Very OT -- The end of an era
namffuak
Posts: 4,185
Spring cleaning is kicking in, now that I can see dirt and not snow outside the window.First on the list, my overflowing bookshelves.
So - with a bit of reluctance - I am scrapping the manuals for Qmodem Pro, Qmodem Pro for Windows, Telix, and Off-Line Express. I don't think I've actually dialed up a computer BBS this century and it looks like Qmodem is officially 'abandonware'.
Sigh.
The good old days - 300 baud Hayes Smartmodems overclocked to 450 baud, the brand new 1.2 MB quad-density 5.25 inch floppy drives, and five local multi-node BBS systems - three carrying ILink conferences, one Fido-net, and one carrying the RIME conferences. And with all the functionality and capabilities of the web, I miss the ease of use and simplicity of OLX - I'd love to be able to fire up one app and have it collect all the new posts from all the forums on all the web sites I tend to visit.
Hmm. Interesting. Looks like I tossed the Wildcat! version 4.5 BBS manual some time ago (I ran a 1-line BBS myself for a couple of years).
Now what else have I got that I don't need anymore . . .:coolsmile:
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Comments
Wow...now there is some nostalgia...
Wow...now there is some nostalgia...
Yeah - first home system was in 1982. If I had a dime for every dollar of computer gear I've bought in the last 30+ years for home use, I'd have a heckuva lotta dimes. :roll: I think I'm over the addiction - with the exception of a couple of 1 TB USB drives for backup I haven't bought computer gear in over 5 years now. Of course, back when I ran the BBS I purchased two 1.2 GB drives - IIRC, one was $800 and the other, a few months later, was $600. The 1 TB drives ran me $89 each . . .
A whole lotta dimes.
Now, of course, I blow the budget here. :-S
...OK, I suddenly now feel so much older. Where's My SSI cheque? My Geritol? My subroutines?
Oh my. BBS days, 300 baud days, all the different types of BBS's. I coded for 3 I think, only remember CBase as I did many games for it. Yep we is old folks...
And the very first thing I did after getting the system home and connected up was program the sample terminal emulator from the IBM Async comm package. On the first weekend I tied into the Capitol One BBS in Washington DC and found PC-Talk - my comm program of choice until I ran into Qmodem several years later.
And the other free time went into playing Colossal Cave . . . We had it on the Honeywell I was supposed to be administrating at work, and the Financial systems analyst and one of the inventory control programmers and I were playing the bloody thing during lunch hours.
About six months later I got access to a review copy of a Fortran compiler and coded up a couple of routines from the IBM Scientific Subroutine package source. And I found out that the original IBM PC, without a numeric co-processor was 20% faster than an IBM 360 model 40 (the timings in the book were from the mod 40). Bliss!
And it's been downhill ever since. :)
You guys think this is ancient history? My first computer manager used to keep us entertained with tales of programming late 1950s mainframes with 4KB (yes, 4 kilobytes) of main memory.
I seriously wouldn't throw it away, pack it away and store it osmewhere yes. But one day it might actually be some collector that want to buy or something :)
My cousin had a VAX 11/751 in his garage. (Now, there was a geek for you!)
He only fired it up once -- it ran for fifteen minutes, then browned-out the entire neighborhood!
Ah, yes..., good times!
Just remember the rule: The things that become valuable in the long term are the things that everyone throws away. Pre-1970's comics and bubblegum cards? Out with the rubbish when the kids moved out and now worth gazillions. Post 1980's comics and bubblegum cards? Zillions of them in plastic bags and the "investors" are lucky if they're even worth their cover price. That said, unless the manual is for a particularly important item, it's most likely only going to have value for someone who used to own that system or an uber-die hard collector, and for the latter it usually has to be in pristine condition.
Ha! I learned to operate a computer on an IBM 360-20. I got the gig 'cause they needed young guys to lift the heavy boxes of punchcards. PUNCHCARDS!
I met my husband at the key punch machine. He saw me there and sat down at the machine next to me and pretended to need to punch some cards so he could talk to me. That was 1975. My first home computer was a Commodore PET with 8 KB memory. I loved that machine!
Ha! I learned to operate a computer on an IBM 360-20. I got the gig 'cause they needed young guys to lift the heavy boxes of punchcards. PUNCHCARDS!
Ah, yes - the ever popular IBM 5081 tab card. My first job was on a 360/30 running DOS, with the 1440 compatibility feature. 32 KB memory, three 2311 disk pack drives, with 7.25 megabytes per pack, and one was permanently mounted because it had the OS on it. Also a 1000 card per minute card reader, a 600 card per minute punch, and a 600 line per minute printer. The department head was enthralled with the 1440 feature - it gave him a 16 KB 1440; the original they replaced was only 12 KB.
I remember the one day we got a new shipment of cards in and I spent the afternoon shuffling the cases around so the new stock was buried against the wall and the old stock was easily accessible. I moved just under 1.2 tons of cards over the course of two days. Only had to move them an average of 6 feet, but still. . . Crap, I don't think I could lift a case of cards anymore (5 boxes to the case, 2000 cards to the box). We went through about two cases a day back then.
