[HN Gopher] The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of ...
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The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's
Obscure Computer
Author : ecolonsmak
Score : 55 points
Date : 2025-01-04 12:45 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (postgamecontent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (postgamecontent.com)
| 31337Logic wrote:
| I used these in grade school back when I lived in Ontario. Your
| write-up on these is detailed and brought back lots and lots of
| memories. Thank you!!
| bfdm wrote:
| Ditto that. Hours and hours on these in the 1990s.
|
| Mostly Mathville and Offshore Fishing, of course.
| TheCycoONE wrote:
| A day in the life or Crosscountry Canada for the edgyness.
| Robot R&D for fun but I don't remember actually trying to
| pass the tests in it.
|
| A lot of hours with a mostly absent gr. 5 teacher.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Ah the icon... the one system where you can just tell it to run a
| shell as root to gain superuser privileges...
|
| https://www.juliandunn.net/2006/08/21/on-hacking-the-unisys-...
| thijson wrote:
| It was possible to poke two byte memory locations with the
| value 255, run a new shell, and you would be root. I figured
| that out by comparing memory dumps as different users, figuring
| out which locations corresponded to user and group number.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Each Unisys ICON came with its own monitor and a very robust
| keyboard with a trackball embedded in it.
|
| The trackballs were robust indeed.
|
| Due to the client/server nature; a classroom of kids logging in
| at the same time could take several minutes and most of that time
| would be filled with a classroom of 7 year olds spinning the heck
| out of the tennis ball sized trackball.
|
| One more knowledgeable teacher once told us that the this
| probably made the computers slower because each time you do
| something it has to pause and decide what to do. I guess he
| understood interrupts somehow.
|
| But that logic doesn't work on 8 year olds with a trackball and
| nothing else to do.
| n00b101 wrote:
| Consider yourself lucky.
|
| My public high school in Ontario was supposed to be a "magnet
| school for the gifted" and instead turned out to be a scam.
|
| The computer class teacher was absent for a year, and the
| substitute teacher insisted that the keyboard and mouse cords
| should be neatly arranged at the end of each class as if it was
| a knitting class. The "coursework" consisted of learning how to
| type out "business memos" using a word processor.
|
| The school believed that this was an important skill and
| imagined that we would be writing "memos" on computers and
| printing them out in the "business world."
|
| I skipped every class I could to hang out with my girlfriend
| and got out with a 2.0 GPA.
|
| The school in question has since been demolished. The whole
| scam was to try to prevent the school from being demolished due
| to low performance, so they pretended to be a "magnet school
| for the gifted."
| cabinguy wrote:
| Ah, Unisys. I used to buy/sell refurbished laptops and stumbled
| upon a couple thousand Unisys laptops, one time. Pentium 133's &
| 166's. I wasn't very familiar with them, but luckily they were
| all in "like new" condition when I got them. At that time I was
| probably paying sub $1/Mhz and selling them for $3-4-5/Mhz...so I
| have very fond memories of Unisys as well. The good old days.
| overthink wrote:
| My highschool had dozens of these. Hazy memories from 30+ years
| ago but I seem to recall they had a chat program called Coco (?).
| I remember chatting with friends in the library while in typing
| class and getting in trouble for it. High tech!
| bitwize wrote:
| The 186 produced some obscure, kinda great, but ultimately doomed
| (due to not being PC compatible) systems in the early 80s. My
| favorites are the Tandy 2000 and the Mindset. This is one I
| haven't heard of.
|
| I'm also fascinated by the early Canadian personal computer
| scene. They were trying some innovative things in the great white
| North. Things like the mostly PC compatible Hyperion, which beat
| the Compaq Portable to market by a hair (and which _You Can 't Do
| That on Television_ star Christine McGlade famously carried in to
| work on her motorcycle), and the NABU, an early network computer
| concept whose software was downloaded through a television cable
| network (unlike the ICON it was successfully rescued from total
| obscurity).
