Let's Identify the Dinosaurs [Archive]

clown-lover

12-15-2007, 4:43 PM

I've actually done all of those.. I hooked up 8" floppy drives to my TRS80 Model 1 (with help from another friend)

I've also owned a Kaypro 2x, and Osborne computer. My first modem did 300 bps and I could read faster than it could transmit.

My statement to people who has me "How did you learn all that stuff?" is, I've been a nerd since before being a nerd was fashionable.

IceH2O

12-15-2007, 4:50 PM

I wouldn't even know what to answer on the poll but I had a Commodore Vic 20 back in the early 80s. Had all the possible components for it too.

http://oldcomputers.net/vic20.html

Then I had a 64 for a while in the mid 80s.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=98

nickmcmechan

12-15-2007, 5:23 PM

vic 20...way cool, was much better than the zx spectrum!

jflng

12-15-2007, 5:26 PM

I thought I was going to get to identify real dinosaurs. I'm a bit disappointed about that.
First computer was a commodore 64. I was young then, and I didn't really start learning and working on computers till the early to mid 90's.

Penfan66

12-15-2007, 5:30 PM

Really don't have a poll answer, but I remember programming in Pascal on a Commodore SuperPet in high school.

Slappy*McFish

12-15-2007, 6:11 PM

I learned on an Apple II, myself.

jones57742

12-15-2007, 7:29 PM

Folks:

I am really enjoying the responses!

Thanks Very Much
Ron Jones

jones57742

12-15-2007, 7:41 PM

...is, I've been a nerd since before being a nerd was fashionable.

I just had to respond to this one.

I came out of the "pocket protector" world although I never wore one.

Decent gals (35 years later ala "Revenge of the Nerds") are very hard to come by but the ss's are lined up around the block these days.

I did not know that "nerd was now fashionable" but I thank you for that info as I wear whatever I want to the office, private meetings and public meetings and will feel better per your post.

TR

jones57742

12-15-2007, 8:11 PM

Folks:

I also played with some of those "toys" and really "slobbered up" on the prologue to the post.

I intended to receive responses from the Intel folks who needed the technology in order "to keep groceries stuffed in their face"

I also anticipated a few responses from Mac folks indicating "None of the Above" as the XP interface is only now approximating the PARC GUI which the MAC has had from Day 0 and the linear addressing which the Motorola chips have had from time zero (it is really ashamed that the DEC Alpha did not "make it") as Microsoft is now only attempting to fully implement linear addressing (ie. Vista) which is easily available in the current Intel chips.

TR

I chose Intel/Microsoft for an inexplicable reason although the linear addressing of the Motorola chip I believed to be superior to the Intel chip as well as the Mac GUI vastly superior to DOS.
If I absolutely had to "guess" it would be speed.
In the early days apps which could run under DOS were much speedier than the identical app's running under the Mac OS (and this was well before Lisa).

JohnInFlorida

12-15-2007, 11:02 PM

OgreMkV

12-16-2007, 12:33 AM

Heh, I've done all of those... on the same lightening fast 8088... turboed to 8 mhz. Of course that was way after the Atari 6400. I loved that membrane keyboard.

Anyone ever have to program in assembly? Not because it was really efficient to do so, but because there wasn't anything else to use?

A friend of mine had a video game system that could be used to program in basic. I think it had 8k onboard.

Two words: Coleco Adam
Two more words: Tape Drive (it wasn't just for backups then)

Man, I'm getting old. My students don't even now why they are called Pentium computers.

Grins

12-16-2007, 1:15 AM

What? No questions about punch cards?

Octavarium

12-16-2007, 1:58 AM

Im 22, remember playing on MS DOS green font at age 6. 32 megs was insane, and 56k was "lightning". Wow how things have changed in such little time.

jones57742

12-16-2007, 9:41 AM

Folks:

This post is "kinda a bump" as I am really enjoying the responses!

Please note that I am excerpting only the IMHO "best of the best".

My first modem was a 300 baud that you plugged the phone receiver into two rubber earcups to connect the computer.
Once communications were established did you have to place the phone and modem in a a drawer or cabinet in order that "room noise" would not cause a plethora of protocol checking errors and a subsequent communications collapse? (BTW a towel above and a pillow below the phone/modem for a whole ten minutes of uninterrupted communications.)

Also were not some of the utility programs on the BB's wonderful?

