I’ve been through the Old Computer Museum and Googled 'til I bled (or at least sweat a little) and I just can’t identify it.
In this YouTube video (about the makings of an Atari 2600 game and its company) at around the 6:09 mark, Dennis Koble walks into his development lab to continue working on his game. The computer that he sits at (which has a twin behind him, facing the camera as he first walks in) is the one I’m trying to identify.
Things I know:
Had to have been made prior to 1982 (as this video was released in 1983 but was produced throughout 1982 – Dennis has only started developing the game at that point in the documentary, which would put it around January or February of 1982) and most likely made in 1980 or 1981, as Imagic was formed in 1981 and these machines would have been purchased when they opened up shop.
It has a very similar form factor to the original Tandy TRS-80 Model II/III machines — all one unit, monitor and all (but it’s definitely not a Tandy). Square and boxy (unlike the sloped sides of the Commodore PET and kin), rather small monitor (8?“) and probably monochromatic. All white bezel, white keys, black front. Monitor occupies left 2/3rds of front, which means the right side probably has a couple of 5.25” floppy drives or a tape drive or something there.
Has a dual 8" floppy drive connected to (but external from) it.
It is not an HP9000-series minicomputer as suggested by one of the commenters (in the comments for part 2 of this video), nor any HP model from that era from what I can tell. (I searched the HP computer museum, too)
Any ideas what it is? It’s obviously not the sort of machine intended for home use, but none of the business-class machines or terminals I’ve searched match.
Can’t tell you about the computer, but I recognize the big bearded guy in the scene where they’re talking at the picnic table. I was in a dorm with him and we briefly worked at the same small company that designed the Intellivision and wrote many video games for it.
I think that’s a terminal, rather than a standalone computer - the styling is similar to some of the devices on this site, but I can’t find an exact match.
I thought that was a possibility, but with the style of business machines of the era it could have been either/or. It’s almost certainly a North American-made (or at least commonly available in North America) machine at any rate.
No, that was APh Technological Consulting (scroll down), which was started by a couple of new Caltech grads. Nearly all of their employees were Caltech students or alums, actually. A bunch of APh alums ended up at Atari and Activision, among other places. APh lost them in large part because they weren’t paying game royalties to the programmers – I don’t recall whether APh itself was getting royalties from Mattel. Those were crazy times – a tiny company with a bunch of young guys when the video game market was exploding.
It looks like the Atari 2600 to me. Ancient Atari 2600 link. The site has the variations on it, so look at them if you don’t think it’s an exact match.
No, the computer Koble is using to program the games on at around the 6:09 mark in the linked YouTube video. 2600s I know, I’ve been a collector for years (though I stopped over a year ago, may take it up again in the future). I’m just curious to know what machines they coded the games on before they were dumped to EEPROMs for testing.
When I started using computers, we used ‘dumb terminals’; some model of Lee Data. Unlike the Tektronix machine we had, which spoke BASIC and could store stuff on a large cassette or 8" floppy, the Lee Data terminals could only talk to the mainframe (a Cyber 77). Since the computer in the video has floppy drives and a joystick, I’d lean toward it being an actual computer instead of just a terminal.
My guess is that it’s a microprocessor development system. These usually are hosted on a much more sophisticated processor with a real operating system, and include an editor, cross-assembler, linker, loader and hardware in-circuit emulator for the target CPU. It doesn’t look like any of the ones that I’ve used, but they were produced by many companies.
Those keywords might just have hit the nail on the head. The first (not-scholarly-article) Google link brings up an HP Journal brochure scan for the HP64000 microprocessor development system (PDF warning) which looks very much like the one in the video (though not yet an exact match). I’m willing to bet it’s a similar model in the same line.