time for fairly obscure canadian retrocomputing history
IBM Home Computing seems to have been a canada-only chain of retail stores that sold IBM products. it didn't last long here - maybe 5-10 years - before it disappeared in the early 2000s. we had a single location in downtown Edmonton City Centre Mall in the mid-90s.
it wasn't the place to go for the best deals on hardware and software. everything was sold at retail prices, and i remember seeing very few sales. i remember buying my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold at the downtown location as a first-year university student for the princely sum of $300.
as you can see in the last photo - buying an IBM in 1994 was a major investment. you could buy three used cars at the time for less than a pentium desktop. 😬
does anyone else remember these retail stores? did they exist in the US, or was it a canadian chain?
One day while picking my son up from day care, I noticed all the kids checking me out in a very particular manner. I asked him what they had done today, and apparently, they had been talking about what their parents did for work.
"I couldn't remember if you are with the FBI or the CIA, but the guys thought it was pretty cool" he said
While he had a few details wrong, it made for a good story at morning coffee with my IBM colleagues the next day.
Do any #IBM employees follow me here on Fedi? I will do pretty much anything - anything... - to be able to use and possibly review the new IBM Power S1012 in its tower configuration. I even have two POWER9 machines to compare it to!
IBM is releasing a family of Granite code models to the open-source community. The aim is to make coding as easy as possible — for as many developers as possible.
Dotarło do mnie takie zaproszenie, więc się od razu dzielę.
Spotkanie autorskie z Edwinem Blackiem
8 maja (środa) o godzinie 18:00 odbędzie się w Łodzi spotkanie autorskie z Edwinem Blackiem, autorem książki „IBM i Holocaust. Strategiczny sojusz hitlerowskich Niemiec z amerykańską korporacją”
Miejsce: Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi, ul. Wojska Polskiego 83
I finally did it and moved to a more appropriate "home realm" for a #FreeBSD enthusiast. Thanks @stefano for offering this!
Moving followers worked flawlessly, restoring all my settings was pretty quick, but of course all my old toots are left on https://techhub.social/@zirias 🙈
So I guess I'll introduce myself here by writing a little thread, adding a few of my works that someone might find interesting. But first a bit of "who am I":
I'm a "professional" software architect/developer (mostly #dotnet platform in the day job), FreeBSD hobby-admin and ports committer, #C64 fan (and occassionally coder and even musician), and apart from computers also interested in music (playing a few instruments myself), traveling, cooking, sometimes sports, sometimes politics ... but probably won't toot about any non-technical stuff (or, very very rarely).
Also quite recent: #dos2ansi. This is a very versatile converter for #MSDOS#ansiart (and other "text") files to a format using #Unicode and only standard #ANSI#SGR escape sequences, so, suitable for today's terminals like #xterm. It includes an ansiart viewer which is "just" a shellscript, leveraging dos2ansi, xterm, less and some nice original #IBM fonts to do its job. So, maybe something for the #retrocomputing fans.