Head Guru Posted September 11, 2007 Share Posted September 11, 2007 I thought this would bring back some memories for any of the old time computer geeks here at TCH. This video was distributed to Microsoft dealers and was never intended for end users. It is pretty amusing however. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Bruce Posted September 11, 2007 Share Posted September 11, 2007 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Don Posted September 11, 2007 Share Posted September 11, 2007 Funny Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Andy Posted September 11, 2007 Share Posted September 11, 2007 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Prel Posted September 11, 2007 Share Posted September 11, 2007 (edited) Edited September 11, 2007 by paulo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bunni Posted September 11, 2007 Share Posted September 11, 2007 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phatfunkjazz Posted September 12, 2007 Share Posted September 12, 2007 I thought this would bring back some memories for any of the old time computer geeks here at TCH. This video was distributed to Microsoft dealers and was never intended for end users. It is pretty amusing however. Ha ha...I love it. It was actually kind of cool, those early days when home-users had to program their own PC's, in DOS mode, with BASIC. I think that the average home-user today takes computers for granted (I know I do), never realizing (as well they shouldn't) just how fragile the boot sequence is and what a miracle that computers work the way they do. Thank you to all the geeks who invented and developed these damn things. I remember my programmer friend at Microsoft told me (back in 1993) that "good code is like poetry and that it is beautiful to read". Wow! Stefan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Bruce Posted September 12, 2007 Share Posted September 12, 2007 I see the gadget website Gizmodo reads our forums. Or else someone tipped them off after Bill posted this. Notice the time stamp of their post opposed to this thread's start. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jayson Posted September 12, 2007 Share Posted September 12, 2007 I liked that they used a 5 1/4 floppy, I have one in my basement, hmmmmm, can I get software that comes on a 5 1/4 floppy and run on my machine.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-James Posted September 12, 2007 Share Posted September 12, 2007 I see the gadget website Gizmodo reads our forums. Or else someone tipped them off after Bill posted this. Notice the time stamp of their post opposed to this thread's start. Is also made it Slashdot's front page a day later. Ahead of the time, TotalChoice is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmanmcp Posted September 12, 2007 Share Posted September 12, 2007 I liked that they used a 5 1/4 floppy, I have one in my basement, hmmmmm, can I get software that comes on a 5 1/4 floppy and run on my machine.... I have in my hand a Fantasy Role Playing game called "The Bard's Tale" by Electronic Arts on 5 1/4" floppy disks. The copyright is 1987 and it runs on DOS 2.0 or greater, CGA/EGA. I used to love that game...maybe I'll bring out the old IBM XT and play it again. I know a couple years ago the wife had me clean out the back room and targeted one of my box's of old software that was all 5 1/4" floppy's for the trash...<shhhh>I believe I sneaked out of the house late that night and put them back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmanmcp Posted September 12, 2007 Share Posted September 12, 2007 Look what I found. The original IBM 5150 with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives. You booted from the floppy A drive and the data was or programs were loaded or written on the floppy B...those were the days. I had to cheat a little and show the more advanced model of monitor, CGA color, I believe the old green or amber mono monitor went to the recycler. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Bruce Posted September 12, 2007 Share Posted September 12, 2007 Bob, your giving away your age! I remember those too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bob Crabb Posted September 12, 2007 Share Posted September 12, 2007 (edited) LOLOLOL -- In my basement, I still have an ITT XTRA pc clone that I bought in 1984. When I bought it, the machine had dual 360KB 5.25" floppy drives and a whopping 256k memory. I upgraded it later to have more memory and a huge (I had no idea why anyone would need this much storage) 20MB hard drive. The funny thing is, a couple of years ago, I was looking for something that I had written many years ago, and couldn't find it. I remembered that I originally wrote it on that pc. I went down to the basement, hooked it up, and the thing still worked!!! Then I had to hope that the old AT compatible machine on the shelf next to it also worked because it had both a 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drive. I have an assortment of old hardware down there, including an old Centronics 500 series dot matrix printer. Maybe I should open a museum. Edited September 12, 2007 by Bob Crabb Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Don Posted September 13, 2007 Share Posted September 13, 2007 I know I have an old 8 inch floppy disk