OT: Old doods nostalgia over obsolete tech

[dan88z]

The 1st network I managed was token (chokin') ring. Something goes bad- adapter, port, cable- the whole thing would shut down and you'd spend a day troubleshooting. Isolating hubs to find the one that had the offending member, then unplugging them all and figuring out which one it was. Fun stuff.

I remember having a "portable" IBM. Luggable was more like it, basically an XT on wheels with an 8" green monochrome monitor and a 10mb HDD.

I might still have a working PS2 386 in my garage, complete with windows 3.1. I'll have to check. I might have decided the nostalgia wasn't worth it and trashed it last year when our garage got hit by a falling tree and we took advantage of the dumpster the contractors had for getting rid of debris.

[kpatz]

I used to call it "slowkin' ring" Remember the connectors IBM had for the Token Ring concentrators (hubs)? They looked like they were designed by a committee, and they looked big enough to carry 20 amps of current. I guess there was a method to the madness--the connectors were "bi-sexual" in a way, you could connect them end-to-end without any adapters. No male or female connectors to deal with.

 

I remember going to school to take networking classes, and one of the lab projects was to build a network using the various topologies (e.g. ethernet, token ring, etc.). When I came to doing my Token Ring network, I did it all right but it wouldn't work. Turns out the instructor pulled a fast one on us, and gave us a faulty concentrator.

 

We've come a long way now with gigabit ethernet.

[Allerian]

Did anyone ever populate their own XT boards with a full compliment of 640KB of DRAM using individual DIP chips? 4 rows of 9 chips; 2 rows of 256K and 2 rows of 64K. I once did that to over 50 (yes) machines in one evening... my thumbs and fingers were SO SORE. Some of them even got math coprocessors installed, too.

Yes I have. My very first computer tech work was installing a math chip in our "Engineering machine", a brand-new XT. I was sweating bullets the entire time. Afterwards the heat loss calc program we ran went from 12 hours to a mere 4! We could do two calcs a day! Woooooo!

To further my geek cred, I've paid $2000 to add the 4mb of ram to a Compaq 386/20, had a really nice Apple IIe with dual floppies, ran a popular BBS, sysop'd on one of the first multiuser chat boards, had a sweet modem collection, and was one of the fist people to ever try the 386 processor upgrade for the IBM AT. What an arrangement this thing was... ran from a card in one of the slots and had a cable that plugged into the 286 socket.

The performance difference was barely notecable, even in AutoCAD.

And nobody here can out network-geek me unless you can tell me a story about Systemizers, followed by one about Invisible Network's Ultra Server, followed by another about adapting a type 1 connector to coax.

(My TRS-80 was purposely left out of this, as I try to psycologically black out the owership experience.)

[Gribs]

LOL! I can certainly tell that some of us are "of an age". I remember my first SCSI hard drive didn't work until I figured out the buss needed active termination.

 

Haha! I remember asking a guy what the heck SCSI meant. He was a lead engineer at 3M named Dan who was developing a product with this company called I-omega that was called "floptical" because it used optical tracking through barium-ferrite magnetic media (low absorption/scattering at the tracking wavelength). Eventually I-omega made there own drives and 3M spun off Imation which made its own spin-off of the same technology which was probably better but not first to market. I just had lunch a few weeks ago with some Imation engineers - a few that are left - and learned that Imation had a whopping 6 patents last year (please note facetiousness and sarcasm) and that Dan had just recently been let go from Imation.

 

After my catholic confirmation at age 14 I was insanely thrilled when I opened the present from my confirmation sponsor and found this:

 

 

I was surprised that a google search on "GE AM/FM cassette decks vintage" turned this up right at the top.

[Umbra]

My first real job I had to boot my PC from the dual floppy drives. It didn't have a hard drive for storage, only floppies and it was stuck on a lantastic network with token ring that didn't work more than it did work.

[ElectricPuppy]

I did the BBS thing in the late 80s. I thought it was so cool that you could transfer files over your telephone line. Porn mostly. Of course. Oh yeah, I had the Data Cassette Drive for my Commodore 64.

Hehe, I've still got this very deck in a box, along with my C64, a pile of cartridges, and even their dot-matrix printer (I forgot the model) in boxes in my rafters alongside my Atari 1040ST and color monitor, and a Mattel Intellivision.

And yet, I didn't feel any remorse in tossing out the various generations of PCs I've had over the years. Why is this?

[Crawling Wind]

When I got my 286, I was the envy of my peers. It had a 20MB hard drive, and people asked me what I was going to do with all that space.

[J3RK]

OMFG... talk about a blast from the past... I've installed a few of those drives in my day... now I can hear the stepper motor sounds in my head again... chunk chirp chugga-chugga... Do you remember those full-height 20MB CMI drives that IBM used in the original AT? Those drives were dead quiet, but about as reliable as a Juno-106 VCF chip. They would crap out left and right.

 

 

Yes, and I had a 10MB full height, but I got it later in some old XT junk and never used it. Had a couple of 80MB 5.25 full height Micropolis drives too. I was amazed when I got my first 3.5" drive.

[J3RK]

I did the BBS thing in the late 80s. I thought it was so cool that you could transfer files over your telephone line. Porn mostly. Of course. Oh yeah, I had the Data Cassette Drive for my Commodore 64.

I had the other style, narrower and taller. I had two tapes for it, (Snoopy Math, and Lemonade Stand,) because a short time later we got a 1541 drive.

