end of an era

[rekees4300]

Didn't those 360s use hydraulic actuators for the disc drives? Seals would go bad and there would be oil all over the inside of them. ISTR seeing the IBM techs in their white shirt, tie & dark suits having to work on those beasts. I felt bad for them. At the time (mid 70s) I did tech support for a company that made typesetting equipment, but at least we were allowed to dress a bit more casually.

Our equipment at the time used drum storage...big as a washing machine with a whopping 8meg storage capacity!! I think the PDP 8's we used maxed out at 32k core...no bloatware in those days!!

Actually they used hamsters on a treadmill. Drum storage was short lived, quickly replaced by platters. Recall in the 70's went on a business trip that required transport of the platters. Walking through airport everybody would stare because nobody had a clue what I was carrying.

 

[dave1949]

I worked on platter drives. Head crashes and alignments, air filters, spindle drive motors and a bunch printed circuit cards. My main site had 24 drives and about 40 disc packs. Sometimes the poor operators would get into this protracted round robin game with the system scheduler mounting and unmounting packs. :laughing:

It's odd to think that a terabyte of storage would be easy in the space that just one R/W head took up, let alone the platter itself. And there was probably enough copper and steel in one drive's servo to make several hundred modern desktops.

 

[Soundguy]

.. and the average phone today is (way) more powerfull than what got us to the moon..

 

[PhysAssist]

I am reading that thread and the Xray of your leg is helping me loose weight. :laughing::laughing::laughing: Not real hungry after seeing all of the metal in your leg! :shocked:

I have an IBM 5150 PC 1 at home in the closet and I would bet it would work if I powered it up. A few years ago, these are the same years used to count FarmGirls age, I knew a guy who had a 5150 PC 1 on his desk that was serial number 5. Yeppers, the fifth PC IBM built. He wrote much of IBM DOS in assembler and used that machine for years after it was obsolete. Eventually he got a PS/2 Mod 70 but that 5150 PC was still in his office and in use. Now, PC in this case is Personal Computer. IBM had a 5100 PC where PC stood for Portable Computer. That PC weighed over 50 pounds but it did include a B&W monitor and tape drive! :laughing::laughing::laughing:

The S100 systems were kinda on the way out when I bought my first micro computer, aka, an Apple II+.

Later,
Dan

Hi Dan, et al,

Sorry 'bout the graphic nature of my post.... But glad it's helping you!

And I thought I was bad having kept my old HP running Win 98 SP2 until I couldn't fix or repair it any longer (last year).


Thomas

 

[Soundguy]

i have a pc running win 95 and it is? a k5 or k6 chip.. 150 mhz, and has some sort of seagate 850??meg hdd, partitoned into 2 425meg drives.

use it on a dedicated AV cart at my wifes school to run scrolling banner adds on a vga to tv converter..

 

[aczlan]

i have a pc running win 95 and it is? a k5 or k6 chip.. 150 mhz, and has some sort of seagate 850??meg hdd, partitoned into 2 425meg drives.
use it on a dedicated AV cart at my wifes school to run scrolling banner adds on a vga to tv converter..

Presumably, its not connected to any networks...

Aaron Z

 

[Soundguy]

nope/ standalone system.

might have a modem in it.. but no network card.

even if it had a NIC .. i don't know if you could get them to talk..

 

[aczlan]

nope/ standalone system.
might have a modem in it.. but no network card.
even if it had a NIC .. i don't know if you could get them to talk..

As long as the school was still running IPV4, Win 95 should be able to talk via a wired network. Wireless could get dicy, given the problems I see with WPA2 in XP, I am not sure anyone backported it to 95.

Aaron Z

 

[Soundguy]

As long as the school was still running IPV4, Win 95 should be able to talk via a wired network. Wireless could get dicy, given the problems I see with WPA2 in XP, I am not sure anyone backported it to 95.

Aaron Z

i remember a long while back having a home network running 802.11b or something to that effect. had 1 switch, a WAP and the 1 local pc, and then one across the house with a lil linksys dongle. man that was a PITA to get working.

now G and N router.. et al .. etc. easy.


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

 

[Soundguy]

of course.. i guess better than token roing / ibm.



I rememebr old days of pc gaming. and no 10base T network. was all bnc cable with terminator resistors and T's. someone would unplug to leave and hose the game. then we got smart and made up a long cable with pre installed T's and just had people connect them up to their bnc on their NIC.

back then it was all plug and pray and irc and dma setting.

then loading net bios and ip config.. etc. oh the joy.....

 

[ultrarunner]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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:

 

[Soundguy]

yep.. seen plenty of legacy port errors like that.