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

[npalen]

My first was also the Timex Sinclair. (Late 70's IIRC) Then graduated to a Commodore Vic20 which I believe was the predecessor to the Commodore 64. I recall being incredibly intrigued by the spreadsheet program which had a whopping 10 rows and 10 columns. Hey, that was state of the art.

 

[Soundguy]

i remember whena buddy got a commie 128 and a 3.5" drive!

i remmber reading about the amiga.. but never getting to play on one.

speaking of commies.. we modded one.. overclocking it. added a proc fan.. added another SID chip ... had to add a reset button as well.. probably due to that overclocking.

that and the rs232 pack.. a couple 1541 and 1001 drives an the thermal wax printer and the dot matrix and it was a neat deal...

i remember we had an eprom burner that could be run off a c64.. fun toy... especially when you could buy USR Sportster modems for 1/4 the price of a dual standard.. and the early builds used the same size/value rom..

later one they made some changes..and then you saw spiral death syndrome.


of course them c64 were way old by then..

had a tandy laptop we put a nec v20 chip in.. and another? laptop we put a v30 in vs the 8088/8086 procs.. that tandy laptop had the blue monochrome screen..

 

[Grandad4]

And as far us old farts! Yup I am sure there are several of us here that can remember when the first color TV came out. I can remember watching lots of black and white tv shows.

Actually, some of us remember when local TV stations originally started broadcasting in the late '40's and early '50's. The relatives all came over to my aunt's house to watch TV in the evenings. We did have a radio, but couldn't afford a TV until about 1956. I guess we're really some of the oldest cheese!

As for computers, I learned to program in binary machine language using punch cards in the early '60's. Maybe the computer science dept. didn't want to turn out any sissy programmers that needed higher level languages, at least that's what the instructor said, but I got the idea they were just too cheap to allocate computer time on any system that would actually run FORTRAN or COBOL or whatever, to us mere students (BASIC hadn't been invented yet). We used some little IBM computer, submitted our stack of cards each afternoon and hoped the job would run successfully overnight. The next morning we got a printout of the job... either a successful run or an ABEND sheet indicating where it failed. Being a lousy typist, mine failed most of the time.

I also remember the time when some of the Computer Science upperclassmen got in hot water for using up some amount of costly mainframe time running, again by punchcards, a routine to print out a Playboy centerfold on green bar paper using the big line printer. At the time, us lowly freshmen were dazzled by their talent. Thinking back on it, those guys probably did have the programming ability for something like that, but they certainly lacked the artistic ability to transform Miss April into X's and O's.

 

[Soundguy]

abnormal end..

reminds me of face down, 9 edge first...

 

[scott67]

My high-school had a two rows of Commodore Pets with one centralized dual 51/4 floppy drive. You took turns with the drive, saving your work, and hoping no one saved onto your disk. My friend wrote a basic word processor for his project, and looking back, I don't hardly seen a word processor program.

 

[Soundguy]

i remember , in college, taking 'micro computer applications'

what a lame course

 

[rekees4300]

My first "PC" was a Radio Shack TRS-80. It had 4K and programmed in Basic, display was a TV. No disk, data was stored on a cassette tape player. Recall spending many hours playing Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Pong. The thing cost around $600 bucks which is like a million in today's dollars! :laughing:

 

[Alan L.]

I operated an IBM 360 early every morning while I was in college, for $6 an hour, back in the 70s. Had to type in a bunch of stuff at the console, change out tapes and disk packs, and compile programs written on punch cards. A whole wall of disk drives as big as washing machines totaled 2GB of storage.

Started using an Apple ][ in 1980, with green monochrome 40 character screen, 48K of RAM, and 2 5.25" 140K floppy drives. Most used program was Multiplan, the spreadsheet, and later Lotus 123. Graduated to the IBM PC-XT with 10 MB hard drive. The accounting program we used on the IBM was actually pretty fast. Only problem was you couldn't accumulate enough data in that small space to print a whole year of transactions. Had to print monthly ledgers and bring balances forward.

First multuser computer was an Altos with a 286 Intel CPU and running the Xenix operating system. Later, Novell on PC clones with a Compaq server, finally to windows networks.

Too bad Microsoft no longer has any competition. It shows.

 

[sodamo]

.....
Too bad Microsoft no longer has any competition. It shows.

Although I preferred apple/Mac at home and was the workstation integration engineer of a military project that involved over a hundred Mac II workstations, that ran both Mac and DOS stuff within a Unix shell, I also had my "other" hat. My last project involved upgrading networked, but pre Internet, 286 workstations to windows 3.1. But as the real purpose of my job was more bleeding edge, I got paid to read most of the computer mags of the day. Seems like hardly a week went by without reading that some exciting technology that we'd been following with interest got gobbled up by MS and sorta disappeared.

David Sent from my iPad using TractorByNet

 

[tomd999]

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 8" diskette stations, 80 column MFC stations, a chain printer and 2-40meg disk stacks with a tape deck for archive. It would take about 20 minutes to compile say 500 lines of source and run a 2000 record program.

I remember the day the owner came in with the first IBM PC, 2 5-1/4 diskettes, orange monitor. What stuck out in my mind was the big red/orange power switch on the side of the case that was the same one as on the side of the chain printer. We laughed at the little box running PC DOS and "Basic"

I never had any of the early personal computers as I always had midrange and mainframes to work on so my first PC as a Gateway Pentium 60 with 4 Megs of RAM, a 420Meg HD, a 14" color monitor running DOS 5 with Windows For Workgroups 3.11. Cost me $2100 bucks, no CD ROM, no sound card, no modem.

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