[pogo97]

My electronics teacher in high school was an old-school guy. In the age of op-amps we built a tube radio (AM of course) as our project. He claimed that if you understood tubes you had all you needed.

 

In retrospect, he was wrong. [He was right, though, about calculators, which he said would stop costing hundreds of dollars and become really cheap for the simple ones!] But transistors or op amps would be useless now, too, so it doesn't much matter. I can solder real good, though, and have proper respect for high voltages.

[clusterchord]

my first PC was AT 286, running at whopping 8MHz, and was expanded to 4mb RAM memory. 5.25inch disks. disk was 20mb iirc. i was running Roland MPU-IFC (later music quest 2port SE) and Texture DOS-based sequencing software. no GUI editing whatsoever. this was late 1988.


btw, MIDI timing was insanely better than now, with my current computer that is about 400 times faster

[augerinn]

I remember the first time I networked using WWG3.11. Up until that time, we had an A/B switch to share a printer.

 

I also remember writing the obligatory "Hello World" program in VB 3.0.

 

I had a copy of a walkman. Damm thing weighed about 10 pounds, and used 4 D cells.

 

Beta anyone ? How about DCC ?

[ChristianRock]

I worked with 8" disks for my first couple of years in the IT industry. I also came into my first IT a year after they had deactivated the last system that worked with perforated cards

 

For my first couple of years, they kept track of how many times I compiled my code, because mainframe time was being charged to the cost centers that we were serving within the company...

 

...and I kind of miss those green ChUI monitors.

 

And I'm just 39.

[J3RK]

33 tomorrow. Remember the monitors, have held an 8" disk, but never actually used one.

 

I have however populated 8 bit ISA RAM cards for an XT! I'm in the club!!! I later stole those chips to upgrade my first VGA card. I also stole some of the slightly longer (41256) chips off my first 286 board to upgrade the memory on my Gravis Ultrasound.

 

I had a couple of XTs, but the best was when I had:

 

286/16MHz, SoundBlaster 1.0, 4MB 30pin SIMMs, 256K VGA and an Amiga 500 sitting next to it. Plenty of music, games, graphic apps, etc. Was quite happy with that combo for some time.

[Gribs]

I worked with 8" disks for my first couple of years in the IT industry. I also came into my first IT a year after they had deactivated the last system that worked with perforated cards For my first couple of years, they kept track of how many times I compiled my code, because mainframe time was being charged to the cost centers that we were serving within the company... ...and I kind of miss those green ChUI monitors. And I'm just 39.

 

I remember using those to store data taken off an Ion Scattering Spectrometer being run by a PDP-11 computer (at Kodak as a summer intern). I only wrote one program on punch cards though. My high school programming/math teacher told us that punch cards were going away but she wanted us to have the experience of doing it once (that was in 1983). I am glad she did that. In high school we used teletypes to connect to the district mainframe (an HP with a whopping 32k of RAM) and stored our programs on punched paper tape. Each teletype had a tape puncher/reader on it, but everything was automatic - no filling in little bubbles. I remember keeping punched tape programs in the little side box in my saxophone case with my reeds and mouthpiece. That was a good way to protect the rolls of tape from getting squished.

 

Edit - green monitors - vt240 terminals - yummy.

 

I was just talking with an office buddy about how things move so fast. Now days even blogging is considered to be something that "old" people do. Why? Because the younger people don't like to read. Blogs require you to read too much information in too much time. Young 20-somethings apparently prefer to bite and digest their information in smaller bursts. My comment was that we know blogging is out of fashion because the VP for R&D for our business sector has started doing it

[ElectricPuppy]

Some random terms to stir up some nostalgia:

Hercules graphics
Novell
dBase
Wordstar
Windows "protected mode"
Extended memory
PC Jr.
TIGA

[soundxplorer]

[augerinn]

Some random terms to stir up some nostalgia: Hercules graphics Novell dBase Wordstar Windows "protected mode" Extended memory PC Jr. TIGA

 

 

Quattro

Quattro Pro

Lotus 1-2-3

WordPerfect

Boreland

ISA

Modem/Dial Up

[J3RK]

Some random terms to stir up some nostalgia: Hercules graphics Novell dBase Wordstar Windows "protected mode" Extended memory PC Jr. TIGA

Expanded Memory
Upper Memory Bank
Not Enough Low Memory
Write Protect Sticker
Disk Notcher
Direct Access 5.0
Adlib
EGA (had a nice Paradise EGA card at one time...)
CGA
Sysop
Renegade
Wildcat
DX and SX
Turbo
Vesa Local Bus
EISA

[J3RK]

[J3RK]

Listing terms kinda reminds me of Stewie saying something about "people who say "anywho" or "guestimate""

[mildbill]

I don'tknow what you guys are talking about.







But I've used some kind of old stuff: Started with Yamaha CX5M computer, switched to Atari 1040 ST, then gave in and got a pc. Don't even remember what kind it was, but I think it ran Win 3.1.

I swore I wouldn't use a pc until they used cool windows and a mouse like the Atari did.

We used Mac's for music at the Uni, but I never really clicked with them.

[soundxplorer]

Anyone else have Journey's video game for the Atari 2600?

[Masaaki]

I had 20 different autoexec.bat and config.sys
How's that?

[ElectricPuppy]

Nostalgia? Nausea, maybe, is all that comes back to me with those terms, which I don't fondly recall.

 

 

Heh, I think instead of trying to invoke fondness, I was really looking to make you say, "Oooooooh wow I forgot about that... I hated that thing!"

 

Lulz.