAP

2009-01-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

bedanya SAP IDES & SAP Netweaver apa ya??> trus klo mo ikut kursus functional / abap bisa pilih salah satu dari yg> diatas??

Jawab:

bedanya masalah modul yg disedikan kl Netweaver defaultsnya hanya ada, BASIS, APABtidak ada modul2 funtional seperti yang ada di IDES,jadi kalo ambil funtional harus ambil yang IDES

Software Manager & Project Manager vacancies

2009-01-28T12:48:00.000-08:00

Software Development Manager (SDM)A Pioneer in medical healthcare software developmentcompany currently requires software development manager with the followingrequirements :

Detail knowledge of software development life cycleand methodologies is a must. Furthermore, knowledge of softwareconfiguration management and product lifecycle management will be adefinite advantage.
Previous hands-on experience in developing client andserver side components for 3-tier client/server or web based application, network/socketprogramming,
Java (Enterprise Edition), BEA Web Logic, JSP, HTML is a must.Knowledgeable in Power Builder.
Proven track record in developing mission critical
-enterprise grade, preferably ERP software application.
Having excellent management skill is must, driven,result oriented but also a good team-player.
Bachelor or master degree from a reputable universitymajoring in Computer Science/Engineering or business.
Mature, age between 30-40 years old with min. 5-10years experience in managing software development projects.

Project Manager (PM)We also urgently seek Project Management (2 vacancies) with the followingrequirements :

Bachelor/masterdegree from a reputable university majoring in Information Technology/ComputerScience/Engineering .
Mature(age; 30-40; Self-starter, self-motivated and result-oriented; goodinterpersonal & communication skill;
able to work independently and atthe same time, be a good team player.
At least 3 years experience in project/softwareimplementation as a Project Manager in the business integration withproven organization and prioritization skill;
strong knowledge in projectmanagement methodology.
Hands on experience in ERP implementation atexternal clients companies.

Please sendyour CV to hrd@bvk.co.id.
Strict confidentiality is maintained.

job vacancy

2009-01-28T12:39:00.000-08:00

We are considered as one of Telecommunication Solution ProviderCompany. We would like to invite strong and talented individu to bepart of our successful team as :

2. Technical Engineer
- Male, Age min 27 Years
- Minimum 3 years of experience in the similar position
- Having knowledge of software
- hardware installation and itstroubleshooting, networking (Linux, WindowsNT,LAN)
- S-1 graduate majoring in Management Information/ Information Technology - Having experiences to lead technical teams
- Knowledge in Cisco networking and products will be an advantage
- To be placed in Balikpapan

Send your CV by email recruitment@ kti-telco. com
toHRD Dept HeadKTI-Telcowww.kti-telco. com

History, the History of Computers, and the History of Computers in Education

2008-07-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

History, the History of Computers, and the History of Computers in Education1780 - Early public schools adopt the teacher/manager model with the teacher as the primary manger of instruction and assessment in a single classroom.1946 - First vacuum tube-based computers developed; universities help in computer development effort; technology used in war effort.1951 - Little technology used in schools, primarily TV; baby boom begins with resulting increases in class size; first-generation Univac computer delivered to the US census bureau.1954 - General Electric is the first business to order a computer. Early rock and roll music, based on the rhythm and blues tradition, gains a little in popularity.1955 - IBM's first commercial computer is sold; the cold war results in use of technology in aircraft design and in weapons control. Russia developing the technology for the first spacecraft.1956 - Eisenhower elected president; Elvis Presley records "Hound Dog"; school overcrowding growing; school dropout rate rapidly declining toward zero; schools still based on the teacher/manager model in individual teacher-controlled classrooms; the cold war continues with technology playing an important role and is intensified when Russia sends up their Sputnik space vehicle to demonstrate their lead in technology.1958 - As cold war continues, National Defense Education Act brings some new money and some new technology into schools, but primarily in vocational education. Mainframe host computers are not widely accepted in schools that are still using the si ngle classroom, teacher/manager method of delivering information to students.1959 - Transistor-based computers in use; the cold war continues with public support for the development of technology needed for space exploration.1960 - COBOL business-oriented, high-level programming language created; Kennedy elected president with campaign promises to put more money into education; crime rate doubles in one decade; Gary Powers shot down in hi-tech spy airplane; 70,000 invo lved in civil-rights sit-ins.1962 - Airlines begin to use a computerized reservation system. President Kennedy diverts more money into education. The cold war continues and results in a confrontation with Russia as hi-tech spy planes discover missiles in Cuba; George Wallace campaigns for governor of Georgia pledging segregation forever.1963 - Vocational Education Act passes with new money supporting the use of technology in schools; however, the mainframe and minicomputers in use at this time are using batch processing methods that do not fit well with the single teacher-as-manag er-of-learning methods in use in most schools; BASIC, a simple high-level programming language is developed, mostly for use in universities to train programmers; IBM 360 family of computers is developed; most computers still using host methods with punche d cards as the primary input device; line printers are still the primary output device; the cold war and the competitive space exploration effort continues with President Kennedy's call for the science to be developed that could put a man on the moon.1964 - Johnson elected president; the Beatles rapidly rise to stardom; Bob Dylan writes songs that give voice to the protest movement; the Gulf of Tonkin incident results in the first confrontation between the US and the government of North Vietnam ; the civil rights movement grows including a one-day civil-right protest absence of 464,000 students in New York; China explodes a test Atomic bomb.1965 - Elementary and Secondary Education Act brings new money into schools for technology. mainframes and minicomputers are put into place in some schools, but most are used for administration or for school counseling (databases for information a bout and for students); the cold war continues as President Johnson expands the war, with 125,000 American troops in Vietnam; ; hi-tech weapons are used in bombings of North Vietnam; 50,000 Americans killed in traffic accidents.1967 - High-level programming languages such as Fortran are being taught are in universities. School vocational training programs begin to include computer maintenance; Stokely Carmichael declares a need for SNCC to move from civil rights to black power; Mohammed Ali refuses army induction for religious reasons bringing national attention to both the black power movement and the anti-Vietnam movement; student strikes on many campuses related to protest over both civil rights and the policy in Viet nam; acid rock and protest rock grow in popularity; centers of dissidence like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco develop; anti-war protests grow, especially on college campuses; 380,000 US troops in Vietnam.1968 - Nixon elected president; riots in many cities break out over civil rights issues; the cold war continues with a rapid expansion of the war in Vietnam 9,419 dead in Vietnam; some programs designed to bring money for technology into schools ar e canceled; host computers are not widely adopted in schools because they are seen as appropriate for use with the teacher/manager model of learning (they don't fit into the single classroom, but instead are accessed remotely by sending batches of data).<> 1969 - Neil Armstrong arrives on the moon; the Woodstock rock concert in upstate New York draws hundreds of thousands; the cold war and the war in Vietnam continues; many students, religious leaders, civil rights leaders, and ordinary citizens begi n to speak out against the war in Vietnam. 1970 - Pascal created; the US bombs Cambodia; Kent State antiwar students killed by Army reserve troops; mainframes and minicomputers in use in some schools, but very little use in the delivery of instruction.1971 - Intel's first microprocessor developed; the first microcomputers (PCs) are developed; mainframes and minicomputers are in wide use in business; a few software companies begin to develop mainframe and minicomputer- based instructional program s; 18-year old given the vote. 1972 - Five men working for President Nixon's re-election caught in the Democratic party's headquarters in the Watergate hotel complex; Nixon re-elected president and orders the bombing of North Vietnam.1974 - President Nixon resigns and is given a full pardon by his successor, President Ford; a gasoline embargo creates lines at gas stations; Patty Hurst kidnapped; Hank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth's lifetime home run record; Apple I computer is sold in kit form.1975 - Some Apple 1 PCs are donated to schools; some schools have adopted mainframes and minicomputers and refuse to consider PCs; four Nixon administration official convicted in Watergate cover up; The war in Vietnam ends and the government of Nor th Vietnam invades and takes over South Vietnam.1976 - Carter elected president; the cold war continues; Iraq holds hostages, rampant inflation; the Apple I computer gains popularity in small business.1979 - 15 Million PCs estimated to be in use worldwide; PC-based spreadsheets developed, mainframes and minicomputers still in wide use.1980 - Reagon elected President, the cold war continues with Reagon declaring Russia to be the "evil empire"; the TI 99 which uses a television screen as the monitor is the world's most popular PC.1981 - IBM is the first mainframe manufacturer to develop a PC; drill and practice CAI gains acceptance in schools; the cold war continues. The first educational drill and practice programs are developed for personal computers.1983 - IBM PC clones proliferate; Sperry Corporation is the second mainframe manufacturer to develop a PC (actually developed by Mitsubishi in Japan); the Apple II computer finds widespread acceptance in education because PCs better fit the teacher /manager model of instructional delivery (PCs can be used to "support" the ongoing teaching in the single classroom). Simple simulation programs are developed for personal computers.1984 - Reagon re-elected; 31 states use 13,000 PCs for career guidance, but there are still relatively few computers in classrooms; the Apple Macintosh computer is developed; computer-based tutorials and learning games are developed by commercial software manufacturers. 1986 - 25 % of high schools use PCs for college and career guidance, K-8 schools buying mostly Apple II and Macintosh computers, high schools buying mostly DOS-based clones.1988 - Bush elected President; 60 % of all workers in the US use computers, laptops are developed; Gorbachoff proposes an end to the cold war;.1990 - Multimedia PCs are developed; schools are using videodiscs; object-oriented multimedia authoring tools are in wide use; Simulations, educational databases and other types of CAI programs are being delivered on CD-ROM disks, many with animati on and sound; the US crime increases dramatically; the cold war ends.1992 - Clinton elected President; for the first time, police and prison budgets begin to surpass education budgets; schools are using Gopher servers to provide students with on-line information.1994 - Digital video, virtual reality, and 3-D systems capture the attention of many, but fewer multimedia PCs than basic business PCs are sold; object-oriented authoring systems such as HyperCard, Hyperstudio, and Authorware grow in popularity in schools; most US classrooms now have at least one PC available for instructional delivery, but not all teachers have access to a computer for instructional preparation.1995 - The Internet and the world wide web began to catch on as businesses, schools, and individuals create web pages; most CAI is delivered on CD-ROM disks and is growing in popularity.1996 - The Internet is widely discussed as businesses begin to provide services and advertising using web pages. New graphics and multimedia tools are developed for the delivery of information and instruction using the Internet; many schools are rewiring for Internet access; a few schools install web servers and provide faculty with a way to create instructional web pages.1997-2007 - The growth of the internet expands far faster than most predicted. It soon becomes the world's largest database of information, graphics, and streaming video making it an invaluable resource for educators; but marketing-oriented web pages, computer viruses hidden within downloadable programs and/or graphics, and spam (widely disseminated email-based sales pitches) threaten it's usefullness. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo constantly develop new ways to find information within the ever-growing number of web pages. Web sites that offer individuals a place to put personal information become popular, as does internet-based publishing and discussion forums. Voice recognition slowly enters the computing mainstream, but it's development is slowed by an unacceptable frequency of errors. Some computers incorporate TV input, but it is not as common as many predicted. Educational software becomes more useful and interesting to students as graphics and video are incorporated. Larger computer storage capacity and the growing prevalence of CD-ROM and DVD drives in personal computers make it easier for educators to store large graphic and video and sound files for educational applications. 2008 and beyond ???

History of Computing Information

2008-07-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

History of Computing Information

Information about the history of computing, assembled by Mike Muuss for your information and edification. Documents from the home of the ENIAC -- The U. S. Army Research Lab .

Online Documents
"ENIAC: The Army-Sponsored Revolution" , by William T. Moye.
An executive summary of the history of computing. A complete and concise presentation of the origins of the BRL and the ENIAC, with names, places, and dates. (4 pages)
"My Life with the ENIAC - a Worm's Eye View", as lived by Harry Reed. Plus "Firing Table Calculations on the ENIAC".
The History of Computing at BRL , by Mike Muuss.
A chronicle of processors, software, and networking at the U. S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, prior to the installation of the ENIAC through 1992. (18 pages)
Photographs of Historic Computers
The ENIAC Story , by Martin H. Weik.
The world's first production electronic digital computer was developed by Army Ordnance to compute World War II ballistic firing tables. This is the story of that computer. (6 pages)
Electronic Computers Within the Ordnance Corps , by Karl Kempf.
This historical monograph covers the pioneer efforts and subsequent contributions of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in the field of automatic electronic computing systems during the period 1942 through 1961, including pre-electronic computing devices, ENIAC, EDVAC, ORDVAC, and BRLESC. It also discusses the use of computers for solving gunnery problems, and provides a "family tree" of early computers. (140 pages in 7 chapters and 9 appendices)
A Report on the ENIAC , by Adele Goldstine, 1946.
The original technical description of the ENIAC, including diagrams and several (pre-von Neumann) ENIAC "programs".
"A Logical Coding System Applied to the ENIAC" , by R. F. Clippinger. Ballistic Research Laboratories Report No. 673.
The document describing how the ENIAC was made programmable. "In the Spring of 1947, J. von Neumann suggested to the author that it would be possible to run the ENIAC in a way very different from the way contemplated when it was designed; a way which had very important advantages to be discussed below." "It is hoped by the author that this report will make the task of coding problems so clear and straightforward that physicists, aerodynamicists, applied mathematicians, etc. with no prior experience with computing machines can code their own problems...." (40 pages)
"Computers at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School, 1943-1946" , by Herman H. Goldstine
A description of the people, missions, and personalities that came together in the ENIAC project. Told from the point of view of then-Lieutenant Goldstine who, with the help of his superior officer, sponsored a development program at the Moore School looking toward the production of an electronic digital computer for the BRL. ENIAC was the result. (6 pages)
Important ENIAC Dates (1 page)
"Colonel Paul Gillon -- Grandfather of ENIAC" , by Paul H. Deitz. (2 pages)
Dr. John von Neumann at the dedication of the NORD Hear von Neumann speaking at the dedication of the Navy's NORD computer. December 2, 1954. Digitized from a cassette tape provided by Dr. Goldstine.
BRL's Scientific Advisory Committee in 1940 contained such luminaries as Prof. von Neumann, Prof. von Karman, Prof Rabi, COL Zornig, CAPT Simon, Lt. Gillon, Mr. Kent; they were joined later by Hubble and others. (1 photo, 3 scanned letters, 2 pages of text).
The Technology Challenge: How Can America Spark Private Innovation? by Vice President Gore. ENIAC Birthday speech delivered at University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, February 14, 1996.
Printed References of Interest
The Computer, from Pascal to von Neumann by Herman H. Goldstine. In 1942, Lt. Herman H. Goldstine, a former mathematics professor, was stationed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania where he assisted in the creation of the ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer.
The Purpose of This Archive
To help the public remember that it was the U. S. Army which initiated the computer revolution. Few inventions have had as big an impact on our civilization as the computer, and all modern computers are descended from ENIAC, EDVAC, ORDVAC, and BRLESC -- all of which were conceived of and built to address pressing Army needs.
To give credit to the highly skilled and dedicated military and civilian scientists and other workers through whose efforts, together with their counterparts in the private sector, met and solved a great national defense challenge while at the same time giving birth to a technology which would change the world.
To ensure that detailed information about and photographs of these early machines not vanish with the passage of time. Because of the ENIAC's vital role in the design of the hydrogen bomb and in gunnery calculations, much of the design information was originally classified, and few copies of the (now de-classified) reports still exist.
When the collection of documents has grown further, a CD-ROM release of this information is planned. Target date is summer of 1998.

"Where a computer like the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons."
Popular Mechanics, March 1949
U.S. Postal Service Celebration -- First Day of Issue: 50 Years of Computer Technology -- 8 October 1996
(Medium GIF 186k), (Large JPEG 769k)

At 0930 hours on Tuesday 8-October, at Aberdeen Proving Ground Maryland (home of the ENIAC) the U.S. Postal Service issued a new stamp commemorating the 50th birthday of ENIAC and the 50 years of Computer Technology that have followed.

This was the first US Stamp dedication to be broadcast live over the InterNet's MBONE. Stamp collectors in 6 countries were able to watch and listen in real time.

Army ENIAC Celebration -- 13&14 November 1996
Celebrating 50 Years of Army Computing
Agenda

On November 13 and 14 at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, the U. S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and the Ordnance Center and School (OC&S) sponsored a two-day anniversary celebration of 50 years of Army computing. The program included presentations by Herman Goldstine and Harry Huskey and reminiscences by other people involved, as well as recognition of other "pioneers." On the 14th, the Army and the Department of Defense (DoD) dedicated the ARL High-Performance Computing Major Shared-Resource Center (MSRC), part of the DoD High Performance Computing modernization (HPCM) program.

ENIAC, completed in the fall of 1945 and publicly unveiled in February 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first operational, general-purpose, electronic digital computer. Pursued by the Army as a means to speed up calculations required to produce firing tables, ENIAC was first used to solve an important problem for the Manhattan Project. In construction and use, ENIAC provided a platform for testing major component concepts, and its success stimulated the development of other machines, leading to the buildup of the modern computer industry and the pervasive presence of computers in everyday life.

The ENIAC team developed plans for the next generation machine even before completing ENIAC. In fact, engineers and scientists at the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) helped develop a series of machines -- the EDVAC, ORDVAC, BRLESC I, and BRLESC II. BRL personnel continued to experiment with computer hardware, software, and operations, for example, working with ARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to expand the ARPANET, now the InterNet. In the late 1980s, the lab dedicated two of the Army's first supercomputers, a procurement managed by a man who first worked on ENIAC.

ARL, which includes elements of the former BRL, has been designated an MSRC, one of four such centers in the DoD's HPCM program. These tools will greatly enhance already extensive research capabilities in such areas as simulation, virtual reality, and scientific visualization.

Links to Other Web Sites
ENIAC 50th Anniversary Celebration (UPenn)
The John Vincent Atanasoff Archive (Iowa State University)
The History of Computing, notes from "The Machine That Changed The World" (Va. Tech)
John von Neumann
Smithsonian Computer History
A Comparison Between Intel Paragon and ENIAC
Looking Back At ENIAC: Computers Hit Half-Century Mark, by Neeraja Sankaran, The Scientist V9#16, 1995.
First Generation Electronic Computers (1937-1953) From An Overview Of Computational Science
Atanasoff Obituary
The Development of the Computer (Princeton)
Hobbes' Internet Timeline
The Colossus Rebuild Project A British WWII-era vacuum-tube programmable logic calculator.
Konrad Zuse: a guided tour of his computers. The Z3 was build with relays and finished in 1941. While never used in production, it was the world's first program controlled computer, pre-dating ENIAC by two years.
The History of Computers
American University Computing History Museum
Goldstine Obituary

Mind Machine Museum

2008-07-17T18:41:00.000-07:00

a virtual museum and gallery of
vintage computers, vintage calculators, and related artifacts

First in collection......the original control console
for the first supercomputer, the CDC 6600....date: 1964
manufacturer: Control Data Corporation....serial number: 0002
designer: Seymour Cray....original cost of computer: $6 million

Calculators, computers, and video games are all high-tech tools of the mind. Teachers may find students fascinated by early examples and willing to engage in high-tech archaeological "digs" in their local community. These artifacts, combined with their disks and cartridges, may be disassembled and analyzed, restored and displayed or operated as functioning units--an archaeological, technology challenge that gives students a historical perspective about the computer revolution, both its software and hardware.
Traditional antiques are at least 100 years old, but given the rapid, unprecedented changes in microcomputers, game machines, and calculators, any such product that is 10 or more years old might be considered antique. This website is an attempt to create a web museum of many of these amazing artifacts of the twentieth century that I have owned. The following list provides links to illustrations to each model, original prices (when known), and basic specifications.

The Morrow Z80

2008-07-17T18:38:00.000-07:00

MORROW'S MICRO STUFF

The largest incubator of microcomputer people was the Homebrew Computer Club, an organization that grew out of Bob Albrecht's People's Computer Company and Community Computer Center run by Fred Moore in Menlo Park , California . He had the idea that it would be a good idea for computer enthusiasts to get together to exchange news and ideas, and so, using the mail lists of PCC, he put out a call for such a meeting. The first was held in March of 1975, in a garage belonging to Gordon French. This evolved into the Homebrew Computer Club, which grew rapidly until several hundred people were attending meetings, and even spawned a San Francisco branch which actually met in Berkeley .

George Morrow, a graduate student in mathematics, became interested in microcomputers and with two friends, Chuck Grant and Mark Greenberg, formed a sort of company to make boards for the Altair. However, Morrow had his own ideas of what he wanted to do, and the group split. Morrow went on his own way, and Grant and Goldberg formed Kentucky Fried Computers, which became North Star Computers.

The first project George Morrow built was a combination 8080 CPU board and front panel board for either the Altair or Imsai. This board had a keypad on it, and it was used for programming the computer in place of the switches and lights used by both the Altair and the Imsai. To me this seemed like a good idea. The hardest thing to build, in both machines, was the front panel board. Morrow's board eliminated this problem. I sent for one and took it home to build. Upon completion, I found that the board would not work, so I sent it back to Morrow and forgot it for a while. One day the board came home with a note from George.

"Stan," he wrote. "Whoever built this board, never let him solder anything, ever! This is the worst soldering job I have ever seen."

When I told him I was the solder butcher, he laughed and said he meant it.

For years after, George teased me about my soldering. He never let me forget it.

The CPU board was a good idea but was not a success because George had it programming in octal notation while the rest of the 8080 world was using Hex notation. Besides, the hobbyists liked to program by flipping switches.

George's next project was the design of a 16-bit computer using the PACE chip made by National Semiconductor. With his friends, Goldberg and Grant, they would design the machine, and Bill Godbout would market it.

Although Godbout advertised the machine, it was never completed, and the partners split. George next designed a low-cost 4K memory board which was made and sold by Bill Goudbout. Priced at the low price of $189, the board sold very well, and for the first time George Morrow was earning real money from his designs. After a while, George left Godbout's distribution and started his own company, called Morrow's Micro Stuff, to sell his boards. It was a time of rapid expansion in the fledging microcomputer industry. The demand for cheap memory boards was almost impossible to fill. Most of the people buying computer kits did not realize that they would need much larger amounts of memory until after they had built the computer. Then they looked for the most inexpensive way to fill this need. Small companies like Morrows Micro Stuff moved in and sold most of the memory boards.

In 1977, George and Howard Fulmer joined forces to produce a complete computer. This was called the Equinox-100, and although it was well built and came in a very attractive cabinet, it was an 8080 machine at a time that the world was turning to the Z-80 processor. The company was short lived, and George turned to the production of floppy disk systems.

Morrow's new products, called "Thinker Toys" or "Discus," were low-cost 8-inch floppy disk sub-systems, consisting of a controller card, cables, and the disk drive, mounted in a cabinet with a power supply. The system came with CP/M and CBASIC at no extra cost, and for the first time, a S-100 computer owner could be running on a disk for under $1,000. The Morrow systems were a great success.

George again turned to the manufacture of complete computer systems with a line of complete computer systems sold as a package with a video terminal. His company, Morrow's Micro Decisions, made the Z-80 computer with 64K of RAM and either one or two floppy disks. The video terminal was made by a terminal manufacturer. The system was sold with CP/M, two versions of BASIC, and an applications package including WordStar, a spreadsheet, and a financial analysis package. The system also included a shell program, which made it easy to use CP/M. The entire package sold for $1,500 to $2,300, depending how many drives were included.

The Micro Decision system proved to be quite popular for a short time. The IBM PC was turning people toward 16-bit MS-DOS machines.

George Morrow was not one to give up easily. He designed a MS-DOS portable computer called The Pivot. This was different from the bulky "luggables" like the Compaq and IBM Portable that were appearing at that time. The Pivot looked like a small portable radio with a keyboard that folded into the package.

At this time, the Internal Revenue Service had a requirement for thousands of portable computers, and George Morrow's Pivot was the closest to their specifications. The Zenith Corporation was after this contract, and to get it they licensed George Morrow's design for the Pivot. Zenith gave George a choice of how they would pay for the license. Either Morrow could get a lump sum payment for a non-exclusive license, or an exclusive license with a smaller payment and a royalty on every unit sold. George took the larger lump sum payment because he wanted to bid on the IRS contract himself.

Zenith won the contract and made so many portables they were able to undersell Morrow in all markets. Shortly after this, Morrow Micro Decisions closed its doors.

The Heath/Zeinth Z 80

2008-07-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Heath the King of Kits

For many years, the Heath Company, of Benton Harbor , Michigan , sold kits for radio and audio test equipment and all kinds of electronic devices. Their expertise in this field was completely unchallenged. The thousands of catalogs they sent out brought electronics into every remote part of the United States . Heathkit designs were made simple and broken down into small steps so that failure was almost impossible as long as the builder followed the instruction book step-by-step to completion. They also had some retail stores in major markets where builders could get help with their projects. However, when the microcomputer revolution started in 1975, Heath was very slow to join in. They were selling microprocessor training kits when the new computer companies were selling computers.