I cut my commercial programming teeth there - converting 1440 autocoder to 360/D PL/1.
**********
...sweet.
Now that's really a stone age computer.
Never underestimate the technology of the Goa'uld ;-)
Still too modern - it's got 3.5" drives ;-)... should be 8" at least!
Remember DAZ3D....I still have an old WD mybook full of the original Genesis and Victoria 4 clothes and 3D characters...has one of those old usb connectors
- OT forum post in 2032
:)
...hmmm, I knew Bryce has been around for a while, however...
The keyboard must have been be gigantic though to contain all the glyphs needed. ;-)
Probably too late now, but if not, you really should ebay that stuff.
Still too modern - it's got 3.5" drives ;-)... should be 8" at least!
I have a system that boots off of 8" floppies. They are very floppy. :lol: It has 32K RAM and no HDD. It has no graphics, just a dumb terminal on RS232. It can play Adventure, AKA, Colossal Cave, AKA Advent. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike..." Needless to say, this is not my daily driver! I also have a monstrosity from IBM that may well be the heaviest PC IBM ever built. It's a 3270 AT/GX. The monitor alone weighs 70 lbs.
I believe I still have a (small) board from an ICL 1900 series mainframe lurking somewhere.
I have a system that boots off of 8" floppies. They are very floppy. :lol: It has 32K RAM and no HDD. It has no graphics, just a dumb terminal on RS232. It can play Adventure, AKA, Colossal Cave, AKA Advent. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike..." Needless to say, this is not my daily driver! I also have a monstrosity from IBM that may well be the heaviest PC IBM ever built. It's a 3270 AT/GX. The monitor alone weighs 70 lbs.
...must be some really big magnets in that monitor. I still have an old NEC Multi Sync from my Pentium machine. Not quite 70# but still heavy enough.
I kept the red and green buttons from my first 370/158 for about 15 years, then decided that while that job was my first, and got me started on a great career, it was not my best and therefore anything from it was bad karma that should not be kept for two decades. A good decision. :)
I have a system that boots off of 8" floppies. They are very floppy. :lol: It has 32K RAM and no HDD. It has no graphics, just a dumb terminal on RS232. It can play Adventure, AKA, Colossal Cave, AKA Advent. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike..." Needless to say, this is not my daily driver! I also have a monstrosity from IBM that may well be the heaviest PC IBM ever built. It's a 3270 AT/GX. The monitor alone weighs 70 lbs.
...must be some really big magnets in that monitor. I still have an old NEC Multi Sync from my Pentium machine. Not quite 70# but still heavy enough.
It's a 20" CRT made well before those were common (1986-1987). It has lots of shielding around it inside the case, making it heavier. It even has a warning label about the weight! It used individual twin-ax RGB-Sync cables that connected to a separate computer case that contained what we now call a GPU. The base unit is an AT, but with a special IBM mobo, and a special card that connected to the "GPU" box. The base unit has two 5.25" hard drives, each of which outweighs current laptops. It has a coprocessor card with a National NS 32016 cpu that boots true SYS5 Unix (SYS5.3). Truly a Brontosaurus among dinosaurs. On the bright side, at the Vintage Computer Festival in 2000, it won best of show, best in class, and best presentation (completeness). That's what you call a Trifecta! :-)
I used to have (and may still have) a quad-input AND gate from a Burroughs head-per-track disk system. 1.5 inches by 1.5 inches by about 2.5 inches - three layer perf board (not etched circuit board, 3 discrete layers) six transistors and all the resistors and capacitors in a pluggable 3-D stack. Disk drive itself was ginormous - 4 feet tall, 4 feet deep, and 20 feet long; 5 cabinets, one of logic and four with disks - four disks each, mounted vertically, 42 inch diameter and 3/4 inch thick. It held a whopping 100 MB. Each disk cabinet had a 3 horsepower electric motor to drive the disks.
I also have (somewhere) a sheet of read-only memory from a 360/30 - plastic, the size of a tab card, with 12 72-bit instruction words punched on it. I have a disk HBA from an IBM 3380 in the basement - dual actuators (two logical drives in each physical 3380 module) with 4 inch diameter voice coils to drive them.
On a more truly personal note, I still have the two original IBM single-side full-height single-density 5.25 inch floppy drives from that first PC. $540 dollars each, back then. (IIRC, I took out a 3 year loan to buy it - it priced out a very near $6,000 including software and printer).
...still remember the DEC "Maytags" (DEC RP-06).
Actually it was the old Chinese who invented (or rather discovered) the binary system used in modern computers. The several thousand year old TAOist "bible" I Ching is built on a system of 64 hexagrams which technically is 100% identical to a 64 bit data sequence (see picture). It is said that Leibniz actually got the idea for the binary system from the I Ching.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/ancient-book-wisdom-i-ching-computer-binary-code
http://www.astronlp.com/DNAI_CHING.html
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At one job, I gave my parents the grand tour of our raised floor computer room. My mother was impressed by the 3380 when I opened the cabinet. The platters were belt driven!
My father was impressed by the 950 horsepower V10 diesel backup generator and both were impressed by the backup battery room with racks and racks of clear plastic lead-acid batteries at the ready!