There is some controversy - you could actually use a TRS-80, an Apple II or a PET right after taking it out of the box.
I think that, if we define a personal computer as a machine that is designed for a single interactive user, the LGP-30 would be a good candidate. It was not, however, a home computer.
For me, a personal computer needs more than switches and LEDs as its UI. With a serial port, a terminal, and a monitor program in ROM, the Altair would qualify.
TRS-80, AII and the PET came later.
You were right on the peripherals.
Instead of a serial port, I'd set a TV output with a keyboard as an input, and the Altair would get far more sales.
Teletype and all, the Altair looked and worked like an cut-down entry-level version of the minis that were popular in engineering and science.
Not as powerful as a PDP-8, but less than a tenth of the price.
It was the perfect aspirational project for the electronics hobbyist community of the time.
The fact that you could barely do anything with it wasn't the point. It was a real computer you could set up at home and use without time restrictions or hourly billing.
The S-100 bus market turned into a preview of the PC market. S-100 systems soon sprouted real terminals, floppy drives, and workable memory, and began to appear in the offices of accountants and other non-tech professionals.
The IBM PC probably wouldn't have happened without it. It normalised relatively affordable computing, and the idea of a third party market of expansion cards on a standard bus.
We had an Altair at home, that my father assembled from a kit. That version did not have a serial port. It had only the switches on the front panel. I did succeed in inputting some programs and in having them run. But of course it was appallingly limited.
There were two very clever I/O ideas that emerged for the Altair: (1) A radio on top of the housing would pick up a signal, allowing audio output! (2) A cassette tape recorder could be used as an external storage device, though I forget how it interfaced... the serial board, I think.
My first computing experience was with an IMSAI 8080 that class assembled the year before.
It had a keyboard and video board, rather than a terminal. The monitor was open chassis to boot (ah the old days when we didn’t protect children from lethal electricity).
It had a ROM monitor and cassette tape. You had to type in (in hex) a short machine language program into the monitor to load BASIC from a cassette. We simply never turned it off.
I tried ti enter the bootstrap through the front panel once, but I made some mistake, and it didn’t work. It was an awful enough experience I never tried again.
Ah man- the power supply in the IMSAI 8080 was scary enough, plus you had the monitor power supply open. Fun times- the "book" sequence on ours was "fat finger in the paper tape reading software, read the cassette IO software from paper tape, load BASIC from cassette, and good to go."
One of the interesting aspects of the Altair was that it was based on a bus called the S-100 bus. You would have a CPU card and a memory card at least, but everything else was optional. The serial board was separate, and strictly not absolutely necessary to play with the computer, since you could enter simple programs directly from the front panel.
I remember S-100 from when I was a kid. Never was hands-on with that hardware but there were all kinds of ads for cards in Byte magazine and others. Seemed like you could get a card for almost anything in S-100 protocol.
That's right. There are still S-100 enthusiasts who are maintaining and developing S-100 cards, see http://www.s100computers.com/ (does not seem to respond correctly to HTTPS right now).
keep the historical context in mind. There were people who wanted a computer at home and people who wanted to bring home the experience they got with access to powerful mainframe & minicomputers at work or school, so there was both a push to build your own computer and a desire to build IO devices like teletypes. The combo, all-in-one is the real revolution (IMO) that you got with the Apple II or the Sol. The TRS-80s and PETs feel a lot more like early commercialization in comparison. Woz was motivated by showing off what he could create, because that's how he communicated. It makes sense that a keyboard and TV - with graphics - shows off way better, same with being able to program in basic "... for $300 you can build a computer that's so good you can type programs on it and run them..."
"Personal computer" can refer either to a small-form computer, in which case the Olivetti P101 was likely the first in 1965 (the PDP-8/E was also a contender), or to a microprocessor-based computer, in which case the Micral N holds that title in 1973.
The Altair, in 1975, was the first commercially successful personal microcomputer.
You might want to look at the Sol-20, Micral N, and Kenbak-1 as well. From 1971, the Kenbak was a _personal_ computer, but not a personal _micro_ computer.
The Wang 2200 looks most like we'd expect a personal computer to look like, but the price range was not home-friendly (~$50k today).
If we draw the line at “home computer” we can give Honeywell the crown, even though I doubt even a single one was actually used as a “kitchen computer”
MSYS2 is basically Cygwin with Pacman for package management, plus several other environments with either GCC or Clang and different Windows-Native C and C++ runtimes.
It's nice, but not perfect. It inherits a lot of problems from Cygwin. File access is still slow (as mentioned in other threads) and symlinks don't behave right (by default making a symlink creates a deep copy of the target, and even NTFS symlinks need to know whether the target is a file or a directory; either way you cannot create a symlink when the target is missing, and this causes rsync to fail, for example.)
MSYS2's strength is as an environment for compiling cross-platform apps for Windows, and I would recommend WSL2 for anything else.
Agreed that it's good for building native Windows software and there are better options for other use cases. When recommending–praising MSYS2 I sometimes forget that the only time I use Windows is to build software for use by other folks who actively run Windows as their desktop/laptop OS.
Re: "Cygwin…plus several other environments[+]", the second paragraph of MSYS2's home page summarizes it pretty well:
Despite some of these central parts [Bash and cli tools] being based on Cygwin, the main focus of MSYS2 is to provide a build environment for native Windows software and the Cygwin-using parts are kept at a minimum.
My "bad experience" with MSYS2 was when I misunderstood how the different environments were set up.
There are several different environments, each with their own different and incompatible set of packages. When you run "mingw64", you are running a different environment than "msys2". If you install a package named "gcc", you are getting the "gcc" intended for "msys2", and not the package intended for "mingw64".
The "Msys2" version ships with Windows headers that are not compatible with some Windows programs, while the "Mingw64" has compatible headers. Then this led to me filing an invalid bug report.
The role of the different environments (with their color-coded icons), and the necessary prefixes to install packages for those environments could be made a lot clearer. And that if you are in the "Msys" environment, all software you build will depend on "Msys".
You’re right, getting started with it can/could be a bit confusing. The website explains everything clearly but is prose-heavy. The naming schemes for the environments and packages make sense after you understand how the system works, but it does seem like there’s room for improvement and simplification.
I love electronic music. Been listening to it for 30 years. Mostly drumbass, dubstep, some house. Groups like subfocus. I used to listen to tiesto, bt, etc.
One, I hated the term "raving". I was thought raves were finding an abandoned house, playing music and drugs. I just like the music and don't need the dance clubs or the drugs.
But with the said, I think the "club" scene has dropped off. Expensive drinks. Expensive covers. Who wants that.
Has the music droppped off? I think it kind of merged into more mainstream music.
This exactly. I've been to "raves", they were just giant parties with $3 beers in an abandoned or semi-legal building somewhere in Brooklyn. I was surprised when I started hearing people call giant corporate venues with dancing "raves".
I went out to one of those giant clubs in Brooklyn not too long ago to see a friend DJ (Brooklyn Mirage). I was on guestlist, but the cover would have been $50. I bought a round of drinks to say thanks, and for three drinks I paid $75. Plus they made me load a credit card on some stupid wristband to even get the drinks. What 20-something can afford to do that with any regularity? Their rent is already 2-3x what I paid when I moved to Brooklyn nearly 20 years ago.
I don't buy the "young kids don't want to go out late anymore". They just never encountered scenes that were consistently relaxed, fun, and cheap.
A lot of entertainment is priced in and the powers that be lament that young people aren't falling for it anymore.
You like sports? Well, you need a subscription to see their away games, a subscription to see their home games, and a separate subscription to see their games in season, and a subscription to see their off season. You want to see them in person? well.....
You like music? Well, the cost of a ticket to see your favorite artist is $80 + $60 in fees. Online purchase fee. Printing fee. Seat Reservation fee. etc.
Wanna go out for a few drinks? That'll be $8 for shitty beer on tap
Want to go anywhere? Time to reserve your parking spot, or pay your parking ticket. Public transport outside NY? lol. Can't really get drunk or high now either since you need to kinda be sober enough to get back. Or fuck it! Uber and pay an extra $50 in surge charge fees!
Want to go to the museum on the weekend while you visit a city? Well, too bad, it's very congested so the museum has surge charged the price of the ticket to $70 (the Shedd Aquarium special in Chicago).
> I'm good I think I'll just stay home and jerk off
Exactly. There's a fine line between convenience and the cost of doing it yourself, like getting a decent smash burger or firing half of the devops team.