Anyone ever have to program in assembly? Not because it was really efficient to do so, but because there wasn't anything else to use?

You must be referring to a Php 8 bit or a 4 bit Wang as:

1) the heavy iron had fortran and cobol compilers (the other ol's [ie. snobol, algol, etc] have faded into the realm of archaeologists). {C was still only a dream in Dennis Ritchie's brain, as was Unix and TCP/IP}

2) IBM told Gates that it would not market the XT as one of the alternate OS's for the XT unless a fortran compiler was available also. (IBM also told him, per their heavy iron folks, that an assembler would also be necessary as coding in hexadecimal "was a real pain")

BTW you could forget coding for the extended registers on the 386 chip as MASM was way to full of bugs with respect to these registers.

What? No questions about punch cards?

I have never seen anything but heavy iron in the early 1970's utilize punch cards for input.

BTW those of us who were "doing our thing in much higher cotton" had access to our code as well as data files which were on the "big reel tapes" via a teletype.

TR

Que

12-16-2007, 10:22 AM

I first learned fortran in high school and we made our programs on punch cards. Our programs would run at night when the school computer wasn't being used by the staff. The first removable storage media I used was an 8" floppy disk.

Q

JohnInFlorida

12-16-2007, 11:10 AM

Once communications were established did you have to place the phone and modem in a a drawer or cabinet in order that "room noise" would not cause a plethora of protocol checking errors and a subsequent communications collapse? (BTW a towel above and a pillow below the phone/modem for a whole ten minutes of uninterrupted communications.)

Also were not some of the utility programs on the BB's wonderful?

No, didn't need to use a drawer/pillow/etc. because I was using an original "Ma Bell" style phone handset that was probably designed in the 40's/50's and the rubber cups on the modem were designed for that exact handset.

Again, it all makes me feel (as you originally put it) "dinosaur"ish. :eek:

Keep Smilin'
John :)

kj5kb

12-16-2007, 1:58 PM

Done 'em all

I remember when hard drives were a buck a Meg, used, no warranty...
(...actually when they were quite a bit more than that, even...)

That would make a 300GB hard drive $300,000 at a buck a meg!

clown-lover

12-16-2007, 2:10 PM

This thread makes me shake my head.

My first 'puter was a Sanyo MBC-2000 ... 64M of RAM, no HD, and it ran on CPM (pre-DOS, nevermind pre-Windows 3.0), ... at least it had 5 1/4" floppies and not 8"

My first modem was a 300 baud that you plugged the phone receiver into two rubber earcups to connect the computer. (That was years later, a 386 machine, not the Sanyo, which I believe I bought in 1978 for ... $2300??.

Yep, it makes me feel old.

Keep Smilin'
John :)

I would bet john that it wasn't 64M of Ram.. It was probably 64k of ram ;) But you were smokin' back then..

My first Kaypro cost me 2953.71 with tax etc. It had a whopping 8" monitor, and when closed up looked like a suitcase.. In fact I still have a picture I scanned in of it..

vidiots

12-16-2007, 3:36 PM

My first computer was also the Commodore 64, and first modem was a 2400 baud.

I have written tiny programs in assembly using DOS debug.

I ran a computer bulletin board for many years, where I became highly addicted to playing Barren Realms Elite.

I fought the switch to Windows all the way up until Win95 when I finally caved in and joined the crowd. Until then I stuck with DOS and Deskview, which ran much faster than Windows with fewer bugs.

jones57742

12-16-2007, 8:01 PM

I fought the switch to Windows all the way up until Win95 when I finally caved in and joined the crowd. Until then I stuck with DOS and Deskview, which ran much faster than Windows with fewer bugs.

I would have done the same except for one overwhelming consideration.

I run around with a gal who has a ranch in southeast New Mexico and she had recently purchased a Gateway with Windows 3.0 loaded, I purchased Visual Basic 1.0 (I believe) which was released concurrently with Windows 3.0, I read the manuals at home but loaded VB on her computer during my next visit.

Within 5 minutes I knew that the "world was fixin to change for us common folks".

15 minutes of coding and debugging in VB was equal to a day of coding and debugging in C and MASM!!

TR

BTW: Three Items

A substantial portion of that early VB code is still being used at the office and the code will compile under VB 9.0 without modification.