The computer companies did not bother to write detailed instruction books and test them for accuracy. Their instructions would read, "Solder in all the resistors after checking the schematic for the correct values. Next, solder in all the capacitors." or "Be careful not to make solder bridges."

The first time I assembled an Imsai kit, I used the photograph in the advertisement to find out how the chassis went together. They never gave us a mechanical drawing of the assembly with the first ten kits I sold.

I remember listening to one of my salesman asking the customer, "You sure you know how to solder this? It sure isn't a Heathkit!"

When Heath finally came up with kits worthy to be called Heathkit, they were strange machines compared with the industry standards. They did not use any of the standard programs and were a breed unto themselves.

The H8 was the first 8080 computer made by Heath. It had a sloping front panel mounting a 9-digit keypad which could be used to program it in machine language. However, it used octal notation rather than the Hex notation which was used on the S-100 machines. It was a bus machine with a unique 50-pin bus. Expansion cards and peripherals were available for the machine, including the memory and speech cards, the H7 floppy disk assembly, and the H10 paper tape reader/punch. The H8 needed at least 16K of memory for nominal operation and 48K if a floppy disk was to be used. The maximum memory capacity was 64K. The H8 had no internal video but was designed to be used with a terminal such as the H9 Video Terminal which had a 12" CRT.

Heath started with their own operating system, HDOS for disk operation, but added CP/M capability to give their users the ability to use all the software coming on the market for what was becoming the industry standard.

The basic H8 kit sold for only $350, but there was almost nothing you could do with the basic kit. You had to add memory boards and I/O boards and a terminal and disk system to really use the H8.

The Heath Company made a deal with Digital Equipment Corporation to incorporate the DEC LSI-11 CPU into a machine called the H11 which can be thought of as the first 16-bit micro. The resulting computer was supposed to be able to run PDP-11 software, but it was extremely limited because of its puny memory. The H11 was a disappointing effort for the customers, who thought they were getting a cheap DEC PDP-11.

The Heath Company started to fall on bad times at the start of the 1980s. The chip revolution had changed the entire electronics business, and people no longer built electronic kits because entire portions of the equipment were built into a single chip. The flood of imports had lowered the prices of radio, audio, video, and test equipment to levels where the kits cost more than completed units. However, Heath still had its value as a maker of educational and training equipment and texts. The company was bought out by Zenith Radio Corporation, who brought out completely new lines of computers.

The Heath/Zenith H-89 was the first of these machines and by far the most popular of the brand. It was sold as the Z-89 in its factory-built version, or H-89 as a Heathkit. The Z/H-89 was a desktop-integrated computer with a full keyboard and a 12" non-glare CRT. Next to the CRT was a single 5 1/4" floppy disk drive. The double-density version of the disk controller could store 160K, and there was also a optional external floppy disk and a hard disk option which could store 11 Mbytes. The standard unit came with 48K of RAM, and it could be expanded to 64K. An unusual feature of the H-89 was the fact that it used two Z-80 CPU chips. One ran the computer while the other ran the video terminal functions.

The H/Z-89 was able to run the standard CP/M operating system and all the software available under that system. It quickly achieved a reputation as a solid workhorse of a computer, and had a large and loyal user community.

The H-89 kit was either $1,895 for a white CRT, or $1,995 for a green CRT. Assembled units were $2,895 for either a built-in disk drive, or a double-density controller for a double-density drive and a hard disk. The factory-built version was $3895.

The engineers at Zenith had an answer to the IBM PC, which was quickly obsoleting the Z-80 computers. It was their Z-100 Series which was also sold as a kit under the Heathkit "H" designation. The series consisted of the Z120 which was an all-in-one business computer with a 12" CRT. The Z-110 was a "flat-top" computer designed with high resolution graphics to mount an RGB color monitor.

The Z-100 series had two microprocessors. One was an 8088 designed to run under MS-DOS and the same 16-bit software as the IBM PC. The other CPU was an 8-bit 8085 which could run CP/M and all the thousands of programs available under that system. All the Heath computers had used their own bus system, but the S-100 departed from that and used a standard S-100 bus! Floppy disk storage was 320K per disk, and a 5MByte hard disk was available.

The Z-100 started out like a house-on-fire; it was an excellent computer, and it had the best color graphics of any machine on the market in those days. The problem was in the incompatible MS-DOS software. The special versions for the Z-100 were not kept current and the S-100 Bus made it incompatible with developments in expansion boards by third parties.

The Z-100 was replaced by MS-DOS-compatible machines from Zenith.

Zenith itself was bought out by Bull Group of France, who closed down the Heath

Texas Instruments TI 99-4

2008-07-17T18:34:00.000-07:00

Texas Instruments, the semi-conductor giant, had lagged behind Intel and Motorola in the development of microprocessors, concentrating on the production of memory chips and calculator chips, in which field they were first in the world. Texas Instruments calculator division had engaged in a world-wide price war, in which they had destroyed or crippled the competition for all time. They had brought the price of a "four-banger" calculator from over $100 to under $10 and added refinements while they were doing it.
The Texas Instruments labs had been engaged in R&D to flank the CPU makers by producing a superior microprocessor. The TMS9900 was the result, a 16-bit CPU with advanced features and supported by a family of peripheral chips that provided graphics and fast mathematic processing. The first application of the TMS9900 was in the Texas Instruments line of mini-computers, which were marketed to compete with Digital Equipment's PDP-11 line of computers and Data General's Micro Nova. These were moderately successful, but the field was small and largely dominated by DEC and Data General.
What Texas Instruments was looking for was a large-volume consumer product. Tandy, Radio Shack, and Commodore seemed to be on the crest of a new wave of electronic products called Home Computers, and Texas Instruments was determined to repeat their calculator success in this field with a much superior system. Their philosophy was completely different from that of other manufacturers.
They meant to control the system completely. The design of their Home Computer would include color, and programming would be in a proprietary language that would be loaded into Read-Only-Memory (ROM's). The ROM chips would be mounted in plug-in cartridges which would be sold to the computer owners. Software developers would have to buy the cartridges from Texas Instruments and program them. Texas Instruments would only license specific software developers and they did not envision much competition among them.
The T.I. 99/4, introduced in 1980, was Texas Instruments's contender for the home computer market. It used the 16-bit TMS9900 running in an 8-bit bus for economy. One of the first places it was shown was at the Personal Computer show in Boston . I had closed the Computer Mart and was looking for a new business to go into, so I took the shuttle to Boston to attend the show and see the T.I. 99/4. It was a low silver keyboard with ports for plug-in cartridges and a color monitor. The quality of the graphics and color impressed me, and I felt that this computer system had possibilities. The listed price was $1,200, which I felt was rather high for a product for the home. I was told that the unit also included BASIC and could support a cassette recorder so the owner did not only have to rely on cartridges but could learn to write his own programs. In addition, there would be a cartridge to load the simple integer BASIC in the machine and another containing Advanced BASIC for more extensive programs and additional memory to support it.
When I left the hall to catch my return flight, I met a Texas Instruments salesman who had tried to enroll our store as a dealer for their advanced line of calculators. We shared a cab and sat together on the flight.
I told him of my interest in the T.I. 99/4, and he asked me if I wanted to become a dealer.
"No," I said. "I am out of the retail business, but I am interested in developing software for the machine."
He told me that Texas Instruments had exclusive contracts with large, experienced firms to develop cartridges. They would not just sell the cartridges to anyone. However, I was free to develop BASIC programs which could be loaded from cassettes. All I had to do was apply to Texas Instruments for a license and pay them royalties. They would then give me information regarding the (GPL) Graphics Programming Language and color system. The catch was that there was only 16K of RAM memory in the basic computer, not enough write any meaningful software. It was definitely not an open system.
In the face of competition from Commodore, Radio Shack, and Atari 400 and 800, the TI 99/4 was a huge flop. Texas Instruments pulled it back and started a re-design. They included a new motherboard known as the "Q" (Quality improved) that used a smaller number of chips. The result was the T.I. 99/4A, which was a very improved machine that could be sold at a competitive price. They eliminated the color monitor and included a TV interface. They improved the keyboard and added more memory in the BASIC machine. The new computers were to be sold through department mass market stores and mass market stores for about $450. The new machines started to sell and gained a group of devoted fans. Then a problem with the power supplies caused Texas Instruments to hold all T.I. 99/4As until it was solved. During that time Commodore introduced the VIC-20 for $300 and the C-64 for $595, and launched a big promotion for the C-64. By the time the T.I. 99/4A could resume selling, Commodore had launched a price war when they introduced the VIC-20 for less than $300. Texas Instruments responded by offering a $100 rebate on the T.I. 99/4A for Christmas 1982.
The Commodore had several things that the public liked better than the T.I. 99/4A. First, there was much more software available, and it cost less. Second, it was easy to add Commodore's floppy disk; all you had to do was plug it in. The operating software was built right into the disk drive. To expand a T.I. 99/4A required a large and expensive expansion module plus the drive unit. Texas Instruments had never expected that everyone would want a disk drive.
Atari responded to Texas Instruments'rebate by offering rebates on their Model 400 and 800 computers. Texas Instruments came back and extended their rebates until April, plus giving away free speech synthesizers to customers who bought quantities of software.
By the start of 1983, Commodore started selling C-64's to discount mass merchants for resale at less than $400. They also sold VIC-20's at $150.
Texas Instruments responded by cutting $48 off the 99/4A price. Commodore cut further, and the price of VIC-20 went under $100 if the customer bought some software or other peripherals. Texas Instruments talked about meeting the cut later in the spring.
Commodore's next salvo was a "trade-in" rebate of $100 on any computer or video game the customer brought in, even if it didn't work.
People bought broken Sinclairs for $10 and got a $100 off a C-64, which they could take home for $300. Dealers started giving VIC-20's away if the customer bought peripherals and software.
The coup de grâce took place at the 1983 Spring Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago when Commodore announced that they had cut the dealer price on the C-64 to $200. This would allow discounts to sell the C-64 as low as $200 to $230. Then they announced a cut in their software prices, taking the last high profit item away from Texas Instruments
Thanks to perfected design and Jack Tramiel's business acumen, and Sig Hartmann' sharp dealing with software vendors, Commodore's cost on a C-64 was less than $100! They had been making money on both hardware and software while running Texas Instruments into the ground!
The debacle at the CES was the last straw for Bill Turner, President of Texas Instruments' Consumer Division. His accountants told him that they would lose $100 million in the second quarter of 1983, and that was too much even for the giant Texas Instrument Corporation. Bill Turner resigned, and on the fateful October 13th "Black Friday" Texas Instruments announced they were ending production of the T.I. 99/4A Home Computer. However, that was not the end of the story.
The inventory of T.I. 99/4A computers was dumped on the market at prices as low as $50. This gave thousands of people the opportunity to own a computer who had not previously been able to afford one, and created a large and dedicated hobbyist user population who organized into User Survival Groups.
The period from 1982 to 1983 was an intensive period of T.I. 99/4A support. Publishers brought out hundreds of books on the computer, and software development was at a peak. Most general computer magazines carried articles on the T.I., and the company supported the computer with peripherals and software.
The production death of the T.I. 99/4A brought on a peculiar situation. The dumping of the hardware at way- below-cost prices created a huge group of users who wanted books, software, and support. While Texas Instruments did not provide it, small supporting companies grew by selling what the new users demanded. User groups grew and became bastions of loyal T.I. support. Software continued be developed and circulated within the group.
At the time Texas Instruments pulled the plug on the T.I. 99/4A, they had been working on the T.I. 99/8, which was known as the "Apple Killer." This advanced machine used an improved TMS9995 display chip and had UCSD Pascal in ROM. It also had a new rewritten BASIC interpreter and was ten times faster than the T.I. 99/4A. However, in spite of the fact that hundreds of loyal users were waiting for the machine and 100 pre-production models were made, Texas Instruments pulled the plug prior to the 1983 Summer Consumer Electronics Show.
The death of the T.I. 99/4A had an extremely bad effect on the overall position of Texas Instruments as a manufacturer of general purpose and memory chips. The home computer production lines gave Texas Instruments a base on which to plan production of chips and to achieve economies of scale. With that gone, Texas Instruments had a difficult time competing against the Japanese.
The user groups continued on GEnie, Compuserve, and Delphi with support of some small hardware and software companies. One company, Myarc, brought out the Geneve 9940 which was supposed to be the successor to the 99/8. While it did attract some users, it could not compete with the attraction of the PC clones and the Mac.
However, ten years after the official demise of the T.I. 99/4A, a sizeable user community continues to use and support the "computer that will not die."

Commodore Up To Amiga

2008-07-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

The story of Commodore Business Machines must be divided into two distinct parts_the Tramiel era and the post-Tramiel era. It was Jack Tramiel who created Commodore and made it the leader in home computers, and it was his exit that changed the company culture and made it into what it has become today_a bad company with a great product.

To understand Jack Tramiel you had to remember where he come from and the road he traveled to get to the start of the personal computer revolution. A Jewish refugee who survived six years in Hitler's death camps, Jack found his way across the Atlantic where he joined the U.S. Army. The Army taught him how to repair typewriters and stationed him New York City . When he finished his military duty, Jack stayed in New York and opened a typewriter repair store in the Bronx . This grew into a business machine company selling mechanical adding machines and repairing typewriters.

In 1955, Jack saw opportunities in Canada and moved the company across the border where it continued to expand, and in 1962 Commodore went public. In 1965, the rags-to-riches story took a detour, and Commodore found itself in financial trouble because of the dealings of a former Chairman, whose company failed. As usual, Jack survived the crisis, but the price he paid was loss of control of his company. This was to come back and haunt him later. He made a deal with Irving Gould, a Canadian financier, giving up his stock in Commodore in exchange for cash, with the provision that some stock would be returned if his rescue operations succeeded. Jack took three million dollars of the money and bought MOS Technology, a semi-conductor manufacturer in Pennsylvania . He knew that the future of all electronic machines was dependent on a supply of chips, and if he had to buy from competitors like Texas Instruments he could not stay in business.

With characteristic fervor Jack pushed Commodore toward recovery, and the company gave him back 8% of the stock.

Among other chips, MOS Technology made the 6502 microprocessor, a near clone of Motorola's M6800, but with a completely different instruction set. In an effort to get the 6502 adopted by computer engineers, MOS distributed them at very low prices. For this reason, Steve Wozniak designed the Apple computer using a 6502 chip, a decision that was to make this one of the most popular 8-byte CPU's. Two other companies were later licensed to make the chip, to meet the demand from Apple, Atari , Ohio Scientific, and others.

Within MOS Technology, Chuck Peddle, the chip's designer, built a single-board computer called the KIM-1. The KIM contained many advanced features and allowed many users to gain a low cost introduction to microcomputing. However, after acquiring MOS Technology Jack gave Peddle six months to design and build a prototype of a real personal computer. The Commodore team put together the first self-contained personal computer which they called the "Personal Electronic Transactior," or PET. The PET was announced in 1976 and first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in June of 1977. It came with either a 4K or 8K memory, and a built-in green video monitor. The keyboard was built like a Commodore calculator instead of a typewriter keyboard. Programs and data were saved and loaded from a built-in cassette recorder. The price for all this started at a mere $795, a price decision that Jack was later to regret. However, there would be no PETs available to dealers or the public for six months. Commodore announced that if you wanted to order one, you had to pay the full price now and wait for delivery some time in the future.

It was even harder to become a dealer. Dealers had to have a store and a service facility and were also required to post at least $2,500 with their applications, and there was no promise when they would get delivery. Moreover, Commodore played favorites and channeled product to dealers who were on the favored list. In spite of this, the public demand for PETs was huge.

When Jack realized that he had a real winner, he doubled the price and introduced the PET into the United Kingdom and Europe . It was an incredible success, and within a short time Commodore had rounded-up 80% of the market overseas.

Meanwhile, back in the United States , the company was gaining a terrible reputation for lack of support of both users and dealers. As a dealer, I would order 20 PETs to cover orders. They would ship perhaps 10, and of those only 6 would work. We got to be more expert in the repair of PETs than of any other computers because we had so much more experience. We never sold a PET that had not been "burned" in at least a week. However, the machine did evolve, and the calculator keyboard was replaced by a "almost" standard qwerty model (which lacked an alpha period. You had to use a decimal point!) That was typical of Commodore. The printer interface was non-standard, so you had to buy your printer from Commodore. The cassette interface was different_even the parallel port was strange. Later, the cassette was eliminated, and a floppy disk drive was sold as a necessary option. The 2040 Disk Drive had two disk drives, which allowed the user to work with two disks, and Commodore's engineers found a method of storing 170K bytes on a drive (or about 50 pages of text.) At that time, Apple's drives held 150K and Atari's only 90K! The operating system was built into firmware on the 2040 disk drive rather than being a separate software program. This made it easy to use but kept Commodore locked into obsolete operating systems for long periods.

The overseas success lead to the development of a vastly enhanced computer called the CBM 8032. This business computer had a green monitor, a full business keyboard, and 32K of memory. Larger disk drives were also made available for business use.

There was little advertising, almost no software development (except for programs adopted from European versions) and even fewer dealers. Most people in the United States almost counted Commodore out of business.

One place that Commodore placed most of its United States production was in education. It quickly dominated the educational market by giving a free computer for every two that a school bought. This bargain made it harder for the much more expensive Apples and Radio Shack TRS-80s to get into the schools, although the teachers much preferred them. Selling the schools was one thing, but keeping them running was another. Many of the Commodore PETs ended up in closets because of lack of repair parts.

However, as a result of its overseas operations and the MOS Technology chip business, Commodore had grown into a prosperous company and was actually the third largest personal computer company after Apple and Radio Shack.

In 1978, MOS Technology developed a chip that allowed a computer to use a color monitor or color TV instead of the monochrome display. It was called The Video Interface Chip, or VIC, and it could only display 22 columns in color. The VIC chip had not sold well because the price and availability of color monitors or TVs . Now, two years later, Apple and Atari had color computers, and Commodore had none. Chuck Peddle was lobbying for the development of Color PET and CBM computers. Then, at a meeting called in England to discuss the future of Commodore's products, Jack Tramiel suddenly announced that he wanted to market a color computer right away, and he wanted to retail it for $300!

This was an unheard-of price, but Jack justified it by saying, "The Japanese are coming! So we will be the Japanese! We have to compete with ourselves." Tramiel told his people, 'We have to be like the Japanese. We constantly have to come up with something new, something better. We have to believe that we are the competition. If we do this, then no one can get ahead of us."

Tramiel knew that the way to beat the Japanese at their own game was to produce a product at a price they could not compete with. The Japanese tactic was to watch carefully while an electronic device was introduced, first at a high price and later at a lower price as the market grew. Once the ground was broken by others, and the quantities being sold were sufficient to support mass production, a Japanese company could then enter the market with an excellent product at much lower price.

Tramiel's strategy was to introduce a new product at the lowest price possible right from the start. He could then capture the market before anyone else could get in and compete. Once the competition matched his low price, he could cut prices even lower since he would have already achieved large-scale mass production.

The little color computer evolved in secret at MOS Technology, Valley Forge , Pennsylvania . It was not a self-contained unit such as the PET. The entire machine was housed in the keyboard case, and its memory capacity was only 5K of RAM. There was a slot for a software cartridge which would contain a program recorded in Read-Only-Memory (ROM) so it did not use any of the 5K main memory. However, the computer could also be programmed with a small version of BASIC that was also in ROM, and the program could be saved on a Datasette recorder. The keyboard was much more standard than the PET model and the missing period was found. The number keys (0-9) served double functions. When pressed at the same time as the Control key, they changed the color of the display. There were eight colors available; white, black, red, cyan (light blue), purple, green, navy blue, and yellow.

The color computer also could display the PET graphics set and even a reverse set of graphics characters. The video screen was only 22 characters wide, but the characters were nice and large. Naturally, there was no CRT with the little computer, but by then most users had a color set at home, and a video switch was supplied to connect into the antenna terminals. The code name of the small computer was Vixen, but there was much discussion on a final name before settling on VIC-20.

Introduced in January 1981, at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas , the VIC-20 was a big success. The press very favorably compared it to the new TI-99/4 and the Atari 400 computers. However, it was not until the Spring CES in Chicago that the final version with FCC approval was available.

The VIC-20 introduced thousands of people to computers, because it was inexpensive and was sold in the mass market stores. It also had a full line of peripherals. Many of the on-line services such as GEnie and Compuserve owe their growth to the low-cost VIC-Modem. This unity allowed large numbers of people to get on line who might have never tried telecommunications. The price and capability of the VIC-20 was a factor that destroyed the market for video games such as the Atari 2600.

The other very important thing about the VIC-20 was that its expansion gave birth to the most popular computer ever built_the Commodore 64.

The Commodore 64 had 16 colors in place of the eight on the VIC-20. It had a 40-column screen rather than 22. It had a music synthesizer chip (SID chip) and easy-to-use graphics called Sprites, and it could use all the VIC-20 peripherals. Most of all, it had 64K of RAM at a time when Apple had a maximum of 48K. It went on sale to computer store dealers for $595, and a few months later was moved to K-mart for $400.

The home computer price war really started between Texas Instruments and Commodore in the summer of 1982, with Texas Instruments issuing a $100 rebate on the TI 99/4A, bringing the price down to $200. Commodore dropped the VIC-20 price to dealers by $40, and let them sell it for any price they wanted. In September 1982, the Commodore 64 hit the computer stores at $595, and then Atari joined the fray with a $55 rebate on the Atari 400 and dropped the price on the Atari 800 to under $500. Commodore moved the C-64 from the computer stores to mass merchants such as K-mart for $400.

The dealers roared with pain at seeing one of their most profitable incomes going out the door. To a computer store, the sale of a C-64 was only the start on a much more expensive computer system. They made more money on the peripherals and software than on the computer. The VIC-20 price was dropped to less than $130, and merchants started selling them below cost whenever a complete system was purchased.

In February 1983, Texas Instruments again cut the dealer's price of a TI 99/4A by $48 making the retail price $150. Commodore responded by cutting the prices on all peripherals and reducing the price of the VIC-20 to below $100!

Then Commodore came up with a massive "trade-in" offer. They would give a $100 trade-in on any video game, or computer, against the purchase of a C-64! Out came all the old Atari 2600s, Intellivisions, VIC-20s, Sinclairs, and Timexes. People bought Timex Computers on sale for $50 and turned them in on C-64's for $100! The retail price with a "trade-in" was $300.

Atari had just introduced its new 1200XL and found they had to rebate $100 right from the start. However, at the Spring CES Commodore really lowered the boom. They slashed the C-64 dealer's price to between $200 and $250 and cut the price of all their software, including new releases, by 50%.

The blood was flowing all over the home computer industry, but at Texas Instruments it was the worst. Commodore's costs were so low that even at the depressed prices they actually made money on their computers. However, Texas Instruments was losing $100 million in a quarter, and things were not getting better. Texas Instruments' president resigned, and the company quit the home computer business after taking enormous losses.

There were other fallouts of the price wars, and Atari represented one of the worst to its parent company, Warner Communications. This would have an unforeseen effect on Commodore.

During the summer of 1983, Commodore announced that it had become the first personal computer company to hit one billion dollars in sales. Then, upon this announcement came the totally unexpected resignation of Jack Tramiel. The industry was shocked; there had been little indication that Jack was that unhappy with conditions at Commodore.

The computer press was full of rumors about the cause. It was said that Jack wanted his sons to come into the business in top executive positions, and that Irving Gould objected. It was claimed that Gould wanted to make Marshal Smith President and that Smith declined as long as Jack was in the company. The actual reasons have never been revealed, but Jack and his wife left for a tour around the world, and upon his return he formed a company with his sons. Shortly thereafter, they bought Atari from Warner Communications.

Commodore has had a succession of CEOs and executives and is said to have a revolving door in its executive suite. The C-64, in various versions and the upgraded C-128, have lasted for more than ten years. Their numbers alone make them the most popular computer ever built. Commodore went on to feature the Amiga, a 16-bit machine developed by the Lorrane Amiga company.

ATARI 800

2008-07-17T18:31:00.000-07:00

On January 5th 1985 , Jack Tramiel was having one of the most enjoyable days of his life. At Comdex in Las Vegas , he was standing in the Atari exhibit, which had been roped off and covered with cloths. The Atari exhibit was the only part of Comdex that was not yet open on the first day of the show. It was awaiting the arrival of the Governor of Nevada, who would formally open the exhibit by cutting a ribbon and allowing the show attendees to see the long awaited Atari 520ST, a new 68000-based computer with the GEM graphics user interface. It was reputed to do everything the Macintosh could do and then some, at half the price of the Mac. In fact it was referred to by the press as "The Jackintosh." The Atari 502ST included color, MIDI sound, and the GEM graphics user interface. The new computer was the rave of the show, and the Tramiel family and their loyal retainers, who had left Commodore when Jack resigned, basked in the glory.

