The We Will Miss You, Chohole Complaint Thread
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I can't get my Bluetooth earbuds to pair with my device!
Also where is the coffee to put in my mug? Where is the glass for my milk? Also where is my plate for the waffle? Oh also I need syrup! Am I forgetting anything?
Non-complaint: Wheee... been wallowing in ancient technology. Now that I have woken my two old XP machines, it seems a shame to let them continue to rot on the shelf. So, I started thinking how they could be integrated into my system.
I haven't got it all worked out yet, but I have performed some tests with what equpiment and cables I have on hand and the project looks do-able. I've Amazoned the necessary converters that I need (no cables needed, just converters for VGA to HDMI.
Remember a few months ago I had a SNAFU with an unobtanium KVM switch cable that I destroyed and tried to unsucessfully fix? Well, the solution at that time was to give up on trying to buy a new cable or even fix the existing cable, and just surrender and buy a whole new KVM switch kit with four new cables included. After stealing one of the cables, from the new kit I said that I now had a spare switch and three spare cables. So, in the fullness of time that spare switch has now found a use. Wheee...
The two old WinXP machines will be attached to the spare 4-port KVM switch and permit me to manage three devices (got a missing cable, remember?) That gives me the ability to share keyboard, mouse, and audio from the two XP machines and leaves a spare channel for my testbench needs.
In the process of setting this up and doing initial tests, I also took the time to straighen out the spaghetti mess of cables in that area, so now that area is also neatly tie-wrapped.
All that's left now is to await the delivery of my converters to get everything wired up.
At the moment, I am luxuriating in the mental image of the complexity of my system, more computers, more cables, more switches. Oh my! When finished I'll have 7 computers connected in my system and all able to be alive simultaneously. Wheee..., more ability to manage everything from my chair, by pushing buttons, Wheee..., more buttons with lights!
Do the streetlights dim when you power up your network?
Dana
complaint: haven't had this occur for a while but somehow I was signed out had to sign in again.
I hadn't noticed that, but it does seem coincidental that when I have a lot of my machines turned on, I hear the town's fire siren whine.
Seriously though, I am a little concerned about blowing the fuse (tripping the breaker) for my half of the house.
Although, back in 2008. when I first moved into here, I had three ancient-at-the-time big white towers and three big boob-tube monitors heating the room and the circuit didn't fry. Fortunately, these modern machines, by comparison, when idle, are sipping electrons through a cocktail straw instead of a showering from a hose. I haven't yet had my three modern flat monitors and seven computers all turned on at the same time. But they have been tested individually (by swapping currently available cables & adapters). I will, however, make sure that when I do test with everything active, that there is not half a ton of ice & snow having fallen from the roof onto the basement entrance doors, in case I have to reset the breaker. (Yes, there's an entrance ito the basement from the inside but it's in the neighbor's apartment.
)
I'm cold. I think it is because it is cold outside. It is also cold inside because I don't think the heater is on.
Hrmph..., In the process of further testing the oldest of my old XP systems (Dell Dimension 2350) I discovered that it does not boot when using USB keyboard & mouse. I must use PS2 mouse & keyboard. Further checking revealed a newer BIOS for that machine (BIOS version A02 instead of A01). I'm hoping that version A02 introduced USB mouse/keyboard support during boot.
OK, so simply download Dell's A02 BIOS for that machine and execute it. Right? Wrong! This software is so old that once downloaded and executed it wants to write its data to a floppy disk to boot from for installation.
Floppy disk!!! Yes, the machine has a floppy drive but I'm not sure it works and I'm not even sure I have any working floppies left in my boxes of everything.
Yay, way in the bottom of my storage box of miscellaneous blank media I found one box of new, unformatted floppies. Only four left in the box so I hope l they work.
Yay! I've sucessfully formatted a floppy but it took me several tries, I'd forgotten the limits of floppy drive labels. Oy!
