Definition of "Fully Blown"

[John W Kercheval]

Definition of Fully Blown ™

I have been asked about this on this board so here is the reply.

I coined this phrase back in 1983 when I doubled the speed of my HP41CV with the capacitor switch. I was too broke to have a phone inside my house so I used the pay phone outside my house at the intersection of Grove & Virginia Streets in Berkeley to announce it to my college buddies.

Those were the heady days of early PC development, the “Halt & Catch Fire” days. Post the Cap’n Crunch era, Woz was at Berkeley himself finally earning that EECS degree, awarded in 1986.

Basically what it means is:

You have taken the existing machine (whatever it is) to its maximum, or a greatly enhanced power version, and the next step up is to change machines entirely.

The computer industry home high power enthusiasts started using it in the late 1980s to describe maximizing chip strength by using memory cache which was getting in vogue back then. A 386-16 with some on chip cache was a lot faster that one that did not have it. So the machine was said to be “fully blown” if it maxed out that plus RAM plus maybe an S3 graphics chip, etc.

I think the ultimate fully blown machine would be that 41CL thing by Monte unless you count the giant improvements to be an entirely new machine. Your call. I would call it an entirely new machine. Ergo, not blown.

Also, blowing involves under the hood/case mods, simply plugging in more stuff is not alone sufficient.

I call my HP71b fully blown but that really isn’t true. I have not removed the back of the case and modified the inside- I would like to but cannot think of anything to do.

BTW, I am big into blowing. I removed the 6.0L V12 engine from my car, bored and stroked it out to 7.2L and reinserted it into the vehicle. 7.2L,12 cyl. 690HP. It had 389 HP going in. Numerous other mods as well.