Bent pins and jumper wires are possible, of course, but nasty. :-) And I would not consider them if a large number of pins need to be redirected that way, starting with power and clock pins.
The adapter you show is intriguing for me due to its pins. I have made a similar adapter a couple of years ago (a little high score saver for an old arcade game, with a couple more ICs: http://www.e-basteln.de/arcade/asteroids/highscore/). I used an old bag of solder pins for it, but struggled to find new stock in the right size.
I assume the adapter in your picture uses press-fitted pins. I have not come across these yet -- would you have details? Where to get them; are special tools required to install?
Thanks,
Juergen
Commodore PET with the Chiclet keyboard and built-in cassette drive.
...
Not as old as the stuff you guys had, I am not that old
...
This thing is still the best design ever and I am so many times close to buy one - try to be reasonable tho it just looks ice, catches dust, takes up nonavailable space and does exactly - not much :-) Anyway - I love the thing, as it also was my first contact to CS
Does this one count?
http://www.experimentierkasten-board.de/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=50
The Kosmos "Logikus", which I got in the early 1970s. A plugboard, 10 switch banks, 10 little light bulbs (behind a transparent paper overlay). Essentially you could wire logic equations, and the user would position the switches, either to provide input or in response to the output shown via the light bulbs. No clock or registers in this one, thank you very much!
The Logikus did come with a great instruction book and clever application examples. It could help you solve logic puzzles, for example -- I seem to remember the one with the wolf, the goat, and the cabbage which you had to get across a river by rowboat...
Sorry, I could find German web pages only. Has this been sold elsewhere under a different name?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logikus
EDIT: To answer my own question -- yes, the "LOGIX" was a licensed version for the US market. And the overlay on this LOGIX looks very much like that skipper with the wolf, goat and cabbage:
http://www.samstoybox.com/toys/LogixComputer.html
In the E-test (test wafer probing, measurement and evaluation) lab I managed, we had several Lomac LM80 automated test systems. They had a 40-channel (or 48??) switch matrix, and four SMU source-measurement units which could source/sink voltage or current and simultaneously measure voltage/current. Perfect for evaluating transistors, etc.
The LM80 came with an S-100 bus CP/M computer with a full 64Kbytes of memory and two 8-inch floppy drives. I got several Xerox 820 computers to allow users to enter test parameters for the LM80s (so that the LM80s could spend their time testing and the programming could be done off-line). The Xerox 820 was a commercialized version of the Ferguson BigBoard (referenced in Reply #71) Xerox (whose PaloAlto Research Center, PARC invented the windowed GUI with mouse control and local networking) took a giant step backwards and licensed this rather basic CP/M board from a small company in Texas (Digital Research, not the same as the CP/M people).
But we quickly outgrew the 64K Z80 computer that came with the Lomac test system. So I reverse-engineered the control bus and the control software to operate the SMUs and the switch matrix, and wrote a driver for the HP 9845, a couple orders of magnitude more sophisticated machine than the little CP/M sytems. The HP 9845 came with several plug-in I/O modules, one of which was a 16-bit, bi-directional parallel port which was perfect for talking to the Lomac hardware (with only five or six 7400 series TTL "glue" chips in-between)
The Lomac people came to visit one day and were astounded that we had upgraded their system on our own. Those systems were used during development of a couple generations of CPU chips (386, 486, Pentium, etc.)
I had one of those, although it was the Radio Shack/Tandy version. Same basic thing, they were just multi-contact slide switches and you built 'logic' by using the jumpers between various contacts. Fran Blanche did a video on one of them, though based on her reaction I think she forgot about what it really was until she got it out of the box and started playing around.
The original chicklet keyboard PETs - we had those in physics lab in college, they were pretty much obsolete by then (around 1985) but no one had the time to rewrite the programs used for various experiment data gathering in some other BASIC. So the PET soldiered on.
I think most kids start with some version of an abacus. Even today.
I suppose the PC computers we use today, will look really old and only be in museums one day.
They have already partially gone out of fashion. With some people I know (especially younger people), only using/having laptops/tablets and mobile (smart) phones, as regards their own personal computing devices.
If you are a designer, artist, financial trader, etc. that needs large screens and powerful computers with massive power and storage capabilities... you are still a customer for a PC!
The first computer I programmed was a Siemens 4004 Mainframe (/370 architecture clone) in the early 70ies, in FORTRAN.
My first "computer" I owned was a TI-59. My first PC was an IBM XT. So - guess how old I am
1980/81 built a a Ferguson Big-Board
My first post abacus "computer" was a robot similar to this image.
Irt had a grid of numbers and electrical contacts along with electrical probes and eyes that light up.
The probes were an " input device " and the eyes would light up when the correct product was identified by the user.
Vintage early sixties
I had a TI-57 programmable calculator. I never found it when I cleaned out my Mom's house, I don't know what became of it. But I DID have the manual for it. I got a lot of use out of that machine, even if the battery life was a bit limited (but it did use rechargeables). I lusted after the TI-59 but that was beyond what I could afford.
Not my first computer; but since we are drifting towards the topic of "favorite CPU":
My favorite CPU is the 68000, due to its relative simplicity and regularity. And the first 68000 machine I owned was the "DTACK Grounded" board for the Apple II. Anyone remember that one? Hal W. Hardenberg of Digital Acoustics was probably best known for his strong opinions on Intel's processors and Apple's 68000 computers, as voiced in the DTACK Grounded Newsletter, and for his great humour in expressing them.
The original DTACK Grounded board had a whopping 96 kByte of painfully expensive static RAM. No wait states here, thank you very much!
I still have mine. Note the elegant tilt of the SRAMs, which made taping down those bus traces so much easier for Hal...
We’re power users. I’ve seen normal users machines. It’s not pretty. The average user can fuck up an etch-a-sketch. It’s like watching the monkeys around the monolith at the start of 2001.
Anyway back on first computers, I was talking to placement student in the office today and his first computer ran windows 7. Now I feel old.