An interesting item is that when ver was run in a Windows 3.0 DOS box the return was DOS 7.x (I believe that I remember this).
When ver is run in a Windows XP DOS box the return is DOS 5.x

I anticipate that most of the folks who are responding to the last item in the poll have never heard of a software interrupt, pushing and popping, etc. and if one of them has it is very, very doubtful that he/she has ever produced code in MASM which would write directly to the EGA memory area, clear the screen and display "Hello World" with each letter in a different color (needless to say I was "hopping up and down in glee" the first time I was able to get that code to run).

TR

OgreMkV

12-16-2007, 8:12 PM

ver returns Windows XP (5.x) on my machine

OK, I'm not as old as some of you guys and I never was very much of a programmer.

I do remember writing stories on a word processor (with spellcheck!) that fit on a 720k 3.5" floppy. That was a laptop with NO internal RAM. It had DOS in fixed chip memory and two 720k floppies. A beautiful mono-blue screen.

sigh... those were the days. If it wasn't for the dang internet, I could get some crap done.

JohnInFlorida

12-16-2007, 8:42 PM

Bobnova

12-16-2007, 9:35 PM

I low level'd a 5mb full height 5.25" hard drive, that was back in the day :P

Also used a TRS80 with a tape player for storage.

Spent a lot of time with an apple II+, nice computers those. Best oregon trail in history imo.

Bobnova

12-16-2007, 9:38 PM

Last win3.1 ran on 6.5, 95 ran on 7.0 (7.5 for 98 i think) as i remember.

Those were the good old days :P

clown-lover

12-16-2007, 10:58 PM

clown lover, you are correct with 64k not 65M ... only makes me shake my head even more ... :headshake2: ...

And I was even legal, sitting in the bar with the "tabletop pong" under the condensation rings on the glass ... Oh my!

Keep Smilin'
John :)

Hey we were rockin an rolling back then.. I really wonder what people would do if the had to manually send init strings to their modem because the stupid thing went off hook for some stupid reason or the modem program didn't hang it up.. Or how about downloading things before zmodem ever came along and you lost your connection due to static.. But that 340k file took half the night.

I used to run a BBS (The D-Generation BBS) and could spend all night downloading FidoNet..

Does anyone remember the Term program called TermMite? (I think thats what it was called..) Man that was to many years ago..

Peace - - Mark

The Zigman

12-16-2007, 11:17 PM

Did em all, heck I remember installing DOS 6.4 on my 386 it was on I think 3 Floppy disks... they were 5.25 inch floppies then. amd when Windows 3.1 came out, it was on like 6 floppies, 3.5"... I installed windows 95 from 14 3 1/2 inch floppies!! Man.. I am old...

jones57742

12-17-2007, 1:22 AM

Hey we were rockin an rolling back then.. I really wonder what people would do if the had to manually send init strings to their modem because the stupid thing went off hook for some stupid reason or the modem program didn't hang it up..

You reckon how many folks remember the Com port addresses and/or that Com 1 and Com 3 shared one port and that Com 2 and Com 4 shared another port. (was this one not intensely stupid of Mr. Gates!)

Our $10k XT's came with one parallel port card (which you hoped was actually configured for LPT1 as several days could be expended determining why the printer was not printing and then configuring the card for LPT1 as the documentation was garbage and was actually for the last generation of cards and not the card which you were attempting to configure.)

If you really could afford a print wheel printer in addition to your dot matrix printer you could purchase a 2nd parallel port card for $300 and then have the pleasure as described above configuring the card for LPT2 as these always came configured correctly for LPT1.

Or how about downloading things before zmodem ever came along and you lost your connection due to static.. But that 340k file took half the night.

I believe that one of the reasons why I am enjoying thread is that I had completely forgotten the joys of xModem and yModem as well the tremendous benefits of zModem.

could spend all night downloading FidoNet..

Was not the animated puppy dog worth the wait???

TR

Folks nowadays get irritated when they plug the "big" USB connector into a USB port on their laptop* and the "little" USB connector into their digital camera but they have to wait 30 seconds in order to upload thirty 3M images.

