Here’s another from the same family:
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It’s easy to see where the enthusiast mechanical keyboard crowd got their initial inspirations from. These are gorgeous.
Probably at least partly, yeah. But all of these build on a basis of the sheer perceptual experience of interfacing with something like this - the combination of visuality, tactility and utility tends to leave a pretty strong impression, even if it gets subsumed into habit and is rendered almost invisible over time as one gets used to it. There’s a reason people get nostalgic for things they took entirely for granted while they used them every day 
The movies and TV shows definitely serve a major role in preserving these as iconic objects as well as part of what is in hindsight seen as a particular aesthetic, but this would be hollow and superficial unless it had a more substantive basis to build on. Rather, the set designers, propmakers and others involved in the making of these films and series should be recognized for their ability to identify objects with the multiple possible layers of appreciation that these often have.
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I did production line testing on equipment that used 8/i and 8/e computers. Painful, toggling in instructions so the paper tape reader could read the boot program, get a problem and do it all over again.
So were Roland Corporation I would guess!
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ISTR that the term is “Harvest Gold.”
UV light will do that to plastics without UV inhibitors added to them. Luckily a soak in hydrogen peroxide alongside some more UV light (and ideally a little warmth) will typically reverse it!
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Possibly - but also just look at the aesthetics. Nice clean lines. Crisp boxes and large colorful switches. And the “futuristic” fonts!
Oh boy, does that bring back memories! I cut my teeth on a DEC PDP-11.
In my senior year in high school in 1976, my physics class had a student from Middlebury College come in and perform student teacher work. She also helped out in the “Math V” class, which was beyond me.
I heard the Math V class was going to tour the computer center at the college. I successfully begged to come along. There really wasn’t all that much too see. There in the glassed-in raised floor room as others describe sat the PDP-11 minicomputer. Next to it was a reel-to-reel tape drive and another box I cannot remember. A line printer sat just outside. For youngsters, a line printer printed an entire line of text at a time instead one character at a time.
Adjacent to the PDP-11 was a small room with about five DEC Decwriter terminals. These terminals were basically dot matrix printers with a keyboard. There was also one terminal, who’s brand I cannot remember, which had an amber-colored CRT and a keyboard.
I was so smitten by this that the student teacher gave me her login and password for the system. Every chance I had I snuck in and laboriously typed BASIC code printed in a long defunct magazine called “Creative Computing.” Most of it was simple games which could be played on a Decwriter. Mostly from studying the code, I taught myself the basics of BASIC. 
The student teacher graduated but her account was still active. That summer, I spent many hours in front of one of their terminals, grabbing the CRT-based terminal every chance I could. After about two months of sneaking-in, the director of the computing center nicely said that I need to stop coming. I probably stuck out like a sore thumb, being 17 years-old when summer students were mostly in grad school.
45 years later, I’m typing this on an LED touch-screen iPad, using WiFi, while in my lab at Intel. 
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We had a PDP-11/34 IN MY HIGH SCHOOL! It was the only one in a Tucson high school in 1977. Everyone else had to run on the school district’s one overloaded DECsystem-10 time-sharing machine, with the really old KA10 transistorized processor.
Needless to say, I parlayed that into a college student job programming a PDP-11 for optical analysis. Now I program tiny PICs and huge FPGAs.
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I know that PDP-11! That’s on display at the Computer History Museum!
(It might be my favorite machine there)
Ken Olsen, the founder of DEC, gave a talk at MIT and said that when they designed their first minicomputer, they went down to Lechmere, the old discount appliance store, and looked at the switches and dials on the various washers and driers to get ideas for how to design the controls.
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So, in the 1950s, people bootstrapped their washing machines using front panel switches? Were they afraid of getting the paper tape wet?
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Back in the 1980s I spent a three day weekend fixing a high end washing machine that the shaft on the “cycle” switch had been pulled out of. and then reinserted and twisted this way and that for a bit. I think there were 18 programming disks with crenellated rims which engaged leaf switches. Getting that back together involved making pages and pages of timing/function diagrams, but the repair shops were closed so I did it…on Tues, called around and discovered I could have got the part for 25$, but I thought “so what it was a fun challenge and the washing machine worked”. Few months later it failed again, so I thought “OK, 25$ not so bad” but by then it was 125$… No, there was no point to this story, other than to illustrate even mechanical washing machines had some computing elements 
Which I’m sure you knew. So, yeah, no point
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I think even the Altar 8800’s switches were better.
IMSAI did theirs more DECish, but obviously used hex.
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Three out of the four founders of Data General came from DEC, but I suppose that they didn’t think of recruiting any of DEC’s industrial designers.
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IMSAI offered the option of stuffing the front panel switches in groups of 3 or 4 when assembling the kit. The Intel 8080 world started out in octal, then made a transition to hex in the late seventies. I wonder if IBM had a say in that? The Z80 was always considered to be a hex machine, as I recall.
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