The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer(postgamecontent.com) |
The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer(postgamecontent.com) |
In case anyone is interested in more information about the earlier version of the ICON (and the LEXICON file server it ran from), here are my two blogs posts:
https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/
https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/lexicon-computer/
One interesting QNX command we used to get in trouble in high school was apb (all points bulletin) - here's a demo of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8ts6zV2DU
I'm also fascinated by the early Canadian personal computer scene. They were trying some innovative things in the great white North. Things like the mostly PC compatible Hyperion, which beat the Compaq Portable to market by a hair (and which You Can't Do That on Television star Christine McGlade famously carried in to work on her motorcycle), and the NABU, an early network computer concept whose software was downloaded through a television cable network (unlike the ICON it was successfully rescued from total obscurity).
512K RAM, MMU (discrete logic), 4x serial, 10MB hard disk, floppy. No keyboard or video interface; you were expected to use serial terminals, typically three of them for users, with the fourth port used for a printer. Ran Xenix 1.0 which was basically V7 Unix ported to the platform. No networking except what would run over a serial port.
I got a fully working one at a garage sale for $40 in the early 1990s and geeked out with and learned quite a bit about Unix on it for a while. Since it had about the same limitations as a PDP11 and Minix (64K code, 64K data) there was, in those days, a fair bit of software that could be made to run (i.e. lightly ported) easily. I remember getting a vi clone going that used 63K of the possible 64K code space. V7 didn't have a fullscreen editor stock.
Long gone now. By the time Linux became my main OS a few years later, this was still in the "junk" category rather than "valuable collector's item" category and I gave it away.
In the early 80s, when it wasn't yet clear that PC clones would dominate, it was a wonderful machine: it had a workstation-class (for the time) graphical display and was faster than any IBM product until the second-rev AT came out.
Microsoft was more focused on being cross-platform back then. Multiplan, for instance, ran on an abstract machine and so was ported to everything from minicomputers to the frickin' TI-99/4A. They even tried to consolidate Xenix and MS-DOS on a single unified API called "XeDOS"; fun fact: this is how MS-DOS 2.0 got subdirectories and piping/redirection.
Did you spot the Tandy 2000 used as a prop in Stranger Things? It was the cash register for the video store they used to search for Eddie in I believe Episode 2 of Season 4.
The trackballs were robust indeed.
Due to the client/server nature; a classroom of kids logging in at the same time could take several minutes and most of that time would be filled with a classroom of 7 year olds spinning the heck out of the tennis ball sized trackball.
One more knowledgeable teacher once told us that the this probably made the computers slower because each time you do something it has to pause and decide what to do. I guess he understood interrupts somehow.
But that logic doesn’t work on 8 year olds with a trackball and nothing else to do.
My public high school in Ontario was supposed to be a "magnet school for the gifted" and instead turned out to be a scam.
The computer class teacher was absent for a year, and the substitute teacher insisted that the keyboard and mouse cords should be neatly arranged at the end of each class as if it was a knitting class. The "coursework" consisted of learning how to type out "business memos" using a word processor.
The school believed that this was an important skill and imagined that we would be writing "memos" on computers and printing them out in the "business world."
I skipped every class I could to hang out with my girlfriend and got out with a 2.0 GPA.
The school in question has since been demolished. The whole scam was to try to prevent the school from being demolished due to low performance, so they pretended to be a "magnet school for the gifted."
https://www.juliandunn.net/2006/08/21/on-hacking-the-unisys-...
We figured out how to create a SUID shell, so we could get back to root even after we head logged out. Poking a few bytes would have been more interesting!
87 points by jasoneckert on April 4, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 34 comments
Mostly Mathville and Offshore Fishing, of course.
A lot of hours with a mostly absent gr. 5 teacher.
These systems had numerous problems, one of which was the school board's severe lack of resources to manage them. The teachers were limited in what they were allowed or able to do, so if a lab went down, it typically took about a week to get someone to fix it. As students, we used this to our advantage. I have fond memories of causing all sorts of issues on these systems as a kid. Another perk was that my school wasn’t air-conditioned, except for the computer labs, so during the hot months it's where you wanted to be.
Each classroom had a IIe, some with green screens and some with colour monitors. All outfitted with a well-rounded collection of educational game 5 1/4” floppies.
We also had a networked Mac Plus computer lab with a couple of Performas at the “head” of the table.
It looks like this computer is also known as the Burroughs ICON and the CEMCORP Icon.
But none here are maybe from that Era that was coming to a close in the late 70s and are not yet qualified to shake their fist and angrily yell at that singular cloud floating in a beautiful blue sky!
But I liked the PDP-8 best.
So there!
You are seen.