*BTW this is no problem as they do not have "a big plug in" to an ISA card which takes up the space of three slots.

clown-lover

12-17-2007, 7:01 AM

You reckon how many folks remember the Com port addresses and/or that Com 1 and Com 3 shared one port and that Com 2 and Com 4 shared another port. (was this one not intensely stupid of Mr. Gates!)
02f8 and 03f8 if I remember correctly or it might be reversed. Like I've said I've forgotten most of that stuff.. ;)

Well there were always quite a few issues I had with Mr Gates and his OS.. :D

Bobnova

12-17-2007, 10:16 AM

Not really gate's fault, the conflict between com1/3 and 2/4 was IRQ, they had different memory addresses, but their ISA bus IRQ's were the same, meaning they couldn't both be in operation at the same time.
Thats hardware, not software.

jones57742

12-17-2007, 3:00 PM

Awe come on everyone. Surely other folks have some "old war stories"!!!

The younger folks believe that booting from a CD is a "slow arduous pain" and would enjoy the stories.

An example would be spending several days trying to get a 386 chip on a Micronics motherboard to boot and finding (by trial and error) that the setting of dip switches 2, 4 and 6 for floppy and hard drive access via the ISA chips/slots was incorrect in the motherboard documentation!

Not really gate's fault, the conflict between com1/3 and 2/4 was IRQ, they had different memory addresses, but their ISA bus IRQ's were the same, meaning they couldn't both be in operation at the same time.
Thats hardware, not software.

Bob:

I could be way, way off here as 25 years is a long time and memory fades but I believe that the interrupts were software with one exception.

I think that I remember when the AT bus came along that IRQ 7 was the cascade to IRQ's 8 through 15.

Thanks For The Post!
Ron Jones

OgreMkV

12-17-2007, 3:22 PM

DIP SWITCHES!!!!

My favorite experience was turning a 386 40mhz into a 386 10mhz by the judicious application of about a 30,000V static discharge. Stung like the dickens too. Yeah, that turbo 386 was the bomb back in the day. Everyone envied me until the 486s came out and the static incident.

A friend of mine decided to write his own defragger for Linux. Unfortunately, he was on cold medicine at the time (A beer would leave this guys drunk for two days. Nyqil was... interesting). Anyway, he forgot to link in the 'write' portion of the defragger and tried it out on his own HDD.

US Robotics external 36.6 zoom modems!

Another good one, back when the university network was via 2800 baud modems. I kept complaining because my PC couldn't get a good connection and it was way slower than 2800. It would randomly (or so we thought) drop me, etc. Finally, I figured it out. They had wrapped the cable around the AC duct a couple of times. I made the maintenance team unwrap it and it worked fine from then on.

Sorry, just randomly reminiscing here.

Sploke

12-17-2007, 3:32 PM

Wow I don't have nearly the computer experience as some of you guys... Our first computer was a Tandy 486 that ran everything off of 5 1/4" disks...pretty sweet. My dad's first laptop was roughly the size of a microwave. His second was actually reasonably sized, and rocked with Windows 3.1 and a 28.8 dialup modem. We had Prodigy Classic internet service, so you could use IE and that was about all they would let connect to the internet, I forget why, but no messaging programs or anything.

clown-lover

12-17-2007, 3:46 PM

jones57742

12-17-2007, 3:59 PM

How about prodigy when you had to use their proprietary software.. Yeuck...

Or CompUServe when a file could not be attached to a message?

TR

jones57742

12-17-2007, 4:01 PM

DIP SWITCHES!!!!

My favorite experience was turning a 386 40mhz into a 386 10mhz by the judicious application of about a 30,000V static discharge. Stung like the dickens too. Yeah, that turbo 386 was the bomb back in the day. Everyone envied me until the 486s came out and the static incident.

Did either the CPU or you emit smoke?

I have been there once with a smoking CPU.

A friend of mine decided to write his own defragger for Linux. Unfortunately, he was on cold medicine at the time (A beer would leave this guys drunk for two days. Nyqil was... interesting). Anyway, he forgot to link in the 'write' portion of the defragger and tried it out on his own HDD.

The adult beverages "must have gotten to the boy" as everyone knew to try out this flavor of software on someone else's computer and then explain to them how the software was not invasive and did not know why their computer would no longer boot and all of their applications and data were gone.

TR

khombre

12-17-2007, 11:59 PM

Where's the DOS option with monochrome monitor? lol :)

jones57742

12-18-2007, 2:18 PM

Where's the DOS option with monochrome monitor? lol :)

To the best of my "memory and belief" when the XT (ie. eight bit slots) went away and the only slots available were ISA slots the monochrome monitors went away also.

TR

khombre

12-19-2007, 7:37 PM

To the best of my "memory and belief" when the XT (ie. eight bit slots) went away and the only slots available were ISA slots the monochrome monitors went away also.