The Atari company, founded by Nolan Bushnell, the inventor of Pong, had grown to become the largest manufacturer of video games and had been sold to Warner Communications. Sales hit 2 billion dollars in 1982, but they plunged to less than 1 billion in 1983 as the public turned to home computers instead of video games. This decline represented a 580 million dollar net loss to Warner. Steven J. Ross, Warner's Chairman and CEO, wanted to unload the business, which he now felt was a drag on Warner and not compatible with the rest of his company. However, it was not easy to find a buyer who could rescue Atari and was willing to take on the job.

Atari had gone into the home computer business producing a line of 8-bit machines based upon the 6502 CPU. The Atari Models 400 and 800, which were the company's first models, were excellent graphics computers, but had several problems in competing in the highly competitive home market. The Atari 400 had a plastic membrane keyboard and was overpriced at $600. The Model 800 was much better, but it was priced just below the Apple II, and it was perceived as more of a "home" computer while Apple was considered as a "serious" computer.

The later 1200XL systems were not much different except in physical appearance, and although they had 64K of memory instead of 48K maximum on the 800, there was not too much inducement for Atari 800 owners to upgrade their machines. Atari also produced peripherals for their computers, including the Model 1010 cassette program recorder, the Model 1025 printer, and a number of disk drives.

Part of the problem was that Atari, hoping to repeat its success in the video game business, had played its game too close to the chest. They kept important programming information "secret" and disclosed them only to programmers who agreed to market through Atari. Serious application programming companies who were producing 6502 software for Apple refused to comply with Atari's demands and turned their backs on the products. The game programmers, however, seized the opportunity to use the excellent color graphics capabilities of the Atari machines to develop intricate games. By the time Atari recognized their error, lowered the prices of the machines, and tried to woo back the business program developers, it was too late. The software companies felt the potential sales would not justify their conversion costs.

Another problem was Atari's identification with their video games. They had called their game machines "VCS" (Video Computer System,) and now potential buyers felt that their personal computers were merely advanced game machines.

Jack Tramiel had started Commodore Business Machines, presided over its growth, and now had resigned from the company. Within a short time, many of the Commodore team responsible for the success of the company followed their leader as the culture of the company changed under the direction of the new management.

When Jack Tramiel left Commodore, Steven Ross recognized the opportunity. What better person could purchase Atari than Jack Tramiel, whose success with low-cost home computers was partly responsible for the decline in simple video games?

After leaving Commodore, Jack and his sons formed a new company, Tramiel Technology Limited (TTL,) with the stated intention of developing new electronic products. At that time, Steven Ross approached Tramiel with the idea of taking over Atari, and they entered into negotiations. By the beginning of July 1984, Tramiel Technologies and Warner Communications became shareholders in each other's companies, and TTL bought Atari.

Tramiel got most of Atari's assets for only $240 million in notes, at a reported very low rate of interest. To give Jack time to re-organize Atari, payments on the interest were not due to start until 1985. Wall Street viewed the deal as Warner selling Atari to Tramiel and loaning him the money to buy it! In addition, Jack got 5-year warrants for one million shares of Warner stock executable at $22 per share‑the market price of Warner when the deal was made. With the Atari drain removed from Warner, its stock price would rise, and Jack's profits would further sweeten the deal.

In return, Warner got warrants for 14.3 million shares of TTL stock representing over 30% of TTL. Warner also agreed to assume obligations for past Atari debts. It was a sensational deal for Tramiel and the end of a costly adventure for Warner. All that Jack Tramiel had to do was to make Atari into a profitable business once again.

He wasted no time and flew to California to take over the bloated Atari organization and re-shape it. Tramiel installed his sons at the helm and set to work to cut away the fat and deadwood.

Sam became President, Gary was put in charge of collecting $300 million worth of outstanding receivables, and Leonard was put in charge of software. In one month they reduced the staff from over 5,000 to 1,500. Atari occupied 40 buildings. Tramiel canceled leases and cut that to seven buildings and turned a profit by selling the furniture that filled those buildings. The warehouses at Atari were packed with over one hundred thousand, 8-bit computers that Atari built but couldn't sell. It was 1985, and 8-bit computers were considered very obsolete. The 16-bit IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh were the desirable computers of the time.

Jack believed that everything would sell at the right price. Atari went on an ambitious project to find the best price at which the Atari 8-bit machines would move out of the warehouse. Since Jack had only paid $80 each for them, a fraction of their original cost, he could afford to sharply cut the price. Moving them out was not difficult. The new Atari team managed to clear the decks for the next generation of computers.

Commodore, which had suffered by the loss of key people who left with Jack and by the Atari price cutting, immediately started a lawsuit charging Tramiel and his associates with taking valuable designs and information when they left Commodore. Jack Tramiel immediately retaliated with a $100 million lawsuit against Commodore. The suit charged that Atari had a previous understanding to purchase the Lorrane Amiga Company because Atari had lent it money to develop the Amiga Computer. Jack charged that Commodore snatched Amiga from Atari by offering a better deal. This suit was without much merit because it happened before Tramiel took over Atari, and Warner had never pursued their claim. Jack's counter-suit did serve to discourage Commodore from their lawsuit against him and his people.

While all these legal maneuvers were going on, the new Atari crew was working on a design that would outdo both the Amiga and the Macintosh and undersell them by 50%. The Atari 520ST was the result. This computer, without the monitor, was priced under $1,000, an incredibly low price for a 1/2 megabyte computer. This gave rise to the motto that Atari used to identify the company, "Power Without The Price."

If price and computer capability were the only criteria for computer business success, Atari would have become one of the giants of the industry. Instead they managed make management decisions that in the long run proved to be unwise. It was said that they managed "to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."

At the time of the Tramiel takeover of Atari, there were many computer dealers who specialized in the Atari computers. There was also a sizable user community, and both the dealers and owners must be counted among the most loyal of all families of computer users. They were almost fanatical in their loyalty to Atari computers.

The Atari Forums on Compuserve, led by Ron Luks, were among the largest groups of organized computer users. All of these computer users, plus a sizable contingent of Apple II and Commodore users who had been priced out of the ability to upgrade to 16-bit graphics machines, looked forward to buying the Atari 520ST and represented a huge potential market.

Some of the best graphic software was being written for the Atari 8-bit machines, and developers also were more than anxious to write for the new Atari 520 ST. The potential market seemed almost unlimited.

In retrospect, it is hard to understand some of the counter-productive management decisions made by Atari, even though they might have seemed correct at that time.

Today, it is axiomatic that new computers must be put into the hands of software developers as soon as possible, and companies like Apple employ evangelists to encourage this. Atari, on the other hand, made it as difficult as possible for software developers to get into the 520ST software game. They initially charged them up to $5,000 for a Software Development Kit consisting of a computer and some manuals. Since in the beginning there would not be too many computer users to buy the software, the developers would be unable to recover their large investment for a long time. This discouraged many software developers from writing for the Atari ST .

Wynn Rostek, writing in Computer Shopper for October 1985, described how Atari made another bad decision. They squeezed out the loyal, existing Atari dealers for the 8-bit machines. Atari decided to distribute the new computers through manufacturer's representatives who had to qualify the existing dealers. This policy eliminated many dealers who had supported Atari in hard times in the past. As the dealers dropped away to sell other lines, Atari turned to the mass merchandisers and discount mail order houses. This further antagonized the dealers who remained, and did not work either. The Atari ST was too complicated a computer to be sold without instruction and dealer support. Atari then went back and tried to recruit a new dealer organization. They kept bouncing back and forth between mass merchants and specialty dealers until neither wanted to do business with them.

There were also severe quality control problems with the early machines. Due to poor packaging and long shipping routes, the chips in the computer tended to become loose, and the computers would not work. The failure rate in the first few shipments was almost 50%. This was not serious in the case of experienced dealers, who burned-in their computers before selling them, but with mass merchandisers who sold sealed boxes, it was a disaster. It took strict application of quality control to cure the problem.

The second computer Atari made was the Atari 1040 ST with a full megabyte of RAM and with a built-in single floppy drive. The older 520ST did not have room for internal drives, but could support two external floppies. It also had a port for an external hard drive. Provisions to support two floppies and an external hard drive were built into the TOS operating system from the beginning of the first 520ST. One problem with adding hard drives to the Atari ST machines was the non-standard interface known as the Atari Computer Systems Interface (ACSI) which was a modified SCSI-type interface. Third-party vendors enabled users to get around this when they developed boards that converted ACSI to standard SCSI and allowed any SCSI hard drive to be used with an Atari ST .

The 520ST and the 1040 ST were the two computers that comprised the ST line until 1987, when Atari came out with the Mega ST computers. These new machines had a separate keyboard and built-in hard drives.

In 1989, when other companies were improving their computers, Atari produced the Atari 520STE, 1040 STE, and Mega STE models, which were somewhat improved versions of the ST computers.

In the United States in the years since 1985, when the Atari ST line was introduced, the Intel-powered MS-DOS computers and the Apple Macintosh have completely dominated the industry. Commodore's Amiga ran a poor third, and the presence of Atari's ST and Mega was hardly felt except among the loyal fans.

Apple, IBM, Compaq, and the countless clone manufacturers spent millions of dollars on advertising. Commodore advertised in spurts when a new president took over, but Atari spent hardly anything on advertising. Even when they did advertise, they used Atari magazines, where they only talked to the converted. And so with few dealers and no ads in general computer magazines, they gained few new customers. Atari's answer to declining sales was always to cut the price. However, with the huge growth of the AT-clone market, they could never match the features and prices offered by the clone manufacturers.

Since the population of Atari ST and STE and Mega ST & STE computers was small, and the operating system was unique, there was no incentive for standard software developers to offer Atari versions of popular software. Only the game software developers featured Atari versions. There were, however, some excellent Atari software systems which did offer a user some excellent programs but little choice.

The more Atari's business declined in the United States , the more Atari turned to overseas sales. In Europe , the situation was completely different from the United States . There were fewer distributors, and they tended to specialize in one type of computer and one country. The prices for machines and software were higher, and Jack Tramiel directed most of Atari's production and marketing efforts into European sales and development. The machines proved very popular and sold very well. Soon, all the Atari production and support were devoted to Europe , and the United States market declined further from lack of support in this country. To this day 85% of Atari's income is derived from outside North America . This foreign success was achieved at the expense of the North American market and caused a lot of resentment among domestic users and dealers.

Basically, Atari did very little development work on new computers and very few updates to the TOS operating system. Atari did come out with machines like the portable laptop Stacy and The 68030 TT line, but very few machines became available in this country.

In all the years from 1985 to 1989, Computer Shopper magazine, one of the few general computer magazines who even covered the Atari, had only one cover and feature story devoted to Atari and that featured the packaged Desk top Publishing System put out by the Atari Business Systems Group. This featured a Mega STE computer , a scanner, and the Atari Laser Printer. It had some fairly good DTP software, but the laser printer could only be used with an Atari Mega because the intelligence was in the computer rather than the printer. It was priced about $5,000 for the whole package, not a bad price for the time. The same package now sells for $3,000, but even at that price, it is no great bargain today.

Atari must be credited with marketing one of the first practical palmtop computers. Their Portfolio has an excellent keyboard and a good display. It comes with five built-in applications, a PC card drive for uploading and downloading files to a desk top PC and has 128K of RAM. Originally, the Portfolio sold for about $500, much less than competing palmtops, and was well received. Again, however, Atari failed to come out with new models with featuring provisions for expanded memory, or the new standard flash cards for application software. Instead of offering upgraded models with increased MS-DOS compatibility and new features, they lowered the price. As new palmtops come on to the market at any price, the sales of Portfolio will continue to decrease.

Although Atari is completely out of the large-screen video game business, the Atari Entertainment Division, with its Lynx color hand held video game, has done much better than the computer division. The Lynx sells well, and there is a fairly large assortment of software for it. The Lynx hand-held game business is only a small fraction of the multi-billion dollar video game business, which is now completely dominated by Nintendo.

Atari's most glaring failure recently took place in the courts rather than in the stores. In a 150-million-dollar lawsuit, Atari has sued Nintendo for domination of the industry, charging Nintendo with being a monopoly, operating in restraint of trade.

Here was a setting for the biggest Atari potential victory since they introduced the 520ST. There was little doubt that Nintendo almost had a monopoly of video game machines. Their software policies were very monopolistic, and at one time Atari had a large share of the business, which they lost when Nintendo came in. In addition, here was an American company suing a Japanese one in a United States court. To make matters worse for Nintendo, there was a strong feeling against Japanese business practices. It looked like Atari could not lose, and 150 million dollars would revive the faltering company.

The trial was a long one. Nintendo admitted they dominated the market and were a monopoly! However, their defense was that they had not acted in restraint of trade. They just provided a better product that people wanted to buy. In addition, they claimed that the many negative business decisions Atari had made cost them their position in the industry. Nintendo was not to blame for Atari's problems_Atari was.

To make matters worse, Nintendo was able to prove their claims, and Atari lost the case. Not only did Atari not get an award of 150 million dollars, but they have to pay Nintendo's costs to defend the case. This could amount to an additional million dollars, in addition to their own legal costs.

Things look very bleak for Atari. The loss of the Nintendo lawsuit and decrease of business in Europe has hurt them. The large PC manufacturers are building clones in Europe , and prices are falling. However, Atari has not given up yet. They may have just one more chance. Atari introduced the Falcon 030 at the Fall, 1992 Comdex in Las Vegas . This new machine features a 68030 CPU, more memory, and standard SCSI interfaces. This computer will compete with the lower-priced Macintosh computers and should attract a lot of attention. A second machine, now in development, will also be a fast 68040 machine with a large compliment of memory and standard SCSI interfaces. With these new computers selling at traditionally low Atari prices, the wounded company could get back into the business. It seems like the last hurrah for Atari.

TRS-80 "The Trash 80"

2008-07-17T18:30:00.000-07:00

Introduction to TRS-80
In the spring of 1977, I received a phone call from Ben Rosen, who at that time was a market analyst for Morgan Stanley. He was just about the only stock market analyst specializing in the infant personal computer industry and one of the industry experts. Ben, who later became the Chairman of both Compaq and Lotus, had already organized the first of his famous industry seminars, and he had invited me on a panel as a retailer. This call, however, was to tell me that I was about to receive a visit from an important person, if I had time to see and talk with him today. Ben went on to tell me that my visitor would be Charles Tandy, who owned the Radio Shack chain of some 7,000 stores. He had only that day, and he wanted to visit a successful computer store.
Mr. Tandy arrived shortly after lunch and introduced himself.
"Call me Charles," he said as I conducted him through my operation.
We started in the basement where we repaired computers, built many of them into systems, and had our stock room. Then to the selling floor, where he seemed most interested in the Apple II and the SOL. Charles was a man who could put anyone at ease, even if they knew how important a person he was. He had the knack of asking the most direct and revealing questions in a way that aroused no resentment. I really enjoyed talking with him, flattered that this powerful businessman would seek me out for advice. At the end of the day, he told me that he had visited other computer stores and in general classified them into two categories: first, stores run by computer hobbyists where a neophyte would be ignored, or snowed. The second type of store was run by ex-used car salesmen who were masters of the hard sell. They tried to completely snow the average prospective buyer. He said my store did not fit into either category (for which I was grateful,) but seemed to meet the customer at whatever level they were at. I told Charles that most of my salespeople were recruited from the hobbyist ranks, but that I had trained them somewhat in the art of retail selling.
We talked all afternoon, and at the end of the day he asked what I was doing that weekend, and would I consider going back with him to his headquarters in Fort Worth . It was common gossip in the industry that Radio Shack was going to be selling computers very soon, but nobody knew what kind they would be selling. Now it seemed that I was being invited to get an advance look. Of course I told Charles I would love to go with him.
The next morning was Friday, and I met the Tandy party in their suite at the Hotel Carlisle on Park Avenue for breakfast. After breakfast, we piled into a limo for a trip to the airport, but first we made a stop at a nearby shop where they sold novelty telephones. Charles bought a few as gifts for his friends back in Texas . Later I was told that he bought the store because they carried the most unusual phones. Phones packed aboard, we drove out to Teterbro Airport in New Jersey and boarded the Tandy corporate jet for the flight to Fort Worth .
All this was new and exciting to me. I had never flown in a corporate jet, and I had never been to Texas , either. Landing in Fort Worth , we all drove to a local barbecue which was Charles favorite, and then straight to the Tandy plant. There, Charles introduced me to most of his executives and told me they were developing a new type of computer for sale in their stores. He said that they had investigated all of the machines being offered for sale and had come to the conclusion that they were all too complicated and too expensive for the average person. They had therefore designed a completely new concept in small computers.
With that, they showed me what seemed to be a keyboard and a 12-inch TV screen, with a wire connecting the two units. The plastic case was colored with a metallic silver gray finish, and the keyboard and front of the TV was a contrasting black. The oversized logo on the front read "RADIO SHACK TRS-80" and "MICRO COMPUTER SYSTEM."
My first comment was, "Where's the computer?"
"It's inside the keyboard case," I was told.
"Right under the keyboard!" I could hardly believe it.
I was used to the Altair and Imsai_even the SWTPC 6800 and the SOL with their brute force power supplies and expandable bus. Even the Apple II, which I considered a masterpiece of compact design, took much more space than the TRS-80 keyboard unit. Then I noticed the external power supply plugged into the wall. Well, there was one reason for the size.
"We decided to use an external power supply to conserve space and keep the heat out of the computer case.
"Okay," I thought. That made sense.
I really liked the idea that the TRS-80 came with its own TV monitor. In those days video monitors were very hard to get and they were expensive. I had bought a huge order of 9-inch, high quality, security type video monitors to sell with my computers, and I sold them at a very small mark-up if the customer bought a computer.
Radio Shack had provided a 12-inch TV quality video display that was really a television with the radio section removed. This was a smart way to get a larger, reasonably priced video monitor if you had the buying power of Tandy.
"Tell me some more about the computer?" I asked.
"Well," someone answered, "it's a Z-80 based machine with 4K of RAM, and a ROM with the boot-up software and BASIC. Programs and data are loaded through a cassette. The video display has 64 characters and 16 lines and there are graphics characters as well as uppercase letters."
"This is interesting," I thought. "Just like the first Apple I."
"Tell me about the BASIC?" I asked.
"Well, it's out. Level I contained in a ROM. This is an integer-only version with only two character variables. Our Level II will be out shortly and will have enough advanced features for anybody."
By now I was very impressed with the TRS-80, and I fully realized that it was going to be hard competition for anything I sold, except possibly the Apple II. The big question in my mind was, how much would they sell it for?
As if he was reading my mind, Charles asked me, "How much do you think should I sell it for?"
I really had no basis of comparison except possibly the SOL (I had not received an Apple II yet,) and it sold for $1,400 with a video monitor. Well, this machine is a lot simpler, so I should figure about $1,000. However this is Radio Shack so it must be cheaper. I'll say $900.
"Well," I said, "about $900 would be a fair price."
"What would you think about $600?" one of the Tandy people answered.
"If you are going to sell this system with a video display and built-in BASIC for $600, you better build a hell of a lot of them," I returned.
"Stan, just how many do you think would be enough?" one of the Tandy people asked.
"Enough," I said, "would be about 50,000."
"You are out of your mind," answered one of Tandy's staff. "No one has ever built more than 5,000 of the same type of computer, and we are thinking 12,000."
"You have 7,000 stores," I returned. "If you have only one to show and one to sell, that's no way for a big company to do business."
"We don't think all of our stores can sell computers; it's a specialized business."
"True," I answered, "but this computer may change all that."
After this exchange, I sensed a division in the company. Charles and all the people he had brought on board to develop the TRS-80 were convinced that the TRS-80 would be a tremendous success and would change their business. The older electronics people whose thinking was fixed in the audio, radio, and hobby electronics business did not understand the fascination of the computer for even the most conservative business person.
Charles then showed me folders containing cassettes and manuals for all kinds of home and business software. There were accounting programs, home management programs, and educational programs. They were all going to sell for less than $30.
At this I smiled and said, "Keeping business records on a tape cassette program has not proved very practical. (I was being very kind!) You would be well advised to keep your programs very simple until you get a disk-based system."
They ignored me and changed the subject. "How many of these computers could you sell in your store?"
"I would start with 10 per week and end up selling 40 or 50 a week," I replied.
They obviously did not believe me, but they didn't challenge my statements.
The meeting broke up at that point, and I was taken to a hotel to freshen up for some Texas hospitality later that evening. The next day was Saturday, and about 9:30 I received a phone call that Mr. Tandy was tied up, and that I should have my breakfast. He would pick me up later.
About 10:30 , Charles picked me up at the hotel and took me to the yet uncompleted Tandy Center . He showed me the building and parking lot with its subway into the center. He told me that it would become a center of life in Fort Worth , and he wanted it to be his contribution to the city he loved.
Then Charles told me how he had started in business making leather hobby kits and selling them in his craft stores. How he had bought the failing Radio Shack company, which was a retail electronics distributor that had evolved from ham radio equipment. He had built Radio Shack into the world's largest electronic retailer and one of the largest distributors in the United States . He believed that the personal computer industry was going to become very important in the near future. He also said that most of the companies then in business would fall within a year of two. The reason, he said, was because they were so disorganized and had no idea how to manufacture and market their products. I was very impressed with Charles' statements because I had staked my future on the industry, and I had the same feelings about some of the companies I did business with.
After we left the construction of Tandy Center , we went to the temporary offices of the corporation where we resumed our meeting. There I was told that Charles wanted to buy my store and hire me to train managers for his computer stores. The purchase price offered was not very liberal, but I was assured that my employment contract would be very good. I told them I would take it up with my partners.
When I returned to New York , I consulted my wife, who actually owned the store, and her parents, who had supplied some of the starting capital.
They said. "Do what you think best."
My partner, Mike Alpert, said that as long as he got back his investment and some return, he would go along with anything I wanted to do. So the decision was mine alone to make. One thing bothered me about this sale, and I called to talk it over with Charles Tandy. When I started the store in 1976, I did not draw any salary for a full year. We lived on my wife's salary as a New York City school teacher. It had always been my intention to pay myself that back salary when the store income allowed it. Now, if I sold out, that year would be down the drain. I explained this to Charles and told him that all I wanted was $25,000 for that hard year. He could not see it and told me that I was getting my foot on a high rung of the ladder at Radio Shack. He told me that all of the men who stuck with him when he took over Radio Shack were now millionaires. This attitude turned me off to the deal, and I decided to turn it down. The TRS-80 became the most popular computer ever built, but Charles Tandy passed away a year later. Most of the people he brought in to develop the Model I computer were gone shortly after his death. John Ratliff, Charles Tandy's assistant, told me that I would have never made it at Radio Shack.

APPLE II

2008-07-17T18:28:00.000-07:00

The Early Days of Apple Computer

We were just beginning to realize that the computer store might be a success beyond our dreams and that the little space in Polk's Hobby Store might not be enough, when I received a phone call.

It was a very fast-talking young man who told me, "I'm Steve Jobs." He said that he had been sent by Paul Terrell and John French, who had both bought his great single board computer and become dealers. Paul had bought 50 of them! This was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and he had to send me one.

"Sure, send it," I said. After all, Paul and John were friends and I would go with their choice. Whamo! Next day Fedex delivered a package C.O.D. $500.

I was a little taken aback, but I paid the charge and gave the package to Dave, one of my techs.

"Here. Look at this, and let me know what you think," I told him.

"What is it?" he answered.

"A computer, the Apple 1."

"Whaddya mean a computer? All in that little box? Common!"

He took the box and disappeared. Later, he took some money from the cash register and went to Radio Shack. When he came back, he fiddled with some wires and a video monitor, and called me over to see what he had done. A Radio Shack transformer was wired to a plug that went into the wall. The other side had wires into the page-sized PC board. A black square appeared on the video screen.

"See! It works," Dave told me.

"What does it do?" I asked.

"Nothing, needs a keyboard. I'll get one," Dave told me.

Dave came back with one of our SWTPC keyboards and wired it in after studying the schematic.

"Don't work," he told me. "Better call 'em."

So I called the number listed in the paperwork and asked for Steve.

"Which one?" the young man at the other end asked.

"The fast talker," I told him.

"Oh, Steve Jobs. Wait a minute." Steve came on the line, and I told him the keyboard didn't work.

"What kind of keyboard did you use? South West? Nah, they won't work. I'll send a good one and some software tomorrow."

"Wait." I told him I didn't need it Fedex next day_I could wait. Too late, he was gone.

