Workhorse
They have a Cray and you reckon the Speccy's holding it together?
My money is that the backend is on an HP 3000/48, worked on one of those bad boys back in 96/97 - Thing hadn't had more than 5 mins downtime in 5 years
Online retailing can be a rough sport. The competition is rabid, customer loyalty is fickle, and IT expenses can go through the roof. That's why The Register can appreciate an e-tailer with a unique business model. A hawk-eyed El Reg reader points out that UK online retailer Ebuyer.com appears to be cutting costs by running …
If you look at the address of this organisation as listed - "Ltd, off Ferry Road, Howden, East Yorkshire, DN14 7UW, United Kingdom" - it is perhaps excusable in that they are probably flooded. I do note that they also have a CBM Pet (the first machine I bought in 1983) and a Cray amongst their fleet.
I say fleet advisedly - as they're now all probably floating.
I own two Dragons and an Oric, as well as many other "vintage" machines (yes, I know, I'm a geek), and he's absolutely correct.
The Dragon was manufactured by Dragon Data Limited and the Oric was manufactured by Oric Products International Limited.
(I'm still on the lookout for a Cray. Please quote postage before offering me one...)
Neil's right. I've got several Spectrums (Spectra?) and there was no 128k rubber key version, unless you made one yourself.
I can only assume that the author was extremely young (if at all extant) when these machines came out, because his lack of knowledge on the subject matter is laughable.
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48k models, running at around 1Mhz. The clue is in the "48k" part of the name...
And as for the Commodore Pet, now that was a classic machine!
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Fraid not the speccy was always slightly over 3.5MHz (3.513 I seem to remember) even the 16K ones.
Though being a Commodore person you wouldn't believe in clock speeds over 1MHz ;)
Actually I was very fond of the VIC 20 apart from the 20 column display
To Nick Ryan:
48K Spectrums come with 3.5MHz (and 128K also). Back then the CPU frequency was imposed for strict compatibility reasons. There is no Spectrum at a lower frequency than 3.5MHz actually. Trust me because I counted cycles in the machine code over and over again to be sure that the code can finish until the next interrupt arrives :) (interrupts were generated at 20ms each and in some cases you should be absolutely sure that the processing will finish in less than 20ms).
What times - what amazing speeds... :) Anyone doing a lot of stuff in under 20ms nowadays?
Ovi
Good to see one of their server admins had a sense of humour! :-)
Though if they're going to fake the platform they're running on, why not also fake the server software response as well! Maybe they should report themselves as running an early version of NetSite. Of course maybe they already have faked it, and their servers are actually running IIS!
I used it to test my webserver - says I'm running Server 2003 - which is highly accurate seeing how it's a fiesty fawn version of Ubuntu Server.
Oh hum - and what's with old tec anyway? We have had a 286 and 386 in daily operation at my company for years now - runs our DOS based call centre software better than the PII's and PIII's that are doing the same job. They never go down, never fail, just keep on running - the old adage is true - they just don't make them like they used to.
Aah the memories. The first two machines mentioned, the MSX HX-10 and
the C64, happened to be my first two machines. I'm posting this from
my Amiga 1200 for a laugh. See for yourself!
http://www.aura-online.co.uk/~chewi/amireg.gif
Maybe I'll host a site off here sometime. It's got 128MB RAM so it's
more than adequate. (-;
Even the so called geeks who are also commenting on this article before me seem to fall for it.
It's a big publicity stunt. They hacked the apache source files.
Now how much is the register getting for all this or was the article poster that ignorant that he did not see it that it was a hoax?
Any way, the register, please don't lend yourself for this kind of the register abuse. Posting an article what actually is a big commercial is spam. My advise: Don't spam your own readers ;-)
Well, if they're flooded out, I have my dad's Sinclair ZX81 downstairs. That's about a 1MHz Z80 CPU and 1K of RAM built in, but it includes the boffo 64K RAM expander, and a data acquisition and relay control setup. He used them as PLCs for settling tanks at a mine in the Sierra Nevada; he could buy them for $30 in 1983, and even a ZX81 was fast enough to control filling and draining a swimming pool.
hi,
they host their site on a nice server farm - each one responds with a different
server 'identity' - i've just talked to their Dragon 32 , their C64 and their MSX.
its a nice/neat/geeky way of ID'ing each machine in such a setup
SP nice to see the Amiga going strongly in this thread. mine's hardly a classic - 240MHz PowerPC 603e with voodoo3... not what most people recall as Amigas
(those A500 with sensi soccer or monkey Island 2 - aka 12 diskettes of doom)
I still have a working 1982 Brown Case Commodore 64 with a 256k memory expansion cartridge , 1541 Floppy Drive ... even came across a color Commodore monitor a few months ago for it, had always run it on a TV before
Lords of Conquest still rocks !
