Reading "The Soul of a New Machine" [1], the story of building the successor to the Eclipse, when I was 13/14 was what made me want to work with computers, although I couldn't decide whether hardware or software was cooler. DEC had already won by that point, though. I even acquired a DEC Rainbow 100+ as my first "PC" (it was a hybrid 8088 / Z80 which could boot DEC's DOS or CP/M).
A couple of years ago my father and I scrapped the last of the Rainbows (not rare enough for a museum to be interested) and a Micro PDP 11/23 (no interest from museums or UK PDP enthusiasts, and too hard to ship internationally). It was a sad day.
You know, you get points for reading the book but lose points for buying a Rainbow :-) (kidding) Fortunately you didn't buy the PDP-11 version which ran the "Personal Operating System" (which was a lobotomized version of RSX-11, and aptly abbreviated to POS)
I agree that its a great book, these days it would be much less dramatic with everything running on simulators prior to chip tapeout.
Haha, the Rainbow was a skip-rescue, as was the PDP (which rain RSX-11M). Even came with the "orange wall" of manuals. Made a nice space heater, and we had fun running RS232 all over the house to attach terminals to it. Sadly it didn't have a compiler, only Macro-11...
Reading "The Soul of a New Machine" [1], the story of building the successor to the Eclipse, when I was 13/14 was what made me want to work with computers, although I couldn't decide whether hardware or software was cooler.
Same here, pretty much. That was a very influential book for me. I went back and read it again a couple of years ago, and it was still fascinating. Then I found out a guy at our local Hackerspace was there during some of that time and knows some of the folks mentioned in the book. That made it all seem even more real to me... quite an interesting story in any case.
"The Soul of a New Machine" is a great book, about a topic that wouldn't seem that interesting. I second (third?) the recommendation.
My Mom worked at Data General and she used to take home some transparent masks for chips that were "corporate trash". She made art out of them and they're still hanging in her house.
A couple of years ago my father and I scrapped the last of the Rainbows (not rare enough for a museum to be interested) and a Micro PDP 11/23 (no interest from museums or UK PDP enthusiasts, and too hard to ship internationally). It was a sad day.
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0679602615