ArticlesLong-time geeks sometimes get together and harp nostalgically about the old days of computers, trying to outdo each others stories about how primitive the computers were that they were using.
Many years ago, I decided not to play those games. I think I decided shortly after hearing an academic explain: “The whole team was excited when we first received our 16 KB computer – after all, that equated to one kilobyte each!”
Nonetheless, I am planning a short series of articles about a computer system I used many years ago. Not to tell you how slow it was (although I will probably do that, just to give a sense of balance) but to explain how advanced it was. I was excited about that machine, because I thought it was setting the pace for other integrated development environments (IDEs). I was wrong. In some areas, IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse only caught up over 10 years later. In others areas, I am still waiting in hope.
The risk is that I am going to sound old, nostalgic and curmudgeonly. I hope I don’t, because that is only mostly true.
So let me set the scene. The year was 1991. The US President, George Bush, sent troops to Iraq. The Treasurer was hounding the Australian Prime Minister for the top job. The US was rocked by a series of tragic storms covering a number of states, with wind speeds peaking over 400 km/h. Ah, the good old days.
I was being forced to use my leastest-favouritest-ever word-processor.
However, I was also using my mostest-favouritest-ever IDE (Integrated Development Environment). It was called the Rational 1000 or R1000.
Comment by Randy on December 9, 2007
The company I work for actually had an R1000 in one of their storage rooms up until just a couple years ago – 2005 I think. The machine was about the size of a small refrigerator and weighed a ton! There were a bunch of old monitors that looked like VT100s but had an odd shape.
Anyway, the thing was worthless and was going to be hauled of for scrap so we decided to power it on and see what it would do. Nothing ever did show up on the terminal, but the fans were really loud and the disks made this terrible noise. The thing must have just wanted to head off to the scrap yard!