time for fairly obscure canadian retrocomputing history
IBM Home Computing seems to have been a canada-only chain of retail stores that sold IBM products. it didn't last long here - maybe 5-10 years - before it disappeared in the early 2000s. we had a single location in downtown Edmonton City Centre Mall in the mid-90s.
it wasn't the place to go for the best deals on hardware and software. everything was sold at retail prices, and i remember seeing very few sales. i remember buying my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold at the downtown location as a first-year university student for the princely sum of $300.
as you can see in the last photo - buying an IBM in 1994 was a major investment. you could buy three used cars at the time for less than a pentium desktop. 😬
does anyone else remember these retail stores? did they exist in the US, or was it a canadian chain?
One day while picking my son up from day care, I noticed all the kids checking me out in a very particular manner. I asked him what they had done today, and apparently, they had been talking about what their parents did for work.
"I couldn't remember if you are with the FBI or the CIA, but the guys thought it was pretty cool" he said
While he had a few details wrong, it made for a good story at morning coffee with my IBM colleagues the next day.
Do any #IBM employees follow me here on Fedi? I will do pretty much anything - anything... - to be able to use and possibly review the new IBM Power S1012 in its tower configuration. I even have two POWER9 machines to compare it to!
IBM is releasing a family of Granite code models to the open-source community. The aim is to make coding as easy as possible — for as many developers as possible.
Dotarło do mnie takie zaproszenie, więc się od razu dzielę.
Spotkanie autorskie z Edwinem Blackiem
8 maja (środa) o godzinie 18:00 odbędzie się w Łodzi spotkanie autorskie z Edwinem Blackiem, autorem książki „IBM i Holocaust. Strategiczny sojusz hitlerowskich Niemiec z amerykańską korporacją”
Miejsce: Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi, ul. Wojska Polskiego 83
#BASIC turns 60 today! Happy birthday from the PCjr. Sometimes, I wonder what path my life would have diverged into if I had never had access to a computer and a book on BASIC programming as a kid.
The image/source is originally from Icons & Images by Elmer Larsen from 1985. I typed it in and tweaked it with PC-BASIC, then transferred it to a working PCjr with a gotek floppy drive.
Growing up with MS-DOS, I knew its role in today's Windows' usage of \ to separate directories and / for command-line arguments (choices that sound quirk-y in an Unix-influenced world that uses / and -, respectively.)
I never understood why MSFT - a very Unix-aware shop, having released their XENIX a year before MS-DOS - went with such an odd choice, until I looked at the (recently open-sourced) MS-DOS source code.
The files include documentation for computer manufacturers (so they could write compatible BIOS code, customize distribution, etc.), and this piece on MS-DOS 2.0 (which introduced subdirectories) suggests that - as usual in those times - the party behind the odd decision was none other than IBM:
Can anyone have any idea about what this #mysterious#IBM#hardware can be ? I can't remember precisely how I got it, I THINK it was from a dumpster or found in a pile of some "electronic garbage". I have absolutely NO IDEA what this can be , I have a SUSPECT but I could be totally wrong, I THINK they MAY be part of an IBM 5100 but I can't be sure, if anyone knows what they could be I'd be interested to know !
The Love for #C64 computers never ceases. #IBM quantum computing Code is running here, which experiment claims the C64 outperforms the IBM #qbit#Quantum computer