some where. Remember programing with toggle switches and lights My how times have changed Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeJ Posted September 13, 2007 Share Posted September 13, 2007 Look what I found. The original IBM 5150 with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives. You booted from the floppy A drive and the data was or programs were loaded or written on the floppy B...those were the days. Yea. When I worked in the business school lab at college, the labs were full of these and the teachers mostly had these too. Whenever a floppy drive would stop working I'd grab 2 or 3 from our supply and hope one works. I also remember the tubes of memory we'd have with us to replace the memory chips on the motherboard which you needed to carry around a chip puller for (or a screwdriver and some skillz ). They kept blowing from static electricity. Fun times. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeJ Posted September 13, 2007 Share Posted September 13, 2007 I see the gadget website Gizmodo reads our forums. I saw they posted the too. That was painful to watch. That was 7 minutes of my life I'll never get back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Bruce Posted September 13, 2007 Share Posted September 13, 2007 The Mission Imposible theme playing in the background and her comment was great. I have other plans, I hope Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mike Posted September 29, 2007 Share Posted September 29, 2007 I remember those machines well, Madman. Now , we're BOTH dated. HEH HEH. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deverill Posted October 5, 2007 Share Posted October 5, 2007 I see the gadget website Gizmodo reads our forums. Or else someone tipped them off after Bill posted this. It was on YouTube. I doubt Gizmodo found it here before the YouTube version hit their radar. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Bruce Posted October 5, 2007 Share Posted October 5, 2007 It was on YouTube. I doubt Gizmodo found it here before the YouTube version hit their radar. Maybe, maybe not. We started the photo contest and a day later Gizmodo runs one. I think they have been tipped by someone that reads these forums. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonsjava Posted January 11, 2008 Share Posted January 11, 2008 I first started on the good old Apple IIE, but that was at my school. I then moved ...um...up? down?....I moved over to the Tandy 1000 8088 with 640k RAM and 1 floppy drive (no hard drive, of course). I had some tricks up my sleeve that allowed it to almost run like a 286, but not *quite*. I'm only 27, so either my age is now "old" or you don't have to be old to have stories about old computers anymore . I loved my Tandy (mainly because I could hide smokes in there when i was older--it had a seamless slide-out to add upgrades on the top. I know, that's not a good reason to love a computer, but that's not the only reason I loved it). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duckman Posted January 11, 2008 Share Posted January 11, 2008 (edited) I remember when CP/M was the OS to have. Before that we had the computers you assembled from a kit ... such as the MITS Altair, the IMSAI 8080, the SWTPC 6800, and (later on) the NorthStar with this thing called a floppy disk drive. Nothing like hundreds of solder connections to make before the exciting test of plugging it in and turning it on for the first time And getting a "factory assembled" computer took weeks and sometimes months and cost much more. With these early computers, a cassette tape recorder to load software was a luxury. There were paper tape readers to read in software. BASIC and other software came on rolls of paper tape to read in through a TTY terminal with tape reader or a small manual paper tape reader where you pulled the paper tape through it. Next came the 8" floppy disk drive and then the 5-1/4" drives. At some point, hard disk drives were introduced. NorthStar made a hard drive with a whopping 18mb of storage which took up an entire desktop (drive only) and was heavy... If you got a new printer (the early ones were only 40 columns of text), chances were you had to code in your own machine-level printer driver to read the port, check handshaking, send a character, and so on. USB? Forget it, the parallel and serial connections were the ports to have. The "Centronics" style parallel connector was sort of an industry standard for many early printers in the beginning desktop market. And modems? The speed of 110 baud (around 10 characters per second) was standard and also expensive ... then came 300 baud and the luxurious 1200 baud by an Atlanta company called Hayes. Graphics consisted of using standard letter/number characters to create images. Memory mapped video/graphic cards came along at some point and gave some better graphics capabilities. Software? Not much available. Initially there was "Tiny BASIC" to program in. It only took about 1K or so of memory which was important because a lot of early machines only came with maybe 4K of RAM (that's 4096 bytes). Some came with a 1K RAM and were expandable to 4K by adding more memory chips. Exciting times Edited January 11, 2008 by Duckman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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