end of an era

ultrarunner · Sep 29, 2013

My Apple // is still up and running with the qume LQP daisy wheel printer... Never crashed and I'm never tossing it because it cost me a small fortune at a time I had almost no money to speak of.

My Window 98 is also up and use it occasionally on the net... have some old files and pictures archived.

At work, most everything I do is on Windows 2000 for building automation...

Yamaha2112 · Sep 29, 2013

I wish Atari stayed in the game. Their "ST" computers vastly outperformed nearly every computer on the planet at the time. I can only imagine what computers would be like now if the they kept going.

WM75Guy · Sep 29, 2013

For the majority of our workstations now we use mini-PCs that mount on the back of the monitor. No disk drive of any sort. As IT loads all software off of the network there is no need for one. With most consumer software downloaded instead of installed from disk and file transfer by flash drives the DVD drives will disappear. The last couple of programs and hardware that I bought the disk that came with them just connects to the Internet and downloads the installation software.

cqaigy2 · Sep 29, 2013

Soundguy said:
of couse now that brings back memories of arcnet and some thomas conrad cards.. and dip switcha nd jumpers...

Ok you can stop right there!

But remember when the dip switches were lose and they would change all by them selves?

Soundguy · Sep 30, 2013

cqaigy2 said:
Ok you can stop right there! But remember when the dip switches were lose and they would change all by them selves?

i've seen both loose dip switches and jumpers.

can remember using fingernail polish to hold dip switches in place. and tweaking jumpers to make contact.

i have also soldered in socketed chips to prevent loose conenctions,a nd done the reverse.. removed soldered chips and added sockets.

i remember back when 8250 ( or 16450 even ) UARTS were the norm.. and thent he 16550AFN came out.. adn you had superior buffering for multitasking and serial operations that required a WORKING FIFO

we had some old baords with soldered on 8250's I dyked them off and soldered in DIP sockets, to pop in the 16550AFN's

ahh.. the days.

Soundguy · Sep 30, 2013

Yamaha2112 said:
I wish Atari stayed in the game. Their "ST" computers vastly outperformed nearly every computer on the planet at the time. I can only imagine what computers would be like now if the they kept going.

remember the amiga? good video toaster...

Soundguy · Sep 30, 2013

repowell said:
For the majority of our workstations now we use mini-PCs that mount on the back of the monitor. No disk drive of any sort. As IT loads all software off of the network there is no need for one. With most consumer software downloaded instead of installed from disk and file transfer by flash drives the DVD drives will disappear. The last couple of programs and hardware that I bought the disk that came with them just connects to the Internet and downloads the installation software.

aMAZINg TO LOOK AT THE HARDWARE COMING AND GOING.

(argh.. caps )

floppies are gone. even the zips and other hi capacity drives are gone. most optical drives are at LEAST dcdr if not dvr.. hard to find a cd only.. or dvd only drive now.

I believ ethe dvd will still be around for a while due to data size it can store however. and yeah.. last printer i installed.. had a dvd that merely conencted you to the internet to get a driver.

usb drives,and to some extent. SD cards will make it for quite a while... cloud and personal cloud storage i see as the next big thing... that one will go mainstream when universal wifi is here.

dodge man · Oct 2, 2013

I actually had a basic computer language class in the late 1970's when I was in high school. That's was pretty cutting edge for our high school at that time and it was all punch cards. We actually wired up a series of switchs, relays and light bulbs and could add about 5 places of binary with the lights and switches. That kind of taught us the basics of how a computer actually works.

In college I was one of the last classes who's computer class was with punch cards. The language was PL1 which was suppose to be the new up and coming language, it was suppose to be a cross between Fortran and Basic. That would have been the early 80's.

Back to the original post. I am a land surveyor and some of our survey equipment still works best through a serial port. They make cables that hook up to a USB port and have a serial end on it but they don't always work that great. Our equipment maker just said add a serial port to your computer. $9.99 was the cost to add a serial port to my PC at work.

I feel kind of lucky, I'm 51 and I've been able to witness the coming of the computer. I never used a slide rule in school but I just missed that era, and calculators were just becoming common place when I was in high school. I've also seen what the electronic age has done to the world of land surveying. One of the biggest complaints among some land surveyors is the era of the "button pushers". The common sense is leaving some people and the important values in land surveying are going away. Pushing a button on a GPS system doesn't tell you where a property corner goes, applying legal principals and common sense tells you.

This is a great post and its weird how people get all nostalgic over stuff that is really pretty recent in the terms of history.

MossRoad · Oct 2, 2013

I just got to use a serial port and a terminal program yesterday on a piece of equipment here. My newer W7 laptop doesn't have a serial port. They bought me a serial USB device. It starts on COMM6! My terminal program ends at COMM4. Splendid. I pulled out my older XP laptop with a built-in serial port and that was a thing of beauty. The kids had no idea how to set up a terminal program, baud rate, 8-none-and 1, etc... their eyes were glazed over.:drool: