Old Computer Tech stuff

[torch]

As for the use of all-caps: meh, I assume you are old. I too remember the days when official documents were all-caps. It was seen as more dignified and reduced confusion. My first daisy wheel printer didn't even have lower case characters. These young pups who didn't learn to type until ASCII extended the available character set just don't appreciate the privations we experienced. Half of them can't spell, either.

 

[GreensvilleJay]

wow Daisy wheel printer..nice machines ! A GREAT upgrade from the Teletype ASR33s I used to repair.

 

[torch]

wow Daisy wheel printer..nice machines ! A GREAT upgrade from the Teletype ASR33s I used to repair.

Yeah, I was on the technological bleeding edge. I even had a 300 baud modem with which I could dial in to my favourite BBS's with my 16 bit computer. Way higher throughput than those paltry 110 baud TT terminals.

 

[GreensvilleJay]

heck I still have a couple original 4 bit Intel 4004s here, working !

 

[85Hokie]

heck I still have a couple original 4 bit Intel 4004s here, working !

The 8088 Micro processor was my first computer - dual floppy drive - no HD .....and it was smoking hot and smoking $$$$$$$$$$$$$

 

[GreensvilleJay]

you must remember VISICALC then !

 

[torch]

We should probably move this to the off-topic area and leave this thread for the OP's problems.

 

[TheOldHokie]

you must remember VISICALC then !

Heck I even remember the EC-132 Friedan calculator with CRT screen. along with our IBM 7090 and Larc mainframe computers.

Dan

 

[xrocketengineer]

Does a TI-99/4A with the expansion box count?

 

[ken erickson]

In 1984 I purchased a Tandy 1000 HX with two 3 1/2 inch floppy drives. No hard drive, no modem and a whopping 256k of RAM. No printer, no color monitor but a 9 inch monochrome monitor. I do not even remember it having a mouse! That darn thing cost me about $1100 at the time. I think a 20 meg hard drive was in the neighborhood of $300 to $400 if I remember correctly. Jeez. thats ONE picture from my Sony DSLR!

 

[GreensvilleJay]

My first microcomputer was a Tandy Model II, bit of $10K, 64KB ram, one ,8" floppy drive
. got a Tandy TX/hardcard for 'free' as payment when I successfully recovered all the files 'lost' on a companies new IBM system( had 20Meg HD ).Still have it and a couple Tandy Model IIIs. Have a Compac III somewhere in the basement. Still have a W98SE machine with DBASE III on it.
Sad thing is I now run Microchip micros that cost $1 and do more than any of the Z80 PCs or 8088 unit.
Silly thing is I have the chips to allow the Tandy Model III to run any IDE HD..somewhere....

 

[torch]

Thankyou mysterious moderator.

 

[North Idaho Wolfman]

I was lucky enough to have gotten to play, and I do mean play, with a IBM PC prototype that was in a brief case and a CRT monitor with no case at all just a tube and a box of parts to run it.

And the PC did not mean Personal Computer back then it meant portable computer.
It was really the true start of the Laptop computer.

It was the "hardware" from this computer

IBM 5100 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I played a star trek game ( or star trek inspired game) that was simply X's and an O, The X's being Romulan ships and one O being the enterprise.
It took about 15 min for each move in total, but boy was it exciting to watch the "ships" move around.

 

[North Idaho Wolfman]

Thankyou mysterious moderator.

 

[ctfjr]

In the mid 70's a friend of mine was president of E&L Instruments. They made training materials for digital electronics and sold the 'Bugbooks'. I learned Boolean logic on early ttl devices.
In 1976 I breadboarded my 1st computer, an Intel 8008. It had 256 bytes of memory. I soon interfaced a 4k S100 bus memory card to it and obtained a model 33ASR complete with paper tape punch/reader.
I was programming in binary machine language, one bit at a time with switches before I eventually got an assembler.
Ahhh, the good old days

 

[ve9aa]

ahhhh, memories ! (not all of them fond)

My first computer was an Atari 800xl with (I think) 128k of ram. Cassette tape drive.
About the same time I also had a Commodore 64 (never could afford a Tandy 1000 like the Kool kids) with
plug in modules. (remember those?) The mouse was the size of a Japanese sports car.

My first "real" (?) computer was a DEC Rainbow with dual processors by 2 different companies.
IIRC it had a Zilog Z80 and an Intel 8088 (or something very close to that)
No HDD, but had a biggie 5.25" floppy....I later piggy backed a 3.5" floppy into it somehow.
I laughed when a previous poster dialed into the local BBS. I thought I was hot sh!+ when I did that too....lol

My first Windows (3.0, not 3.1) computer was a Intel clone 486DXII with a Math Coprocessor. (important to point that out to make me feel all that much more proud about it.) I had a 120MB HDD and doublespaced it to get twice the storage (and in return it ran at least twice as slow for me). I bragged to all the guys at work around 1998 that I was gonna buy another Meg of Ram for it (it had 1MB) and it cost me $145+tax at the time...for another single MEG (not Gig)

Where did the time go, eh?

 

[PHPaul]

wow Daisy wheel printer..nice machines ! A GREAT upgrade from the Teletype ASR33s I used to repair.

Kids...

I spent a fair bit of my early Navy career repairing Model 28 Teletypes!

 

[ctfjr]

Now you really are waking up some dormant neurons!
Our radio club ran RTTY (radio teletype) and I'm pretty sure they used a model 28. iirc it wasn't ascii. baudot? Noisy little bugger.
My model 33asr was courtesy of Western Union. They rented space for a tty repair depot in my building. The guys refurbed and gave me one and a box of spare parts.

Later on we also had a DEC Rainbow. Put a 5mb drive in it and my sons used it to host a FidoNet Node, "The Hole in the Woods". I remember the big deal it was 1st going from a Hayes 300baud to 1200 then to an amazing 2400baud

 

[Deleted member 47704]

We had Wang word processors took 8 inch floppys. Saying you had an 8" Wang never worked as a pick up line.

 

[sagor]

My first computer was the Altair 8800 with a 2Mhz 8080 CPU in it and maybe 16k ram (don't recall). I got a few more from an estate sale, and they had the 8" hard sectored floppy disks with some Basic operating system.
I also had one of the original Shugart 5-1/4" floppies, very early serial number.
All gone now, sold the 8800a on Ebay many years ago for a huge gain. Sold the 8800b and 8800 Turnkey systems as well after upgrading some of them to CP/M with those 8" floppies....
Sigh.. those were the good old days....
I still have some of those 8" hard sectored floppy diskettes for nostalgia.