Next day, another C.O.D. for $60 arrived, and a little plug-in circuit board with two chips on it arrived, and a cassette. Fedex collect. Again I called California for Steve.

"Got the keyboard? Good one! I'm going to buy a lot and we will get them cheaper. The little board, oh yes, that's the cassette interface, only two chips, Woz invented it, runs at 1200 baud. Great, you'll love it. the software is the "Game of Life."

All of this in one breath! I hung up.

Dave figured everything out and hooked it all up. It worked just as Steve said it would. The cassette interface was terrific. All the other ones we had ran at 300 baud and had a full board of chips and parts. This interface ran four times as fast and always got a good load. That alone was unusual. The Game of Life was very complex software for that time. It put figures representing cells on the screen. They lived, died, or reproduced, depending on their proximity to other cells, generation after generation. I was impressed. I called Steve and told him.

"Wait, Woz is working on BASIC. We should have it shortly," he said.

I also found out that Woz was his partner, Steve Wozniak, and he was the inventor.

Now it just so happened the New York Chapter of the Association For Computer Machinery (ACM) was holding a dinner meeting, and our store, together with other metropolitan area computer dealers, had been invited to show our equipment. This was a first experience for these big computer people who had little contact with microcomputers. I knew other dealers were planning to bring large, complete computer systems. With the arrival of the Apple 1, I changed my ideas. I asked one of the hangers-on at my store to take the Apple, and mount it, the keyboard, and power transformer into a large attaché case. He did a great job, and I had a portable microcomputer. My wife and I went to the dinner, and all we took was the case, a 9-inch video monitor, and the cassette recorder. We seated ourselves next to the wall, where there were electrical plugs, and I quietly connected everything and loaded The Game of Life. The monitor faced the podium where the chairman was conducting the meeting.

He could not help but notice it. He stopped in his introductions and said, "What in the world is on that tube?"

I answered, "It's the Game of Life running on my computer."

"What computer? I don't see any computer. What are you talking about?" the chairman answered. Now he was really upset!

I got up and said, "My computer is in that case, and I am sorry, but I have it running just for practice. I did not think it would disrupt things here."

"You are telling me that there is a computer in that little case? What kind?" he sputtered.

"It's the Apple," I replied.

"Apple? Never heard of it. Well, turn it off now!"

After the formal part of the meeting, all the computer dealers set up their equipment to demonstrate their products.

I waited until last and got up and said, "I thank all my fellow dealers for showing off their systems because we at Computer Mart sell exactly the same products. However, I have here the future of personal computing. It is called the Apple Computer, and it requires no expensive terminal and no big box of electronics. It's all here in this little attaché case, and I invite you to see and use it."

It was the Apple that caused the greatest excitement of the evening. However, they all asked me to call them when BASIC was available and when the little computer could be expanded. I called Steve Jobs the next day and told him what had happened. He was even more excited than usual and told me Woz was working hard on BASIC, a typical Steve Jobs half-truth.

A week later, I went to a Processor Technology dealer's meeting at Emeryville , California . There were several telephone messages from Steve Jobs to me during the meeting. When I could break away, I called Steve at the number he left. He begged me to come down to Los Gatos to visit him that day. Not having any idea how far it was from Emeryville, I agreed and set off in my rented car. I arrived at the address, which turned out to be his sister's house, and Steve was there with Dan Kottke and another friend. He told me he had great plans, and Apple was going to be a big company. He asked me to invest $10,000, and said he would give me 10% of Apple Computer for my investment.

Looking at this long-haired hippie and his friends, I thought, "You would be the last person in the world I would trust with my ten grand!"

What I said was, "Steve, all my money is invested in my store, but I will help you. I have a double booth at the big computer show in Atlantic City , New Jersey this August. If you come to the show, I will give you free booth space and publicize the Apple computer."

He was somewhat disappointed at my turn-down but quick to take advantage of my offer. Booth space was expensive, and the show was a sell out. "I don't know if we can raise the fare to get to the show, but if we can I'll take you up on your offer. Woz has just finished the Apple II prototype, and he is bringing it over to show you."

When Wozniak came over I was a little more impressed with him than Jobs. He brought a computer board with jumper wires all over and parts hanging off all over the board. This was to be the Apple II! After Woz hooked his haywire rig up to the living room TV, he turned it on, and there on the screen I saw a crude Breakout game in full color! Now I was really amazed. This was much better than the crude color graphics from the Cromemco Dazzler.

After a few minutes Woz turned it off and said, "I am still working on it; everything heats up after a while!"

"How do you like that?" said Jobs, smiling. "We're going to dump the Apple I and only work on the Apple II."

"Steve," I said, "if you do that you will never sell another computer. You promised BASIC for the Apple I, and most dealers haven't sold the boards they bought from you. If you come out with an improved Model II they will be stuck. Put it on the back burner until you deliver on your promises."

I suppose I wasn't much encouragement for the young businessman because I told him things he didn't want to hear, but a week later he called me in New York .

"We have the tickets, and we are coming to the Atlantic City Show. Woz almost has BASIC finished_we will bring it with us. Get me a room at the Hotel."

I called the Shoreham and was told there were no more rooms. So I doubled up two of my people and gave the room to the Apple characters.

On August 26, 1976 , we all went to Atlantic City , New Jersey and the old Shoreham Hotel for what was to be the first national computer show, and the most important. We had our booth set up with our Apple I housed in a case with a monitor inside and the keyboard in front. It was a one-piece masterpiece made by a friend of mine, Mitch Bogdanowitz, who was a great model maker. We called the new desk top computer Eve, because she ate the Apple! Of course we also showed an Imsai, and we expected to receive our first SOL at the show. Half of the booth we saved for the two Steves and their Apple Computers. They showed up later in the day. Steve Jobs and Dan Kottke came into the booth and started to set up signs.

"Woz is in the room finishing BASIC. He's using the hotel T.V." said Jobs.

At this point my mother-in-law came over to Steve. She looked him up and down and said, "Young man, your backside is sticking out of holes in those jeans! You are NOT going to be in my booth like that. Take 'em off and I'll sew them up, now!"

Steve Jobs was more than a little surprised_I don't think anyone had ever spoken to him like that! However, you didn't fool around with Elizabeth Olivet, who was a very formidable Italian grandmother. Steve went behind a curtain, took off his pants, and handed them to her. She took out the sewing kit from her commodious bag and mended the worn jeans until they met her standards of modesty.

All Jobs said was, "Thanks, I think we better get back to the room to see how Woz is doing."

The next day, on August 28th, the show opened. Steve Jobs had several Apple I computers running_the new Apple Basic, and he had one encased in a wooden cabinet that he was really proud of. Their exhibit attracted a lot of attention, as well it should. In this show full of 8080 computers with large cabinets, flashing lights, and colorful switches, the Apple was the lone 6502-based machine. It was a single board, yet it had its own video display and ran full BASIC. In addition it could load from a cassette faster than any other machine there. Nobody who walked anywhere near the booth failed to be buttonholed by Steve Jobs, who told them in no uncertain terms what a great thing the Apple was. He even got press coverage_ no mean feat in a show where the new SOL computer was introduced, where the Altair B dominated the largest booth, and where TDL showed the very first Z-80 CPU for the S-100 bus.

We did not get the new SOL during the show, but one was given to us at the end. When the show closed, the partners went back to California somewhat disappointed because, in spite of all the attention , they had not sold one Apple 1. Neither had I, although I had taken orders for several SOLs and a couple of Imsai systems.

The return from Atlantic City was a great letdown for the partners. Wozniak felt that he should be only working on the color version and that Jobs was keeping him from it. In fact, Woz tried to sell the idea to Processor Technology, maker of the popular SOL computers. They relied on the advice of Lee Felsenstien, who didn't think much of Apple, and turned Woz down. Then Commodore came to Jobs as a result of the Atlantic City Show and wanted to buy the company as an easy entry into the microcomputer business. Jobs asked for $100,000 and fairly big salaries for the partners. Commodore thought the asking price was ridiculous from two young men working out of a garage, and luckily for Apple the deal fell through. They were just about at the end of their resources. The dealers had not re-ordered because the Apple 1 simply did not sell. I had to make mine down below cost to get rid of them.

At this point Jobs decided that they needed help with marketing, advertising, and public relations. Asking around Silicon Valley , he was give the name of Regis McKenna as a top practitioner of these arcane arts. Steve contacted Mc Kenna for an appointment but was shunted to an employee whose job was to screen out people who might waste the company's time. Job's appearance seemed to put him in that category, but when he started to talk he was able to convince the interviewer to pass him along to Regis McKenna himself. Again, in spite of a less than qualified endorsement from Paul Terrell, McKenna saw something in the two partners and their product. He decided to take on Apple as a client.

Because he realized that the first thing Apple needed was more money, he introduced Jobs to Don Valentine, a venture capitalist. Valentine liked the idea but did not invest in Apple himself because he felt it did not offer a big enough market for him. He introduced the partners to Mike Makulla, a man who had made a fortune by investing in the Intel company, and retired at 30. Makulla saw a future in microcomputers and decided to make Apple his venture into the business. He invested money, borrowed more from a bank, and with the two partners formed Apple Computer Company.

Wozniack was a hold out for the longest time because he wanted to keep his job with Hewlett Packard and moonlight with Apple as he had been doing up to that time, but Makulla wanted a 100% commitment from both partners as a condition for his investment. The company was incorporated in January 1977 and bought out the partnership completely. Markulla brought in Michael Scott as President because he felt that neither of the partners had the skills to run a corporation, and he himself did not want to become too deeply involved. Nevertheless, he was the engine that turned a garage workshop company into a major computer corporation.

I spent the year after the Atlantic City show selling SOL computers, SWTPC computers, and developing a dealership in Alpha Micro Time Sharing computers. However, when Apple II's started to arrive they slowly built into our major line, displacing the SOL and SWTPC 6800's. The Apple II changed the entire business. No longer did solder wielding techies hang out at our store_the Apples came completely built and ready to run. The Apple disk system was priced within everyone's price range, and soon there was a lot of very useful software for it, lead by Visicalc, the most important program. Businessmen would come into the store to buy "A Visicalc Machine" and that's all they used it for. In the Apple II users, we saw a different type of enthusiast. The Apple users did not mix very well with the S-100 users, just as there is a division between the Mac users and the MS-DOS users today. In New York City, The Big Apple Club was formed just for Apple owners and met at our store. The Apple users were much more oriented toward software and graphic applications. They were more interested in what a computer did then how it did it.

Being the major Apple dealer in New York brought us a lot of business and growth, but then trouble struck The Computer Mart of New York. I had signed a very large purchase order with Apple, and I distributed the extra computers to several other Computer Mart stores, with whom I was loosely allied. We all got a good volume price from Apple, who only had to deal with me instead of five other stores. I marked the machines up 5%, for my trouble and expenses in distributing them.

This worked well for all until Apple decided to open a distribution center in Boston under control of my old competitor and friend, Dick Brown. My contract was canceled, and I was told to buy through Dick Brown. This would work no hardship on me, but my fellow Computer Mart owners in Boston, Vermont, and New Hampshire were in direct competition with Dick Brown's Computer Store, and they did not trust him to deal fairly with them. This was particularly important because there was an acute shortage of Apple disk drives, and people would buy only if they could get a disk drive. Instead of signing with Brown immediately, I tried to reach Steve Jobs to make some other arrangement to get our computers. Not only did he refuse to talk to me, but all my computer shipments were stopped.

Finally I decided my friends would have to shift for themselves, and I signed with Brown. It took some time for me to get my orders back into the pipeline, and I lost a lot of sales to other dealers in the New York area. This loss of business, coupled with the closing of Processor Technology, finally did in my business in 1979, and I left the retail computer store.

People who have read my articles often ask me if I regret refusing Steve Jobs the $10,000 investment for 10% of Apple, which is now a multi-billion dollar business.

I always answer, "No, I did not lie to Steve Jobs. Every cent I had was invested in my own store. I tried to help him in every way I could, but when I needed him he turned his back on me."

I did not see Steve Jobs for a few years after the store closed, but I heard plenty about him. Then one day my wife Dede and I were crossing Central Park West after a walk in the park. As we emerged near the Tavern On The Green we saw a party of young men and women heading for the Tavern.

All of a sudden my wife stopped and exclaimed, "My God! Steve Jobs in a three-piece suit!"

He looked at her and smiled, the very picture of sartorial perfection. "Hello, Dede, you sure know how to humble a fellow."

There was never anything humble about Steve Jobs.

Processor Technology SOL

2008-07-17T18:25:00.000-07:00

The defects of the original Altair 8800 computer helped create the supporting industry. Even after the purchaser laboriously soldered together all its parts and managed to get it working, the original Altair 8800 computer was little more than a box full of promises. It consisted of a front panel full of little switches and lights, and a metal cabinet containing a power supply. The entire computer portion was one CPU circuit board with the microprocessor chip and a memory of only 256 bytes (expandable to 1,024 bytes).
To Gary Ingram and Bob Marsh, a couple of friends from Berkeley, California, the Altair's faults were seen as their opportunity. Marsh, a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, listened to complaints at each of the club meetings and determined that one of the major problems with the Altair was the small amount of memory provided with the computer kit. The Altair's design did provide for plugging in additional memory boards, and both 1K and 2K Static Memory Boards and a 4K Dynamic Memory Board were offered by MITS. However, the 4K memory board was considered unreliable.
Marsh and Ingram decided to form a company, Processor Technology Incorporated, to produce improvements for the Altair.
The two partners were completely different. Marsh, a small good-looking man with dark hair and a thick mustache, had an outgoing personality and a good sense of humor. Gary Ingram was a long haired, reclusive ascetic. He seldom had anything to say to outsiders. Both were deeply involved with electronics. Though Marsh had dropped out of engineering school, he worked on the fringes of the industry. Ingram was employed as an engineer. The partners developed a wish-list of improved boards for the Altair.
Describing their ideas as already-completed products, they composed a magazine ad and a hand-out flier, hoping to generate funds for their enterprise. This was a common practice in those days. People read ads and would send money to buy "vaporware," products that were announced and sounded good, but would only be available "real soon now." In the case of Processor Technology, their ads reaped a harvest of checks, and the partners were able to rent Lee Felsenstien's garage in Berkeley , where they went to work to make the ads come true.
The first product Bob Marsh worked on was a 4K (4,096 bytes) static memory board. He knew 4K was needed to run the smallest version of Altair Basic, yet the most glaring defect in the Altair was the lack of reliable 4K RAM memory.
There are two kinds of memory chips used in constructing computer memories. The Read Only Memory (ROM) chip, once programmed, retains its information even though you turn off the power. However, since its memory can not easily be re-programmed, the ROM chip is only used for information that does not change.
Random Access Memory (RAM), the second type of memory chip, can easily be re-programmed, and so it is the working memory of the computer. There are two types of RAM memory chips. The most common, Dynamic Memory (DRAM) needs periodically to be given a pulse of electricity (refresh) to keep its memory alive. The alternate choice is Static Memory (SRAM), which consumes more power, but will retain its information without refresh as long as it is connected to a power source. Both DRAM and SRAM will lose information once the power is turned off.
MITS had intended to make memory expansion its first priority, but the expensive 4K dynamic memory board it created did not work well. The Altair board obtained its essential refresh pulse from the 8080 microprocessor chip by a process called "cycle stealing." The problem with this technique is that sometimes the computer chip is off doing something at a time when the memory needs to be refreshed. If this happens, the memory "forgets," and data is completely lost! To make "cycle stealing" work at all, precise timing is required.
Timing problems in the Altair 4K board were what made it defective. Bob Marsh designed the very reliable Processor Technology 4KRA Memory using static memory (SRAM) chips. It had 4,096 (4K) bytes of memory, but if you didn't need that huge amount you could buy it with only 2K, and later add the rest. The 4KRA was priced at $218 in kit form, or $280 assembled, while the defective MITS board cost $264 in kit form and $380 assembled. When 8080 computer users read the ads for the 4KRA, they flooded Processor Technology with paid-in-advance orders.
The instant success of Processor Technology's 4KRA was the catalyst that launched the company into business. Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram moved from their garage workshop into a much larger industrial facility in Emeryville , California , and were joined by Steve Dompier and Gordon French of the Homebrew Computer Club. They hired Lee Felsenstein, their former landlord, as a design consultant. The company started producing a steady stream of new products that worked with the Altair and other computers of the same basic design.
Processor Tech's Altair Mother Board
After the company's great success with the 4KRA memory, Marsh turned his attention to another acute but much simpler problem with the Altair. It badly needed a better motherboard, and MITS was not going to provide one. When you bought the computer kit, MITS only supplied a four-slot motherboard and one connector for each plug-in board ordered. If you originally bought the kit with only the Central Processing Unit (CPU) card, you only had one installed connector. When you wanted to put in a memory board, you had to disassemble the computer to solder in the 100 pins for the next connector. Most owners only went through that once. They got smart and soldered in all the remaining connectors at one time. If you wanted to expand your computer with additional plug-in boards, you had to solder in additional four-slot motherboards and connectors.
You really had to be a dedicated hobbyist to go though that kind of torture. Processor Technology designed an 18-slot motherboard and sold it for only $35. You could add Altair's full compliment of 18 connectors (at a cost of $15 each) all at one time. Word of this improvement quickly spread among Altair owners, and they bought all the boards Processor Technology could make.
The 2K ROM Board
Processor Technology offered another product they thought was needed for the Altair or Imsai, a 2K ROM board. Loaded with programmed Electrically Programmed read-only Memory (EPROM) chips, this board allowed the user to start his computer without flipping countless front panel switches. The board was not much of a success. It came without the EPROMS, which were difficult to buy and once bought were beyond the programming ability of most computer hobbyists. In addition, the computer hobbyists liked to flip the front panel switches. It was part of the mystique of the computer they were unwilling to share with the casual user.
Almost Free Software
Processor Technology proposed to supply its customers with "almost free software." For only $15, it made Software Package #1 available, containing an assembler, a text editor, and the system executive programs. The utility programs in this package made it possible for the hobbyists to develop applications using the additional memory now available. Processor Tech also promised a low cost version of BASIC, a promise that caused them a lot of trouble and was not kept for about a year.
Computer Mart Becomes a Dealer
Back in New York , I became the Storekeeper (the title I gave myself) of The Computer Mart of New York. Noticing a small ad for Processor Technology in Popular Electronics, I asked Les Solomon, Technical Director of the magazine, about the company. Les knew all the members of Processor Technology and recommended I do business with them. He confided to me that, in addition to the products advertised, new devices were being developed that he said would "blow you away."
When I expressed interest in becoming a Processor Technology dealer, Les called Bob Marsh from my store and arranged for my dealership. As with IMSAI, my main supplier, the financial arrangements were simple. My order was paid for with cash-in-advance, so the company could use my money to buy the parts to fill the order. I got most of the advanced cash from customers. They were so anxious to get the boards, they were willing to pay at least 2/3 of the price up front just to be placed on my delivery list. Of course, if the wait was too long, I had to refund the money. But often, no matter how long the wait, customers chose to leave their deposits rather than take a chance on being dropped from the list.
The best part of becoming a Processor Technology dealer was that it greatly expanded my customer base. Ed Roberts, head of MITS, would not let his dealers sell any products that competed with Altair. My philosophy was directly opposite. My store was the very first to sell more than one brand of computer, and my policy was to carry all kinds of computers and accessories. Since I could not sell Altairs, the people who owned them never had occasion to come into my store. However, with the Processor Technology line Altair owners flocked in to shop for the products they read about in the magazines. They bought Processor Tech boards from me as well as chips, connectors, software, books, and magazines.
Two sorely-needed new Processor Tech products revealed to me by Les Solomon were an input/output board and a Video Display Module. Until this time the difficult job of getting information into, or out of, the microcomputers required separate parallel and serial interface boards.
At that time, the main input/output device used with big computers, minicomputers, and microcomputers was the Teletyper. This wonderful but noisy machine was both a keyboard-input terminal and an output printer. In addition, many Teletyper models included a paper tape punch which could be used as the computer's memory storage.
Connected to a Teletyper, your computer could "dump" the program or data in its memory by punching a pattern of holes into a paper tape. These paper punches could also duplicate their tapes. As many copies as required could be made, and the paper tape could then be rolled or folded up and stored in a drawer. In the early days, punched paper tapes became the principal method of distributing software, mainly because there was no standard for cassette tape.
For the microcomputer user, the main problem with the Teletyper was its cost. The Teletype Corporation sold only to large companies and then only on a yearly contract. New machines cost about $1,800 (three times as much as the microcomputers) and were very hard to get. On the re-sale (gray) market, "used" machines (really, new ones) were sold for as much as $2,500 and re-built ones for about $1,200. Computer hobbyists tried to find old, obsolete models to repair and put back into service, but they were scarce.
Even if you had a Teletyper, you still needed a serial interface board to connect it to the computer. The 3P+S Interface board from Processor Technology had three parallel ports (3P) for connection of various devices such as keyboards, printers, and plotting boards. The 3P+S board also had a serial port (+S) for connection of any kind of Teletyper, no matter how old it was. This was possible because the 3P+S had hundreds of options, which you could select by installing various jumper wire combinations. No matter what printers, terminals or other I/O devices you added in the future, you would never outgrow the 3P+S.
In an effort to provide machines for Altair users, MITS made a deal with Teletype Corporation. For $1,500, MITS sold a brand new Teletyper machine that would only work with their Altair I/O board. Within a few months, the hardware hackers found a way to interface the Altair/ Teletyper machine with a 3P+S board. The information quickly became available to all users through the magazines and computer clubs, rapid conduits for all new breakthrough information. Selling for only $125 in kit form, the 3P+S became Processor Technology's best seller.
The VDM-1 Video Display Module
In 1975, using a video terminal instead of a printing terminal for computers was a relatively new idea. The video terminals were sometimes called "glass teletypes." They were expensive. The price of a video terminal was many times the cost of a personal computer, so they were only used for large computers
In September of 1973, two years before the Altair appeared, Radio Electronics Magazine had published an article, "The TV Typewriter" by Don Lancaster, describing how to build a crude video device. This device used a TV screen to display the characters which had been typed on a keyboard. Lancaster expanded the article into The TV Typewriter Cookbook, a book written to help hobbyists build their own video terminals. The South West Technical Products CT-1024 Terminal kit, described in the previous chapter, was very difficult to connect to an Altair or IMSAI.
Before working for Processor Technology, Lee Felsenstein had been attempting to build a video-operated "Tom Swift Terminal." Therefore, Marsh and Ingram chose Lee as the person to build the plug-in video terminal board needed by the Altair.
The Processor Technology VDM-1, as it was called, was advertised for sale in the first issue of Byte in September of 1975. Delivery was promised 3 weeks after receipt of order. Processor Technology, like all the early computer manufacturers, underestimated the development time required for a proposed product. The VDM-1 was not actually available until the fall of 1976, and even then delivery might take up to 60 days after order.
When the VDM-1 finally was delivered, it did everything promised. You could connect a keyboard to the computer through the 3P+S Board, plug-in your VDM-1, connect it to a video monitor, and your computer became its own video terminal. The VDM-1 also ran one of the first action video games. Developed by Steve Dompier, Target shot arrows at targets moving across the screen.
The video board was almost too good to be true, with only a few minor faults. A real video display terminal usually had 80 characters displayed across the screen and could show 24 lines of text. The VDM could display only 64 characters on each line, and there were only 16 lines of text. A real video display terminal was made, with special cathode ray tubes (CRT's) and video circuits designed for that specific purpose. Such CRTs were not available for use with the VDM-1. You had to use either video monitors designed for closed circuit television, or converted TV sets. In TV, the picture is "painted" on the face of the tube by a stream of electrons. It "paints" (scans) one line at a time. At the end of the line, the electron stream is blanked out and is returned to the next line. Then it scans across the tube again. This TV scan rate, which permitted only time enough to display 64 characters by 16 lines, was used as the basis for the VDM-1 design. Since typing margins are usually set at least 5 to 10 characters from the edge of the paper, 64 characters proved to be satisfactory for word processing. The VDM-1 was such a wonderful board that users forgot its shortcomings. It became another best seller for Processor Technology.
The Time of The SOL
The VDM-1 completed the full line of expansion boards for the Altair/Imsai computers. Processor Technology now proposed to write an article describing how to build a video terminal for the Altair. Popular Electronics Magazine agreed to publish the article and show the completed terminal on the cover, provided it was ready for photography within 30 days. Bob Marsh hoped a cover story would assure immediate success for the new product, so he challenged Lee Felsenstein to undertake the task. Using the same circuits Processor Tech perfected for their earlier boards, Lee set to work to meet the deadline. His final design went further than the requirements for a video terminal. He developed a complete new computer. This was a different kind of a computer, one designed not for hobbyists and hackers but for business people who needed useful applications. This was to be a machine not relegated to a workroom or the basement, but a computer that could proudly claim a place in a living room or a private office. The new machine would look somewhat like a modern blue typewriter with handsome walnut side panels and an excellent keyboard.
A friend of Bob Marsh could supply the walnut side panels for the case, if the computer was designed low enough to fit them. The height problem was solved by mounting the expansion boards horizontally rather than vertically. With only room in the case for five boards, most of the computer functions, including the CPU, video, I/O ports, and cassette interface, were mounted on a single large PC board positioned on the bottom of the computer.
Felsenstein's design included a completely new idea, the "personality module." This was a ROM containing various types of system software which changed the capability of the computer. It could have a standard operating system, an intelligent text editing system, or a special operating system designed for a specific job. To effect a change in personality, all you had to do was plug-in the appropriate module.
The stripped-down terminal version Lee designed for the magazine article had a personality module, but only had limited RAM memory. It was still more intelligent than most "glass teletypes," so it was called The SOL Intelligent Terminal.
The full version was to come in two styles. The less expensive one had a simple keyboard and only one slot for expansion. It was called The SOL-10, and very few were ever built. The second model was a complete computer with an excellent keyboard and a card cage with five slots. It was called The SOL-20, and provided enough memory for general computer applications.
When the prototype was complete, the Processor Technology crew headed for New York City to demonstrate it to Les Solomon. The machine had been named The SOL, in his honor.
When Bob Marsh revealed the name to me, I called Les and joked, "They're naming the new machine after you_The LES Intelligent Terminal!"
Solomon was flattered by the honor in spite of the fact that when Bob Marsh and Lee Felsenstein arrived with the computer, it did not work. It took two days of intensive troubleshooting in Les's basement workshop to bring the SOL to life.
The article in Popular Electronics offered a kit version at a very low price and free schematics to all who asked. Processor Technology, deluged with orders, took almost a year to fill them. The SOL-20, the full working computer, was introduced at the Personal Computing '76 show in Atlantic City . PC '76 was the first big computer show ever held, and SOL-20 was the hit of the show.
My store was selected to be one of the first dealerships to get the SOL. We were a large, well-established New York City store, and many influential business and financial people were our customers. With an eye to attracting additional financing for future growth, Processor Technology wanted the SOL-20 to make a good impression. The Altair and Imsai computers had mainly been sold as kits. The SOL was the first personal computer to only be sold as a factory-built computer. There was one problem, however. The computers I received were "dead on arrival."
I immediately called the factory for repair instructions.
"Can you wait a few days?" Bob Marsh asked me.
"Sure," I answered. "What's going to happen? Magic?"
Three days later, Lee Felsenstein walked into the Computer Mart and asked, "Where are those dead computers?"
A fully operative SOL was important enough to put the designer on a plane for the first service call. From that time on, all computers were carefully tested before shipment. We never again received a SOL that did not work right out of the box. In fact, the SOL became known as the most reliable machine on the market. By 1977, SOL was the dominant personal computer in the industry and was the principal product in my store.
In the spring of 1977, Processor Technology called a "mandatory" dealer's meeting at its headquarters in Emeryville, and I traveled to San Francisco to attend. It turned out to be an important meeting for me as well as for Processor Technology. Here, I met other dealers from all over the United States and made contacts that proved to be of great advantage for future business. John French, owner of the Computer Mart of Los Angeles, was a telephone acquaintance, but after this meeting we became close friends and business associates.
While at the meeting, I received several urgent calls from Steve Jobs asking me to meet him in his garage "factory." He was so insistent that I took time out to meet him and Steve Wozniak. What happened there is the subject of another chapter, but two years from that meeting Apple Computer had replaced Processor Technology as leaders of the industry.
At the Processor Technology meeting, Bob Marsh described the company's plans to introduce the Diablo disk system. This disk system, which was to sell for $1,200, was exactly what the dealers needed. The SOL computer was selling to business people more than home users, and cassettes were not appropriate for storing business programs and data. Gary Ingram made one of his rare appearances, and demonstrated the disk system and the PTDOS operating system. The dealers were also promised larger memory boards and a new color video board.
Business was so good that Processor Technology announced it would no longer require cash in advance. Qualified dealers could now place orders and pay COD. Thirty-day credit terms were promised in the near future. Dealers had to submit an order every three months, and for larger orders there would be an increasing scale of discounts. We all left Emeryville with a feeling of confidence that both Processor Technology and our dealerships were well on the road to legitimacy, leaving behind the "hobbyists" stigma and emerging as a real computer business.
When I returned to New York with the news of the disk system, several of my customers started developing business software for the SOL. These included a lawyer's time accounting system, a church collection accounting system, and an income tax preparation program.
But the picture wasn't quite as rosy as it seemed for Processor Technology. The Diablo Company, whose main business was daisy wheel printers, was purchased by Xerox Corporation, and the development of Diablo's floppy disk drives was stopped. Most of Processor Technology's work on the floppy disk drive system was lost. They were back to square one using cassette tape storage.
Marsh and Ingram's answer to this problem was to adopt a new disk drive just coming on the market, the Persci 270. A new and untried device, it drove two 8-inch floppy disks with one motor. The basic idea was to obtain twice the disk storage at less than the price of two drives. The new Processor Technology floppy disk system, called Helios, consisted of a cabinet containing the Persci 270 (with two drives in one assembly), the power supply and cables. The PTDOS disk operating system was included. The cost, $1,895, was later raised to $2,300.
For a while Processor Technology continued to grow, and the dealers prospered. Then Radio Shack came out with its TRS-80 Model I at half the price of the SOL. They eventually developed a disk drive and the TRSDOS operating system. The Apple II appeared and quickly became very popular. The Apple II sold for much less than the SOL, could do graphics in color, and had an ever growing library of software. Its drawbacks were a 40-column screen and the lack of upper/lower case characters. In spite of these drawbacks, when Steve Wozniak developed an inexpensive and reliable floppy disk drive for the Apple II, it soon outsold the SOL.
At Processor Technology, the partners were mesmerized by the success of their company. They became aloof, less available to the dealers, and appeared not to be interested in their problems. Lee Felsenstein urged them to improve their products, but, except for larger memory boards, no new products were under development, and no attempt was made to upgrade the SOL to keep it ahead of its rivals. The promised color video board was never delivered and neither was the promised improved BASIC. Though Chuck Grant and Mark Greenberg, owners of North Star Computers, had been under contract to Processor Technology to develop a version of BASIC for the SOL, North Star, claiming that their agreement was non-exclusive, sold it to other computer manufacturers. Processor Technology was under the impression that the BASIC was exclusively theirs, sued, and lost the case after a long litigation that hurt both companies.
In spite of the growing problems, Processor Technology moved south to a much larger plant in Pleasanton , California . There, in big offices with windows overlooking the countryside, the partners became even more distant from the heart of the industry and their dealers. They talked more to outside financiers about investors and the possibility of going public, and less to the people who sold and used the SOL.
Meanwhile, North Star developed a new, low-cost, mini-floppy disk drive system that would work with the SOL. Coming with its own operating system, the disk cost less than half the price of the Helios.
Back in New York , Larry Alcoff, a young man interested in personal computers, had undertaken to make the CP/M operating system (now an industry standard) run on the new inexpensive North Star disk drives.
When he started, Larry did not realize he had undertaken a tremendous task. He was a wealthy young man who hung out first at my computer store, and then at Bob Radcliffe's Hoboken Computer Works. Radcliffe, a former Bell Labs engineer, urged Larry to try this difficult job as a way of learning about programming and computer hardware at the same time. As Larry progressed with Bob's help, it became apparent that the job would succeed.
To sell the product, Larry first sold "program patches" to CP/M owners that allowed them to run their CP/M software on the North Star 5 1/2" drives. Then, at the suggestion of Tony Gold, who ran the CP/M Users Group, Tony and Larry formed a business called Lifeboat Associates because they were "all in the same boat." The partners licensed CP/M from Digital Research Incorporated and produced a new North Star 5 1/2" Drive version of CP/M. If Processor Technology had adopted the North Star floppy disk system, it might have avoided additional trouble. However, because of the past legal problems, the partners refused to even consider it. They kept trying to sell the Helios disk system to their dealers. Problems with Helios started to surface almost at once. Although much faster than most of the other 8-inch disk drives being sold, the Persci 270 was very sensitive, difficult to keep in alignment, and if moved, might lose alignment and stop working. Unfortunately, these problems only surfaced after Processor Technology spent thousands on development and manufacture, and had shipped the Helios to several dealers. It was too late to switch to another drive.
In addition, many people, including the dealers, urged Marsh and Ingram to abandon PTDOS, their proprietary operating system, and adopt CP/M. The partners refused to listen, certain that their system would be much better.
When their pleas and recommendations went unheeded, the dealers became less and less interested in the Helios. They could sell the North Star disk drives and ignore the undependable, expensive Helios. For the next year most of the dealers sold SOL computers with North Star disk drives and CP/M from Lifeboat. This made business applications possible. If you included a daisy wheel printer and either WordStar or Michael Shrayer's Electric Pencil, the SOL became an efficient word processing system that only cost $3,500. In those days, an equivalent dedicated word processing system cost $10,000. Soon other disk drive systems made by George Morrow, Micromation and Micropolis came on the market and could also be used with the SOL and CP/M.
Thus, SOL dealers who ignored Processor Tech's Helios disk and its oddball software prospered, but dealers who sold the Helios found themselves in trouble because of constant failures. In my case, one of the few Helios I sold resulted in a lawsuit by my customer against Processor Technology, one of many such cases throughout the country. Until suit was brought, Helios customers could not even get the principals at Processor Tech to discuss the problem. Marsh and Ingram would listen to no one.
As if the problems with the Helios drives were not bad enough, Processor Technology finally came out with a new line of dynamic 32K and 64K memory boards. These boards used new dynamic memory chips rather than the static memory used in the original Processor Technology memory boards. The required refresh cycles for the dynamic memory chips were generated on the board itself. This procedure supposedly made them "safe" from the problems associated with the original "cycle stealing" dynamic memory boards. But all at once, all over the country, these new memory boards began to fail. At first, Processor Tech replaced the defective boards, but the problem soon became overwhelming. When dealers sent in defective memory boards for replacement, none were returned.
Relationships with the dealers became more strained. It became harder and harder to communicate problems to the partners, yet people on the lower level were not given the power to make decisions.
To keep my dealership, Processor Technology required that I send in an order every three months, but, since I (and other dealers) were selling more and more Apple II's and less SOLs, our inventory of SOL boards and computers grew until it reached almost $100,000. I became very concerned and tried to talk to the company about my problem. I knew I couldn't afford to buy any more, and I wanted to run a sale to convert this excess inventory into much-needed cash. When the ordering period came, I declined to order anything, and Processor Tech pulled my dealership. In answer to this, I prepared an ad for Byte and several other magazines saying "SO LONG SOL" and announcing a clearance sale at 50% off. When Processor Technology heard about it, the partners called and begged me to take back my dealership.
Gary Ingram himself said, "It all was a terrible mistake. Please don't drop the line."
They would help me reduce my inventory by selling it to other dealers. Because of our close relationship in the past, I agreed and canceled the ads. But my problems were only typical of the trouble at Processor Technology. The accumulated mistakes and the unresolved problems, compounded by the inaccessibility of the owners, proved to be overwhelming. On May 14th, 1979 , Processor Technology closed its doors forever. They did not declare bankruptcy, they just closed. I was stuck with almost $100,000 worth of inventory that I had to liquidate.
Lee Felsenstein went on to design the Osborne 1 Computer, Bob Marsh went into business building mini floppy disk drives for the Osborne Computers, and Gary Ingram completely disappeared from the industry. But the thousands of SOL computers did not disappear; they survived and were used for years by their owners until they could not be maintained any longer.