The most ridiculous thing is having venues trying to casually extort you at every possible opportunity, without the implicit advantage of a few very subtle but 'approved' dealers lurking around while making sure everybody is having a safe but very fun time.
> What 20-something can afford to do that with any regularity?
Practically every 20-something (and just as many 30+ somethings) I know in NYC DO do this very regularly, especially if they already live in wburg/bushwick. If they're not there, they're mixing it up at nowadays.
I guess the 20-somethings I know (and knew when I was also 20-something) are broke artists and models. They don't have $200 to spend on a night out every weekend. Nowadays certainly is affordable and there are others of course. People make it work.
There were definitely expensive clubs that kids with money went to when I was young -- a friend ran sound at The Box and that was always wildly priced. But there was no shortage of illegal parties in warehouses with cheap drinks and no cover on the williamsburg waterfront and out in Bushwick in the early 2000s for the weirdos. Even met my wife at one.
I think a lot of those illegal warehouse parties died with the DeBlasio administration. At least, that's when I stopped hearing about them so I am open to the possibility that I'm no longer plugged in to the right scene.
The DeBlasio administration was the first to add a "night mayor", and they made it easier to open legit venues in the same neighborhoods that used to host the illegal warehouse parties, like that triangle just west of Flushing avenue centered around the Morgan L train stop, where Elsewhere and The Brooklyn Mirage among a few other big, high priced venues are now.
In exchange for making it easier to open more venues and have more legal dance parties, they cracked down on the illegal parties pretty hard. This had the effect of pushing the prices up, changing the scene and crowd, and introducing more regulations. Before, you had to be a little more plugged in to know when and where the parties were because they were "underground" (but only a little). You could also reliably dance until 6 or 7am and buy all the alcohol you wanted whenever.
Now, these parties are way more mainstream so people who are less enthusiastic about dancing show up because it's something accessible to do, and everything must legally shut down at 4.
I remember being excited that things were going legit because I thought it would make the parties that I frequented better, but now with the benefit of hindsight over the past 8 or so years, I think it's had a negative impact on the scene, along with all the other issues related to the ubiquity of cell phones and the changing gen z tastes.
I still long fondly for Bushwick circa 2012, but it might just be more "Back in my day..." nostalgia.
I think pervasive (invasive?) social media and the "always-potentially-on-camera" reality, paired with cancel culture, has also killed a lot of "underground" scenes (and counter-culture in general but that's a whole other topic).
If you haven't read it, you might like Emily Witt's recent book Health & Safety. She writes about her experiences raving in Brooklyn (and Berlin) from roughly 2015 to present day and many of the changes that have occurred (as well as dropping in her own personal story which may or may not be interesting to you).
Those underground parties still exist for the most part. I've aged way out of all this, like you have, but I'm aware of their existence through many friends in the music scene in NYC. If you're enterprising and skilled at navigating Instagram and similar platforms as they rise and fall you wouldn't have too much trouble figuring out where they are.
I can tell you living in south america that this is true. Three drinks esp. caiprinhas even at the expensive places would be about $13, $8 or $9 on promo. Cover for the fancy place is $17. Bottle service is $34.
Plus the bombed out building post war Berlin industrial feel is 1. Real, and 2. free for the promoter and the drinks are cheaper there. Yes, that's real barbed wire, and yes, its really electrified.
Yep, "back in my time", you could go to parties with then relatively famous DJ's (from gigi d'agostino, gabry ponte, etc., to our locals like Umek and Sylvain) for the entry fee equivalent of then ~2 street kebabs, and "club dj's" (local dj, playing other peoples popular music) for a price of ~1 kebab.
Drinks were a lot cheaper, but for most of us, it was drinking store bought drinks outside, then going in and having one or two drinks inside.
Now, an event like this, 60eur+ (~15 kebabs) for less known DJs, and you can't even sit down at a table/booth, you need to reserve those in advance and pay like 300eur (+ tickets.. but you get a bottle of cheap vodka and like 4 redbulls in the price). And it's a night club, a few tables and benches were always a must for those who either drank a bit too much or took a bit too much of the happy pills.
Brooklyn Mirage is hardly a rave place, just a club. Went last year it was pretty terrible. The sound was so quiet I could talk with my gf without yelling. There was also a food vendor inside the venue for whatever weird reason. Paid $300 for tickets and 2 drinks. I heard basement is a good place but never been. Europe's techno parties and raves are still going strong and no food vendors inside ofcourse we are not that lame.
