Minicomputer"What we do today, tomorrow sounds old" --pointed out Ken Olsen in 1982 referring to Digital's effort to enter the personal computer market. I would add that obsolesce is not a bad thing for technologies that reached their momentum of glory at some point in history, and that's exactly the case of "minicomputers" back in the 1960s and 70s.
Most people today recall their first encounters with early personal computers unaware -in most cases- that computers started to be popular much before than that, possibly when they were attending elementary school. What actually introduced the computer to the popular culture was not the so called "personal computer" but those refrigerator-size monsters that back then were called "minicomputers".
Heritage/1 has been designed around that concept. It is not a "mainframe" because mainframes are designed to carry out heavy work loads and their design puts an emphasis on reliability (to which end they employ generous amounts of redundancy). It is not a "personal computer" either because it lacks a video monitor, a keyboard and a mouse.
Heritage/1 is a minicomputer and she has been designed to work exactly in that "classical" fashion. Any temptation to modern thought has been intentionally removed from the mind of the author. The modern concept of "fixed disk" is an example: back then, data (and software) did not reside "into the computer" (as part of it) but "outside the computer" supported by removable media such as tapes and removable disks.
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Homebuilt CPUs WebRing
JavaScript by Qirien Dhaela
Join the ring?
David Brooks, the designer of the Simplex-III homebrew computer, has founded the Homebuilt CPUs Web Ring. To join, drop David a line, mentioning your page's URL. He will then add it to the list.
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Project start date: May 13 of 2009
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