Terminology Oldsters vs Youngsters

[TaterChip]

I actually still have some knocking about.

I can see several storage cases full of 5¼" disks (and some loose) from where I'm sitting (loft man-cave) .. most have been archived but I still need to do my C64 disks. There's even a still-sealed box of Maxell HD 5¼" disks on top of the shelf rack ..

Better not to ask how many floppy disk drives I have up here!

I have one sealed package of 3.5 floppies. One day they will be a collectors item. It was a run of Loony Toons floppies with Bugs Bunny.

[TaterChip]

You're only old if you can remember closing the latch behind a 5.25 floppy. If you don't remember it.... then your as young as a new snow

So what does it say when i completely forgot they had a latch until you reminded me;-) 360K! Enough for several spreadsheets and a few letters!

If you cant remember that far back, then you must not be old

[diyliberty]

I remember buying single sided 5.25 disks then cutting the notch out on the other side so I could flip it over and use the other side. Doubled sided disks at a discount!

[BenTrabetere]

I remember buying single sided 5.25 disks then cutting the notch out on the other side

I still have my notcher. I found it last week while digging through my Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case. I could not remember what it was at the time.

Show of hands. How many people have at least one BFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I remember buying single sided 5.25 disks then cutting the notch out on the other side

I still have my notcher. I found it last week while digging through my Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case. I could not remember what it was at the time.

Show of hands. How many people have at least one BFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC?

I still have my notcher...somewhere. And I have several BFOOTYSPHTOBKJICs. My problem, besides being a bit of a hoarder, is every time I get rid of something, two weeks later, I wind up needing it.

[MurphCID]

I remember buying single sided 5.25 disks then cutting the notch out on the other side so I could flip it over and use the other side. Doubled sided disks at a discount!

Oh no! I remember doing that as well. Those things got pricy back in the day. I also remember going from 360k to 1.2mb 5.25' floppies.

[MurphCID]

I remember buying single sided 5.25 disks then cutting the notch out on the other side

I still have my notcher. I found it last week while digging through my Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case. I could not remember what it was at the time.

Show of hands. How many people have at least one BFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC?

Me too! Also Developer=Programmer.

Or loading the OS, then removing the floppy, and putting in a floppy with the program you want to run at the time? Or encountering the "Out of Memory" error?

[coffee412]

Anyone remember playing Gorilla in basic ?

I remember when a friend showed me his IBM 8088 and we used to go dumpster diving at the IBM outlet. We got the expansion for memory and brought it up to 1024. Then we got involved in BBS's. We started one called "The Lighthouse bbs" in Holland, Michigan. Later I moved to Kokomo, Indiana and I had a 486 and ran "The Kokomo Club" which became really busy and we upgraded to three lines. Those were fun times!

[wwblm]

Then we got involved in BBS's. We started one called "The Lighthouse bbs" in Holland, Michigan. Later I moved to Kokomo, Indiana and I had a 486 and ran "The Kokomo Club" which became really busy and we upgraded to three lines. Those were fun times!

The BBS Days! I was out in the sticks then and had to pay $0.25/min just to get on to a BBS. Better than the $20 something an hour to be on the internet with Compuserv (plus the $0.25/min). Those were the days;-)

When modems were a thing and many people were still using those 5.25 floppies, I was working with a customer using $1400 modems on each end that allowed us to be part of the same AppleTalk network. I did graphically based database programming over that modem network. I can still remember dragging an icon then waiting and watching as it drew in stages as it went across the screen in steps over several seconds. Exceedingly painful and time consuming but far better than the alternative. The alternative was to split the database file into several pieces -- perhaps a dozen 1.4 MB floppies -- overnight the floppies and pray that you could put it back together again. (Floppies were so reliable;-) Program away on my blazing fast hard drive and then have to compress, split, copy the floppies and overnight back. I do not miss those days or the other alternative which was to fly down there, work like a dog all weekend, debug Monday AM with the pressure of having to get to the airport and having to take the factory down if anything did need fixing.

Still working on that database but with high speed internet on both ends it is way faster than my blazing fast hard drive was back in the day!

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Then we got involved in BBS's. We started one called "The Lighthouse bbs" in Holland, Michigan. Later I moved to Kokomo, Indiana and I had a 486 and ran "The Kokomo Club" which became really busy and we upgraded to three lines. Those were fun times!

I was on Q-Link (Quantum Link for Commodore 64 and 128 computers) back in the day until it was bought and abandoned by AOL.

[CloneWerks]

"Pound" symbol vs "Hashtag"

I can remember when you had to use "Finger" to look someone up, or maybe WHOIS. Using GOPHER, and I can remember being absolutely floored the first time I fired up the Mosaic browser! Colleges used to print up directories (basically mini phone books) of addresses for other computer systems you could connect to and you could buy a copy in the university book store.

Also man do I miss the focused conversation and absolute lack of advertising and con-jobs on Usenet!

[BG405]

Show of hands. How many people have at least one BFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC?

I've absolutely no idea what one of those is!

I never did get a notcher. Didn't know they existed back in the day. I made my "Flippies" with careful use of a very sharp knife!

Only issue with flippies made on the 1541 is that you still have to turn them over if you are using them on a double-sided drive, the 1571, which was never an issue for me back then as I only had the 1541. Plus a 1541 can not read side 2 of a 1571 DS disk, for obvious reasons (rotation direction being a primary one).

Now I have one original 1541 with (what used to be) a beige front drive unit, the one with the pull down gate not the turn lever .. (ALPS? I can't remember) along with the MkII I bought new back in the mid or late 1980s. Plus a more recently acquired 1571 .. I had to swap the mains connector on that as its internal filter caps decided to become a space heater! Good job I touched the plug and found that out before it got TOO toasty.

