On Mon, 8 Feb 2016 12:42:27 -0800 (PST), Skeezics
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skee...@gmail.com> wrote:
>There is a terrific video of the Intran software running on a landscape PERQ T2 floating around the web. I think it's available through the Digibarn museum web site? It looks like a VHS transfer from around 1984-85 and really shows off the capabilites of Metaform and the PERQ. Great stuff considering DTP was really still quite new then...
Yes, I have seen that video. It is on Digibarn.
Our PERQ had the landscape display, but I'm pretty sure it was T1.
It had the brown case with the 4 cooling slots on the bottom front and
the horizontal 8" floppy. I also remember the 24" hard drive mounted
on the left side of the chassis, exactly as in your video.
It also had the 4 button puck and the digitizer pad. It was connected
via ethernet to the Xerox 9700 printer. The 9700 was a marvel unto
itself in 1982. 2 pages per second, non stop printing. You could do
1.5 million pages per month with normal maintenance.
>Digibarn also has a full set of Intran floppies. I've been nagging at them over the years to get those archived and copied to Bitsavers, because someday I will get my T2 running again and would LOVE to have a working copy of Metaform to play with. (I don't know if the various bits and pieces I've collected amount to a complete distribution or not.)
That would be great. Even better would be to get them running on the
emulator! Although just seeing Scavenger and chess running again
after 35 years is astonishing.
>I've got a copy of chess, and it's pretty good! There's also PERQman, of course. There were several other PERQ games floating around, and I've been trying to gather them up and get them to run again. There's a Pente, Tetris, Asteroids ("Rasteroids" :-) and some others that I remember but can't find, like a Galaxians (not quite finished when I played it) and a rudimentary Space Invaders... not that most people back then would spend $30K on a machine to play arcade games, but they did show off the graphics capabilities quite nicely. :-)
Yes, I have chess, its included with the emulator. It also has
PERQman, and Pente. But I can't figure out Pente. Either it crashes
the emulator, or I don't know what I'm doing.
Still looking for the pool game. I don't know if it came with the
InTran software or what. It was VERY good.
>Yes! Brad Meyers has posted a bunch of great videos from that era, many of which feature the PERQ. In addition to SAPPHIRE, he wrote most of the games and demos and other nifty display hacks. I've been working on a long-overdue cleanup and reorganization of my server room at home, trying to make space for the new PERQ so that I can post some more in-depth videos and show some of that software in action. Watch this space! :-)
Yes, I saw some other Brad Myers videos also. He was quite active in
those days.
>Thank you for posting! I love that there are still people in the world who remember the PERQ (fondly, or otherwise)...
I feel the same way. I thought I was the only person in the world
who knew what a PERQ was. Discoverning this newsgroup and Digibarn
were real eye openers.
I mainly remember being astonished at how cool the PERQ was, and the
InTran software. Then the InTran software was purchased by Xerox (I
believe) and it ran on other hardware platforms. But I did a LOT of
work with InTran on the PERQ.
Bob