Yay! Upon rebooting it booted from the floppy and has started installing the new BIOS.
Wheee... Rebooted OK using new BIOS and USB keyboard/mouse.
Wheee..., all is OK again. Happy, happy, joy, joy!
However, I still need to get a VGA(m)-->HDMI(f) adapter to use it with my KVM switch, and it has no #2032 button battery so it keeps forgetting my personalized BIOS settings.
But those items have all been Amazoned.
I remember vaguely of Zip drives, but I don't know what they are anymore. I know they are extinct.
I had one years ago, but it's gone. It was a SCSI version, and I haven't had a SCSI board for quite some time. I still have some blank Zip disks, though.
Dana
yep, 100MB Iomega Zip drives - had the SCSI and Parallel (SCSI with an integrated Parallel-to-SCSI controller, thus no need for termination) versions.. And the dread "click of death" of failed media.. went to DAT as a backup medium and never looked back
isnt it true that some downloads here are bigger than 100 MB?
well. considering that the ZIP drive was a 1994 item.. its not really applicable.. They were, howverer, a better alternative than 1.44MB 3.5" floppies for sneaker-net transfers..
...back in the 80s a friend's father bought a brand new, and for the day, "powerful" computer. He got it all set up and running then called my friend over to show him something that was supposedly a really neat feature. However before launching the programme or whatever process it was, he said the two fatal words "watch this" and after pressing the left mouse button the entire neighbourhood blacked out. My friend replied "That was cool dad, can you do it again?"
Definitely an amusing coincidence.
...yeah, we used ZipDrives at the old development firm I worked for back in the 90s. We also had a tabletop tape drive that handled the same size reels as the big refrigerator sized units used.
heh -- back in the datacentre early days EVERYTHING was refrigerator sized (or bigger).. Cut my tape teeth on the big iron..
I never worked with one, but in the late '60s I worked with older people at the college computer lab who told stories of having to wire patch panels to do programming and I/O formatting.
But earlier than that, in 1965 or '66 I saw my first real computer. I was a still senior in high school but the computer was at Syracuse University where I had been sent for a few days to attend a series of special science lectures. I have no idea what kind of computer it was, but it was large, noisy, cold, and used papertape to load a program that would play poker via a teletype. Until then I had no interest in computers. Something about that demo by a college student on a University computing system to just play a simple game of poker piqued my interest.
Another demonstration at one of the lectures at Syracuse that week was Dr. Henry Eyring demonstrating, among other concepts, the chemical reaction that is the basis of "Glow-Sticks", long before Glow-Sticks were a thing. He didn't have just a little stick of fluid, he had a big fishbowl of it and when he dumped in the activator it gave off a lot of greenish light in the darkened auditorium. Cool!
Yep - patch panels on IBM Unit Record Equipment - still in use in some places in the mid 70's - I only worked in the URE room for a short time. Most patch panels were labeld byzone as to what sockets did what, but there were generic blank pane's for custom jobs (note that all URE equpment was for dealing with punch cards ) You could read in a stack of cardsm and depending on how you set the patch panles up, have the machinbe spit out a set of new crads with the derived data on them. The fellow who was the URE supervisor was Henry Williams, but everyone called him "Tiny" He could wire up a custom panel just by having the "boys from upstairs" tell him what they needed as output... Yeah.. he'd been doing it for a long time.
now as for tape - Worked in the tape pit for quite a while. Pic is mine from our datacentre in the mid-70's. If I remeber correctly that's my mate Andre..
The IBM drives had vacuum collumns to help magae the flow tension of the tape as it was read or written. That wa there was no stress on the actual tape. The tapes were 2400 feet long and were held on the master eeel by friction. about 15 feet from the end of tape was a reflective metal tape strip called the "End-of-Tape reflector" This worked with a light and photocell arrangemnt to signal the drive mechanism that it was time to stop.
