Omega-TI Posted February 8, 2018 Share Posted February 8, 2018 You need to click on the picture to get a clean image link. Even then, on screen it did not look sharp enough... so I tweaked it a little. Hope that's okay. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
juansolo Posted February 8, 2018 Share Posted February 8, 2018 (edited) Those Sinclair machines have some serious stylin'. The keyboards look like they'd be just horrible to use, though. Any first-hand reviews from people here? Had them back in the day (Spectrum + and Toast Rack) and have a JS128'd rubber key one now. I can say that the Plus and Toast Rack are better than the rubber key and the ZX81 before it... More than that, they're bloody awful Not helped at all by the bizarre idea Sir Clive had of having all the basic commands on the keys, which was madness. Basically, in the day, you wanted a C64 (Atari sadly never really made an impact here), and if your parents couldn't afford one, you ended up with a Spectrum... Though saying all that... I kinda still have a lot of nostalgia for the little thing, even with it's many, many foibles. EDIT - I really did just reply to an ancient post on this thread... So sorry... Edited February 8, 2018 by juansolo 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted February 8, 2018 Share Posted February 8, 2018 I got me one of them Portfolios. Neat little devices, just wish I had time to go all John Connor with it. I remember when they were on display at the B.X. and had a ton of peripherals available, including IIRC a floppy drive. Neat-o. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+davidcalgary29 Posted February 10, 2018 Author Share Posted February 10, 2018 We need a Portfolio subforum! I’m getting mine ready for portable BBSing with WiModem 232 and it’s certainly a task searching through different forums for resources. Does anyone have a HPC 8 model? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polyex Posted February 11, 2018 Share Posted February 11, 2018 I remember writing software for the BeOS. Great OS! Sexy being in the eye of the beholder, there's the PPC-based BeBox... The LEDs (named 'Das Blinkenlights') on the front of the case would bounce up and down based on the load on each of the two CPUs. It was really quite mesmerizing to watch in the dark. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polyex Posted February 11, 2018 Share Posted February 11, 2018 NeXTstation... 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+davidcalgary29 Posted February 12, 2018 Author Share Posted February 12, 2018 Wow, I had completely forgotten the NeXT... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 I always thought the Sun SPARCstation IPX was rather sexy in its own right. Chunky little thing with a surprising amount of power under the hood. A "mo-ped" kind of sexy. Though, this might be just a bit too far. But it does bring a question to my mind: of all these sexy computers, in which one would you want to be buried? Could not find a good image of one; this one is the largest (and an IPC which, aside from the grey feet instead of Sun purple, is very close to the IPX in looks.) I still have one sitting under my desk. I may do a photo session with it. Sadly one of the capacitors in its power supply leaked and aside from getting capacitor goo all over the place the power supply popped and I am not convinced something on the board did not pop with it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 Yes, the Sun "shoe boxes" are neat in size, a bit of a precursor of the Mini-ITX form factor. However I used & administrated them so much in the late 90's that eventually I grew tired of them. I think the LX series were the hottest in that form factor, at least before upgrades. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
juansolo Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 So a couple from me: Old Cray stuff was unfeasably sexy, and almost certainly the worlds most expensive seating at the time. 'Deep Blue' which was an RS/6000 SP frame built as a chess computer to beat a grand master. I like these anyhow as they're systems I used to work on. But they do look cool as hell in a computer room, especially if you have a few of them lined up next to each other. There's some lovely old Apple home kit, it was always nicely designed. The clamshell iBook The G4 Cube of course: All of the Power Mac / Mac Pro line: 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polyex Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 All the Mac machines after Jobs came back to Apple are sort of NeXTstations anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polyex Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 All the Mac machines after Jobs came back to Apple are sort of NeXTstations anyway. Heck , I am typing on one now. (iMac 2011). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pacman000 Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 (edited) NeXTstation.. That is good looking, but I like the NeXT Cube better: Photo by: Rama & Musée Bolo Found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NEXT_Cube-IMG_7154.jpg Free to reuse, with attribution, if you release derivative works under a similar license. Edited February 12, 2018 by pacman000 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polyex Posted February 12, 2018 Share Posted February 12, 2018 Its the monitor . That is good looking, but I like the NeXT Cube better: Photo by: Rama & Musée Bolo Found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NEXT_Cube-IMG_7154.jpg Free to reuse, with attribution, if you release derivative works under a similar license. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 @juansolo: You had me until you went all Mac there 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