Anyone here used a CatWeasel card? Apparently there is a recent open source equivalent available now.

[wwblm]

"Pound" symbol vs "Hashtag"

Currently doing work in the UK on a UK computer where I want the Number symbol. Confuses the heck out of me as I also need to use the Pound sign as well. Too old to use a Hashtag;-)

I can remember when you had to use "Finger" to look someone up, or maybe WHOIS. Using GOPHER, and I can remember being absolutely floored the first time I fired up the Mosaic browser! Colleges used to print up directories (basically mini phone books) of addresses for other computer systems you could connect to and you could buy a copy in the university book store.

Now you are really making me feel old. Being in Minnesota I thought that GOPHER was the greatest thing since sliced bread!!! Now I just did a whois on a domain of mine that I really plan on doing something useful with this year. Whois tells me I've been hosting it since Creation Date: 1997-09-16T04:00:00. That must make me old and a major procastinator

[ivar]

Who remembers bios beep codes?

For a short time in the early 90's I was working at a gig building ibm pc clones.
I recall we only encountered either 3 slow beeps or 8 fast beeps. IIRC, 3 beeps was faulty ram, 8 beeps missing display adapter..?

I don't consider myself 'old' quite yet, but I've become a "greybeard" , lol! So I can point the milennials and Gen Z youngsters in the right direction when they're all lost

[MurphCID]

The joy of upgrading your 9 pin dot matrix printer to a 24 pin, and thinking: WOW! This is amazing print quality! Or using the (extremely) loud daisy wheel printer at the office to print out stuff for personal use?

Installing a NEC V20 chip in place of the 8088 since it made the system "faster?

Using "Xmodem" "Ymodem", and Kermit to try and send files on a 1200 baud modem. AND ending up with a $300 phone bill to my buddy in Dallas since they were all long distance calls....

[diyliberty]

Speaking of printers, I bought a color printer in 92. It came with a special ribbon that had black plus blue, red and yellow stripes. When I printed something out in color the printer would first do all of the black for a line, then tilt the ribbon up to the next color and print that color. Repeat until all four colors were done. If I used a lot of colors on a page it would take nearly 10 minutes to print a page. It was high tech for its time.

[RollyShed]

You lot are talking about modern computers.

A "REAL" computer, to start it you put in four digits in binary i.e. 7413 with each digit keyed in with 3 sets of switches in binary so the front of the computer had a row of switches, at least 14 or more. After near a dozen instructions had been entered it could now read punched paper tape, possibly about 2 feet of it. Then the actual programme to do the job was put in with another length of paper tape.

I had to go to Australia to learn programming for a week. I think I failed due to missing a day or so due to flue or something similar.

On returning to New Zealand a month or so later I had to write a programme that told me there was a faulty capacitor in the power supply. How what
I wrote did it I don't know but the fault was in part of the supply that shut things down if the mains supply failed. The circuit thought this was happening despite it not.

The computers? DEC PDP-8s, we had at least 3 of them.

Eventually computers got modern with not very reliable 8" floppy disks. 5" were much better. And as for 3-1/2", how could they possibly hold so much and always work?

[BG405]

Or using the (extremely) loud daisy wheel printer at the office to print out stuff for personal use?

Hopefully not what an old friend/work colleague did once .. sent a rather naughty "chemistry" book to one of the office printers by mistake. He only got away with it because they couldn't prove where the job had been sent from and by who. (DO NOT think of looking that one up online unless you want your physical home security to be tested. I've obfuscated the real title for good reason).

When I printed something out in color the printer would first do all of the black for a line, then tilt the ribbon up to the next color and print that color. Repeat until all four colors were done. If I used a lot of colors on a page it would take nearly 10 minutes to print a page. It was high tech for its time.

We had something similar in the room full of RM Nimbus machines in college. It took an age to buffer, then another age to print anything. There was always a queue. The head/ribbon wasn't aligned properly and you'd get coloured bands across the whole thing.

[coffee412]

Then we got involved in BBS's. We started one called "The Lighthouse bbs" in Holland, Michigan. Later I moved to Kokomo, Indiana and I had a 486 and ran "The Kokomo Club" which became really busy and we upgraded to three lines. Those were fun times!

I was on Q-Link (Quantum Link for Commodore 64 and 128 computers) back in the day until it was bought and abandoned by AOL.

Believe it or not, I never even touched one . I got into computers when the 8088 came out by IBM. That was my real experience. I did go to college (1979) but all we did was write small programs in cobol,fortran and basic. Put them on punch cards and submit them to the counter where they would run them. Then later that day or next day look on a bulletin board on a sheet to see if you passed or failed. It was not a very good experience. lol, I ended up dropping out. The whole college thing just didnt interest me. I then took on a bunch of dead end jobs in the factories and tried to figure out what I wanted to do. I finally got into a 'Little Trouble" and my Dad took me out back behind the house and told me "Im shipping you off to live with your aunt in Holland,Mich.". Thats where I lived for a while and got re-introduced into computers. Kinda saved my life really.

[wwblm]

Baud, kbit, 10 base T,

Latency, distance, bandwidth

AppleTalk, LocalTalk, Ethernet, Novell, TCP/IP


I remember stringing standard phone wires to connect computers at a whopping 230 kbit/s! That was really something at a time when network adapters were hundreds of dollars plus expensive cabling... vs a fairly cheap box to plug the phone wires into. It worked but a few years later 10 base T was the bomb! 10 base T could make it over 330 feet and would move about 1 MB /s!

Just finished running a machine that is 3,860 miles away from me with more than twice that performance. The latency in unimaginable to me. It feels like we are on the same local network. I'm doing my bit wireless and sometimes even mint to mac to distant mac. That seems as amazing to me as the crazy expansion of storage capacity. How many millions of dollars worth of storage relative to the cost of storage back then.