IMSAI 8800

2008-07-17T18:23:00.000-07:00

Although the MITS Altair 8800 was the first practical personal microcomputer and started the industry, credit for spreading the personal computer revolution must go to another company_IMS Associates and its product, the Imsai 8080 computer. While it was not strictly a clone of the Altair, this machine adopted the bus structure of the Altair and used interchangeable plug-in circuit boards. This commonality and the availability of the Imsai assured the dominance of the Altair (S-100) Bus.

IMS Associates was started by William Millard as a computer consulting company, whose most important consulting project was the development of a computer system for an automobile dealer. In an effort to reduce costs, Millard became interested in the new microprocessor chips being manufactured by Intel, and the possibility of networking many of them into a powerful computer system he called Hypercube.

When the Altair article broke in Popular Electronics, Millard and his associates tried to order some Altairs to try out this idea. They immediately ran into two problems. First, MITS wanted payment in advance, and second, they couldn't promise to deliver the order for at least 90 days. IMS Associates couldn't get the money unless they could show their customer that they had a solution to the problem, and they couldn't wait 90 days. Millard did manage to borrow an Altair to examine, and he and his associates became convinced that such a microcomputer represented the best solution to their problem, and the Altair 8800 was not a commercial piece of equipment by any criteria. Since the only other choice they had was a much more expensive minicomputer, with an even longer delivery time, they decided to build a copy of the Altair. Having made the decision to build their own 8080 computer, IMS Associates decided to correct the obvious defects of the Altair and build a rugged commercial grade machine.

The most glaring defect of the Altair was the location of the expansion motherboards. MITS used a standard Optima case to house the computer, and its shape dictated the mounting position of the motherboards. This in turn caused the board mounting connectors to face the side of the cabinet. As a result, the connections from the front panel to the motherboard required a large cable. In addition to making the computer kit harder to build, this cable was a potential source of trouble over the life of the computer. IMS Associates designed their own cabinet and made it much deeper than wide. This allowed the Imsai to be made with the motherboard perpendicular to the front panel so that the front panel itself could be plugged into the first connector on the motherboard. This eliminated the large connecting cable.

The front panel of the Altair used small toggle switches to program the computer in binary machine language (ones and zeros were represented by switches "on" or "off".) The Imsai used the same arrangement but replaced the Altair's toggle switches with heavy commercial-grade "paddle" switches. The plastic switch "paddles" were colored red or blue. Mounted above the paddle switches was a colorful plastic panel with the indicator lights showing through. The name IMSAI 8080 was displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the panel. To emphasize that this indeed was a commercial-grade computer, the heavy aluminum cover was painted what was then called "IBM Blue." In all, the Imsai design was very impressive and professional.

Once the Imsai cover was removed, you could see that the obvious and most impressive difference between the Altair and the Imsai was the power supply. The Altair used a power supply rated at 8-amps and constructed of radio grade components. This was thought to be more than adequate for the original design of the computer, but not for an expanded system. (MITS later had to upgrade the power supply to allow for growth.) The Imsai power supply, on the other hand, came equipped with a massive transformer and very large computer-grade capacitors. The standard model was rated at 20 amps, and for a small upgrade fee you could get a huge 30-amp supply. This big power supply could deliver 30 amps at 5 volts and 3 amps at + - 16 volts. Having a large power supply was an advantage because all the S-100 Bus computers used un-regulated power supplies with power regulators located on each individual circuit board. One of the most common causes of failure in S-100 computers was failure of the on-board power regulators. The use of massive transformers and capacitors provided less electrical fluctuation and longer life for the power regulators. In addition, larger power supplies provide a reserve for later expansion.

For the computer owner, selection of motherboards for the Imsai was very important. The standard kit or assembled unit only came with a 6-slot motherboard (2 more than the Altair), but only two connectors. To expand the system, additional connectors and 4-slot motherboards had to be added to the computer. Every time you added a connector, you had to carefully solder 100 connector pins to the board. Whenever a motherboard section was added, 100 wires had to be added. This required making 200 solder connections, and every solder connection was a potential source of trouble. The Altair connectors were made with a different pin spacing than the standard 0.125-inch Texas Instruments connectors used by Imsai. You could plug the same circuit board into either type of connector, but the pins that went into the motherboard were spaced differently. The Imsai connectors cost from $7 to $10 while the Altair connectors cost $15 each and were harder to get.

Imsai offered a 22-slot motherboard as a $52 option, when you ordered it with the computer. This was the solution to the motherboard problem. If you installed with at least 10 connectors, additional soldering seldom had to be done. Word got around very fast, and almost everybody ordered the Imsai with 22-slot motherboards and 10 connectors.

Like the Altair, the Imsai kit only came with the front panel board and the CPU board. No memory or input/output board was provided. However, by the time the Imsai was being shipped, there were several choices of memory boards available. Imsai made an excellent 4K Static RAM board for $139 in kit form. Processor Technology had both 4K and 8K Static Ram boards available, and even MITS had 8K Ram boards and a new 4K Ram board that worked.

You really needed about 16K of memory to load BASIC and generate programs with usable data. You also had to have a working Input/Output (I/O) board to get things in or out of the computer. I/O boards came in either serial or parallel form, or both. One of the most popular I/O boards was the 3P+S from Processor Technology, which had both forms of I/O on one board. Imsai advertised that they were developing a super I/O board called the Multiple I/O (MIO) Board, but it never seemed to come out and was referred to as the "Missing I/O Board."

One most important thing that MITS had over Imsai was the BASIC written by Bill Gates of Microsoft, which was very important because lack of a good BASIC made operation very difficult.

Imsai had little software capability. The only software they supplied Imsai was a modified version of the Software #1 package, written for Processor Technology and placed in the public domain. This was delivered on a paper tape and required 8K of memory. The software consisted of a executive program, including a text editor and an assembler program for assembly language. To use it, you had to have a teletype tape reader. The procedure was not simple. First, you used the computer's front panel switches to load in a bootstrap loader program, one byte at a time.

Once the loader was in memory, you could start the tape reader and load the executive program from the tape. Now, you could use the keyboard on the teletype to write an assembly program, and the executive program could assemble it. If that worked, the result was object code for your program, and it could be stored in RAM memory. If you had enough memory, you could run your program. Then if everything ran okay, you could store your program using the punch on the teletype to make a new paper tape. The next time you wanted to run the program, all you had to do was load the object code paper tape back into memory and there you were. Simple! This was not exactly what we today call "user friendly," and this is why having a higher level language like BASIC was so important.

Imsai advertised both 4K and 8K BASIC but noted that this was under development and would be available "real soon now." Imsai owners did not wait; they got Altair (Microsoft) BASIC by hook or by crook (mostly by buying it as a group and sharing it among themselves.) Altair BASIC soon became the standard language for personal computers even before Microsoft got out of its restrictive agreement with Altair.

In spite of its usefulness, the Teletype as an I/O device, printer, and mass storage device was too expensive, too hard to get, and too hard to use. The audio cassette interface was a much better choice. Tape recorders were low in cost and easy to use. The problem was that there was no standard interface, and tapes made with one interface could not be read by another. The industry held a meeting in Kansas City to develop a cassette tape standard, but few adhered to it. Finally, because it worked the best, the Tarbell Cassette Interface became a de facto standard for S-100 computers, except for notable exceptions like MITS and Processor Technology's SOL. Cassette tape took over I/O functions from the paper tape punch and reader until floppy disks became commonplace. Video terminals and low cost printers also became available for microcomputers.

IBM had developed the floppy disk to load software, and Altair, Imsai, and other companies were working to adapt it for use on microcomputers. The development of floppy disks and disk operating systems, plus cheap RAM memory, opened up the industry for really useful software, and completed the transition from hobbyist's toys to really useful computer systems.

Because of component board interchangeability, almost no one ran a complete Imsai Computer System. The computer itself might be an Imsai with its 8080 CPU, but even that was likely to be a Z80 CPU from TDL, or Cromemco. The memory could come from any of two dozen manufacturers. Seals Memory were popular 8K boards as were Vector Graphic, IMS (not related to Imsai), and Processor Technology. In 16K memory boards, Cromemco and Processor Technology were well thought of, as were TDL, Seals, IMS, and a few others. The I/O board was most likely to be a 3P+S from Processor Technology although George Morrow made a popular one and some people liked the Vector Graphic. The computer terminal was likely to be a Adam 3A or a Hazeltine 1500. Many users saved money, and in place of a separate video terminal, installed a Processor Technology Video Display Module (VDM) and a keyboard. With this combination, they used the computer itself as a terminal.

For data and program storage, they often used the Tarbell Cassette Interface before the advent of the floppy disk drive. Imsai's first attempt at a "smart" floppy disk drive was a total failure. Later, various disk drives from MITS, Pertec Persi, North Star, George Morrow, Micromation, and Cromemco were installed in Imsai computers. Imsai finally did manage to come out with their own working floppy disk unit. At first, all the floppy disks were 8-inch units and were very expensive. When the 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives came out, many computer owners who had not been able to afford disk drives purchased them from Pertec, North Star, and other companies.

One very important thing that Imsai did to advance the use of floppy disks was to license the best disk operating system, later to be known as CP/M. In fact, it was money from the Imsai license that encouraged Gary Killdal to form Digital Research Incorporated and to get into the CP/M operating system business.

While Imsai never became a successful systems house as did Cromemco and others, the Imsai 8080 with its massive power supply and 22-slot chassis was a foundation for almost any 8080 or Z-80 system you could think of. Even Alpha Micro Systems used the Imsai for its first 16-bit multi-user systems.

From IMS Associates to IMSAI Incorporated

The company that developed the Imsai was very different from the company which invented the MITS Altair. Ed Roberts of MITS was a technical person who was propelled into the leadership of a rapidly expanding computer company. Bill Millard, on the other hand, was an entrepreneur who envisioned the growth of his company into a vast computer utility. He was a believer in the self-improvement techniques developed by Werner Erhard, called "EST," which he attempted to apply to all situations. EST convinced him that once he had made up his mind to do something it was as good as done. He surrounded himself with people who had "taken the training," and this was a big factor in the accomplishment of bringing the Imsai to market in record time. It was also a factor in the failure to test equipment before releasing it to the market, and the inability to see changes in the market as the technology advanced. Fortunately for Imsai, in addition to Millard and his "ESTheads" the company also had the services of some of the best sales and marketing executives in the industry, including Ed Faber, who built both Imsai and Computerland, and Seymour Rubenstein, who founded MicroPro the owner of WordStar software.

It was said that MITS was an engineering company who did not know how to build and market their products. Imsai, on the other hand, was a marketing company who developed one brilliant product and overexploited it. From the Imsai 8080 on, they never knew the difference between a prototype and a production model, and never really had another successful computer.

The Life and Death of Imsai

When the Imsai 8080 was in development at IMS Associates, it looked like the company would run out of money before the computer was completed. As a last resort, Millard placed an ad in Popular Electronics Magazine, describing the computer and offering it for sale as a kit. The ploy worked beyond their wildest dreams. The computer hunger, fed by the Altair articles and the inability of MITS to deliver, impelled people to send in checks for the Imsai 8080 merely from the description in the small ads. Millard used some of the money to prepare a professional ad campaign and place ads in Byte and all the other computer magazines now appearing. The stream of checks grew to a flood and people started to inquire about becoming dealers.

As owner of the Computer Mart of New York, which was about to open, I was one of the first people to contact IMS Associates. They were very interested in selling in volume to dealers, but they had priced the kits at $439, a price too low to provide for dealer discounts. Quickly they raised the price to $499 and allowed a discount of only 15% for orders of 10 or more computers. This was still not enough margin to allow a dealer to make a profit after paying his overhead, considering the small quantity we could sell. Then Ed Faber came up with a scheme that benefited both the company and the dealers. He proposed that if we dealers could pay for the computers in advance, we could get another 5% and IMS would pay the shipping cost. For me that was the clincher; I sent off my check and prayed that IMS Associates would make delivery on time. Little did I know that I would get priority because Millard and Faber wanted their computers on sale in New York where they were trying to raise capital.

Back in San Leandro, the people in IMS Associates went to work to build their first 50 kits to make the initial shipments. By December 1975, they had shipped the first lot and were at work on the second batch of 250 kits. Ten of these were mine, and never had I sweated out anything more than the arrival of those computers. I had exactly one complete computer, one partial kit for the Sphere computer, ten video monitors, one teletype, a lot of books, assorted parts, chips, and connectors to open a computer store with. We hoped to open March 1, 1976, but in the middle of January five of my Imsais arrived and we couldn't wait to open. Not convinced that we would ever make it, I had been looking for work and had contracted to write a manual for the Warner Communications Timesharing Service. We actually opened on New York's Fifth Avenue in back of Polk's Hobby Department Store in February 1976 and started immediately selling Imsais.

Ed Faber quickly saw the potential of the computer stores and took IMS Associates (now called Imsai ) out of the direct sales business. Instead, he developed a plan where a dealer had to commit to only 25 computers a year and put up a deposit of $2,500. The discount was put at 25%, and Imsai would ship on a C.O.D. basis rather than requiring cash in advance. For us established dealers, it was a great help. However, under this plan dealers sprouted all over the place, in garages, lofts, and hardware stores. In addition, the mail order discount dealers appeared, and people started to bring in kits they had bought by mail but couldn't put together.

