Dot Matrix is the droid from Spaceballs.
I haven’t had a chance to watch @running_coach ’s video yet, but I skimmed a wiki article about Zip drives and was reminded of the infamous ‘click of death’ failure which happened to me, and resulted in a class-action lawsuit. Which I got a notice in the mail about, joined it, and I think eventually got a check for like $12.
That’s how the term came to be understood idiomatically (although even today, there are exceptions: large-format LED displays and dedicated alphanumeric displays tend to be called “dot matrix”). But any rectangular matrix of dots/pixels is a dot matrix display. For printers, it was to distinguish them from daisy wheel printers. A laser printer is also dot matrix, but we call those laser printers because the laser is the most important distinguishing feature.
Arguably, “raster” is less accurate today with modern displays. It comes from the Latin word for rake, with the sense of it being drawn across a field. That makes sense for CRTs but less so for LCD, OLED, etc. displays.
Well yeah, it’s a matrix of dots. I was just getting at that if you talk about “dot matrix” and anything computer-related, the first thing that’s going to come to most people’s minds are older printers.
I’m old enough to remember the Univac I. It used decimal arithmetic and had 1000 words of addressable memory. Each word consisted of 12 bytes, 6 bits each. (BTW, byte did not originally mean 8 bits; it varied from 6 to 9 depending on the machine.) And the internal memory was not even random access; only 100 of the memory locations were accessible at any one time. The other 900 were in mercury delay lines. The only long-term storage was in tape drives. Input was by paper tape. The power supply filter was a 1 farad capacitor, consisting of a room full of 2000 electrolytics, 500 \mu-farad each. The whole thing wasn’t quite a warehouse, but a very large room. And there was, at first, no assembler, although that came along soon.
My grandfather used a Univac for doing quality control statistical analysis for the Air Force. He lived long enough for the Intel Core line of CPUs, but his last computer was probably a Pentium III or 4.
His favorite computing device was a soroban.
I still have my old Zip Drive, along with a shitload of 100Mb and (I believe) 250 Mb disks. Obviously it’s been a while since I’ve used it, but I don’t remember ever experiencing he “click of death” or having a disk fail on me.
I have a zip drive floating around somewhere. Also a Jaz drive! I don’t think they sold many of those.
I had no professional experience with the Univac I; I missed the entire vacuum-tube era (though I became quite familiar with IBM’s last pre-computer generation of punched-card equipment, which remained in limited use into the 70s). I do remember Art Linkletter employing a Univac I on his game show People Are Funny to do some basic statistics, back when I was a kiddywink. (I suspect Herman Hollerith’s original machines for the 1890 Census would have done nearly as well.)
My first computer (well, it wasn’t.MINE) was an IBM 360 model 75. About million instructions per second, and a whopping 3MB of memory: one of real core memory and two of solid state.
I’ve often observed that my phone has more memory than existed ON THE PLANET for most of my career.
My father was famous for getting sold on various computers by salesman, despite me being clear in what I wanted/needed. At least until I went to college, and said “Give me a budget, and I’ll order it, you’ll just screw it up again.”.
Thus my first computer was a TI-99/4a. Which, while in some ways innovative when it came out in 1981, was purchased by my father in 1985, a year after it went OUT OF PRODUCTION. You could pretty much not get anything on their proprietary cartridges, and of course, no storage option. I remember getting easy BASIC programs to code in, spending a hour slowly typing them in and correcting my errors, then realizing the moment I turned it off everything would be lost…
Just a terrible experience, especially when my fellow geek friends had Apple II’s or C-64s.
And a few years late, I lived in unspeakable envy of the friend that had an Amiga!
I remember drooling over them at the local computer shop. The graphics were incredible compared to anything on the PC at the time, let alone the C64/128.
My grandfather had one of these:
I wonder if it’s still at the house somewhere. I always thought it was pretty nifty, even if the display was terrible.
yeah, but the ti had good versions of blasto and hunt the wumpus, and its what I first learned to code on …a portable trash 80? what was that used for ?
My first computer was a VIC-20, and I upgraded to a C-64 a couple of years later. I remember my father, who was an air traffic controller, telling me once that the Canadian central ATC system had been computerized to run on a roomful of interconnected C-64s.
Three times for me. You woulda thought I learned after the second time it happened. Hate those things.
Are you sure? I’m pretty sure my friend had a cassette deck for it. Wikipedia also mentions a floppy disk.
That’s why I had to specify, my dad got one after it had gone out of production, IE it was insanely cheap, but nothing was available for it anymore - no cartridges, none of the secondary systems (which had been rare and expensive in the first place). Just the base computer/keyboard unit and a Parsec cartridge.
Which I guess was an okay game by the standards of the age, but I couldn’t really do ANYTHING else with it.
That Kaypro reminds me an awful lot of my dad’s old Osborne, which I have stored away in a closet down in my basement. Except the screen was in the middle (and much smaller) with one drive on either side.
My first PC was a Kaypro but it wasn’t a “portable” like that, just a regular old desktop IBM clone.
This was the first computer my parents bought when I was in junior high. It had the extended ram, too.
When I started having computer lessons in school in 1984 (we were the first computer class at my school ever), we had two Apple IIEs for the whole class. We later got three more IIE clones made in Japan. We learned programming in Pascal, the second program language I learned after I had self-taught me on C-64 Basic.