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The Tandy 2000 was the only 80186-based machine I'd known of
| until now. I actually had one for a while, bought from Radio
| Shack when they were quietly dumping the remaining stock for
| something like 90% off. It was like a computer from a slightly
| alternate timeline, one where MS-DOS's original notion of not
| being tied to PC-specific hardware (e.g., more like CP/M)
| actually took off.
| qingcharles wrote:
| British schools were filled with these non-IBM compat, DOS
| compat 80186 PCs:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus
| sillywalk wrote:
| Previous Discussion:
|
| 87 points by jasoneckert on April 4, 2022 | hide | past |
| favorite | 34 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30894348
| Farfignoggen wrote:
| Well I've seen and programmed on Burroughs Corporation
| Mainframes(IBM Mainframes as well) and have seen an actual Sperry
| Corporation Univac Mainframe Drum Storage system(Ginormous beast)
| in actual use! And has anyone here actually played Space
| Invaders(ASCII Characters used) on a Burroughs TD830 CRT monitor!
| And modern day Unisys is the merger of those 2 mainframe makers
| some time ago!
|
| But none here are maybe from that Era that was coming to a close
| in the late 70s and are not yet qualified to shake their fist and
| angrily yell at that singular cloud floating in a beautiful blue
| sky!
| univacky wrote:
| I was there as well. I punched the cards and read the core
| dumps and programmed in machine language using the front panel
| switches and lights. I programmed the Burroughs machine in
| Algol, and the IBM in assembly language (BALR, USING); the GCOS
| operating system which gave the GCOS field in the Unix/Linux
| /etc/passwd file its purpose and name; and the Univac 494 with
| the FASTRAND II drums. It was the most fearsome computing
| equipment I've ever encountered thanks to its spinning tonnage.
|
| You are seen.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| In my OS course, in 1969, I wrote an IPL (bootstrap) program
| that copied cards to the printer, running in supervisor mode.
| It ran on a 360 virtual machine under the MTS time-sharing
| system. Before that, I wrote programs in assembly language for
| an IBM 7044, and I even was allowed to operate the 7044 on some
| graveyard shifts. I also wrote programs that ran on a CDC 3600,
| a Univac 1108, and a Honeywell 200.
|
| But I liked the PDP-8 best.
|
| So there!
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Respect
| jasoneckert wrote:
| The picture in this blog is the later version of the ICON, but it
| ran the same QNX OS, programs, and games, and used the same
| LEXICON file server for it all.
|
| In case anyone is interested in more information about the
| earlier version of the ICON (and the LEXICON file server it ran
| from), here are my two blogs posts:
|
| https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/
|
| https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/lexicon-computer/
|
| One interesting QNX command we used to get in trouble in high
| school was apb (all points bulletin) - here's a demo of it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8ts6zV2DU
| rbanffy wrote:
| We need a lot more photos of these machines. Maybe even 3D scans.
| mmphosis wrote:
| I implemented the very slow flood fill for Spectricon, the paint
| software.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| My instinctive reflection here is to note how computers used to
| be so focused on the machine. Maybe if you are hell bent on
| having the latest M3 or the latest DDR5, then they still are, and
| that's cool, but I'm just so less interested these days in
| hardware.
|
| What I'm truly grateful for, in 2025, is how much more these
| devices are focused on the software -- nay, the human readable
| _source code_ -- which they run. Back in the early 1990s we were
| beholden to the release cycles of a few large vendors for getting
| the latest _fresh meat_ , whereas nowadays not only do we have a
| constant flood of new ideas to work with, it's also never been
| easier to just make one's own.
|
| All that from seeing a novel trackball and thinking "meh, gimme
| pip / cargo / apt / hugging face / github instead please." Thank
| you all the same though, obscure 1990s hardware, for getting us
| to where we are today x
|
| _BBC B_
|
| _Amstrad_
|
| _Olivetti PC_
|
| _ZX Spectrum_
|
| _Macintosh Quadra_
|
| _CDROM Drives_
|
| _Sound Blaster_ and _AdLib_
|
| _10Base2_
|
| _IRQ allocation_
| xattt wrote:
| [delayed]
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(page generated 2025-01-04 23:00 UTC)