Computing memories

[networkman]

I remember the Amiga 1000 well, TAandy, having owned several of them and their various cousins, the 500 and 2000. One of the nifty things about the 1000 was the names of the designers etched on the inside top cover - that was a nice touch.

I still remember a nifty trick under Workbench 1.2, where you could open a folder, then open another folder inside the first one, drag the first folder into the second one, and then close the second folder. POOF! They'd both disappear from the drive.. couldn't find any trace of them even with a disk editor.

Anybody remember what happens when you open a command shell in Windows 3.0, and then type chkdsk/f and hit enter? :Q Hehe.. that bug is fixed in 3.1.

 

[trevinom]

Originally posted by: networkman
I remember the Amiga 1000 well, TAandy, having owned several of them and their various cousins, the 500 and 2000. One of the nifty things about the 1000 was the names of the designers etched on the inside top cover - that was a nice touch. I still remember a nifty trick under Workbench 1.2, where you could open a folder, then open another folder inside the first one, drag the first folder into the second one, and then close the second folder. POOF! They'd both disappear from the drive.. couldn't find any trace of them even with a disk editor. Anybody remember what happens when you open a command shell in Windows 3.0, and then type chkdsk/f and hit enter? :Q Hehe.. that bug is fixed in 3.1.

Let me guess, it reformatted your harddrive?
I remember playing with Windows 1.0
Believe it or not, the monster existed

I have fond memories of DOS 5.0 which IMHO was the most stable DOS OS. I liked playing with batch files and used them to call WIN as the last command on my autoexec.bat so that I wouldn't have to type 'WIN' every time.

 

[Viztech]

I had an HVAC Calc II in the early 90's when I was in the Heating and Air Conditioning biz. It was a spread sheet that ran on a Sharp Pocket Computer.

It could run calculations in less than 5 minutes that would take 5 hours by hand.

I started in the PC world in '92 with an IBM clone with either an 8088 or an 8086, I don't recall which. The wife worked with it doing word processing.

In Feb. '95, we picked up a Packard Bell 486DX2-50 with a 420 hard drive, 2400 modem and 4 MB of RAM. I still remember the total price, $1400.14 with a 14" XGA monitor.

That fall, I picked up a Saber 486SX-25 with 8 MB of Ram. This became my toy. I swapped hardware in and out of that thing so much that I named it 'Crash' because of all of experiments that failed. (Wish I still had that thing. I learned SO MUCH with it.)

I had those 2 486s networked together using coax that we ran down the stairs. Shared files and printers while I tried to figure out how to share an Internet connection on a single modem!

Before I was through with these 2 486s, I had upgraded the Ram of course, the CPUs went to a DX4-100 in the Pack Bell and a DX2-66 in the Saber, several modem upgrades, hard drives, a second LPT port, CD Rom and sound card in addition to the network.

One day a friend called to say that his employer was closing down operations locally. I raced down to pick up several machines that were being sold. I made a deal and was to return the next day to pick it up and pay for it in cash. A tornado came through the area that afternoon. I had to drive through debris to get to the site which was now without power. He was more desparate to sell now. I bought all of his non-working machines and he took my check for the balance that I did not have in cash. As I recall, I bought 3 or 4 Pentium 90s and a older 486DX2-50 in the coolest Full AT case that I have ever seen. I fixed what I could and used the rest for parts.

I found AnandTech on the web and started building my own. That cool 486 case became a K6-2 266 that served me well for quite a spell.

Ahhh, memories!

 

[zodder]

This brings back memories. I first started on a Tandy 8088. I've forgotten the specs of it, but I sure remember playing Liesure Suit Larry, King's Quest and Indiana Jones on it. I knew right then and there that I was born to be a gamer. )

 

[kamper]

Wow, what a bunch of fogies!!! I think I remember programming on something as archaic as "gasp" JDK1.2



Ok, I do remember as far back as the original SimCity running on, I think, a 286. But I didn't really know anything about computers until I started university 3 years ago and found Anandtech a year later.

 

[HayHauler]

I started working with computers in 1983 at work with (2) IBM 370 mainframes. Yes, we had punch cards, and 22 "key punch operators"
We had a room full of disk drives, the size of clothes washers, 3350's I think. They had about 10 plates and we could swap them out if problems
developed. They had smoked plexiglass carrying cases for them. We printed reports on an IBM 1403 printer on 11 x 17 inch paper, 5 part with
carbons! hahaha, the days of decolating are not fond memories. We printed labels for our customers on Printronix dot matrix printers
connected to the mainframe. The labels would print all night long. If they jammed, you had to start back at the beginning....

In pc's we started with an NCR PC4 (4 mhz) all in one computer. The monitor(green screen), 5 1/4 floppy, HD and connectors were all inside
the monitor case. We got a 3 PPM laser printer and printed cut sheet vinyl labels! If you had a jam, the printer had that page in memory and
nothing was LOST ! ! What an accomplishment. TODAY, we use 6 Lexmark 24ppm printers connected to pc's to print approx. 70k pages
per week...

(DanC)
I also had (insert dramatic music here) - a Bernoulli box! Yes - a 20+20. Those - were (as I recall 8" floppies) 20 MB removable storage. WOW.

I still have one of these in production! It's a 100mb model, but still has it's own scsi card and big hard cased floppies.

My first pc at home was a Packard Bell Pentium 60, 10 mg HD, 2x CD rom, 16 mb ram, 14" color monitor, with the floating point
error on the proc. I never noticed any problems tho. Remember THAT??


Hay
:beer:
Thanks for the memories DanC.

 

[HayHauler]

Just thought I would hook y'all up with some links....

IBM 1403 Printer

Punch card Equipment

IBM 3350 disk drives
You can see some of the plexiglass carrying cases on top of the controllers in the background...

WOW, anyone remember THESE! ?

Enough for now...

Hay
Enjoy
:beer:

 

[DanC]

WOW, anyone remember THESE! ?

My wife just sold one at a garage sale we had last year for about $10. :Q It was her first computer.

 

[JWMiddleton]

Originally posted by: GeoffS
My first was a Radio Shack TRS80 Model 1 Level 2.... 16K or ram, b&w monitor, and a cassette player as the offline storage!

Me too! Mine cost $729.00, if I remember correctly. I bought an Exatron Stringy Floppy to replace the cassette. It was fast and could use more than one character for the file name.

My first modem was a Hayes 300 Baud Smartmodem for $279.00 + tax.

My first HD cost me $1,199 on a half-price sale. It was 5 MB and I partitioned it into 4 parts of 1.25 MB each. It broke after a year and I didn't bother to get it fixed.

I bet I had 4 diff DOSes for my TRS80. Can't remember the name of any of them except for TRSDOS.

 

[JWMiddleton]

Originally posted by: RaySun2Be
Ahhh, the memories.

How about the modem speeds? 300K, 1200K, 2400K. Lightening fast. Then got to work with a synchronous 9600K line, and that was mind boggling fast.

Ray, I would have loved to have had a 300k modem. Mine was .3k

 

[HayHauler]

At work we are compiling our own "Smithsonian".
So far we have a Hayes Smartmodem 2400 and a box of 5 1/4
floppies. Both in the shrink wrapped package they were bought in!

hahaha
Hay
:beer: