Range Rover (1970)

1973 Range Rover

Introduced June 1970

The development of the Range Rover is a very long and quite interesting story which you can read about if you want. But the very short version is that the Rover Company wanted something to follow-on from their successful Land Rover utility vehicle. This search started in the 1950s and surprisingly it took nearly two decades to come up with something that they thought was good enough to bear the “Land Rover” name… and more crucially something that might sell.

The original Land Rover was strictly an off-roader. On road it was awful to drive, slow and Spartan on the inside. Attempts to convert it into a Station Wagon over the years had not met with sales success. But in the US, cars like the International Harvester Scout and the Ford Bronco showed that there was indeed a market for utility vehicles that could be used as an everyday car.

Development of the Range Rover (codenamed “Velar”) started in the mid-1960s, and it combined lessons from the Land Rover’s impressive off-road manners with Rover’s ability to make a quite luxurious and usable car, but perhaps the key added ingredient was the legendary Rover V8 engine. The Rover V8 a powerful and lightweight engine that had originally been developed and abandoned by Buick. Buick’s loss was definitely Rover’s gain and the V8 engine spent 46 year in production (ending only when Rover collapsed).

In the Range Rover, the V8 gave the car the power it needed to shift its substantial weight in a fairly speedy manner. Inside were things like (gasp) comfy seats and carpets. Peculiarly it was designed as a two-door car, although coachbuilders such as Monteverdi would sell you a four-door conversion. It took until 1981 for a factory-built four-door Range Rover to become available and in 1992 a long wheelbase version cemented the idea of it being a luxury car and was probably the best-looking of all the original Range Rover models.

Late model four-door long wheelbase Range Rover LSE

It had idiosyncrasies. The split tailgate wasn’t to everyone’s taste and it had the turning circle of a bus. But it stayed in production (as the Range Rover Classic) until 1996, two years after the launch of the P38 which replaced it and an astonishing 26 years on the market during which it was continually developed as a product.

Today the Range Rover is very much a luxury car, but one that has lost none of it’s off-road capabilities. A 1970 Range Rover could cost you a shade under £2000 (about £32,000 today) where today a base model will cost around £81,000 with typical prices being £100,000 or more. An original Range Rover Classic in fair condition can cost between £15,000 to £25,000 with really good ones nudging the price of a new one. Even though the timeless design doesn’t really look 50 years old, buying and maintaining one of these might well be a labour of love.

As a car, the Range Rover really launched the idea of a luxury SUV in Europe and fifty years later the things are all over the place, love them or loathe them. Today more than a third of new car sales in Europe are of SUVs like the Range Rover, and in the US the figure is about than half the market. The rise of car leasing also means that people don’t have to spend so much at once to get one of these huge beasts. Far from being a niche, the SUV is now becoming the mainstream choice.

Image credits:
Vauxford via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0
nakhon100 via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0

Digital VT05 and VT420 (1970 and 1990)

The video terminal is the unsung hero of the computing world. Often toiling aware in warehouse, factories, colleges, shops and other places out of the public eye, the video terminal was a dependable workhorse for decades… well into the era of the PC.

Arguably the king of the terminal market was Digital Equipment Corporation (“DEC” or just “Digital”) who made terminals that were attached to minicomputers or mainframes, where they could run a wide variety of centralised applications that typically ran on Unix or VMS boxes.

They comprised of not much more than a display, keyboard and serial interface – and although they were not always cheap to buy, they were certainly cheap to run with no moving parts and complete immunity to computer viruses and other malfeasance. You could plug one in and forget about it for years, and it would keep doing its job.

DEC VT05

The DEC VT05 was introduced in 1970 and was Digital’s first standalone raster video terminal. Sure, I could tell you that it was a bit of an upgrade from the glass teletype concept with a bit of cursor control thrown in but probably the thing about the VT05 that most people will notice is how it looks. Digital’s radical space-age design made it look like the terminal was leaping out of the work surface. Inside the system boards were slanted behind the CRT rather than subsequent models which were more conventional inside. It looked fantastic, but the downside was that the VT05 was 30 inches (76 centimetres) deep which meant that you’d likely have to re-engineer your working environment to put one in. At 55 pounds (25 kilograms) it was hardly a lightweight device, so you wouldn’t want to move it anyway.

It could only display uppercase characters, but the keyboard could enter both upper and lowercase. Quite how you were meant to tell what you were typing is a mystery. Maximum data transfer rate was 2400 baud. The VT05 had a video input so you could display other things on the monitor, and mix them together with the text. The VT05 was around for five years until the much more capable – and conventional – VT52 was launched.

DEC VT420

Fast forward twenty years and the direct descendant of the VT05 – the VT420 – is launched. Don’t expect two decade of development to count for all that much though, the VT420 was still conceptually the same thing. Unlike the VT05, the VT420 was a practical design with a separate keyboard and a monitor on a tilt-and-swivel stand that was supplied as standard (unlike previous versions). It weighed just 8kg so wasn’t a problem to move about a bit, and the ANSI character set that it supported allowed full cursor addressability and enough predefined graphics to make a nice user interface.

The VT420 also supported dual sessions, typically by using the two serial ports on the back. Not only could you interact with two utterly different systems, but you could also copy-and-paste between them. That might not seem like a big deal now, but back in 1990 most people still couldn’t paste data between applications on their PCs so it was kind of a big deal.

The data transfer rate was a speedy 38,400 baud using the compact phone-like MMJ sockets, the screen had a maximum capacity of 132 x 48 lines of text and the latest revision of DEC’s legendary keyboard – the LK401 – was almost perfect in every way except for the annoying lack of an Escape key.

Where the VT05 marked a point near the beginning of DEC’s journey, the VT420 marked a point near the end. The days of centralised minicomputers were starting to fade and throughout the 1990s PCs and Macs became more capable professional computing environments. The VT420 was a success but it lasted just three years before being replaced by the VT520 which was almost identical. DEC sold the entire terminal division in 1995 and they themselves were taken over by Compaq in 1998, who were then taken over by HP in 2002.

The VT range soldiered on with Boundless Technologies until 2003, and other manufacturers either closed down or shuttered production in the following years, including Wyse and Qume until there were none left.

Even though the manufacturing of terminals dried up, the computer systems that relied on them still exist. VT terminals are still in use around the world, but newer installations will typically rely on a PC with some terminal emulation software – a more complex and less reliable solution.

Today a DEC VT420 in good condition second-hand can cost a couple of hundred pounds, and maybe budget a thousand or so if you want to acquire a VT05. Of course terminal emulators can be had for less, a client such as PuTTY is free or Reflection is a more commercial offering.

Image credits:
Matthew Ratzloff via Flickr – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Adamantios via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0

Digital (DEC) PDP-11

Well-appointed PDP-11 at TNMOC, Bletchley

Launched January 1970

The Digital PDP-11 is a computer you may not have heard of, but it was hugely influential in terms of hardware and even more so in the software that it helped to create.

Digital Equipment Corporation (typically known as DEC or Digital) was founded in 1957, first tinkering with electronics for laboratory environments and then producing a full computer system in 1959 with the PDP-1 minicomputer. Other models followed and DEC grew quickly through the 1960s with a wide range of new products including the very successful PDP-8.

The term “minicomputer” is rarely used these days, and by modern standard there was nothing mini about them. Often house in racks and sometimes filling a small room, minicomputers were shrunk down versions of the huge mainframe computers that tended to require their own building. Even as microcomputers became popular, minicomputers were much more powerful and made it easier for people to work collaboratively, these days their modern descendant would be a server. Typically you would access a minicomputer with a terminal such as a VT52.

Time and technology move on and by the late 1960s the computer industry started to settle on 8, 16 and 32 bit architecture (based on an 8-bit word size) where Digital was mostly producing 12, 18 and 36 bit machines (based on a 6-bit word size). In part this change happened because the computer industry was starting to standardise on the 7-bit ASCII character set.

In January 1970, DEC launched its first 16-bit minicomputer – the PDP-11. Combining the extensive experience of the company from the previous decade (both good and bad), the PDP-11 was a high usable and expandable system. A key feature of the PDP-11 was that it was relatively easy to program, especially when it came to using peripherals (initially on the Unibus bus and later Q-Bus). And peripherals were available from DEC in abundance, including disk drives, tapes drives, printers and terminals.

From the outset the PDP-11 was a huge success, starting with the original 11/20 and 11/15 models in 1970 and then developing along with advancing technologies to become smaller and more powerful, ending with the 11/93 and 11/94 in 1990 (which were in production until 1997). But PDP-11 systems ended up being squeezed into other “smart” peripherals too such as robot arms and when added to a terminal such as the VT100 they could make a compact desktop version (such as the VT103). DEC even tried to make a PDP-11 to compete with the IBM PC with the DEC Professional range.

Perhaps confusingly DEC had many operating systems for the PDP-11, notably RT-11. However the most famous OS that the PDP-11 is famous for is Unix – a platform that was developed at Bell Labs in response to the complex Multics OS. In fact, Unix was tied to the PDP-11 platform until 1978 when it was finally ported to a fairly obscure system called the Interdata 8/32.

Unix became an enormous success – it took a while – and today descendants and variants of that OS power smartphones, servers and personal computers worldwide. But the PDP-11 hardware too was hugely influential, directly inspiring 1970s processors such as the Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086.

DEC sold hundreds of thousands of PDP-11s while it was in production, making it possibly the most popular minicomputer ever made. The 32-bit DEC VAX launched in 1977 was meant to be the next logical step, however both the PDP-11 and VAX ended up being sold in parallel.

In terms of both software and hardware the PDP-11 was a hugely significant device, even if most people may never have seen one. Surprisingly it seems some are still in use, and there’s a brisk trade in parts and components on the second hard market.

Image credit: Loz Pycock via Flickr