My understanding is that Brooklyn Mirage was engineered specifically to be both loud and at the same time permit a conversation with the people next to you, so your experience is a feature, not a bug. I think we’re all just not used to having that level of thoughtful engineering with that design criteria, so we just associate “too loud to talk” with “good.” I found the experience to be remarkable.
There were clubs in lower Manhattan and Midtown before 9/11 that had those kind of sound systems. The kind of THD that costs money. Jungly kind of beats were still exotic.
Its definitely not a feature. This sound system would be laughable in europe, where the techno culture is thriving. The point is to get lost to the music dancing. Not much talking should be going on. I think they designed it that way so as to not be noisy to the surrounding area since its an open space. Also, having a food vendor inside the club is extremely lame. Can't americans go a few hours without food? Do they have to eat everywhere they go? Its so weird every cocktail bar in NYC also serves food, this is not the case in europe. You go to a bar to drink, food is eaten at a restaurant.
Oh for sure, Brooklyn Mirage is the worst. And there are definitely great parties still happening all across NYC that are reasonable -- I literally just bought tickets a few minutes ago to see Dlala Thukzin [1] spin at Silo in Brooklyn for $25. Perfectly fine cost to pay the artists.
Completely agreed on the terminology. When I got into the scene (late 90s, Philly and Baltimore), everyone legit totally avoided saying "rave" or "raving" when talking with other folks in the scene. We all just said "party", and it was clear what you were talking about based on context (and, for better or worse, clothing style). No one said "ravers" either, it was always "party kids" instead, at least among the younger end of the crowd.
"Party" could interchangeably refer to either a "one-off" event or a club weekly/monthly, and similarly made no connotations as to whether or not the venue was licensed/above-board. Unlicensed one-offs were referred to as "outlaw", "warehouse party", etc. There were also unlicensed venues which threw regular weekly/monthly parties and these were absolutely amazing, so I'm a bit perplexed by the folks here saying a "real" rave is only an unlicensed one-off.
In any case, in my area, as a term "rave" was largely only used by news media, law enforcement, and outsiders who completely misunderstood what the scene was about. The only major exception was internet discussions – web sites like ravelinks.com, newsgroups like alt.rave. But even there, "rave" in the name just helped people find the sites, and still wasn't a term thrown around much in actual discussions.
> Has the music droppped off?
No, it's better than ever in my opinion, especially for non-mainstream house-adjacent music. There are a ton of talented producers who are seamlessly merging many genres and influences... folks are combining classic UK rave synths (well, really from Belgian New Beat originally) with Italo-disco, or taking trance and adding in happy hardcore elements, etc. Many classic samples and sounds, but given a new twist, it's great.
That said, I used to be a major drum and bass head back in the day, but largely lost interest in that genre as it became less danceable over the years. Not to mention my knees aren't what they used to be...
That's especially interesting since Joi Ito is often credited with introducing the scene to Japan, and prior to that he was very involved in the US scene in Chicago. I wonder if he brought the terminology over too!
Exactly, the organized events are just too expensive; when I think of "someone who goes to raves", they have the means to do so every weekend or at least once a month, but who can afford that kind of thing nowadays when prices have gone way up while income has stagnated?
Electronic underground is still well and alive. Sure there is lots of mainstream electronica now but if you look a bit you’ll find tons of new fresh stuff.
Sure you can organise raves in illegal locations but a club can still be about the music and can be a more sustainable “home” for the music.
Sure it’s a lot more expensive but then again everything is - the clubs just need to survive somehow.
Tbh I live in Berlin, where rave culture is most alive probably
Some of the best events I've ever been to have been where a collective has organized the Nth annual event etc. which has taken over an entire location or venue and brought in a really diverse but very friendly crowd with them from all over the place.
But yes, every other day of the week, it's like a restaurant that serves music, the machine must go on, rent gets paid, food in bellies etc.
Glad you brought up some of the musicians (Tiesto).
Looking back on "Trance" and "House" as genres they seem really vapid, vain, and dare I say it, decadent. Reading about the "mecca" of these genres, Ibiza, makes me wish I'd never listened to this stuff growing up.
