I remember those things. One of the first computers I programmed on starting my career in 1984. We had a variation of the Tower, I think it was called the 'iTower'. It didn't run Unix. instead it ran an OS called rmCOS from the Ryan McFarland company. Same people who made RMCobol. The OS was kind of similar to Texas Instruments DX10 operating system. I believe RM was involved in that too. I remember having to divvy up the ram per user. I think the max a user could get was 64k. You could get an expansion cabinet with additional hard drives. The expansion was the same size as the Tower computer. The big thing they were touting was that it used SCSI for connecting disk and tape drives. Later, I learned UNIX and we ported our software and ran it on the 1632. The article also mentions the 9300 which I also had the opportunity to program. Those were good days!
Somewhere in a dusty basement one of these is running a mission critical manufacturing system. It is the last of its kind and absolutely nobody knows that it is there.
Kidding aside, you could pick any issue from Byte of those years and you'd recognize maybe one or two protocols and a handful of brandnames. The rest has all disappeared.
Ah those good old days of targeted ads without user tracking.
There are a ton of old ads / brochures at 1000bit[0]. It's interesting to see stuff from when I was a kid / teen.
This is a wonderful website.
I remember in the user manual for some piece of software—it may have been filePro—there was a note like "If you're on a single user system like an IBM PC, blah. If you're on a multiuser system like the NCR Tower, blart." Being just a kid, I thought the NCR Tower sounded tremendously powerful. To be honest, it still seems kind of impressive for its day.