Remember when.....

BuckinRut

BuckinRut

New Member
I remember how excited I was when they taught us how to make it snow on our computers at school. I also remember using a tape recorder for programs and not discs of any kind. Those were the days. :lmao:
 
Jeff

Jeff

Stop Staring!!!!!
GWguy said:
.... Microsoft Word came on one 1.2 Mb floppy disk?

The first hard drive available in an original IBM PC was 10 MB?

Why the trip down memory lane? I was just rebuilding a laptop, and the MS Office download was 1.4 GB. Wonder what it will be in another 10 years....
Click to expand...

My first was a Tandy 1000.. Seems like it was 4 Meg Hard drive and I soon upgraded to an 8 meg. The hard drives on these were "OPTIONAL". I then went to the IBM PS/2 and I think I think I still have my old DOS 2.0 around here somewhere. I even had a Handheld Page scanner where you had to run it up one side of a page then down the other then line them up on the screen.

I thought I was cool when I was fiddling with Prodigy back in 91. Heck I was doing online banking back then through NDB. I think the other "ONLINE" service was Compuserve or something similar.

Oh. And we should not forget. Leisure Suit Larry. :yahoo:


But yes this stuff has come a long way.
 
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kom526

kom526

They call me ... Sarcasmo
10 PRINT "KOM ROCKS"
20 GO TO 10


I think that's right. It's been over 20 years :faint: since I tried that.
 
clevalley

clevalley

...
First one I ever screwed around with was a TRS-80, it loaded/saved using a cassette tape. :roflmao:

I think the first I ever did any real work on was a 286 with DOS 3.1 and 5 1/4" floppies, the HDD was less than 20MB. We used WordStar to create reports for the fire department, this was around 1985 or 1986...

The first mainframe I ever worked on were a PDP-11/70 and VAX 11/780. This was right after punch cards got phased out, but we had the toggle switches to load the boot strap on the PDP 11/70, the 11/780 had it's own hard drive, a massive 200MB! :lol:

I remember the first 1GB hard drive, it was about 12" tall, 10" wide and about 24" deep and rack mounted - it weighed around 60 lbs (with all the casing and power supply)... I want to say we got about 20 of them with new storage controllers and 3 shiny new Vax 6000's for a cool 4-6 million, this was somewhere around 1992 or so. :lmao:
 
clevalley

clevalley

...
PsyOps said:
What's ironic about his quote is MS has been at the very front in creating the requirement for more memory and transfer speed.
Click to expand...

Where do you think BloatWare came from? :roflmao:

(yes, we are primarily a MS shop!)

:offtopic: Did you ever figure out that problem you were having with RDP/Terminal Service?
 
itsbob

itsbob

I bowl overhand
clevalley said:
Isn't 'GO TO' suppose to be 'GOTO' ? :tap:
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That was my VERY first computer class in 1981. Took a BASIC programming class with NO computers, taught by our Squadron Commander.

Never knew if we were having class or not, either I couldn't make it to class because I was in the field, or he wasn't in class because.. well, he was the 1/11th ACR SQDN Commander.

We'd writedcode on tablet paper, desk check it, then turn it in. He didn't have a computer to run it on, so he'd desk check it and give it back with a grade..

He's now a MULTI Millionaire.. and here I sit.
 
PsyOps

PsyOps

Pixelated
clevalley said:
Where do you think BloatWare came from? :roflmao:

(yes, we are primarily a MS shop!)

:offtopic: Did you ever figure out that problem you were having with RDP/Terminal Service?
Click to expand...

Another ironic part of this is back when 640k was a lot you'd pay 4 times for that then for what you'd pay for 500 gigs today.
 
D

dgates80

Land of the lost
PsyOps said:
Another ironic part of this is back when 640k was a lot you'd pay 4 times for that then for what you'd pay for 500 gigs today.
Click to expand...

First machine was a Monro-Litton programmable calculator, if you don't count the MC6800 evaluation kit (which was a CPU and a ROM, that's it).

U of W had a Cyber 73 / CDC 6300 dual mainframe with 128k of extended core. Two sides of the operation, the "batch" side -- turn in your card deck -- and the "interactive" side where you used at VT-100 terminal.

Built an Altair 8008 and later converted it to first an 8080 and tehn a Z80 cpu. front panel switches & paper tape, though later w/ CPM an 8" floppy drive. S-100 bus machines.

Then came the TRS-80 Model II -- worked at a place that had a board stuffing and wave soldering contract with Tandy. Scored a scrap board and a large box of scrap parts, mostly scrapped due to bent pins.

I hand soldered sockets onto the board for all the chips and made a clear plexiglass cast for it. I actually got it to work, too.

Navy had a Harris oddball computer, a 24 bit machine. Odd thing, used mag core memory. which was non-volitile. It had a mag tape drive. Oh, and yes, still front panel switches.

Then there were the Univac 618's and the AN/UYK-20 machines that ran NTDS and teh scopes in CIC. Mag core memory in those, as well.

On to the IBM PCXT and the Kaypro, and the first networks -- remember Token Ring? Novell, which came on a set of 50 or so 5.25" floppies! About that time started working with Sun and HP unix boxes. Arpanet and Gopher servers....

Got into digital video stuff in the early days of that, worked alot with SGI boxes.

Worked a Intel I860 parallel machine for a while, that was a wierd contraption! Got to go the school on it in Portland, the Intel supercomputer systems design center. Saw Oak Ridge's massivly parallel box... kinda cool.

Did some DSP programming along the way....

I don't do computers any more. They are appliances these days. Nowadays I am strictly a user....
 
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Sonsie

Sonsie

The mighty Al-Sonsie!
In 1988 in the AF I was writing codes for the keypunch operator to type out on her machine to "automate" contract writing. I think we were the last base to move to the high tech Wang system. :lol:
 
Bann

Bann

Doris Day meets Lady Gaga
PREMO Member
In high school my 1st period Intro to DP class did the attendance for the school. We took the punch cards from each class & ran them through the machine (I think they called it a calculating machine,(?) but it was a huge thing. Bigger than a desk) and come up with the list of classes & the students present in each class.

Later, I worked for a company in DC that used magnetic tape to record their data which came in to a switching center from ship to shore telex & telephone calls. I was in accounts receivable, so we processed the live data from those tapes & turned it into bills. We used computer terminals connected to a main frame located in the computer room. But we did have 2 Apple PC's (?I think) and a Wang Word Processor that were fairly new at the time, I think. (early 80's)
 
BuckinRut

BuckinRut

New Member
Friend of mine dug up a T2200sx (Toshiba) in perfect condition. Neither one of use can figure out how to work it. We assume it has to have a floppy in the drive to boot up, but where on earth would you find the system disks for this mummy?
 
E

EmptyTimCup

Guest
GWguy said:
.... Microsoft Word came on one 1.2 Mb floppy disk?

The first hard drive available in an original IBM PC was 10 MB?

Why the trip down memory lane? I was just rebuilding a laptop, and the MS Office download was 1.4 GB. Wonder what it will be in another 10 years....
Click to expand...



I have a Winchester Drive CARD ... ISA Slot of Course and 8 inch Floppies
 
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