juansolo Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 It also just dawned on me that other than the Cray, everything I posted was a PowerPC based machine. PPC obviously just makes stuff cooler. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fadest Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 The Apollo 7 Squale, probably dead the same week it hit the market. Only a few items knows, but really specific look http://img.over-blog.com/600x244/0/01/53/72/micros-2/apollo-7-computer.png[/ http://www.gamopat.com/article-le-squale-l-ordinateur-qui-s-est-casse-les-dents-96905827.html 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thetick1 Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 (edited) It also just dawned on me that other than the Cray, everything I posted was a PowerPC based machine. PPC obviously just makes stuff cooler. Oh you missed the best PPC ever though it was seriously underpowered compared to workstations of it's time. The IBM PPC Laptop from '94 or '95. It could quad-boot boot OS/2 (PPC version), Solaris 2.5, Windows NT 3.5 and AIX 4.1.3. I had one of these awesome machines at an IBM lab. I would run around from lab to lab gather diagnostics and do simple debug when one of the pre-production AIX test machines crashed and we needed the memory dump and hardware state diagnostics. Mine had AIX 4.1.3, assembler, compiler, all AIX source code, firmware source code on the test machines, xldb (GUI debugger) and serial to jtag cable for diagnostics. It was a $15,000 laptop maxed out ($6,699 base) that obviously IBM could not sell at that price. I had pre-production model that looked like the first picture. It was an early Woodfield type 6020 mentioned at http://www.os2museum.com/wp/ibm-thinkpad-power-series-850/ There were a couple of variations: Edited February 13, 2018 by thetick1 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
juansolo Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 (edited) @thetick1 - They are totally awesome! Edited February 13, 2018 by juansolo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thetick1 Posted February 13, 2018 Share Posted February 13, 2018 (edited) @thetick1 - They are totally awesome! Just a few other awesome features. It is the first laptop/computer to ever do true speech recognition back '95 using IBM AIX Ultimate Media Services (drivers and applications). I remember how cool it was as I used voice for my window manager (as mwm on AIX was primitive). The same speech recognition technology was released to the public as ViaVoice on OS/2 Intel just a bit later. As mentioned before mine was a pre-production prototype as it had an wimpy embedded controller as the processor 60Mhz 603 PPC (note NO "e"). It did have 96M of memory enough resources to recompile diagnostic code apps to debug a crashed lab AIX test machine real time. A co-worker of mine worked on firmware testing and had a bunch of them with quad- boot : OS/2 (PPC version), Solaris 2.5, Windows NT 3.5 and AIX 4.1.3. Also a bit later Linux was working. The Firmware from '94 had a very cool GUI with a polished feel..something modern PCs still don't have: References: https://tecnopolis.ca/aixtp/tpcapab.htmlnce: All models out of the box allow for speech navigation and dictation with IBM's UMS software and the included microphone. With navigation you can simulate keystrokes and mouse events with your voice in a fully customizable and programmable environment, all without going through any voice-learning process. It really works, even for people with heavy accents! Dictation allows isolated word-at-a-time speech to be translated into text in supported applications such as a text editor. While not as sophisticated as the more recently available fluent speech to text software widely available, these features were incredible for 1995 and unheard of on notebooks and even Wintel desktops! Edited February 13, 2018 by thetick1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
juansolo Posted February 14, 2018 Share Posted February 14, 2018 This I personally thought was the coolest Powermac. Those who remember the MDD G4 will remember it sounded like a tornado. I went on a bit of a mission to silence mine, it ended up with Verax temp controlled PSU fans and I water cooled the CPU and GPU. I had to get creative on that 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digdugnate Posted February 17, 2018 Share Posted February 17, 2018 i was always partial to the SG O2 a friend of mine had one when I was in college. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thetick1 Posted February 18, 2018 Share Posted February 18, 2018 i was always partial to the SG O2 a friend of mine had one when I was in college. SGI always had cool looking workstations. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
5200Fanatic Posted February 19, 2018 Share Posted February 19, 2018 How could you forget Caprica 6? Well if we're morphing into robots now, the sexiest has got to be... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thetick1 Posted February 19, 2018 Share Posted February 19, 2018 (edited) How could you forget Caprica 6? Easily.. she looks like jailbait. Cylon Number Six is the sexiest: Edited February 19, 2018 by thetick1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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