About This Article

Over the years I've told various people how great the old Eagles were, without much success.  People don't remember the limitations of the past; they persist in judging events of the past in terms of the present.  Mention a machine with a 10-megabyte hard disk and a 782-kilobyte floppy-disk drive, and they smile in derision.  It's no use explaining that, in 1982, an Eagle IV was an impressive computer, or that an Eagle V (with an unheard-of 32-Mb hard disk!) was state of the art.  It's not 1982, and that's all they can see.  They insist on scorning the Eagles because they aren't the 64-bit dual-core machines, with many gigabytes of RAM, that you can purchase today; despite the fact that such a machine couldn't be built in 1982, and in fact exceeds the power of most mainframes back then.

Some people are interested in the history of computers, however, and even set up web sites which try to be online computer museums, with whatever information they can gather from various sources.  I've written about Eagles for some of these sites in the past, only to see the site owner edit it according to his ideas of style, and (sometimes) his preconceptions.  That is his right; it's his site.  But it doesn't encourage me to contribute more.

Finally I discovered Wikipedia, and began checking it out.  Seeing how sparse the Eagle Computer article was, I gathered my forces (and my notes), and over a couple of days prepared an elaborate update to the existing article.  I even solicited some of the web sites that had pictures of Eagles for their permission to use those pictures in the article.  Finally it was done, given what I had on hand, and I uploaded the new article.

About a week later, I looked at it again, and half of it was gone.  The person who'd created the article in the first place stripped out all names (only famous people can be mentioned in Wikipedia?), all information about ways the computers could be modified, and much of the information about how the machines booted and what BIOSes they used.  It was the old story of the website owner editing things all over again, except that the person doing the editing wasn't the site owner, and made more deletions, for no apparent reason, than any of them ever had.

Fortunately, Wikipedia allows you to recover any previous state of an article, in case someone makes malicious changes or just changes his mind about something he wrote.  I recovered my article, saved it to my own computer, and decided to write my own Eagle article and put it on my own web site, where no one can change it but me.

Watch This Space

Most of the things I own are in storage up in Eugene, Oregon, where I plan to return someday.  In that storage unit is at least one functioning Eagle Computer, all my Eagle and Spellbinder manuals, all my Eagle software, all my Eagle Computer company documents and newspaper clippings, and my copies of the Eagle Computer Users Group newsletter, both printed and on disk.  When I get back there, one of the things I'll be doing is putting all that material online, in this section of my site.

Until then, if anyone has any information about the company and the computers and would like to help make this article better, please write me.  Information about the Eagle 1600 series, and Eagle PCs, would be especially welcome.  I never had much interest in anything but the CP/M models, so I have very little about them in storage.

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