Chatsworth was huge in tech back in the day (from Gemini): Tell me about the tech industry in Chatsworth California in the 1970s and 1980s While Northern California’s Silicon Valley usually steals the historical spotlight, Chatsworth, California—a neighborhood in the northwestern San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles—was a powerhouse of the tech industry during the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of microchips, Chatsworth became the undisputed global capital of computer data storage peripherals. If you owned an early personal computer in the 1980s, there was a massive chance the drive reading your data was engineered or manufactured in Chatsworth. The Birth of "Silicon Valley South" The tech boom in Chatsworth was born out of Southern California's massive post-WWII aerospace and defense ecosystem. Engineers who trained at major aerospace hubs nearby (like Rocketdyne in neighboring Canoga Park) began breaking off to start commercial technology companies. By the late 1970s, a highly specialized cluster of data storage companies had formed in Chatsworth, sharing talent, suppliers, and a fierce rivalry. The Titans of Chatsworth Tech Three major companies defined the Chatsworth tech landscape during this golden era: 1. Pertec Computer Corporation Originally founded as Peripheral Equipment Corp. (PEC) in 1967, Pertec was the anchor that drew tech talent to Chatsworth. The Claim to Fame: They manufactured tape and disk drives for the minicomputer market. The Legacy: In 1977, Pertec acquired MITS, the Albuquerque-based company that created the famous Altair 8800 (the machine that triggered the personal computer revolution and inspired Microsoft). Pertec moved a portion of those operations and subsequent system designs to Chatsworth. 2. Tandon Corporation Founded in a Chatsworth garage in 1975 by Sirjang Lal "Jugi" Tandon, this company grew to become the world’s largest independent manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers. The Claim to Fame: Tandon patented the industry-standard double-sided, double-density (DS/DD) floppy disk drive mechanism. The IBM Boom: When IBM secretly developed its landmark 1981 Personal Computer (the IBM PC), they tapped Tandon as their sole supplier of floppy drives. Tandon rode the PC wave to staggering heights, turning Jugi Tandon into one of the richest men in America at the time. 3. Micropolis Corporation Founded in 1976 by former Pertec engineers, Micropolis carved out a niche by pushing the limits of storage density. The Claim to Fame: They pioneered high-capacity 5.25-inch floppy drives (boosting density to 100 tracks per inch) and later successfully transitioned into high-end hard drives utilizing fast SCSI interfaces for corporate workstations. The "Cluster Effect" Much like Silicon Valley, Chatsworth's tech scene thrived because of a dense network of spinoffs. For instance, Computer Memories, Inc. (CMI) was founded in Chatsworth in 1979 by another group of former Pertec executives. CMI famously won the exclusive contract to supply 20-megabyte hard drives for the powerhouse IBM PC/AT in 1984. Why the Boom Faded By the late 1980s, the Chatsworth tech ecosystem began to buckle under several pressures: The Commodity Meatgrinder: As personal computers became mainstream, disk drives turned into low-margin commodities. Intense manufacturing competition from Japanese and Taiwanese firms squeezed profits tightly. Quality & Scaling Issues: CMI and Tandon both struggled with massive reliability issues as they tried to scale up manufacturing to meet IBM's relentlessly aggressive production quotas. IBM eventually pulled its contracts, which dealt fatal blows to the local firms. Acquisitions and Offshoring: Companies began moving physical assembly to places like Singapore to save costs. By the late 1980s, Western Digital acquired Tandon's storage business, and the era of Chatsworth as a dominant hardware manufacturing hub drew to a close. Today, Chatsworth is largely an industrial and residential suburb, but for two decades, it held the keys to the digital storage kingdom. To hear firsthand accounts of this era, the Oral History of Jugi Tandon offers an extensive, deeply detailed interview exploring his journey from a garage startup to becoming IBM's primary storage supplier in the 1980s.

Welp, mainframe's down. Minicomputer, too. Say, does this VT100 have an 8080?

LOL. I started before microcomputers existed. The first "computer" I programmed was this huge 1m x 1m "tabletop minicomputer" from HP (not the HP 3000). You had to pre-tokenise your BASIC into BASIC interpreter opcodes and variable numbers, then fill in mark-sense cards as input.

This was built more like a minicomputer than a microcomputer. But yes 2200 > 8008 > 8080 > 8086 > 80386 > AMD64

The above code when run by a curious or annoying student would lock an early 1980s vintage HP 3000 minicomputer in an endless loop, refusing to cede CPU to any other process. A reboot was required to free up the CPU.

My granny in Co. Antrim in Ireland. When I was 10yo we visited Ireland, and I still remember sitting in her thatched roof house at the wee table with two woven reed chairs by the tiny kitchen window. We chatted. She went over to the big fireplace with a peat fire burning (it was March) and ladled a bowl of soup for me out of her big black iron cauldron. It was a 3-room cottage and she raised 12 children there. Not only was she born in the late 1800s, but her lifestyle was ancient. And 12 years later I started learning computer science at high school programming an HP minicomputer with 8k of core memory.

A microcomputer is just a regular PC. A minicomputer is somewhere between a mainframe and a PC.

Say goodbye to lag with the KAMRUI E3B Mini PC! 🚀 Equipped with the AMD Ryzen 7 7730U processor, it delivers smooth and responsive performance for multitasking and everyday use. 🖥️ Learn more 👉 amzn.to/3Rwogxg #kamruipc #kamruiminipc #computer #minicomputer

dafür hat dein minicomputer eine eigene applikation onkel

Nothing new about loops. Existed in the era of the mainframe and the minicomputer.

yes, the maintenance is a big challenge... b/w minicomputer is a good starting point.

This really goes back to this here. The processor in this was built more like a minicomputer than a micro, but the 8008 was based off this design, and the 8080 was based off that, and 8086 was based off that, and then the 386 was based off that and then amd64 and etc

Rium .xyz pipy .xyz TurtleShell .xyz BreadBasket .xyz MiniComputer .xyz RichKid .xyz Threadline .xyz h2energy .xyz GoldenAura .xyz

Von KB1 zu EVO-X2. Vom ersten Mini-PC zu einem weltweiten Favoriten. 7 Jahre Innovation, Wachstum und der Weg vom Unbekannten auf die Weltbühne. Danke, dass ihr Teil der GMKtec-Geschichte seid. #GMKtec #MiniPC #MiniComputer #EVOX2 #KB1

1981 Wipro manufactured India's first minicomputer based on the Intel 8086 chip. This was the same year personal computers were just emerging globally. A company that made vanaspati oil in Maharashtra had just beaten most of corporate India into the technology era.

♦️ Der K-202 war als 16-Bit-Minicomputer konzipiert und arbeitete mit integrierten Schaltungen. Für seine Zeit war das sehr fortschrittlich. Er konnte ungefähr eine Million Operationen pro Sekunde ausführen. 🧵

♦️Der K-202 entstand Anfang der 1970er Jahre in der Volksrepublik Polen unter der Leitung des Ingenieurs Jacek Karpiński. Als Computer noch grosse, teure und schwer zugängliche Maschinen waren, entwickelte Karpiński im Ostblock einen der ersten modularen Minicomputer. 🧵

Do you by chance remember the online Star Trek game that was played using a teletype tied to either a mainframe or minicomputer? You would type in commands and it would start spitting out paper with a graphical representation of the result of your commands. This would have been in about 1976, give or take a year.