Anyone ever use a 300/1200 baud modem using 5 1/4" floppies

[dmccarty]

... Applewriter was the word processor and it worked ...

A little later I moved to a IBM PC, then a PC XT, PC AT, PC II and so one. for almost 20 years I moved up in computers ( partly paid for by work). Funny, but each computer was far more powerful than the last - and each cost almost precisely $2,000. Only in the last decade or so have there been cheaper computers available.

Do you remember having only 40 columns and no lower case? Everything was SHOWN in upper case and to make a uppercase character you had to use a key sequence that then showed the letter in reverse mode so you knew it was an uppercase character and not lower?

For years, every micro computer and then PC, cost 3-5K. Excepting the Apple II+. It was around $800 but only16K, no floppy drives, and I was using a B&W TV for a monitor.

I bought a color TV/monitor from Sears when I bought an IBM PC1. I STILL have that color TV and it still works even though it is getting close to *** 30 *** years old!!!!! :shocked::laughing::laughing::laughing:

Later,
Dan

 

[Soundguy]

i too had one of thse tv/monitors!

 

[dmccarty]

Hiya,
...

I'm still in the computer field, I specialize in building scalable private clouds. At the house I run a multi hypervisor cloud consisting of Hyper-V 2008/2012 and ESXi 5.1 hosts with a mix of RHEL and Windows guests on FreeNAS storage. Ya, I'm a geek....

Tom

I have been thinking about getting a NAS for home but the commercial units are expensive and they all seem proprietary. Figured there had to be an open source or Linux solution and I found FreeNas. I am most impressed and one day I think I will build a box to use FreeNAS.

Seriously thought about giving the kids VMWARE images.....

Later,
Dan

 

[farmfun]

DEC VT100 Vt103 ( Digital Equipment Corp) and dual 8 inch disks.

Ah the days of the little white blinking cursor block, not a Flying Toaster to be had.

Telephone handset cradles, 300/1200 baud...

 

[The kid]

Hiya,

Ahhhh, memories. The first system I worked on was an IBM System 3-15d w/ 512K of transistor RAM running the 1978 RPG 2 and 1979 COBOL compilers and OCL. It had Ya, I'm a geek....

Tom

I think most of us have drank from that same cup. We were Geeks, Nerds when Geeks where cool. Don't forget the beetle boots and bell bottom pants.

 

[jaotguy]

yup ... back in the days when TV first stared in Canada ... only on in the evenings ...

paper tape machines feeding the computer programs ...

a hand calculator has more processing power than the 4 x 4K machines ( 4k for the program and 4K for the data ) that took us to the moon.... with T03 transistors stuffed in boxes the size of a suitcase .... slide rules for quick calculations ..... dang I'm old

 

[wcampbell47]

I still have my old Osborne. Dual 5 1/4, 64K and a 5" CRT built into a single, suitcase size case... the first "laptop" - well, er, "portable". Went with me on the road for business trips. CPM operating system, word processor, spreadsheet, database... hi tech stuff back in the day. Paid something like $3k for it in 1982.

Same year that I bought my first - an Osborne with Okidata dot matrix printer. $2,400. I later added DBII for $600. That was a lot of money back then.

 

[The kid]

Here's a picture of what I think was the Cadillac of BBS modems back in the mid 70's to 80's. Ours was ordered from URS thru their Sysop (System Operator) program. It can with a tag pop riveted on the top cover saying. "not for resale" The was very reliable until a lightning strike spiked the house and fried it. USR was reluctant, but did replace it under warranty.

View attachment 309695

 

[SPIKER]

I pretty much forgot about "Quick Basic" remember using it to set up a couple light sensors to monitor cars driving by the computer lab at night to see how many cars pulled in and at what time recording it into a "Advanced" spread sheet. lol We had some good times back then.

In the mid 90's (95 or 96) we had 8 or 10 computers in the lab & I installed "DESCENT" (DOS based video game) onto them & we had networked multi-player action. If I remember right it was one of the first multi-player games made by Paralaxx. I had pretty much already mastered it, I bought in my own Joystick so did one of the other "Gamers" so he and I ruled in it.
We found a copy of ZORK on the server & DOOM as well but compared to DESCENT those games were pretty much left to the 0's & 1's of the server dust bin.

Mark

 

[crazyal]

Anyone else remember having to use a generic cassette tape recorder to save their programs written in basic? You would have to press the play and record buttons at the same time and then tell the computer to save or read the program. You couldn't hear it so you would just guess when to stop recording. You could use a microphone and record yourself saying what the program was so you could put more than one on a tape a few seconds before each program.