TR

Actually, all I can remember is having to insert a 5 inch floppy disk containing DOS and using Wordstar and playing some old pc games :) And yes my monitor was green. Can't really say about the other pc parts.. I was in grade school then. :)

vidiots

12-20-2007, 7:48 AM

I anticipate that most of the folks who are responding to the last item in the poll have never heard of a software interrupt, pushing and popping, etc. and if one of them has it is very, very doubtful that he/she has ever produced code in MASM which would write directly to the EGA memory area, clear the screen and display "Hello World" with each letter in a different color (needless to say I was "hopping up and down in glee" the first time I was able to get that code to run). TR

Hahaha, I remember when I first learned how to call software interupts in my QBasic programs, and was irritated that no one had shown them to me sooner, because it would have saved me weeks of re-inventing the wheel writing my own slower routines to do the same task.

I too remember FidoNet, and was amazed by the concept that I would send any one on any BBS that was a member of FidoNet a Netmail message even if it sometimes took a week to get a response back from them depending on the number of BBSes forwarding the message and the times the did there mail xfers. For some sick reason my FidoNet address is still stuck in my permenant memory 1:322/754 (Vidiot's Lair BBS). The scary thing is that I havent used that address in atleast 8yrs.

Sploke

12-20-2007, 7:51 AM

Haha funny how that kind of information sticks with you. My randomly generated Prodigy Classic login was uzhj82c, which I also haven't used in....wow 11 years. I must be getting old or something.

jones57742

12-20-2007, 6:25 PM

Actually, all I can remember is having to insert a 5 inch floppy disk containing DOS and using Wordstar and playing some old pc games :) And yes my monitor was green. Can't really say about the other pc parts.. I was in grade school then. :)
:grinyes::eek::grinyes::eek::grinyes::eek:

I was 32 and had been in business 2 years.

Hahaha, I remember when I first learned how to call software interupts in my QBasic programs, and was irritated that no one had shown them to me sooner, because it would have saved me weeks of re-inventing the wheel writing my own slower routines to do the same task.
:eek::grinyes::eek::grinyes::eek::grinyes:

Exactly how many regular computer folks (even computer geeks) back in those days knew what an interrupt (hardware or software) was???

Do you remember the "real" knowledge of most of the computer peddlers back in those days?

Folks:

I very much appreciate the posts in this thread.

Who knows! We may have helped out some "younger folks" with our "old war stories".

Maybe if us old dinosaurs are still here next Xmas we can resurrect this thread.

TR

BTW: For you younger folks

One

The vaunted Microsoft multitasking is a joke.

All that is going on is that the values of the registers and the stacks of one process are being written into memory and the values in memory of the registers and stacks of another process are loaded (this is referred to as a context switch).

Two

Please do not try to execute a software interrupt via a DOS box in Win95, Win98 and I believe XP as lockup will occur (as well as possibly way worse "nasty things").

khombre

12-20-2007, 6:34 PM

Jones... you're old lol jk :)

I remember playing maniac mansion on floppy lol :)

clown-lover

12-21-2007, 4:40 AM

Jones... you're old lol jk :)

I remember playing maniac mansion on floppy lol :)

Hey .. How about Hunt the Wumpus???? LOL

jones57742

12-22-2007, 12:12 PM

Ch and Cl:

What yall have described "is nothiing"!!! :devil::headshake2::headbang2::grinyes::grinyes::g rinyes:

Yall have obviously never played "Star Trek" on a teletype running as remote terminal from a 6000's CDC series heavy iron.

I am indeed a dinosaur and if I am not here next year at Xmas yall please ressurect this thread for the benefit "of the young folks" on the Forum.

TR

jones57742

12-23-2007, 7:16 AM

Folks:

I just could not keep from resurrecting this thread for one last item.

A Little Background:

Systems decay to chaos in the "equilibrium branch" of thermodynamics.

Living systems are organized and hence the "non-equilibrium branch" of thermodynamics.

Circa 1972 a post doc and I were attempting to model the Zhabotinsky Reaction as a precursor to the modeling of lactic acid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov-Zhabotinsky_reaction

Topic:

The folks at the CDC heavy iron installation were "messing around with us" on charges for computer time and the computer time accounting system was termed Taurus.

You old dinosaurs know how this situation with Taurus was dealt with.

TR