[HN Gopher] Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON (2022)
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Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON (2022)
Author : sillywalk
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-08-05 18:19 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jasoneckert.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (jasoneckert.github.io)
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article):
|
| _Ontario 's Computer: The Burroughs ICON_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30894348 - April 2022 (34
| comments)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Does anybody know if the software has been archived?
| ipaddr wrote:
| I would love to see the canoe game. Was it Oregon Trail or a
| clone? Because of the trackball it made for a difficult but fun
| game.
| wisemang wrote:
| "A day in the life" (I think?) was the popular one at my
| school. I think because there was a way to go to an arcade
| and play a video game within the game.
| brynet wrote:
| I don't think very many of the LEXICON servers or disks
| survived, but I hope someone somewhere still has them, but
| might be lost to time.
| xattt wrote:
| I had no idea about this history, but explains the prominent
| presence of a UNiSYS office complex at Sheppard and the 404 in
| Toronto.
| wisemang wrote:
| Oh the memories of being a "reading buddy" in middle school circa
| 1993 and seeing the memo posted on the second grade classroom
| bulletin board plainly stating username / password was last name
| / first name of teachers.
|
| From there, somehow the GUI made it possible to trackball-and-
| action-key my way to admin privileges and change the login motd
| for everyone in the school.
|
| My downfall was sharing that info with more destructive
| classmates who changed the password of the administrator and
| supposedly almost got me charged with mischief.
|
| Keyboarding class in grade 9 though was made a bit more
| interesting despite already being able to touch type, as I
| somehow figured out how to drop to the (quite limited) QNX
| command prompt.
| brynet wrote:
| _After heavy criticism for a decade, the government ceased all
| support for the ICON in 1994 and ordered all ICON hardware to be
| sent to landfill and software to be destroyed._
|
| This is a sad part of history, I vividly remember hearing this
| had happened. Growing up in Ontario with computer labs full of
| these up until the mid to late 90's, graph paper hanging on the
| walls with LOGO programs, and games, so many games (Oregon trail,
| Cross Country Canada), and then they started getting replaced
| with PC's in classrooms. I remember missing a local auction or
| something that had a bunch of these Burroughs (later Unisys)
| ICONs for $5/$10, but without the LEXICON server they were
| functionally useless, I still regret not picking one up.
|
| Always happy whenever someone else remembers them.
| thijson wrote:
| My highschool had a lab of these in the early 90's. I would spend
| every lunch hour up there. Got my first exposure to a unix
| command line, although the commands were slightly different, ie.
| frel -> rm.
|
| I eventually figured out a few ways to give myself root. The
| passwords in the password file were not hashed. First method was
| to spoof the login prompt. Ran it remotely from another computer
| on another computer that I knew the teacher would always log
| into. Once I succeeded in getting root's password, I put another
| method into one of the boot up scripts which would copy the
| password file somewhere else if another file was present. All I
| had to do then was just reboot a computer to get root's password.
| Later I was able to figure out the memory location where the
| group and user number was stored by comparing the memory dumps
| while being logged in as various users. Then I just needed to
| poke those memory locations, start a new shell, and I was root.
|
| It's a shame that these computers have kind of disappeared. They
| are a part of computing history, for Ontario at least. I've
| contacted a few people online that still have hardware. Everyone
| seems to be unwilling to share what they have.
|
| To preserve the history, I think it would help if they could be
| emulated. Even a modern web browser probably possesses enough
| computer power to emulate them. They ran on a 286, at least the
| early ones did.
| thijson wrote:
| The computers had a C compiler and Pascal interpreter made by
| Watcom out of Waterloo. QNX was the OS, which is also out of
| Waterloo I believe. So overall, the system supported a few
| Ontario based companies.
|
| There was a trackball integrated into the case. Some buttons on
| the keyboard acted as buttons for the mouse cursor.
|
| One of the most popular programs on these computers was a
| program called FGED. It would save animations that could be
| played back later. Some people would spend hours creating them,
| then later play them back for their friends.
|
| Later version of the ICON supported DOS games. I remember
| playing "scorched earth":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game)
| AstroJetson wrote:
| They had the entire suite of Watcomm products: APL, Basic,
| Cobol, Fortran, Pascal. The Watcomm tools were great, there
| was some magical linker that let you connect Cobol and
| Fortran tools together.
|
| Burroughs was always big on being able to network computers
| together. Their B20 line was awesome on the amount of sharing
| you could do between systems. Lots of sites had one or two
| machines with disks on them, the rest would use the network
| to get to the data.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_B20
| oalders wrote:
| I went to high school in Ontario around this time but I never saw
| these machines. Our computer lab was a bunch of networked
| Commodore 64s that we used for learning Waterloo Structured
| BASIC.
| Enk1du wrote:
| Wait ... a _speech synthesizer_?!?!?! How did we never hear about
| that?
|
| Well, I suppose for the same reason the "talk" command (which
| wrote a message to all networked terminals) was removed after the
| first day.
|
| (it's shown on the motherboard, 7th image down)
| 486sx33 wrote:
| This place had a running system with at least one terminal and a
| lexicon server in operating condition. Not sure what all happened
| since 2018
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Computer_Museum
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(page generated 2024-08-08 23:01 UTC)