At the first big computer show held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on the weekend of August 27, 1976, Imsai was not an exhibitor although MITS and every other company was showing their products. However Ed Faber walked through the show like a king. The truth was that there more Imsai computers than any other make. Every retailer had Imsais, as well as people selling boards and peripherals. In addition there were heaps of Imsais piled up and marked with bargain prices for sale at the show. Although MITS was the biggest exhibitor at the show and they introduced the new Altair B model, Imsai got the greatest attention

However, I was one of the few dealers not showing Imsai computers. Instead I had a brand new computer made on a single board. It did not need a teletype because it had its own video output to a TV set. It had a very fast cassette interface for data storage, and it had its own version of BASIC that came with the computer. It was called The Apple and it was being shown in my booth by two young men from California, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The Apple proved to be one of the hits of the show. In addition to the Apple, the show introduced the new Processor Technology SOL, the new Cromemco, and the TDL Z-80 CPU board for the S-100 Bus.

Although we did not realize it at this show, the handwriting was on the wall for the Imsai 8080 as well as the Altair. The new generation of computers was already here, and within a year the SOL became my biggest seller, followed by the Apple II a year later.

Imsai as a company tried to introduce several new products as an upgrade to the 8080. One was the "smart disk drive mentioned previously. It was a single sided 8-inch floppy disk drive originally set for introduction in 1976. The unit was released and shipped before it was completely tested, and it proved to have all kinds of design problems. When it did work for any length of time, it grew very hot and generated heat to distort the diskettes. It quickly became known as "The Imsai Pizza Oven" and was quickly withdrawn from the market. The next version took over a year to complete, although it was offered in the Imsai catalog.

Another product launched with an intensive advertising campaign was the Imsai 8048 Control Computer. This was a single board computer designed to control all kinds of electrical devices. The 8048 computer worked, but priced at $200 to $400 it found no market. Other devices such as the Commodore KIM-1 were much more versatile and cost only half as much.

In addition to the declining market for Imsai 8080 computers, and the lack of follow-on products, there were other problems in the Imsai Corporation. Bill Millard had decided that his future was to be in selling computers rather than manufacturing them. A man named John Martin had brought him the idea of setting up a franchise computer business to be called Computer Shack. Martin had actually copied the idea from Paul Terral's Byte Shops, but had added some ideas from his experience in the franchise muffler business. Millard incorporated The Computer Shack franchise business, put Ed Faber in charge, and started to sell franchises.

The new business caught the crest of the wave of interest in computer stores and quickly became a major force in the industry. The only setback was caused by Radio Shack, which caused a name change to Computerland. The Computerland stores carried Imsai computers but they also sold Apple, North Star, and Cromemco. In fact, the Imsai 8080 became one of the less popular computers in the stores.

Determined to dominate both the retail franchise and manufacturing ends of the computer business, Millard forced his Imsai division to produce a desk top business computer called the VDP-80. This was an all-in-one machine with the video monitor, keyboard, disk drives, and computer, all in one cabinet. Millard had the cabinet built in Europe with an eye to exterior design and no consideration given to the requirements for the internal components. The new machine was plagued with problems and in addition had an unproven dual floppy disk drive made by Persci. This drive was almost impossible to keep in alignment under the most favorable conditions. In the furnace inside the VDP-80, it refused to run properly. Although intensive advertising sold this computer, Imsai could not afford to keep up their warranty. There was a quick re-design installing 5 1/4-inch drives to replace the 8-inch Perscis and changing the name to VDP-40. However, the damage had been done. The Computer Mart of New York refused to sell the VDP-80 and gave up the Imsai dealership, which had become unimportant anyway.

Millard had stripped Imsai of all its resources and put them into Computerland. Bankruptcy quickly followed for Imsai. While Computerland went on to become the most important retailer of Apple and IBM PCs, the foundation crumbled and Imsai disappeared. Many of the assets of Imsai, including the rights to the name, were bought by Fisher-Fitas, a former sub-contractor to Imsai. They continued the manufacture of the original rugged 8080 machines until the parts ran out and then the Imsai 8080 became history.

Computerland stores prospered as the primary retailer of IBM computers but, when IBM abandoned the ISA bus and the clone business started, they fell on hard times. The franchisers joined in a bitter legal battle with Millard and became independent of his control.

SOUTH WEST TECHNICAL PRODUCTS M6800

2008-07-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

South West Technical Products (SWTPC) was the most unusual of the early personal computer companies. First, it lasted the longest of all the pioneers, and second, it existed before the start of the personal computer age and contributed as much as MITS or Imsai in establishing it. In addition, it was always owned by one man, Dan Meyer, whose personality and ideas determined the products it made and the way it did business. STWPC was also unique in that it made a complete line of computers, peripherals, and software, and made most of the parts in its own factory.
South West established its own unique bus architecture, the SS-50 Bus, which came to be used by several other manufacturers. In spite of this, it's a safe bet that most of my readers have never heard of South West Technical Products.
One day, a tall young man came into the store and asked, "Do you have any SWITS?"
Kelvin Smith, my manager, not knowing what was meant more than half the time when the computer nuts asked something, repeated, "Stan, got any Swits?"
So I came out of the back room and asked the kid, "What's Swits?"
"I mean South West Technical Products M6800 Computers, SWITS!" he replied.
"Well, no, but I have Sphere 6800 computers."
"Junk," the kid answered. "How can you call this a computer store if you don't have South West?"
"Go on. Beat it," I snarled. I was tired of being told off because I didn't have everything advertised in Byte!
He left.
Sometime later, I went to a meeting of the Amateur Computer Club of New Jersey, and a 14-year old named Tod Loofbrourrow showed a computer he had built. It was a small black box with no front panel, and it looked a little like a audio power amplifier.
I was finally seeing a "Swits!"
The demo was astounding. The computer worked, ran software, and powered a teletype. I was impressed. When I returned to New York, I spoke with Leslie Solomon, Technical Director of Popular Electronics Magazine, about it.
"Sure, SWTPC is one of our oldest kit makers, and Dan Myers the owner is a great guy. You ought to sell his computers."
So I called South West in San Antonio, Texas.
"Mr. Myers," I said, "I'd like to sell your computer line in my computer store."
"No," Dan replied. "I sell them myself, by mail. I don't sell through stores."
"Well," I answered, "computers are something new. It's not like your audio equipment. People want to see how they work before they buy them. Les Solomon says I should sell 'em."
"Les says that? Okay, I'll give you 25% discount and ship you ten computers as a trial. You'll get five this week and five next week. You pay me in 30 days or we're finished."
My God, he was offering me 30-day credit! Nobody else in the industry gave any credit_they even wanted pre-payment!"
The five computer kits arrived on time, and I took one home and built it. It was so easy even I could build it, and I was a slob with a soldering iron.
A week later, the tall kid was back. "Heard you got SWITS. Now you're cooking. Would you like me to bring in my video terminal?"
"What video terminal?" I asked.
"South West makes it_goes with the computer instead of the Teletyper."
"Sure," I answered. "Bring it in. By the way, what is your name?"
"Ken Stamm," he told me. "See you tomorrow."
The next day he returned, bringing with him a strange wooden box with a keyboard sticking out of the front and a lot of wires out of the back. In a few minutes Ken had it hooked to my computer and one of the video monitors in the store. He turned on everything and started typing on the keyboard. Wonder of wonders, the characters he typed started appearing on the video screen. It worked! Soon he was running programs on the 6800 computer. This kid knew something!
"How would you like working here after school?" I asked him.
"Okay," he said. "I'd like that."
The next day, he appeared with more things he said I needed for the 6800. Soon, Ken was on the phone with South West ordering all kinds of things for us to sell. He worked for us as long as the Computer Mart of New York was in business and became our expert on SWTPC. In fact, he just about ran that portion of the business.
Dan Meyer founded SWTPC in San Antonio, Texas as an electronics company devoted to building low-cost electronic kits, many of which were originally projects in magazines such as Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics. Some of their products, like the 250-watt "Tigersaurus" Amplifier, enabled hobbyists who were skilled with the soldering iron to have a high-powered audio amplifier for only $154.00. South West also made the Tiger 60 watt amp and a Pre-Amp for it. Other products, such as a Guitar Pre-Amp, Input Mixer, and Stereo Octave Equalizer, rounded out the audio kit line. Then there was the Theremin Electronic Musical Instrument, which was played by moving your hands, and the Psychedelia Color Organs. These, and other products developed as kits from magazine articles, put SWTPC on the leading edge of electronic experimentation.
The unusual thing about these kits was that they were priced low so that the hobbyist could afford them, yet they were engineered so they worked well when they were assembled. Dan Meyer carried these principles over to the personal computer business, which was one of the reasons for the long survival of his company. No one was ever mad at SWTPC after completing their computer assembly. Nine out of ten computers worked the first time when the power was switched on.
The first digital products SWTPC built were a Digital Logic Microlab, which enabled an experimenter to learn about digital logic with the aid of Don Lancaster's RTL Cookbook. The second computer product was the KBD-2 Keyboard and Encoder Kit. This was a fully ASCII-encoded 53-key system with standard digital logic output. It was ready to connect into any video terminal, including a product like Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter, which had appeared in Radio Electronics magazine. The amazing thing about this keyboard was its price of $39.95, a true bargain at a time when surplus keyboards cost twice as much. The kit did not make the highest quality keyboard. Its key switches occasionally went bad, leaving you without a character, but it was cheap and easy to fix.
Before South West built a computer, they made an affordable terminal kit for the many hobbyists and students who were beginning to access college computer networks. The CT-1024 Terminal Kit was capable of displaying 32 uppercase, alpha-numeric characters on a video monitor or a modified TV set. It could not communicate with IBM equipment, which used the EBCDIC code system, or with the old 5-level Baudot-coded Teletypesr ( which were often in use in those days because hobbyists could buy them very cheaply.)
The CT-1024 terminal had a memory composed of six 2102 static RAM chips, which could store 1024 (1K) characters. The unit did not have scrolling, and was only capable of displaying 512 characters at one time on the screen (this was called "a page.") You could then flip a switch and display the second page of 512 characters. When it got to the last character position, of the last line, the cursor would return to the first character position of the first line.
The CT-1024 Terminal had quite a few optional boards which extended its capabilities. A Computer Controlled Cursor option was available as a kit. This allowed computer control over the position of the cursor on the screen. Input or output (I/O) for the terminal was provided by adding another kit of parts. You could put together either a serial I/O option or a parallel I/O option. The builder was warned that while the serial option was in accordance with the usual standard for connection, RS-232C, there was no equivalent standard for parallel interface, and therefore it might be difficult to make the interface work. SWTPC recommended that you use the serial kit.
Another option was the Screen Read Board. This gadget was used when information that had been typed into the terminal was edited, and had to be read out of the terminal and into another device. This was not needed with a computer in the interactive mode.
SWTPC would sell you the basic video terminal kit for only $175 without the keyboard, power supply, interface, or cursor control. The complete CT-1024 terminal kit was $275, with only the baud rate kit at $14.75 and the parallel omitted.
The Altair computer was introduced to the world in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine, and the personal computer revolution started. However, the Intel 8080 CPU upon which the Altair, and later the IMSAI, were based was not the only microprocessor. Motorola had developed the M 6800 MPU (Micro Processor Unit) which was somewhat different from the Intel design. The 6800 MPU was part of a family of chips that made computer design, and use, quite a bit easier.
SWTPC used these chips to design a computer that was simpler to build and program than the Altair design, and cost much less to manufacture. In addition, since SWTPC was an established company, it had the facilities to build the machines, and the organization to meet its delivery dates.
When you first looked at the SWTPC 6800 Computer System, you noticed it was completely unlike the Altair or IMSAI computers. All you saw was a black and silver box with a cover made of black grillwork and two illuminated push buttons on the front. It might have been an audio amplifier, except that it said "SWTPC 6800 Computer System" in large black letters. There were no red and green lights, or rows of switches to set. How did you operate this computer? The secret was in a ROM chip which contained a monitor program called MIKBUG. When you turned on the system, it came to life and permitted your computer to communicate with a terminal. MIKBUG was also a mini-operating system that allowed you to display and change data in memory, dump memory to tape, load a program, display or change the contents of registers, and jump to and execute a program in memory. It also had a routine for debugging programs. All of these system functions were initiated and monitored by a serial terminal. In addition to these system features, MIKBUG understood Hex notation instead of machine code needed for programming front panel switches on other computers.
Contrast this with the Altair. To make the Altair talk to a terminal you had to go through the long process to load a bootstrap loader program. If everything went well, you could be up and running within 15 or 20 minutes. This was one more reason the Motorola system was so popular. It made the SWTPC 6800 such an easy-to-use computer that its owners seldom ever had any complaints to talk about. Boring, boring, when the hobbyists got together at the computer club to discuss their problems; the SWTPC 6800 owner just sat and had no problems to contribute. Dan Meyer made this situation a feature of his advertising after a user wrote in about it.
We sold a lot of these computer kits to customers all over the world. People would come to New York and head for our store because they had heard that we sold SWTPC products, and we had employees who spoke many languages.
Building The SWTPC 6800 Computer
The 6800 had very few parts for a computer. Eliminating the front panel board used with the Altair design was a big help, but the integrated 6800 chip family also required fewer support chips. The 9 by 14-inch motherboard came with all the sockets you would ever need, and they were very different from the Altair (S-100) design which used card-edge sockets and very thin plated lands on the boards. The SWTPC design used Molexr connectors that were long metal pins that stuck up through the motherboard. The circuit cards had sockets which fit over the pins, providing a positive contact. SWTPC provided all the pins for each motherboard. The motherboard held seven 50-pin sockets for processor and memory boards, and eight sockets for the smaller interface boards. You could parallel another motherboard if you ever needed additional slots. The power supply was large enough to support the full compliment of plug-in cards, which originally was one PM board, 4K of static RAM, plus eight interface cards. The design of the motherboard made it simple to build, and although it was tiresome to solder in all of the socket pins, it did not require the close work needed to install S-100 sockets, which had twice as many pins per socket.
The MP-A Microprocessor/System Board (MP-A Board) was the primary logic board used in the system. It contained the 6800 CPU, the 6830 ROM, and the 6810 Scratch Pad Memory (128-bytes) for the ROM. The MP-A also mounted the crystal-controlled processor clock driver and baud rate generator, plus reset and other circuits. The beauty of the SWTPC design was that the lands on the cards were very, very broad compared to S-100 cards. This made it much easier to solder them, and prevented the dreaded solder bridges.
The original memory capacity of the SWTPC 6800 was a huge 16K of RAM. Each MP-M memory board had a capacity of 4K, but when you bought the computer system you got the board with 2K of RAM chips. You could buy the extra memory chips to fill the board, and you could buy extra memory boards. The memory board with 2K was $85 and the additional RAM was $45. Four memory boards fit into the motherboard for the total of 16K. Of course later, when 4K chips became available, you could expand the memory, since, like all 8-bit CPUs, the 6800 was capable of addressing 64K of memory. However, the 2K of static 2102 RAM consumed 0.75 amps of power! By this same scale of measurement, if we used the same kind of chips today, 640K of RAM would draw 240 amps of power at 5 volts DC, thus consuming 1200 watts of power. You would need a separate power line to run the computer, and you could not also run the stove in an average house.
At first glance, the SWTPC 6800 system did not look much cheaper than the Altair or IMSAI_they all cost about $475_but with the 8080-based computers all you got for that price was a barebones computer. No memory, no I/0, and no software. You only got four slots, and even they didn't have all the required connectors. Your $450 was only a down payment on a very expensive computer. With the SWTPC 6800 computer you got all the connectors, an operating system in ROM, and a memory board with 2K of RAM for $395. The extra 2K of RAM was only $45, and the I/0 board was $35. For $475, SWTPC sold you a kit for a complete operating computer. Of course, you could add to it, but your total final cost was nowhere near the price of an S-100 system.
Software for the SWTPC 6800
From the beginning, Dan Meyer and Gary Kay, his engineer/designer, recognized that the secret to the success of their computer lay in software. Having the operating system in ROM was a break for them, but more software was essential. Fortunately, there was an Assembler program available for the 6800 that could be adopted for their computer. SWTPC made it available to owners for $14.95, in either paper tape for Teletyper, or audio cassette format. This low pricing set the pattern for all SWTPC software. While MITS was charging $150 for BASIC, Dan Meyer set the price by the "K," 4K BASIC cost $4, 8K BASIC was $8 and 12K BASIC was $12! Although the SWTPC 6800 did not have Altair BASIC, they had a version written by Robert Uiterwyk that was one of the best cassette BASICs on the market.
The AC-30 Cassette Interface
The greatest need for the early computers was a reliable method of mass storage. The paper tape of the Teletyper was only available to those who were lucky, or rich enough to have access to such a machine, and they were a painfully slow method of saving programs and data. At that time, "real" computers used digital tape drives that cost thousands of dollars, or the new disk system recently invented by IBM. Computer hobbyists, ever inventive, discovered that they could record the tones of a modem on an audio cassette and save them. When replayed, they would recreate the ones and zeros of a digital data stream, and from that beginning came the cassette data storage method. The only problem was that each manufacturer had a different recording method, and the tapes were not interchangeable. In November 1975, Byte magazine called a meeting in Kansas City to set a standard for the recording of digital data by audio cassettes. SWTPC attended and accepted the resulting Kansas City Standard of 300 baud data speed, with 24OOHz sine wave representing a logical one, and 12OOHz sine wave representing a logical zero. As a result, SWTPC built a cassette interface unit capable of supporting two cassette recorders and able to control the motors of both the cassette recorders. The unit was designated the AC-30 and sold in kit form for $79.50. While this unit was used with the 6800 computers it never became accepted by any other system because no other company used the "Standard." Both Apple and SOL computers had a cassette system that was reliable at 1200 baud.
The PR-40 Printer
Low cost, high quality printers are the usual thing these days, but I remember when printers cost much more than computers. The Centronics 779 finally broke the $1,000 price barrier in 1977, and Epson was the first to offer a quality printer at $600.
Way back in 1976, SWTPC alone found a way to sell a really low-cost printer to hobbyists. Seiko made a print mechanism for cash registers that would print 40 columns and Dan Meyer obtained these printer mechanisms. His company incorporated them into a little printer that printed 5 x 7 dot matrix, upper case only, at a rate of 75 lines per minute. The print line was 40 characters wide on a roll of 3 7/8" adding machine paper, but it was enough for listing programs or short notes. Such a machine would attract scant notice today, but in those days a printer for $250 was a great bargain. The PR-40 was sold as a kit although the print mechanism was completely assembled. The electronics had to be constructed, and the entire assembly mounted upon one of SWTPC's metal chassis.
This completed the full starting lineup for SWTPC, and they advertised widely that here was a computer system that almost anyone could build. I say almost because we did have some people who ruined their kits. One of them glued all the parts to the board and brought the mess in to be wired so it worked. Another burnt the motherboard by using a torch for soldering. One accountant had such trouble that he kept coming into my store. We became friends, and he eventually became my partner. Needless to say, from then on he kept the books, and my technicians built his computers.
At the big computer show in Atlantic City, New Jersey in the summer of 1976, Dan Meyer and his entire crew came to the Shoreham Hotel to show off their computer system. Dan was very proud of his complete line. He and all of the SWTPC crew wore tee-shirts emblazoned with "Altair Sucks" on the front. This was a little too much for the show management, who did not want to offend their largest exhibitor. Meyer was requested to remove the shirts. However, he had already made his point, and he got a lot of attention.
After the show, the SWTPC 6800 continued to do very well; however, things were changing in the industry. Floppy disks were rapidly replacing cassettes as storage devices. At first, when the 8-inch floppies came out, they were too expensive for the price range of the SWTPC customers, although other companies sold them to use with 6800 computers. However, when the 5 1/4-inch floppies became popular, South West immediately designed a system to go with their machines. This started problems that Dan Meyer never expected.
SWTPC had no problems with software until the first floppy disks were ready to be connected to the 6800 computers. Bob Uiterwyk, who had written SWTPC BASIC, had promised to produce an operating system and actually produced a system called FDOS. There were problems with this system because it only supported sequential files and not random files. To those not familiar with disk files, I must explain that this deficiency meant that FDOS was nothing more than a cassette system used on a disk. You see, a cassette stores programs and data sequentially, like a row of ducks, and you have to search through the entire tape to find what you are looking for.
The normal disk operating system, with its random file system, rapidly locates data anywhere on the disk. This is the major advantage of disks over tapes, and without it the speed advantage of disks does not exist. Well, the lack of such a system hurt the sales of SWTPC systems just at a time when floppy disks were replacing cassettes all over the industry. Finally, Dan Meyer and his staff wrote a specification for a real DOS, and it was implemented by TSC under the name of FLEX. This single-user system became quite popular and later was expanded to multi-user operation under the name UNIFLEX. Another DOS often used with 6800 systems is OS/9, which will also run on SWTPC machines with the 6809 CPU.
The problem with the disk system also produced terrible strains in the dealer organization. When the system was selling well, Dan never shipped all the components we ordered. I don't know if this was because demand exceeded production or because he still sold equipment direct and the more computers the dealers sold, the greater the demand for add-ons, which often only he could supply. Our strategy was to order much more than we needed. SWTPC would cut our order, and we would end up with the quantity we actually needed. The slowdown in sales hit our store much later than it did others because a lot of our business came from overseas, but it did affect us.
Then I began to notice that we were receiving a lot of packages from South West in our daily UPS shipments. I called Kenny in and asked him what was going on. Did he have a large foreign order to fill? He told me that he did not have any unfilled orders and that stuff was starting to fill the storage cabinets. Then I called San Antonio, and they told me that they were filling back-orders that had not previously been shipped! I quickly took an inventory and canceled all back orders we absolutely did not need. However, the damage had been done, and I owed Dan Meyer more money than I could pay him by the end of the month. I called and told him my problem. Dan was not very pleased.
"I told you had to pay me at the end of the month, and there would be no extensions," he tartly snarled at me.
"Okay, but I have a cash flow problem right now. My taxes are due, and if it comes to a choice between paying my taxes and paying you, it is an easy decision for me to make. I will pay what I can now and pay you the rest as soon as possible. Just don't send me any more stuff."
"Don't worry, I won't. But from now on you are on a C.O.D. basis."
"That's your decision," I told him. "You won't find it easy to replace our store in New York."
So three years of close friendship went down the drain.
Later, I met one of his other dealers at a computer show. "How are you getting along with Dan Meyer?' I asked him.
"Dan is mad at me," he replied. "He shipped me so much stuff I couldn't pay for it."
I told him of my experience, and when we talked to other dealers, it was the same story! The story we pieced together was probably true, although I cannot completely vouch for it.
It seemed that what Dan had done was to repeat an old trick attributed to Henry Ford. He had a commitment to Shugart Associates for a large quantity of floppy disk drives, and they shipped them in every week. If he canceled the contract they would charge back the price of all his drives at the smaller quantity price. They might also sue him for violating his contract. He was not selling the drives and did not have the cash to meet his payments. So he scrapped together every part he could get and used them to fill all the dealer's unfilled back orders. He shipped them all over the country and thus built up his accounts receivable, which he could borrow against to meet his obligations. The trouble came when the dealers could not pay all the bills on time.
I do not know what happened next, since, with my credit cut off and sales of SWTPC stuff declining, I sort of lost contact with Dan. We continued to sell the SWTPC 6800, but with the growth of Apple II our sales were at a minimum. We finally all but dropped the line as far as selling new computers went.
This may have had something to do with Dan's later decision to get out of what he called "hobby computers" and concentrate on "business machines."
SWTPC did improve its products. It introduced a new, improved 6809 CPU, and both a line of 8" floppy disk drives and 5 1/4" floppy disk drives. The powerful UNIFLEX operating system was introduced, and much-improved terminals: the CT-64 and the CT-82.
SWTPC had always been a kit company, and they never attempted to produce a factory-manufactured computer product. This was completely in tune with the hobbyist market that started this industry. However, only so many people want to actually build their own computer, and by 1978 most of them had already done so, and they were committed to their particular type of machine. The advent of the Apple II, the TRS-80, and the SOL changed the market completely. You could now buy a better computer than you could build, and for less money. The market for kits collapsed.
SWTPC then offered their System B, a completely built computer system with two floppy disk drives and a terminal mounted in a desk. The system cost $4,495 and had 40K of RAM, and 1.2Mbyte of disk storage. It ran the FLEX operating system, and came with BASIC and Assembler.
I do not know how successful this system was, but at almost $5,000 1 doubt if many were sold. The industry at that time was offering much better value in CP/M systems. However the SS-50 Bus was still very strong in the 6800/6809 field, and many special-purpose computer devices were sold for industrial purposes. Two other companies, GIMIX and Smoke Signal, built SS-50 bus machines, and they did very well for a long time. SWTPC eventually withdrew completely from the "hobbyist" market, and only built business machines and special purpose computers that were used in point-of-sale systems and other commercial applications.

How the Altair Began ( PC History )

2008-07-17T18:14:00.000-07:00

The story of the first true personal computer has many versions. It is over 20 years since the debut of the Altair 8800 computer in the pages of Popular Electronics Magazine, but everyone connected with it tells a completely different story. Truly, "Success has many fathers."
I (Stan Veit ) was the first (and last) Computer Editor of Popular Electronics magazine, and I came on the scene after the fact, but as one of the few people who was friendly with all of the participants, I am as qualified as anyone to tell the story.
The principals in the story are :
Leslie Solomon, former technical director of Popular Electronics, who is often called "The Father of the Personal Computer" (Les himself says he was more like the midwife.)
Arthur Salsberg, editorial director of Popular Electronics, who was responsible for publishing the articles that brought the Altair to the world,
Ed Roberts, the president of MITS Incorporated, who designed and built the Altair.
A supporting cast at Ziff Davis (publisher of Popular Electronics), and at MITS in Albuquerque, composed of Don Lancaster, Forrest Mims, and David Bunnell, who are well known in the personal computer industry, and a lot of people not so well known.
There are a few facts we are absolutely sure of and can set down as gospel truth. First, the Altair was not the first computer featured as a construction article in a national electronics magazine. That honor goes to The Mark 8 computer, designed by Jonathan Titus and published in Radio Electronics Magazine in July 1974.
Why, then, does the credit go to Popular Electronics and the Altair, which didn't come out until January 1975? I can think of two reasons: first, the Intel 8008 chip, used as a Central Processing Unit (CPU) in the earlier Mark 8, lacked some internal parts that are thought necessary to a microcomputer. Second, the Altair was offered as a complete kit, not just a list of parts to buy in order to make a computer. In those days it was almost impossible for anyone outside Silicon Valley, California, where the chips and other parts were made, to find the components necessary to build a computer. The 8008 microprocessor alone cost $150; the more powerful 8080 usually cost $300. In spite of these costs, Ed Roberts proposed to sell Popular Electronics readers a complete Altair kit for only $397. But I am getting ahead of my story.
Exactly how the Altair project got started is a major bone of contention. According to Art Salsberg, all the technical magazines knew about the development of microprocessor chips and they were all rushing to be the first to publish a computer construction project. Art says he had one of his contributors, Jerry Odgen, working on a microprocessor-based, digital, computer trainer article. Odgen had completed his preliminary work, but the project was not yet in publishable form. It was a "haywire mess" and needed to be cleaned up. When the Mark 8 article broke in Radio Electronics, Art Salsberg realized that the digital trainer was not good enough to counter the Radio Electronic article. He set about finding a better subject for a new project. Ed Roberts had written a construction article for a digital calculator, and the magazine had offered a kit of parts to the readers. This project proved very popular, but now calculators were selling below the kit price, and it was dead. Ed Roberts proposed to Art Salsberg that he design a computer kit using the brand new 8080 CPU chip. This would be a major breakthrough, so Art sent Leslie Solomon to New Mexico to investigate and report back to New York.
The Les Solomon version of the story was that he was traveling out west to visit his Indian foster child. He met with Don Lancaster and Forrest Mims, who wrote for the magazine. They introduced him to Ed Roberts, another contributor to the magazine. After a day of discussion, Roberts proposed the computer kit. Les told him that if the unit was attractive, did not look like a "hay wire rig," and it worked, he could get it placed on the cover of Popular Electronics, which would assure its success.
Another version of the story was told by Forrest Mims in the 10th Anniversary Issue of Creative Computing Magazine. In this version, Solomon was back in New York but knew that Roberts was working on a computer project. When the Mark 8 came out, Arthur Salsberg realized that he would have to publish a more sophisticated project than the stalled digital trainer from Ogden. He discussed it with Solomon, who mentioned that Ed Roberts was working on a computer. Art asked Solomon to call and find out if Roberts could get his project ready for a winter issue. Les Solomon called Roberts and was told that the project would be ready for the January issue. Later, Roberts called and said the computer would be housed in an attractive, multi-colored, Optima cabinet. With this, Art held up the Odgen trainer project, holding it as a back-up just in case Roberts did not deliver on time.
The important thing was that Salsberg and Solomon picked Ed Roberts and MITS to do the computer project, and Roberts was able to do it.!
The key to the whole computer project was the microprocessor chip itself. The 8080 from Intel cost $300 in small quantities; Ed Roberts was able to make a deal to get CPU chips for $75 in huge quantities (for that time,) providing he took chips with cosmetic defects. These are chips with surface defects that do not affect the electrical operation. This deal made the under-$400 kit price possible, but only if Ed could sell as many as 200 computers, which was his break-even point. This was an unthinkably large amount. Roberts was gambling that with the computer on the cover of Popular Electronics, enough of the 450,000 readers would pay $400 to build a computer, even if they did not have the slightest idea of how to use it.
Somehow, Ed Roberts and his small crew made the deadline, and shipped the computer to Les Solomon in New York via Railway Express, the normal, safe, and fast way to ship in those days. Only this time, Railway Express had a strike, went bankrupt, and completely lost the computer. It was never found.
To meet the deadline, Solomon had already started to write the first installment of the article, based on technical information supplied by Roberts and some photos taken before shipment. The Altair on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics was a dummy; there was nothing behind the front panel with its lights and switches. Salsberg and Solomon had stuck their necks out by a mile.
Meanwhile, back in Albuquerque, Ed Roberts had come up with a new design for the replacement machine. If you opened the January issue of Popular Electronics to read about the Altair, you would see a photograph of the lost prototype computer. In that photo, you can see that the computer was made of several boards stacked on top of each other and separated by spacers. There is no connecting bus at all. The boards were connected by ribbon cable. But when Ed Roberts built the new machine he included a bus board. This was a circuit board with 100-pin connectors. The mating circuit board had 50 "fingers" with electrical connections on each side of the board (making 100 electrical connections,) that could be plugged into a socket. This enabled the user to add additional circuit boards and thus expand the capabilities of the computer.
Because the Optima cabinet was so big, he provided for the addition of additional bus cards and built an 8-amp power supply. This was a very large amount of power for the time, and he never imagined it would prove too little to power all the features owners later demanded. The bus structure Ed Roberts invented was originally called "The Altair Bus" and later, the "S-100 Bus," a name Roberts hated because he felt it robbed him of the credit for his invention, and so it did. If you think about it, without the Railway Express strike and bankruptcy, we never would have had the S-100 Bus, and the foundation of a large segment of the personal computer industry which descended from it, including the IBM PCs.
The source of the very name "Altair" is also questionable. Les Solomon says that MITS tried to find a good name but couldn't agree and so called it the PE-8 (Popular Electronics 8-bit.) Solomon wanted to use a better name for the computer in his article. He asked his young daughter, who was watching Star Trek, what they called the computer.
"Computer," she answered.
"You are a big help," he told her.
So she said, "Why don't you call it Altair? That's where they're going this week."
And that's what they called it.
Forrest Mims said the name came from two editors of Popular Electronics in New York. One of them, Alex Burawa, who was an astronomy fan, said, "Its a stellar event, so give it a star name_Altair."
Ed Roberts added the numbers 8800 to the name because he intended to make later models. Thus, it became Altair 8800, and that's the name stenciled on the front panel.
The Altair articles ran for several issues of Popular Electronics, and as a result MITS was deluged with orders. To this day nobody knows how many computer kits were sold through the magazine, but Les Solomon told me he estimated over 2,000. That is more computers of one type than had ever been sold before in the history of the industry. Naturally, MITS was totally unprepared. They had hoped for 200 sales and received 2,000. Their small crew was totally swamped; they did not even have enough parts on order. There was no way they could deliver. However, when people were asked if they wanted their money back after 30 days, no one asked for a refund. They all wanted their computers_never mind about the money!
The flood of money being received at MITS catapulted them into serious business and they started to advertise in Byte, Creative Computing, Popular Electronics, and all the emerging computer magazines, selling even more Altair 8800s. In spite of slow delivery, people all over the country started to put together computers.
At one of the demonstration meetings held by MITS in Los Angeles, Dick Heiser became impressed with the Altair. He was able to persuade Ed Roberts to make him a dealer. Although Roberts did not have enough kits to supply the demand, he was forced to keep selling to keep the cash flowing. Heiser had a new idea about selling computers. With his wife, Lois, he opened Arrowhead Computers, a store selling computer books and Altair computers. Dick sub-titled his retail operation "The Computer Store" and this name caught the fancy of the press, giving him a lot of free publicity and inspiring many others to open computer stores.
What did an Altair buyer get for his $397 when he finally received the Altair kit? He got a box of parts, circuit boards, and some poorly written instructions. The manuals did improve, after Roberts hired David Bunnell as the Technical Writing Department, but you still had to be an experienced kit builder to put an Altair together and make it work. If you became completely mystified by the instructions, there was a phone number to call_if you could get through.
For those who were afraid to even start building a kit, you could buy a factory-assembled Altair for $498, but you had to wait much longer for an assembled unit than you did for a kit. No matter which you bought, you received an excellent cabinet, and a front panel with the name ALTAIR 8800 stenciled across the front. You assembled the 8-amp power supply, consisting of a transformer, switch, fuses, some rectifiers, controller chips, and a group of electrolytic capacitors, inside the cabinet. Then you installed the bus card. You carefully built the front panel and CPU by inserting the parts into the tiny little holes, applying solder so that you did not bridge any of the connections. This was not a job for the inexperienced or careless. If you applied too much heat you could ruin the chips, or even raise the plated lands off the board. If you did not use enough heat, you got a cold solder joint which plagued you ever after, and your computer probably would not work.
After they were built, the front panel board and the CPU plugged into the bus board, which was made with 50 parallel lines (or lands) on each side and four groups of holes that intersected the lands. Unless you paid extra, you only got two 100-pin sockets to solder into the bus card because you only received two circuit boards, the CPU, and front panel. You quickly learned to buy the two additional connectors for $15 each and install them when you first built the computer, because you would quickly need them.
When you bought your kit, you got no memory board or input/output board. All the memory that came with the Altair kit was 256 bytes (no, not "K-bytes"). All you could do with this was to play a game called "Kill The Bit" which had to do with trying to guess which front panel light would come on and trying to flick the switch before the light went out again. Actually this was a real indication that your computer was working. There was hardly any other way to tell.
If you really wanted to use your computer, you had to buy memory boards. You could get a 1K memory board in kit form for $97 ($135 assembled), a 2K memory board for $145 ($197 assembled), or a giant 4K memory board for $264 ($338 assembled.) In addition to memory, you would need either a serial interface board for $119 ($138 assembled), or a parallel interface board for $92 ($114 assembled), or both. One problem you didn't know about until after you built your computer was how much it cost to get a terminal for your computer to communicate with. The ideal was a Teletyper. These cost about $2,000 new for an ASR-33, a model which could act as an input device and a printer. In addition, it could punch paper tape which served as a data storage medium and read paper tapes into the computer. Even at the price of $2,000, you could not get new Teletype, which were built under contract a year in advance. Used, re-built ASR-33 machines sold for $1,200 to $1,500. Video terminals called "glass teletypes" were just starting to appear and they were beyond the dreams of Altair owners. MITS tried to build some terminals that hobbyists could afford, but they were not a success. Finally they made a deal to get some teletypes, without a stand and using their own interface, to sell to Altair owners for $1,500.
MITS also developed a cassette interface kit that worked with their serial board for only $120 ($174 assembled). This worked fairly well and was a big improvement over paper tape.
If you had 4K of memory you could run BASIC. This cost $150 unless you bought it with both a memory and I/O board from MITS. In that case it only cost $60. If you bought 8K of Altair memory, you could buy 8K BASIC for only $75; if you bought 12K of memory you could buy Extended BASIC (when it came out) for only $150. This was the famous BASIC written by Bill Gates (which is another story) and was not too bad a deal, except for the fact that the Altair dynamic memory boards did not work very well. The reason for this was that dynamic RAM needs to be electrically refreshed or it "forgets what it should remember." MITS took the refresh power from the CPU, a process known as "cycle stealing." Sometimes when the RAM needed refreshing, the CPU would be busy doing something else and the memory would be lost. MITS later replaced a lot of those early memory boards without cost, but the damage was done. People did not trust MITS memory boards, and bought static memory boards elsewhere.
If you did buy more than one memory board, you had to add at least another bus board and more connectors. The bus board they gave you with the computer kit only held four circuit boards. The CPU, front panel I/O board, and one memory board filled it completely. To add another bus board, you had to completely disassemble your computer, and solder 100 jumper wires to connect the new bus board to the existing one. Then you had to install the connectors into the bus board, making 100 solder joints for each connector. Finally, you had to solder the 100 new wires to the additional bus board. For every bus extender board, you had to solder 100 wires at each end. You had to be a soldering wizard to be a computerist in those days.
How About Software?
There were no operating systems to worry about. They came in much later, with floppy disks. There were operating programs, called Monitors, which did program loading, execution, and housekeeping, as well as some troubleshooting. There were also program loading routines called "bootstrap loaders." Getting software into the computer was somewhat complicated. First, you had to key-in a routine to initialize your I/O board. You did that by setting the front panel switches to represent a word in machine code (mostly octal). Then you pressed the Enter switch. You had to program the initializing routine word by word pressing "Load" after each word. Then you could load the "bootstrap loader" by reading in a teletype paper tape using the tape reader on the teletype, or an audio tape using a cassette interface. Next, you entered your monitor program, which was sort of a mini-operating system, again using the paper tape reader on the teletype, or the cassette interface. Now you were ready to load BASIC.
Everyone used BASIC in one form or another. Starting with 2K Tiny BASIC for the poor folks, and going up to Altair Extended BASIC (12K,) you had to use some form of BASIC to do anything. There was absolutely no application software in existence. BASIC programs were shared among users by publishing them in magazines or exchanging paper or audio tapes at clubs. Many of the first applications were simple games such as Hangman, Hammarabi, and simple forms of Star Trek.
So how did users get Altair BASIC (later Microsoft BASIC)? Simple. They invented "multi-user" BASIC, which in this case meant that one person bought the package, and ten others used it. Bill Gates and his partner, Paul Allen, had licensed their software to MITS on a royalty basis, and they were the ones who suffered. Gates sent an open letter to all the magazines, saying if computerists did not stop stealing his software, he would stop writing it. That did not work, so his solution was to get out of the bad agreement he had made with Ed Roberts. He then formed Microsoft to sell his software directly to users at a reasonable price. Bill Gates went on to become the world's youngest billionaire.
What Ever Happened To MITS Altair?
In 1976 and 1977, MITS was at the top of the heap. They were selling the Altair 8800 A and B models, plus a small 6800-based computer and a full line of peripherals. MITS had dealers all over the country and they could easily sell everything they could make. They ran multi-page ads in all the magazines and had the largest exhibit space at all the computer shows. Why isn't MITS the biggest personal computer company?
The problem was that Ed Roberts was a much better visionary and designer than he was a businessman. Starting with an organization of three people, he built a big company in a very short time. No one can take away from him the fact that he built and shipped more computers of one type than anyone else. He also developed new products at the same time he was setting up production, not an easy task. But Ed Roberts knew nothing about marketing and he made some serious mistakes.
Roberts gave Richard Brown the entire east coast of the United States as an exclusive territory. Brown and his partner, Sid Harrigan, planned to franchise computer stores all over the eastern territory under the name "The Computer Store" (which Dick Heiser had failed to register.) However, they sold only a few franchises. Meanwhile, other stores opened which would have sold Altairs if they could have gotten them. Instead they sold IMSAIs and South West Technical Products computers because that was what they could get. Thus, Roberts built up his competitors instead of keeping them out of the market.
In addition, Roberts took the automobile dealerships as his marketing example for Altair dealers. He insisted that his dealers could only sell Altairs. He was credited with saying "Ford dealers don't sell Chevies, so Altair dealers will only sell Altairs." However, he could not supply enough computers to keep the dealers in business. In addition, MITS continued to sell directly to end users even after their dealer network was in place. MITS was actually in competition with the dealers and could not stop because of cash flow problems. At that point, Ed Roberts' company could have attracted venture capital, or even gone public to raise money, but he did neither.
To make matters worse, MITS was in competition with two marketing geniuses, Bill Millard and Ed Farber of Imsai, who opened all the dealerships they could. Anybody who would put up $2,500 and promise to buy 25 computers in a year could become a dealer. Imsai actually delivered what they promised. When I opened my store, The Computer Mart of New York, (the first store on the East Coast) the first ten Imsai computers were there waiting for me, exactly as promised. I got all the computers I could sell, as long as I paid cash in advance for them. But the story of Imsai is another chapter.
The plight of the Altair dealers, and the internal cash flow problems became too much for Ed Roberts, although he could have worked them out. When Pertec, the disk drive manufacturer and principal creditor, offered to buy MITS, he sold out and retired from the computer business.
Pertec was a typical big business organization and did not understand the free-wheeling culture of MITS and the personal computer industry. However they did know that MITS was selling a lot of their disk drives. They saw MITS as a way to get into an emerging market. The businessmen who ran Pertec felt that the Altair name was tainted with the "hobbyist" designation. They wanted Pertec to be thought of as a "business computer company." They therefore dropped the name, which was the greatest asset they had, and the Altair disappeared from the market. Later, Pertec itself was brought by Adler of Germany and was absorbed by its parent.
The Altair did not disappear from the thoughts of the computerists and neither did the hardware they used. People hung on to their Altairs as old friends. Nothing will ever exceed the thrill of seeing the sign-on for BASIC printed on the teletype for the first time and reading the prompt "READY."
Ed Roberts went to Georgia and attended Medical School and also became a farmer. At one point, he got back into the computer business, producing a series of modular components to be used as building blocks in laboratories and engineering projects. This business did not survive in the face of off-shore competition.

computer history collection

2008-07-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

Exhibitions
Many important objects from the Computer History Collection were on exhibition in Information Age: People, Information and Technology, a 14,000 square foot display that was located on the first floor of the National Museum of American History. Opened in May 1990, the exhibition surveys the history of information technology and its relation to society from the origin of the telegraph to the present.
The display featured over 900 original artifacts. They included Samuel Morse's telegraphs, Alexander Bell's telephones, a Hollerith punched card machine, a 4-rotor German ENIGMA encoder used during World War II, the ENIAC computer, the TELESTAR test satellite, an automotive welding robot, a selection of early personal computers, and digital high definition television.
Theme
Information Age centered on the technical evolution of electrical and electronic information technology. The telegraph began a revolution in communications by transmitting information in electrical form instantly to distant locations. This new phenomenon of instant information was later expanded by the telephone, radio and television. Then the digital electronic computer made it possible to process information instantly. As the computer developed and matured, communication and processing technologies were joined into networks that now stretch around the world, affecting all areas of global society.
Although the exhibition was built around this technical theme, its emphasis was as much on social as technical change. The transformations in information technology came in a context of social forces such as business, politics, wars, and consumer interests. The exhibition highlighted the interaction between these social forces and the development of information technology.
Objects
Computer Collections SampleClick on an object for more information

The Computer History Collection includes artifacts relating to the production, collection, modification, manipulation, and use of information in modern American society. The collection comprises artifacts employed in the processing of information as opposed to its simple communication. By processing, we mean operations of objects that involve the following functions:
Encoding, or getting data into a machine in coded form
Storage, or preserving the data or information within the device
Modification, or changing the data within the device.
Decoding, or getting data out of the device into symbols that humans can understand.
Data processing objects in the computer collections are all electronic, as earlier processing equipment is in the mathematics collections or other collections in the museum. Because information technology is ubiquitous, other units of the museum also rightly collect artifacts of information technology related to specific processing tasks (e.g. robotic machine tools, typewriters, printing presses, and photographic equipment).
Approximate numbers of objects in the collection:
Mainframe computers or components
25
Minicomputers
10
Supercomputers
4
Microcomputers
50
Other digital devices
15
Analog computers
10
Computer peripherals
100
Software
500
Electronic components
1000
Electronic calculators
450
Documentation
150 cubic feet
Reference Materials
The Computer History Collection includes a wide variety of reference materials related to the objects in its collections. Access to these materials generally requires making a research appointment with the Division. Over time, selected materials being digitized and made available to the public on-line. A few are available below.
In addition to holdings in the Division, reference materials on the history of computing are available in the American History Archives Center. Original Press Release 1 for ENIAC Computer, February 16, 1946 (3 pages / 48 K)
Original Press Release 2 for ENIAC Computer, February 16, 1946 (2 pages / 42 K)
Original Press Release 4 for ENIAC Computer: Physical Aspects and Operations, February 16, 1946 (3 pages / 31 K) Presentation entitled "Using the Computer: Episodes Across 50 years" by David K. Allison. Delivered to the ACM Annual Meeting Session honor the 50th Anniversary of the ENIAC, Philadelphia, February 14, 1996. (590K)
Monticello Memoirs, a 1996 gathering at Monticello of Pioneers of the Information Age
Interviews
Although the development of modern communications and computers is among the most important aspects of modern American history, historical writing about the development is remarkably sparse. And few of the leaders of the development have written their own memoirs.
The Smithsonian Institution is capturing the recollections of some of these people in the form of oral and video histories. In this area, you will find transcripts of some of the Smithsonian's images. Copyrights of the interviews belong to the Smithsonian Institution. They may be cited or quoted briefly, but not reproduced or published in any form.
Marc Andreesen - Interview with Mr. Marc Andreesen, Chief Technical Officer of Netscape, Inc., winner of the 1995 SAIC Leadership Award for Global Integration, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
Gordon Bell - Interview with Dr. Gordon Bell, winner of the 1995 MCI Leadership Award for Innovation, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
Robert Ballard - Interview with Dr. Robert Ballard of the Jason Project, winner of the 1990 Award in the Category of Education and Academia, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program
Seymour Cray - Interview with Seymour Cray, Winner of the 1994 MCI Information Technology Leadership Award for Innovation, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
J. Presper Eckert -Interview with J. Presper Eckert, Co-Inventor of the ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer) From Development of the Eniac Interviews, Smithsonian Videohistory Collection, Record Unit 9537, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC
Larry Ellison - Interview with Mr. Larry Ellison, Chief Executive Officer of Oracle, winner of the 1994 SAIC Leadership Award for Global Integration, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
Douglas Engelbart -Interview with Mr. Douglas Engelbart, Winner of the 1994 Price Waterhouse Leadership Award for Lifetime Achievement, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
Bill Gates - Interview with Mr. William "Bill" Gates, Winner of the 1993 Price Waterhouse Leadership Award for Lifetime Achievement, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
Steve Jobs - Interview with Mr. Steve Jobs, Chief Executive Officer of NEXT.
Ann Meyer - Interview with Ms. Ann Meyer of the Center for Applied Special Technology, winner of the 1993 Award in the Category of Education and Academia, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
Tom Nies - Interview with Mr. Tom Nies, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CINCOM Corporation, a pioneer software company.
Kenneth H. Olsen - Interview with Mr. Kenneth H. Olsen of Digital Equipment Corporation, winner of the 1993 MCI Information Technology Leadership Award for Innovation, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
Charles S. Peskin and David M. McQueen - Interview with Charles S. Peskin and David M. McQueen, Winners of the 1994 Cray Leadership Award for Breakthrough Computational Science, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
Lewis Sadler - Interview with Mr. Lewis Sadler, Winner of a 1989 Computerworld Smithsonian award in the category of Government and Nonprofit Organizations.
Hal Uplinger - Interview with Mr. Hal Uplinger, Winner of a 1989 Computerworld Smithsonian Award in the Media, Arts & Entertainment Category for the production of the "Live Aid Concert"
Don Wetzel -Interview with Mr. Don Wetzel, Co-Patentee of the Automatic Teller Machine. The National Museum of American History gratefully acknowledges the financial support of MasterCard International in the creation of this transcription and the video history from with it was made.

history of computer part 2

2008-07-17T18:06:00.000-07:00

Using the associated index, we will take a cruise through history to discover some of the key developments that have brought us to our present state of computing, including the development of numbers, the introduction of mechanical aids to calculation, the evolution of electronics, and the impact of electronics on computing.
No one person may be credited with the invention of computers, but several names stand proud in the crowd. The following offers some of the more notable developments and individuals, with great regret for any omissions.

