Yoper

[RayH]

Age will tell.

My first computer (after the slide rule, of course) was an airborn, mechanical, navigation computer. Think about the games they use to teach kids multiplication. X on one side, Y on the adjacent one, and where they intersect is the answer (X * Y). Now add a rack and pinion and an axis arm with potenteometers to measure angles and such. What a blessing!! Until, that is, you lost heat and the gear grease would freeze up. Or you lost cooling and all the vacuum tubes fried.

Ah, yes. the good ole days. Memory?? We don't need no steenking memory.

[RayH]

Originally Posted by Joe Scharle

I put one behind a 1440 in Thule Greenland in prep of Apollo 13. (196

Joe,

A fantastic place to visit, but I'd hate to live there. I spent a lifetime at Thule in '75-'76. Plan to vist Gothab in September.

[Gotcha6]

All I ever got in school was a slide rule.
Started with the TRS80 Model I, then 4/4p, then model 16 with a whopping 5 meg hard drive big as a turntable. Didn't have all the fancy mouse/graphics options. Seemed to get by......... The half life on those boxes was pretty short.

[McRabbet]

Originally Posted by dick541

I started with a comodore 64 way back when, I made a box for it. Anybody want it?
dick

Dick, I still have my original C-64 in the box (with a 1541 drive), plus a Commodore B-128 (with an external IEEE-488 bus dual disk drive, it is their CP/M business machine that came out just before the first IBM PC/XT and only sold well in Europe) and a C-128 with disk drives that followed the C-64 but was before the Amiga. I'm holding on to them for no good reason other than nostalgia and potential flea-bay sale some day.

[Bas]

Originally Posted by jeff...

How about that LANtastic with RG58 cable, tee connectors and BNC ends with with that funky green terminating resistor.

I still have some of those cables! I may have thrown out my network cards that had the dual BNC/ 10BaseT connectors though. And LANtastic was great, especially for the time. It was sooo easy to set up. Used an old 286 as a print server, so we could use our fancy 386 machines for programming.

The height of sophistication was to have two video cards, one VGA and one Hercules card (monochrome). I ran Windows 3.1 on the color monitor/ VGA, with a DOS prompt on the monochrome monitor/ Hercules. Inside the DOS prompt - Norton Commander! Still the best file management program ever.

[jeff...]

Raise your hand if you ever had the honor of booting off tape to install Unix on a RISC system that only had one floppy drive. And the floppy drive didn't have a eject button - now we are talking fun... you know of course - all the right makedev files are on the floppies. I recall my first time just me the computer a stack of tapes and several floppies all alone in a office - You know that poor little computer had a few size 10 boot marks on it by the time I was done, have no idea how they got there

We have got it easy today - stick a DVD in and it starts playing...

[Bas]

Originally Posted by jeff...

Raise your hand if you ever had the honor of booting off tape to install Unix on a RISC system that only had one floppy drive.

Ugh. Always happens in the summer too, when it's 90+ degrees with no A/C. Things are definitely easier today. I remember trying to get OS/2 1.1 to work with my cheap Soundblaster clone. I can't count the number of times I had to boot off the two floppy's so I could run TEDIT to rebuild the config.sys file to get the machine to boot. Still easier than building a UNIX system from scratch, too many manual steps....

[sapwood]

Originally Posted by jeff...

Raise your hand if you ever had the honor of booting off tape to install Unix on a RISC system that only had one floppy drive. And the floppy drive didn't have a eject button - now we are talking fun... you know of course - all the right makedev files are on the floppies. I recall my first time just me the computer a stack of tapes and several floppies all alone in a office - You know that poor little computer had a few size 10 boot marks on it by the time I was done, have no idea how they got there

We have got it easy today - stick a DVD in and it starts playing...

Ok, hand half raised
Booted from paper tape for 70s typesetting equipment and produced 1000s of tapes for job storage. Of course, the roof leaked one nite and we had them spread them all over the place drying, taping, and splicing. We used to hole punch (aptly name the "chicken plucker") to edit and splice in text and commands. Nawh, I don't miss that!

1986 Mac Plus still stashed around here somewhere, ~$2500 new and I paid $250 for external 20 Megabyte hard drive

Roger

[jeff...]

root@yos ~ # uptime
6:56pm up 3 days 21:59, 3 users, load average: 1.92, 1.44, 1.16
root@yos ~ #

still ticking