A look at the most expensive PCs in computing history

[Ichinisan]

Is an assembler program like a Linux script?

Assembly is machine code. Basically, it's the lowest level. Working with registers and opcodes. Most people learn a high level language and rely on a compiler to turn it into machine code.

 

[Perknose]

My first PC was an IBM compatible back in 1984, advertised as fully IBM compatible back when reverse engineering the BIOS was still an achievement! Cost over $1,500 with a Sony monitor and a genuine Hercules vid card, as opposed to a mere Hercules compatible, because SCREEN FONTS, which were unheard of back then.

A year or two later, I got a Cardinal modem for $50 from a guy at PACS, the Philadelphia Area Computer Society. They had just come out and that price was killer. Going to PACS in those days felt like a band of brothers.

I vividly remember sitting on my enclosed porch jutting over a south facing hill, surrounding by trees on a sultry summer evening and connecting to the PACS BBS while drinking in my green phosphor screen and thinking, "Damn, ain't this the life!"

 

[bbhaag]

Assembly is machine code. Basically, it's the lowest level. Working with registers and opcodes. Most people learn a high level language and rely on a compiler to turn it into machine code.

So who writes the compilers? Honestly I'm not trying to be confrontational I'm just curious. I bought a very old Norton book of ebay and he mentions some of those things to. I find it fascinating.

 

[John Connor]

So 1's and 0's? That the lowest I can think of. LOL

 

[Ichinisan]

So who writes the compilers? Honestly I'm not trying to be confrontational I'm just curious. I bought a very old Norton book of ebay and he mentions some of those things to. I find it fascinating.

People who understand assembly write the compilers.

...but there's not really a single "assembly" language because each CPU architecture is different.

Programming for SNES was different than programming for Genesis. x86 assembly is different from PowerPC or ARM.

[edit]
In most cases, complex code written natively in assembly is far more efficient / optimized than code written in a high-level language. Unfortunately, we don't have very many "human compilers" like John Carmack working at most game studios.

 

[Ichinisan]

So 1's and 0's? That the lowest I can think of. LOL

Kinda, but those bits would be grouped together to the processor architecture's native word/register size. 8-bits (1 byte) was a common word size on early computers.

As I understand it:
Groups of bits in a particular register set an opcode (mathematical operators like add, xor, etc) and groups of bits on 2 other registers would be data to be processed in an operation (CPU cycle).

 

[VirtualLarry]

MASM 5.1... the spiral-bound opcode reference manual was REALLY handy.

Few people know this, but Microsoft started as a computer language / compiler vendor, not as an OS vendor.

 

[Iron Woode]

in 8bit machine code, everything is done in hexadecimal. each command such as LDA, LDX, STA,STX...etc is represented by a hexadecimal number such as A0 (LDA - load accumulator). The ram location is represented by 2 hexadecimal numbers when it is higher than 255.

Assembler code is basically an English translation of the hexadecimal machine code. So you would write LDA#(160) or LDA#(A0). Some assemblers allowed decimal and hexadecimal.

that is all I can remember now.

 

[sdifox]

68000 assembly optimisation was the bane of my existence. trying to shave ms in processing time for microcontrollers was pure hell.

 

[Iron Woode]

MASM 5.1... the spiral-bound opcode reference manual was REALLY handy.

Few people know this, but Microsoft started as a computer language / compiler vendor, not as an OS vendor.

I learned that back in school because our Commodore PETs used Microsoft Basic 4.0.

I had the option of buying Microsoft stock back in 1982 and didn't. In the early 90's I felt really stupid for not buying it.

 

[KlokWyze]

The Osborne Vixen can be your for less than $30.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Osborne-4-V...ils-and-etc-/262058915599?hash=item3d03edb70f

Honestly this looks exceptionally cheap. I just sold 2 incomplete Macintosh IIci's for over $100/piece. Probably because they are Apple though. lol

 

[IronWing]

The Osborne Vixen can be your for less than $30.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Osborne-4-V...ils-and-etc-/262058915599?hash=item3d03edb70f

Honestly this looks exceptionally cheap. I just sold 2 incomplete Macintosh IIci's for over $100/piece. Probably because they are Apple though. lol

They're selling the floppy disks, not the computer.

 

[Blackjack200]

So 1's and 0's? That the lowest I can think of. LOL

Kinda, but those bits would be grouped together to the processor architecture's native word/register size. 8-bits (1 byte) was a common word size on early computers.

As I understand it:
Groups of bits in a particular register set an opcode (mathematical operators like add, xor, etc) and groups of bits on 2 other registers would be data to be processed in an operation (CPU cycle).

Yeah, with assembly language you're working directly with the processor and memory registers. And like Ichinisan said, each computer architecture will have it's own assembly language. Intel's is called x86 for obvious reasons. The Apple SoCs on iOS devices would be totally different.

Real hackers work extensively in assembly language. If you know where certain weaknesses are you can cause things like buffer overflows by fucking with the memory pointers. No one works in machine code (1s and 0s) as far as I know. It would be incredibly difficult and offer no advantage that I can think of over assembly language.

Further reading:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4Z0S9ZbC0g

 

[Perknose]

Yeah, with assembly language you're working directly with the processor and memory registers. And like Ichinisan said, each computer architecture will have it's own assembly language. Intel's is called x86 for obvious reasons. The Apple SoCs on iOS devices would be totally different.

Real hackers work extensively in assembly language. If you know where certain weaknesses are you can cause things like buffer overflows by fucking with the memory pointers. No one works in machine code (1s and 0s) as far as I know. It would be incredibly difficult and offer no advantage that I can think of over assembly language.

Further reading:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4Z0S9ZbC0g

For the Computer Science program at UPenn way back in the day, they made us, at one point, work directly in machine code. Tedious and all but pointless, but I guess it was done in the spirit of, "Make love to your machine, grunt!"

 

[Blackjack200]

Haha, wow...

...I can't believe they had computers when you were in college.

 

[kn51]

68000 assembly optimisation was the bane of my existence. trying to shave ms in processing time for microcontrollers was pure hell.

Always enjoyed 68K assembly.

In my college years, writing VAX assembly was the equivalent of writing Visual Basic with its instruction set.

 

[HumblePie]

Anyone buying Dells in the 90's was throwing money away. I built a much better and faster system the year before that Dell came out at a fraction of the price. Heck, I was even on these forums at the time figuring out how to do it! Overclocked celeron with more memory, decent mobo, and 64gb hard drive. Along with an obsidian voodoo2 card (single card with 2 voodoo 2s in sli already) it was a screaming machine that kicked the crap out of that Dell TS600 in the OP. I didn't pay anywhere near $2,300 for it either. If I remember I think my price breakdown was:

$20 for cheap beige case
$60 for the celeron
$10 for the heatsink and fan
$100 for the motherboard
$100 for the memory (256MB with 2x128MB Mushkin sticks)
$150 for the 64 Maxtor hard drive
$400 for the video card
$40 for the Creative Labs Sound Blaster sound card
$30 for the FSP PSU
$20 for the cd drive

That's the tower and I had a decent monitor at the time as well. 20inch trinitron I think for $180. Keyboard and mouse were ok along with a cheapie speaker setup for another $30 for all that. I had full copies of windows 98 SE already so that wasn't a problem. So just under $1,000 for it all and it was a much better and faster system.

 

[Perknose]

Haha, wow...

...I can't believe they had computers when you were in college.

Grad level, years later. I was a Poli Sci and English major @ Swarthmore. As an undergrad, it was Fortran on punch cards. Punch cards!

 

[sdifox]

Haha, wow...

...I can't believe they had computers when you were in college.

punch cards son, punch cards. :awe:

 

[Perknose]

Anyone buying Dells in the 90's was throwing money away. I built a much better and faster system the year before that Dell came out at a fraction of the price. Heck, I was even on these forums at the time figuring out how to do it! Overclocked celeron with more memory, decent mobo, and 64gb hard drive. Along with an obsidian voodoo2 card (single card with 2 voodoo 2s in sli already) it was a screaming machine that kicked the crap out of that Dell TS600 in the OP. I didn't pay anywhere near $2,300 for it either. If I remember I think my price breakdown was:

$20 for cheap beige case
$60 for the celeron
$10 for the heatsink and fan
$100 for the motherboard
$100 for the memory (256MB with 2x128MB Mushkin sticks)
$150 for the 64 Maxtor hard drive
$400 for the video card
$40 for the Creative Labs Sound Blaster sound card
$30 for the FSP PSU
$20 for the cd drive

That's the tower and I had a decent monitor at the time as well. 20inch trinitron I think for $180. Keyboard and mouse were ok along with a cheapie speaker setup for another $30 for all that. I had full copies of windows 98 SE already so that wasn't a problem. So just under $1,000 for it all and it was a much better and faster system.

Those were the days, starting with the legendary Celly 300, that brought so many of us to AT! You really could get far better performance and at a significant savings building your own.

I remember explaining to folks the binning process of cpu's after they were cut from a sheet of silicon and performance tested, and what that meant for us. Then they'd ask, "What's a cpu again? Is it the box?" :biggrin:

 

[HumblePie]

Those were the days, starting with the legendary Celly 300, that brought so many of us to AT! You really could get far better performance and at a significant savings building your own.

I remember explaining to folks the binning process of cpu's after they were cut from a sheet of silicon and performance tested, and what that meant for us. Then they'd ask, "What's a cpu again? Is it the box?" :biggrin:

Yah my friend paid extra for through Minotaur website for specifically binned Malaysian made Celly 300. I came in after with a slightly faster celly and rolled the dice on it. I originally had a 333 I OC'd to 533 and then did the same with a 400 to 600. That was before that Dell TS600 600 P2 came out and mine was FASTER and cheaper. My friend said I was crazy going for the full 256 MB amount of ram and a 64GB hard drive at the time. He was like, "What the hell you going to do with all that!??" I was laughing then and now at that statement/question.

But even before all that, it was still much cheaper to build than buy. When you looked at any place selling PC's you had to buy the whole bundle. Tower, monitor, keyboard, mouse, Encyclopedia Britannica, printer, paper, speakers, mic, and a slew of other software. I know because my parents bought me a P1 133 back in 1996 for my HS graduation gift. They paid like $3K for it and that was the middle price bundle. It was a choice of 3 they had when looking around. P1 100mhz bundle setup for $2,500. The P1 133 for $3K or the P1 166 for $5Kish. It was nutz! Funny thing is that I sold the system when I build that celly 333 2 years later. I sold it $75 as that was all I could get for the basic computer. Kept the printer and software though as no one wanted that junk. That was how I found out about this site back in the day by building that celeron pc.

 

[Svnla]

Not sure how many of you would even remember the company, but Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) came out with a personal computer in 1984. <snip>

We used to have DEC computers on racks and they ran legacy manufacturing programs over 10 years ago.

My first PC was a Dell beige desktop with T700 cpu and 15" CRT for $1500.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

For the Computer Science program at UPenn way back in the day, they made us, at one point, work directly in machine code. Tedious and all but pointless, but I guess it was done in the spirit of, "Make love to your machine, grunt!"

We had to do that back in... oh, 2001 I guess.

Hey, waitaminute. I'm not THAT old. :biggrin:

 

[sdifox]

I remember helping my cousin etching an Apple 2 clone mb in acid.

 

[TheGardener]

punch cards son, punch cards. :awe:

Ya, I hated those. At another university, my friend actually had a terminal and keyboard. Was I jealous.