But at 300 BAUD (maybe could rig up 1200 BAUD), I don't think it would make a good internet machine .. I'm kind of attached to my 3Mbits/s DSL
Calm down, Jack - who's it an advert for? This kind of thing gets posted on The Reg because people think it's funny (like all the others who've commented so far, and countless more who didn't).
And to David Jones: only the Oric 1 looked like a grey doorstopesque Spectrum with flimsy keys; they followed it up with the Atmos, which had a lovely keyboard (not seen the likes of it since, though I do like this Microsoft gull-wing job - and yes, Jack, I'm on commission, heh). The Oric 1 and Atmos were otherwise quite similar internally - at least the later release of the Oric 1 without the nasty ROM bugs. The Atmos got a disk system based around 3" disks like the type used by Amstrad PCWs which made it a real machine - particularly as the controller also supported 5.25" and 3.5" drives. The only thing it really lacked was an 80-column display.
What really killed the Oric was lack of software support. The Spectrum had all the good games, in other words. Game developers didn't like the Oric's serial attribute display, but with only 48K of RAM this was a good move since it gave you colour and (for the time, reasonably) high-res graphics in just a few K of RAM (unlike the BBC B, which had 32K and used 20K for its 80-column mode or higher colour depth graphics modes).
Oric's Stratos and Telestrat (Europe only; a Stratos with a modem) were 'real machines' and could've been actual business micros if things had worked out differently...but ain't that always the way. All of the Orics - even the 1 - kicked seven shades out of the Spec in terms of being nice, finished products. If I remember correctly the Spec didn't even have a Centronics parallel port, which was a hell of a thing to miss out in those days. Also, its motherboard jutted out the back like it had pushed too hard on the can in an ugly edge connector, where the Oric had real ports.
Anyway ... that's more than enough retro geeking out now. I do apologise. (I currently own a BBC B, Acorn Electron and Psion 3, having sold up most of my retro collection a few years ago...bah, I had an HP71B, amongst other Gems... having said that I'm a poor junior software developer so most of my machines probably seem pretty retro to an average person; my all singing all dancing PDA is a Psion 5 and to me that's bleeding edge!)
Web sites in general are really not that computer extensive in power needs. That is unless you're trying to feed 1,000,000 hits an hour on a single machine. Under mostly DHTML encoding just about any machine could handle this type of traffic need. It ain't rocket science folks!
Nice to see there are some old-timers contributing to these comments. There's hope for the zimmer frame manufacturers just around the corner.
I was just starting out in the computer industry when the HP9825 and HP9845 were launched in '78. Serious pieces of kit that pre-dated the IBM PC. At home I bought myself a brand spanking Dragon 32 at the local Carrefours, cost me £175 thank you very much. Anyone who hasn't had it tough won't have experience of the 40 character wide display of uppercase alphanumeric only!
Upgraded to an Amstrad 6128 (colour) when that hit the streets. Now despite what people might think of Amstrad, the 6128 was a very nice piece of kit IMHO.
> Even the so called geeks who are also commenting on this article before me
> seem to fall for it.
> It's a big publicity stunt. They hacked the apache source files.
Well, deary, deary me, Jack, I'm sure NONE OF US knew these headers were spoofed.
Sigh, were you the bloke at school who always needed jokes explained to him ?
This is a light and funny article, and the replies.. All the replies are posted along the same vein.
And where's the advert, or the spam ? Um... *answers on a postcard please...*
Gah, yes - was getting confused (but not as confused as the original author)... it was the ZX80 that ran at 1MHz, not the ZX Spectrum. Long, long time ago that I did programming in "machine code" on the Spectrum - about the same time that I did it on the Commodore 64...
As fore requiring hacking of the Apache source, I'm pretty sure that the sever string is just a configuration setting somewhere.
@Murray Pearson - interesting point about using technology like that for industrial purposes - sometimes it's much, much cheaper to use kit like that compared to "industrial" kit that can easily cost 100 times more...