December 17, 2021 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Tech of My Youth
December 17, 2021 at 1:57 pm
Nostalgia is a pleasant thing to discuss on a Friday. My first computer was an Atari 1040ST. I did C development on that ST. It was fun, but I don't miss having all those floppy disk in stacks here and there.
Rod
December 17, 2021 at 2:13 pm
This could be fun...
The first company I worked for that was not mainframe dependent used Novell Netware for their internal network, and BTrieve for the relational database for the initial versions of the software we sold and supported. Interesting to work with, and yet via the rose colored glasses of looking back 30 years in time, now seems like a much simpler time.
I still use a clock radio alarm to wake myself in the mornings. There's a certain satisfaction beating on the snooze button several times before actually getting out of bed.
December 17, 2021 at 3:04 pm
This could be fun...
I still use a clock radio alarm to wake myself in the mornings. There's a certain satisfaction beating on the snooze button several times before actually getting out of bed.
I don't have a clock radio alarm anymore, but I can relate to the satisfaction of beating that thing, especially when it wakes you up from a deep sleep. 🙂
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
December 17, 2021 at 5:29 pm
My first computer was a HeathKit Computer Learning Center. It had a CPU, hex keypad, a few 7 segment LEDs, some other chips and a breadboard. It was fun to play around with and start to figure out what made a computer tick. I moved on to a Color Computer then a TRS 80 Model 1 (with the 48k expansion thank you very much). I ran a BBS that a friend of mine had written in TRS BASIC. I started learning to write code from the same friend. It usually involved bringing over a bottle of scotch and spending hours huddled around his TRS 80 Model 4.
These days I'm more nostalgic for the studio equipment of my youth. That's where I spend a lot of my time that's not related to my day job. A handful of vintage mics and compressors are worth more than the balance of my mortgage. 🙂 Needless to say, I'm having a great time watching Get Back.
December 17, 2021 at 6:04 pm
I miss the 8-inch floppy disks of the Altair and Ohio Scientific computers. Although, I suppose it would be a bit unwieldy to carry 14,000,000 of them to match the capacity of my budget laptop's hard drive.
The first computer I bought was an Apple II with 48K memory, two (yes, 2!) 140K floppy disk drives, and a 9-inch black and white (CRT) screen. The darn thing cost about five times as much as the laptop above, before adjusting for inflation.
Creator of SQLFacts, a free suite of tools for SQL Server database professionals.
December 17, 2021 at 6:47 pm
Does anyone here remember FoxPro for DOS and Clipper?
Old timers in the IT outback will occasionally see these things still living in the wild.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
December 17, 2021 at 7:10 pm
Does anyone here remember FoxPro for DOS and Clipper? Old timers in the IT outback will occasionally see these things still living in the wild.
I (vaguely) remember working with FoxPro for DOS and dBase before that. Hard to believe there are still some apps running out there. Wow, I don't know whether to be impressed, or frightened or both. 🙂
December 17, 2021 at 7:54 pm
Not quite as ancient as some of the things mentioned but when i started getting into computers CRT's were the standard, USB wasn't a thing yet and floppy drives were still required because you needed a boot disc to install windows. Zip drives were the most common large format portable storage because if you had a CD burner you were seriously flexing. And dedicated graphics cards were just starting to become the standard if you expected to game on your computer.
December 20, 2021 at 3:36 pm
Does anyone here remember FoxPro for DOS and Clipper? Old timers in the IT outback will occasionally see these things still living in the wild.
Got my career started. I programmed Clipper while an intern, led to a network position and then Fox/DoS and Fox/Windows for a few years
December 21, 2021 at 7:48 am
Whilst my little brother was playing with Sinclair and Atari products, I'd graduated and was using DEC PDP 11 daily.
DEC were huge back then, with all sorts of PDP 11 and then VAX machines and three or four operating systems - I remember RT11, RSX and RSTS and they were developing a micro computer - the pc of today - called the Rainbow. There was still the old PDP 8 in the office that you toggled the bootstrap code into, to make it read the paper tape to start it up.
It was whilst visiting the big DEC UK headquarters in Reading (by the new brewery) that I first saw email in the early 80s and was impressed!
For such a huge company they seemed to vanish very quickly in my maternity leave years.
December 21, 2021 at 10:36 pm
Started writing code in BASIC back in 6th or 7th grade. Had to save your code to a cassette, and keep track of the start and end positions on the counter on the cassette recorder.
Parents bought me a Tandy computer back in early 80's, i think it had 48K.
Writing Turbo Pascal in high school really got me into programming.
First TV I bought was a 32 inch RCA, damn thing must have weighed almost 100 pounds.
I still have a Sony TV I we use upstairs, Samsung in the basement/man cave. 😉
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we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.
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