Paul Allen Collection

This is interesting:

https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/firsts-history-computing-paul-g-allen-collection/nextcube-personal-computer-148/230086

How so?

Probably the auction price, with the Cube fetching a steep $21,000. The auction saw a lot of old computers achieve preposterous figures, like an Altair for $55,000 and a Lisa 1 for nearly $900,000 (even though a known-working specimen sold for only $80,000 a few weeks ago). There are many other examples. Few of the machines have any particular claim to fame beyond their type --- no famous owner besides Paul Allen, no historic usage or any other distinction.

Well, now we finally know who tipped off Microsoft to the idea that light gray was the window background colour of the future.

Quote from: Rhetorica on September 12, 2024, 06:04:03 PMWell, now we finally know who tipped off Microsoft to the idea that light gray was the window background colour of the future.

There are even more UI similarities if you compare NeXTstep and Windows 95...

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What's odd about that Cube (which, to their credit, is shown turned on and working), is that it has original 030 motherboard but a much newer front with a floppy disk cutout.  The back of the cube says "Computer", which is pre-NeXTStation, but it's probable that the front is from a later 040 cube. The monitor is also a 1992 N4000A (with the mic), instead of the original N4000.

The provenance just says "Living Computer Museum collection", so not much info there. 

A system like could have been pieced together like this at any point in its history, even in the mid-90's... all the parts are easily swappable... still, not what I would have picked to reach $21k!

Quote from: cuby on September 12, 2024, 07:21:35 PMThere are even more UI similarities if you compare NeXTstep and Windows 95...

Yeah the similarities with the helvetica font.

Even the Amiga went for the four colours greyscale look with OS2 and with the introduction of gadtools.library to make it easier for developers to make user interfaces and also to try to standardise a look to make it more professional. They still used the 8*8 topaz font as it's faster for rendering, but if you change the font to helvetica it looks a lot more polished also because it would take more room in the ROM if they added helvetica to the already packed 512KB ROM size.

Quote from: stepleton on September 12, 2024, 04:01:19 PMProbably the auction price, with the Cube fetching a steep $21,000. The auction saw a lot of old computers achieve preposterous figures, like an Altair for $55,000 and a Lisa 1 for nearly $900,000 (even though a known-working specimen sold for only $80,000 a few weeks ago). There are many other examples. Few of the machines have any particular claim to fame beyond their type --- no famous owner besides Paul Allen, no historic usage or any other distinction.

That's exactly right - and then you see some machines like the CADR machines go for hardly anything, relatively speaking. Most of the machines were pretty generic as these things go...

These all seem crazy over priced and you could get most of those for a fraction on ebay. Strange things happen when you sell stuff in fancy places.

CRAY-2 Supercomputer

https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/firsts-history-computing-paul-g-allen-collection/cray-2-supercomputer-147/230085 (https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/firsts-history-computing-paul-g-allen-collection/cray-2-supercomputer-147/230085)

I wish you had posted this sooner, it's *so* tempting.

I wonder where I can get a copy of Unicos?

Quote from: spitfire on October 13, 2024, 04:38:30 PMI wonder where I can get a copy of Unicos?

There's an emulator for more recent Cray machines (XMP, YMP-el, J90, and SV1) available from github (https://github.com/andrastantos/cray-sim/) and
this article by neozeed (https://virtuallyfun.com/2022/12/04/unicos-cd-roms-found/) provides some background.

Some CD images were available from archive.org but the site is still unavailable due to the DDOS attacks...