History of Computers Part 1

2008-07-17T18:05:00.001-07:00

The development of the modern day computer was the result of advances in technologies and man's need to quantify. The abacus was one of the first counting machines. Papyrus helped early man to record language and numbers. Some of the earlier counting machines lacked the technology to make the design work. For instance, some had parts made of wood prior to metal manipulation and manufacturing. Imagine the wear on wooden gears. This history of computers site includes the names of early pioneers of math and computing and links to relating sites about the History of Computers for further study. This site would be a good Web adjunct to accompany any book on the History of Computers or Introduction to Computers. The "H" Section includes a link to the History of the Web Beginning at CERN which includes Bibliography and Related Links. Hitmill.com strives to always include related links for a broader educational experience. The material was originally divided into Part 1 & Part 2

How to Buy a Desktop PC

2008-07-17T13:51:00.000-07:00

How to Buy a Desktop PC
Buying a new computer is no small task. Making the right choice requires more than just knowing how fast a CPU you need or how big a hard drive you want--you need to have a good idea of how you'll use your new rig. Let PC World's experts break the details down for you.
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935 Yes
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Introduction

Graphic: Rick Rizner, Chip Taylor
The Big Picture Before you go shopping for a new desktop computer, ask yourself this question: "What am I going to do with it?" We'll guide you through the options. more
The Specs Explained From CPUs and motherboards to LCD monitors and optical storage, we'll clear up the jargon--and tell you which specs are most important to your purchase. more
Desktop PC Shopping Tips Want some advice before you head to the store or visit a Web site? Our recommendations will help you build a system that fits your needs and your pocketbook.

Hacker :Komunitas Underground

2008-07-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

Hacker :Komunitas Underground

Komunitas Underground? Bawah tanah? …
Betul, komunitas yang tidak terlihat, tidak terdeteksi, seperti siluman, mereka hidup &
berjaya di dunia maya – tanpa terdeteksi oleh pengguna Internet biasa, tak terdeteksi oleh
sistem administrator WARNET & ISP.
Siapakah mereka? – mereka adalah para hacker. Media & stereotype masyarakat
membentuk karakter hacker sebagai orang jahat dan suka merusak. Stereotype ABG 15-
20 tahun-an, yang duduk di belakang komputer berjam-jam, masuk ke sistem dan mendelete,
berbelanja menggunakan kartu kredit curian atau menghancurkan apa saja yang
bisa mereka hancurkan – “anak” ini dikenal sebagai cracker bukan sebagai hacker.
Cracker ini yang sering anda dengar di berita / media, mematikan situs web, menghapus
data dan membuat kekacauan kemanapun mereka pergi. Hacker yang betul sebenarnya
tidak seperti yang ada dalam stereotype banyak orang di atas.
Di dunia elektronik underground nama jelas & nama lengkap tidak digunakan. Orang
biasanya menggunakan nama alias, callsign atau nama samaran. Hal ini memungkinkan
kita bisa menyamarkan identitas, dan hanya di kenali sesama underground. Beberapa
nama diantara hacker Indonesia bisa dikenali seperti hC, cbug, litherr, fwerd, d_ajax,
r3dshadow, cwarrior, ladybug, chiko, gelo, BigDaddy dsb..
Apakah perbedaan mendasar antara seorang cracker & hacker? Di
http://www.whatis.com, cracker di definisikan sebagai “seseorang yang masuk ke sistem
orang lain, biasanya di jaringan komputer, membypass password atau lisensi program
komputer, atau secara sengaja melawan keamanan komputer. Cracker dapat
mengerjakan hal ini untuk keuntungan, maksud jahat, atau karena sebab lainnya karena
ada tantangan. Beberapa proses pembobolan dilakukan untuk menunjukan kelemahan
keamanan sistem”
Berbeda dengan Cracker, Hacker menurut Eric Raymond di definisikan sebagai
programmer yang pandai. Sebuah hack yang baik adalah solusi yang cantik kepada
masalah programming dan “hacking” adalah proses pembuatan-nya. Ada beberapa
karakteristik yang menandakan seseorang adalah hacker, seperti
(1) dia suka belajar detail dari bahasa pemrograman atau system,
(2) dia melakukan pemrograman tidak cuma berteori saja,
(3) dia bisa menghargai, menikmati hasil hacking orang lain,
(4) dia dapat secara cepat belajar pemrogramman, dan
(5) dia ahli dalam bahasa pemrograman tertentu atau sistem tertentu, seperti “UNIX
hacker”.
Yang menarik, ternyata dalam dunia hacker terjadi strata / tingkatan / level yang diberikan
oleh komunitas hacker kepada seseorang karena kepiawaiannya, bukan karena umur atau
senioritasnya. Proses yang paling berat adalah untuk memperoleh pengakuan / derajat /
acknowledgement diantara masyarakat underground, seorang hacker harus mampu
membuat program untuk meng-eksploit kelemahan sistem, menulis tutorial (artikel)
biasanya dalam format ASCII text biasa, aktif diskusi di mailing list / IRC channel para
hacker, membuat situs web dsb. Entah kenapa warna background situs web para hacker
seringkali berwarna hitam gelap, mungkin untuk memberikan kesan misterius. Proses
memperoleh acknowledgement / pengakuan, akan memakan waktu lama bulanan bahkan
tahun, tergantung ke piawaian hacker tersebut.
Proses memperoleh pengakuan di antara sesama hacker tidak lepas dari etika & aturan
main dunia underground. Etika ini yang akhirnya akan membedakan antara hacker &
cracker, maupun hacker kelas rendahan seperti Lamer & Script Kiddies. Salah satu etika
yang berhasil di formulasikan dengan baik ada di buku Hackers: Heroes of the Computer
Revolution, yang ditulis oleh Steven Levy 1984, ada enam (6) etika yang perlu di resapi
seorang hacker:
1. Akses ke komputer – dan apapun yang akan mengajarkan kepada anda bagaimana
dunia ini berjalan / bekerja – harus dilakukan tanpa batas & totalitas. Selalu
mengutamakan pengalaman lapangan!
2. Semua informasi harus bebas, terbuka, transparan, tidak di sembunyikan.
3. Tidak pernah percaya pada otoritas, penguasa – percaya pada desentralisasi.
4. Seorang hacker hanya di nilai dari kemampuan hackingnya, bukan kriteria buatan
seperti gelar, umur, posisi atau suku bangsa.
5. Seorang hacker membuat seni & keindahan di komputer.
6. Komputer dapat mengubah hidup anda menuju yang lebih baik.
Gambaran umum aturan main yang perlu di ikuti seorang hacker seperti di jelaskan oleh
Scorpio http://packetstorm.securify.com/docs/hack/ethics/my.code.of.ethics.html, yaitu:
• Di atas segalanya, hormati pengetahuan & kebebasan informasi.
• Memberitahukan sistem administrator akan adanya pelanggaran keamanan / lubang di
keamanan yang anda lihat.
• Jangan mengambil keuntungan yang tidak fair dari hack.
• Tidak mendistribusikan & mengumpulkan software bajakan.
• Tidak pernah mengambil resiko yang bodoh – selalu mengetahui kemampuan sendiri.
• Selalu bersedia untuk secara terbuka / bebas / gratis memberitahukan & mengajarkan
berbagai informasi & metoda yang diperoleh.
• Tidak pernah meng-hack sebuah sistem untuk mencuri uang.
• Tidak pernah memberikan akses ke seseorang yang akan membuat kerusakan.
• Tidak pernah secara sengaja menghapus & merusak file di komputer yang dihack.
• Hormati mesin yang di hack, dan memperlakukan dia seperti mesin sendiri.
Jelas dari Etika & Aturan main Hacker di atas, sangat tidak mungkin seorang hacker
betulan akan membuat kerusakan di komputer.
Tentunya ada berbagai tingkatan / strata di dunia underground. Saya yakin tidak semua
orang setuju dengan derajat yang akan dijelaskan disini, karena ada kesan arogan
terutama pada level yang tinggi. Secara umum yang paling tinggi (suhu) hacker sering di
sebut ‘Elite’; di Indonesia mungkin lebih sering di sebut ‘suhu’. Sedangkan, di ujung lain
derajat hacker dikenal ‘wanna-be’ hacker atau dikenal sebagai ‘Lamers’. Yang pasti para
pencuri kartu kredit bukanlah seorang hacker tingkat tinggi, mereka hanyalah termasuk
kategori hacker kelas paling rendah / kacangan yang sering kali di sebut sebagai Lamer.
Mereka adalah orang tanpa pengalaman & pengetahuan biasanya ingin menjadi hacker
(wanna-be hacker). Lamer biasanya membaca atau mendengar tentang hacker & ingin
seperti itu. Penggunaan komputer Lamer terutama untuk main game, IRC, tukar menukar
software prirate, mencuri kartu kredit. Biasanya melakukan hacking menggunakan
software trojan, nuke & DoS (Denial of Service). Biasanya menyombongkan diri melalui
IRC channel dsb. Karena banyak kekurangannya untuk mencapai elite, dalam
perkembangannya Lamer hanya akan sampai level developed kiddie atau script kiddie
saja.
Developed Kiddie, dua tingkat di atas Lamer – di sebut Kiddie karena kelompok ini masih
muda (ABG) & masih sekolah (SMU atau sederajat). Mereka membaca tentang metoda
hacking & caranya di berbagai kesempatan. Mereka mencoba berbagai sistem sampai
akhirnya berhasil & memproklamirkan kemenangan ke lainnya. Umumnya mereka masih
menggunakan Grafik User Interface (GUI) & baru belajar basic dari UNIX, tanpa mampu
menemukan lubang kelemahan baru di sistem operasi.
Script Kiddie, seperti tingkat di atasnya, yaitu developed kiddie, biasanya melakukan
aktifitas hacking berbasis pada Grafical User Interface (GUI). Seperti juga Lamers, mereka
hanya mempunyai pengetahuan teknis networking yang sangat minimal. Hacking
dilakukan menggunakan trojan untuk menakuti & menyusahkan hidup sebagian pengguna
Internet.
Dua tingkat tertinggi para hacker & yang membuat legenda di underground dunia maya,
adalah tingkat Elite & Semi Elite. Barangkali kalau di terjemahkan ke bahasa Indonesia,
tingkat ini merupakan suhu dunia underground. Elite juga dikenal sebagai 3l33t, 3l337,
31337 atau kombinasi dari itu; merupakan ujung tombak industri keamanan jaringan.
Mereka mengerti sistem operasi luar dalam, sanggup mengkonfigurasi & menyambungkan
jaringan secara global. Sanggup melakukan pemrogramman setiap harinya. Sebuah
anugrah yang sangat alami, mereka biasanya effisien & trampil, menggunakan
pengetahuannya dengan tepat. Mereka seperti siluman dapat memasuki sistem tanpa di
ketahui, walaupun mereka tidak akan menghancurkan data-data. Karena mereka selalu
mengikuti peraturan yang ada.
Semi Elite - hacker ini biasanya lebih muda daripada Elite. Mereka juga mempunyai
kemampuan & pengetahuan luas tentang komputer. Mereka mengerti tentang sistem
operasi (termasuk lubangnya). Biasanya dilengkapi dengan sejumlah kecil program cukup
untuk mengubah program eksploit. Banyak serangan yang dipublikasi dilakukan oleh
hacker kaliber ini, sialnya oleh para Elite mereka sering kali di kategorikan Lamer.
Sombong merupakan salah satu sebab utama seorang hacker tertangkap. Mereka
menyombongkan diri & memproklamirkan apa yang mereka capai untuk memperoleh
pengakuan dari yang lain. Hacker lain, karena pengetahuan-nya masih kurang, biasanya
akan memilih target secara hati-hati, tanpa terlihat, diam-diam seperti siluman di
kegelapan malam. Setelah melalui banyak semedi & membaca banyak buku-buku tentang
kerja jaringan komputer, Request For Comment (RFC) di Internet & mempraktekan socket
programming. Semua ini tidak pernah di ajarkan di bangku sekolah maupun kuliah
manapun. Secara perlahan mereka akan naik hirarki mereka sesuai dengan
kemampuannya, tanpa menyombongkan dirinya – itulah para suhu dunia underground.
Salah satu suhu hacker di Indonesia yang saya hormati & kagumi kebetulan bekas murid
saya sendiri di Teknik Elektro ITB, beliau relatif masih muda + sekarang telah menjadi
seorang penting di Research & Development Telkomsel.
Umumnya pembuatan software akan sangat berterima kasih akan masukan dari para
hacker, karena dengan adanya masukan ini software yang mereka buat menjadi semakin
baik. Memang kadang eksploit yang dihasilkan para hacker tidak langsung di peroleh si
perusahaan software, tapi di tahan oleh komunitas underground ini – sampai digunakan
oleh lamers & membuat kekacauan.
Bagaimana proses hacking dilakukan? Ah ini bagian paling menarik dalam dunia
underground. Ada bermacam-macam teknik hacking, yang paling menyebalkan adalah jika
terjadi Denial of Service (DoS) yang menyebabkan server / komputer yang kita gunakan
menjadi macet / mati. Terlepas dari masalah menyebalkan, secara umum ada empat (4)
langkah sederhana yang biasanya dilakukan, yaitu:
1. Membuka akses ke situs.
2. Hacking root (superuser)
3. Menghilangkan jejak.
4. Membuat backdoor (jalan belakang), untuk masuk di kemudian hari.
Hmmm bagaimana secara singkat lebih jauh proses hacking ini dilakukan? Untuk dapat
mengakses ke dalam sebuah situs biasanya melalui beberapa proses terlebih dulu, seperti
hal-nya dinas intelejen, kita harus tahu persis segala sesuatu tentang perusahaan & situs
yang akan kita masuki, rencana melarikan diri kalau ada apa-apa dsb. Proses intelejen ini
dilakukan dalam tiga (3) tahapan besar, yaitu footprinting, scanning & enumeration.
Footprinting untuk mengetahui seberapa besar scope / wilayah serangan bisa dilihat dari
berbagai file HTML perusahaan tsb, perintah whois, host, dig, nslookup pada Linux untuk
melihat scope host yang perlu di serang / di amankan. Scanning untuk melihat servis apa
saja yang ada di mesin-mesin tersebut, topologi jaringan dsb. bisa dilakukan mengunakan
perintah ping, traceroute, nmap, strobe, udp_scan, netcat di Linux & terakhir Cheops untuk
melakukan network mapping. Enumeration sistem operasi yang jalan di server target
apakah Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/Linux/ Netware. Program seperti snmputil, enum,
dumpsec, showmount, rcpinfo, finger menjadi sangat “handy”.
Setelah proses intelejen di lakukan dengan baik proses serangan dapat mulai dikerjakan.
Seperti kita tahu, umumnya berbagai perusahaan / dotcommers akan menggunakan
Internet untuk :
(1) hosting web server mereka,
(2) komunikasi e-mail dan
(3) memberikan akses web / internet kepada karyawan-nya.
Pemisahan jaringan Internet dan IntraNet umumnya dilakukan dengan menggunakan
teknik / software Firewall dan Proxy server. Detail sepuluh (10) besar serangan di Internet
bisa dibaca di http://www.sans.org/topten.html. Melihat kondisi penggunaan di atas,
kelemahan sistem umumnya dapat di tembus misalnya dengan menembus mailserver
external / luar yang digunakan untuk memudahkan akses ke mail keluar dari perusahaan.
Selain itu, dengan menggunakan agressive-SNMP scanner & program yang memaksa
SNMP community string dapat mengubah sebuah router menjadi bridge (jembatan) yang
kemudian dapat digunakan untuk batu loncatan untuk masuk ke dalam jaringan internal
perusahaan (IntraNet).
Agar hacker terlindungi pada saat melakukan serangan, teknik cloacking (penyamaran)
dilakukan dengan cara melompat dari mesin yang sebelumnya telah di compromised
(ditaklukan) melalui program telnet atau rsh. Pada mesin perantara yang menggunakan
Windows serangan dapat dilakukan dengan melompat dari program Wingate / proxy
server; dapat melalui unauthenticated SOCKproxy port 1080 atau open Web proxy port
80, 81, 8000, 8080. Daftar WinGate server di maintain oleh CyberArmy di
http://www.cyberarmy.com/wingate/.
Langkah selanjutnya, hacker akan mengidentifikasi komponen jaringan yang dipercaya
oleh system apa saja. Komponen jaringan tersebut biasanya mesin administrator dan
server yang biasanya di anggap paling aman di jaringan. Start dengan check akses &
eksport NFS ke berbagai direktori yang kritis seperti /usr/bin, /etc dan /home. Eksploitasi
mesin melalui kelemahan Common Gateway Interface (CGI), dengan akses ke file
/etc/hosts.allow.
Selanjutnya hacker harus mengidentifikasi komponen jaringan yang lemah dan bisa di
taklukan. Hacker bisa mengunakan program di Linux seperti ADMhack, mscan, nmap dan
banyak scanner kecil lainnya. Program seperti 'ps' & 'netstat' di buat trojan (ingat cerita
kuda troya? dalam cerita klasik yunani kuno) untuk menyembunyikan proses scanning.
Bagi hacker yang cukup advanced dapat mengunakan aggressive-SNMP scanning untuk
men-scan peralatan dengan SNMP.
Setelah hacker berhasil mengidentifikasi komponen jaringan yang lemah dan bisa di
taklukan, maka hacker akan menjalan program untuk menaklukan program daemon yang
lemah di server. Cara paling sederhana menggunakan script kiddies yang tersedia di
Internet di http://www.technotronics.com / http://www.hackingexposed.com seperti
cgiscan.c, phfscan.c dsb. Program daemon adalah program di server yang biasanya
berjalan di belakang layar (sebagai daemon / setan). Keberhasilan menaklukan
program daemon ini akan memungkinkan seorang Hacker untuk memperoleh akses
sebagai ‘root’ (administrator tertinggi di server).
Untuk menghilangkan jejak, seorang hacker biasanya melakukan operasi pembersihan
'clean-up‘ operation dengan cara membersihkan berbagai log file. Program seperti zap,
wzap, wted, remove akan membantu. Walaupun simpel text editor seperti vi dapat juga
melakukan pekerjaan itu. Jangan lupa menambahkan program 'backdooring' dengan cara
Mengganti file .rhosts di /usr/bin untuk memudahkan akses ke mesin yang di taklukan
melalui rsh & csh. Selanjutnya seorang hacker dapat menggunakan mesin yang sudah
ditaklukan untuk kepentingannya sendiri, tapi seorang hacker yang baik akan
memberitahukan sistem administrator tentang kelemahan sistemnya & tidak akan pernah
menjalankan perintah ‘rm –rf / &’.
Oleh karena itu semua mesin & router yang menjalankan misi kritis sebaiknya selalu di
periksa keamanannya & di patch oleh software yang lebih baru. Backup menjadi penting
sekali terutama pada mesin-mesin yang menjalankan misi kritis supaya terselamatkan dari
ulah cracker yang men-disable sistem dengan ‘rm –rf / &’.
Cukup banyak situs di Internet yang bisa menjadi basis pengetahuan underground,
beberapa diantara-nya berbahasa Indonesia seperti Kecoa Elektronik http://www.kelektronik.
org, Hackerlink http://www.hackerlink.or.id, maupun Anti-hackerlink (entah
dimana lokasinya). Referensi terbaik mungkin bisa dibaca di berbagai situs di luar negeri
seperti http://packetstorm.securify.com, http://www.hackingexposed.com,
http://neworder.box.sk, http://www.sans.org, http://www.rootshell.com.
A BlackBerry Properties

The Trail of Dr. Chaos

2007-09-28T02:21:00.000-07:00

Interpol: The Trail of Dr. Chaos
Big Fish Games Exclusive!

A mysterious and dangerous criminal believed to have been in hiding for over a decade, has suddenly re-surfaced. The target of your mission is Dr. Vladimir Chaosky, aka Dr. Chaos. Agencies have been trying to track him down since the Cold War, and now, more than ever, you must bring him to justice. Your mission is to apprehend the evil doctor through global investigative work. Your expertise in tracking fugitives and analyzing crime scenes will help you succeed.

Cleverly hidden objects.
Great mini-games.
Travel all over the globe.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

Download

Azada

2007-09-28T02:17:00.000-07:00

Trapped in a magical puzzle book, the adventurous Titus needs your help to release him from his spell. To do this, you must solve the tricky puzzles of Azada. Crack the series of puzzles and fill in the missing pages of the enchanted book to free Titus from his prison.

Loads of unique puzzles to solve.
Boss Puzzles and surprises along the way.
Get the Strategy Guide.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

Download

Azada Strategy Guide

2007-09-28T02:13:00.000-07:00

A detailed Strategy Guide made specifically to help you get through the game but not spoil the fun. Trapped in a haunted room by his great-uncle, the adventurous Titus has asked you to help release him from the magical spell. To do this, you must solve the most mysterious puzzles of Azada.

Helpful walk-thru.
50+ pages.
Details on characters.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

Download

Dream Chronicles

2007-09-28T02:11:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the Dream Chronicles, where the lines between reality and fantasy fade away. Follow subtle clues to help Faye find her missing husband and escape from the mysterious sleeping spell that has taken over the town of Wish! Stay sharp and focused and you just may unravel this intriguing, dreamy mystery!

32 surreal levels.
18 environments/chapters.
115 dream pieces to find.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

Download

Hidden Expedition: Everest

2007-09-28T02:06:00.000-07:00

Fresh from a successful exploration of the wreck of the Titanic, the Hidden Expedition Club will pit one of its stellar members against a formidable group of opponents in a race to the summit of Everest. Other groups will battle you to be the first to summit Mount Everest. Expert Everest climber Ed Viesturs will assist you along the way. Explore mysteries of the world as you find hidden clues. Race to the Roof of the World!

Over 30 stunningly beautiful scenes from around the world
4 Character mini-games
Ed Viesturs' exclusive footage of the world's most dangerous summits
Race around the world to reach Everest
The expedition continues at

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

Download

Mystery P.I. - The Lottery Ticket

2007-09-28T02:02:00.000-07:00

You are the world famous Mystery P.I. and you`ve been hired by Grandma Rose to find her winning $488 Million lottery ticket! Retrace Grandma's footsteps to collect clues by finding over 2100 cleverly hidden objects and solving puzzles. Two addictive ways to play: Find the Ticket and Unlimited Hidden Object game mode. Grandma Rose has agreed to pay you $20 Million if you find the ticket before the deadline. Hurry, you only have 12 hours to find the ticket!

Over 2100 hidden objects.
20 intriguing scenes.
2 addictive game modes.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

Download

Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst

2007-09-28T01:57:00.000-07:00

Unlock the Secrets of a Century Old Mystery: Rumors surrounding the history of stately Ravenhearst Manor have circulated for decades. The recently acquired diary of Emma Ravenhearst may hold the key to unraveling the history of this unsettling place, yet the pages are missing. Players assume the role of Master Detective to unlock secrets held within Ravenhearst, scouring 32 rooms in the manor for cleverly hidden clues. Locating and assembling diary pages helps tell the history of the house and, ultimately, unlock the mystery.

32 beautifully new, unique rooms.
15 fantastical puzzles.
Thousands of hidden objects.
Get the Strategy Guide

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

Download

Big City Adventure - San Francisco

2007-09-28T01:52:00.000-07:00

Join the Big City Adventure treasure hunt and search for thousands of cleverly hidden items. Travel to all the most famous (and not so famous) locations around the cosmopolitan city of San Francisco. Discover fascinating and obscure facts about San Francisco and it's history, plus, earn cool mementos from the many amazing locations you'll visit. Big City Adventure is a great beginning to a new series of hidden object games.

Thousands of objects to find.
Exciting mini-games to master.
Beautiful sound and graphics.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

Download

Rome: Curse of the Necklace

2007-09-28T01:45:00.000-07:00

A Travelogue: 360 game. Explore the stunning city of Rome through 360-degree photographs in this great hidden object mystery. Find special objects and swap them for clues to solve the mystery of "The Curse of the Necklace." Discover some of Rome's most popular attractions, including the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum and St. Peter's Square. You'll also be amazed by locations that only the locals know about, including some that are quite strange and mysterious!

Challenging Hidden Object game.

Fun mini-games.

Many beautiful and mysterious locations.

Solve an intriguing mystery

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster Processor

RAM: 128 MB

Download

Agatha Christie - Death on the Nile

2007-09-28T01:38:00.000-07:00

Hercule Poirot investigates a thrilling murder mystery and must find hidden clues, interrogate suspects, and much more in Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile. Uncover clues and evidence directly tied to the story. When you have enough evidence, question the passengers in the salong and discover the identity of the real murderer!

Tons of mini-games.
Closely examine clues.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows ME/2000/XP/VISTA

CPU: 600MHz or faster ProcessorRAM: 128 MB

Download

Laptop/Notebook

2007-09-28T01:33:00.000-07:00

Acer
Download driver Acer

Toshiba
Download driver Toshiba

Axioo
Download driver Axioo

Asus
Download driver Asus

Apple macintosh
Download driver Apple

Sony Vaio
Download driver Vaio