{"id":56,"date":"2009-06-24T23:04:17","date_gmt":"2009-06-25T06:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/?p=56"},"modified":"2009-06-24T23:04:17","modified_gmt":"2009-06-25T06:04:17","slug":"a-glimpse-of-the-canon-objectstation-41","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/a-glimpse-of-the-canon-objectstation-41\/","title":{"rendered":"A Glimpse of the Canon object.station 41"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every once in a while, as I work with vintage computers, I get the chance to meet some of the people who were \u201cthere\u201d at the time when the computing revolution started or was in the early days.<\/p>\n

Earlier today, I met with Al for some late \u201870s computing stuff.\u00a0 What I also learned is that he was a director for the workstation division of Canon back in the \u201890s.\u00a0 The Canon object.station 41<\/a> (link to PDF) was one of the products that came out from the workstation division.<\/p>\n

\"CanonObjectStation41-1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"CanonObjectStation41-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"CanonObjectStation41-3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"CanonObjectStation41-4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"CanonObjectStation41-5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"CanonObjectStation41-6\"<\/a><\/p>\n

According to OLD-COMPUTERS.COM<\/a>, after NeXT abandoned the hardware business, Canon bought the license and started producing the successor to the NeXTstations. I recall Canon was the manufacturer of the magneto-optical drives used in the NeXT cubes, and had a huge financial investment in NeXT.<\/p>\n

Al said Canon even tried to get NeXT to allow them to use the same \u201cNeXTstation\u201d brand for their product, but NeXT declined (I\u2019m assuming that this was after NeXT stopped making the NeXTstation slabs).\u00a0 Hence, the \u201cobject.station\u201d.\u00a0 It actually had a similar style to the black m68k slabs, with a height difference and the presence of an internal CD-ROM drive.\u00a0 Some literature on the net indicated that Canon may have subsequently made the object.stations in black.<\/p>\n

The pictures have Al showing me the object.station 41 with Serial #1 (there was a numeric prefix that my woeful phone camera was not able to get a sharper focus on).\u00a0 That slab of machine is packed with circuitry on the inside.\u00a0 He pointed out the capabilities of the object.station, specifically the display architecture that took advantage of C&T\u2019s Wingine technology.<\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t have enough time to power up the machine (along with that matching huge display monitor).\u00a0 However, Al was kind enough to give me some marketing literature for the object.station 41.\u00a0 Being retired, he may eventually find time to tinker with his object.station.\u00a0 Real worthy as a computer museum piece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every once in a while, as I work with vintage computers, I get the chance to meet some of the people who were \u201cthere\u201d at the time when the computing revolution started or was in the early days. Earlier today, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[22],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrocomputing","tag-next"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterwong.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}