So one day - the comapny photograpers are in the datacentre taking some pics for some odd reason. They started to set up lights , but thej got the idea that they could get better pics with... wait for it ... reflectors and strobe flashes - despite we tape apes giving them dire warnings ... the shift manager ok;ed it and when that took the first pic -- yep - every single drive that was being used was overloaded by the flash and took it to mean (it was a short bright light, of course) that the EOT marker had been reached and they all stopped and went into rewind. Lots of crashed progarms, and in one or two semi real time systmes that stopped as they couldn't write to their log tapes... not so much hilarity at that, and a rather nasy lttile bit of work to get back on track. Crashed jobs were usually easy as there were always a good set of rerun instructions, but the tape logging was a while to get fixed..
and paper tape? Still have some in my memorabilai box..
and the first system I was allowed to operate at work was an IBM 360/40.. much like this one..
...never worked on a patch panel computer but dud use patch bay synthesizers (Moog 55 and Arp 2600). Still have a bunch of patch diagram and settings sheets in a box somewhere.
One of my more interesting projects was working with an octave divided into 16 instead of 12 notes for realising music of a culture for an old sci-fi story I was working on.
That image with all the wires is scary xD All the inputs and outputs and cords going everywhere haha
Much respect to the people that can actually handle things like that. It's fifty wires too many for me~
if its wring you want - here;s a pic of an IBM mainframe installatiion.
Back in the stone age of computers (1970s) a lot of computers used wirewrap boards, no soldering of chips onto the motherboard, just bazillions of chip sockets with long straight pins that went through and were soldered onto the board and the long pins stuck out on the other side like a stiff, sparse, wire brush. Then bazillions times 10 wires were attached to the pins by using a "wirewrap tool" to twist the bare ends of the wire onto the pins. There was even a special "unwirewrap tool" to remove connections. My computers at the Space Center during the '70s had wirewrap boards and once in a while the manufacturer would send out instructions to change the wiring to accomodate issues they'd discovered. I did enough wirewrapping to remember it well.
Sometimes corrections came that instructed you to remove the chip, turn it upside down, glue it to the socket with its legs sticking in the air, and solder or wirewrap directly onto the chip's pins on top of the board. Sometimes new boards from the manufacturer would even come with a few of those upsidedown chips.
You guys's old-time computer stories and pics are fascinating, thanks for sharing!
Ever heard about the IBM "NoodlePicker"?
No? Is it like a nose picker?
Wikipedia thankfully has and shared her insight with me, but from the pics and descriptions there, it's kinda hard to imagine people actually worked with this! Before this thread, I always imagined myself as something like an oldtimer myself, in this day and age, having fiddled merrily and utterly cluelessly with a 385 and blown out the fuse box in my mother's house with it. After reading your posts, I feel like the complete newb.
I think Leather Gryphon is talking about the IBM 2321 data cell drive
Yes, that's what Wiki showed me, thanks! Just saying, it's weird to imagine people actually working with what are essentially otherworldly museum pieces today ...
Edit: Ugh, this sounded rude somehow ... Don't mean it to, I'm sincerely fascinated by otherworldly and museum! (slinks humbly back to silent mode)
Yep - IBM 2321 - one of the S/360 storage modules.. we had one or two.. It was always something to see the IBM rep come in to "check the oil" and top it up if needed.. Basically it was a tape media on a drum. Wirewrap, been there.. Pathcing a system in the old days was sometimes really that a wirewrap mod..
Here's another thing - card sorters - Vacuum tube logic.
Card Sorter:
Card sorter control circuit:
and ferrite core memory - iron ferit cores with a 4 wire matrix - X, Y, Sense, and Inhibit. Ori8ginally the Sense wire is used for a read, and the Inhibit wire is used only for a write, but later on those functions were combined on a simgle wire, handled by a separate controller. The X and Y wires are used for locating a specific core ring.
Nope not allowed to go back to silent mode ,if you try it'll set McGyver off .......
Anybody else pondering the notion of how Daz Studio would run on these systems?