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

[The kid]

I'm thinking of how far computers have evolved in such a short period of time. I still have my old IMB XT with 10 megabytes of hard drive space and a wopping 256 kilobytes of ram. My son a I ran a single line SciFi themed Bulletin Board where users would call in and play games download files and such. This was pre-internet. The internet existed but few used it because it took some tech know how to do it. My oh my how things have changed. -kid

 

[orezok]

Yup, and single sided floppies on an Apple II.

 

[J F]

TRS-80 and Commodore 64 ruled the day when I first started. (at least for me)

 

[Ken73]

Try a Timex Sinclair 1000 - look it up! Apple ][ (not +, not E, nor C!) .. Hayes Smartmodems and US Robotics modems.. ahh, the good old days when you actually had to be smart to get online!

 

[Grandad4]

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.

 

[uglyboywith11fingers]

I started working for Honeywell in 1969 on their entry level mainframe, the H200. It had a maximum 32 kilo-bytes of memory and had a processor with 2 micro-second cycle time. (same as VIC-20?)
Physically, these systems occupied the space equivalent to a one-car garage, and needed air conditioning equipment that occupied that much more space.
Most were TOS based (tape operating system), later units had 2 or 5 megabyte disc drives.
Of course, this was the era of the punched card readers and huge printers.
Working on these systems, I was primarily a mechanic.
Only the accumulator portion of the CPU was made up of integrated circuit chips, everything else was just diodes, transistors, etc.

Good memories, though.

Pete

 

[kco]

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.

My first computer was a Kaypro II which copied the Osborne but improved on it since it had a 80 character screen vs Osborne's 50 or so. My first modem was 300 baud.

Here is the wikipedia link for Kaypro:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaypro

 

[troutsqueezer]

I go back even further to the Altair 8800. 256 bytes of memory. I programmed it using toggle switches on the front panel. First use of the S-100 bus. No video display nor keyboard back then. All you could see were LED's flashing on the front. It used the Intel 8080 processor. I was so enamored, later I went to work for Intel.

 

[/pine]

The first modems I used were 2400 baud and I always limited the login access on the BB's I ran to 15 minutes once a day...had 4 hard lines one of which was dedicated for 'CompuServe'...
later I ran an ELM and later yet a PINE (where my moniker came from) server via a leased shell account...

 

[KTurner]

My first computer was a Kaypro II which copied the Osborne but improved on it since it had a 80 character screen vs Osborne's 50 or so. My first modem was 300 baud.

Here is the wikipedia link for Kaypro:

Kaypro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I still have a Kaypro just like that in the garage, but I got it long after it was already old.

Our first comp, if you ignored the atari 2600, was the Commodore 64. First modem we had was a 300 buad acoustic coupler for it. And we used cassette tapes in the datasette drive until we got a 5-1/4 floppy drive. I remember calling out pages of hexadecimal from the back of some magazine as Dad typed it into the C64, calling out the checksum at the end of each line to verify it was entered correctly. That's how you used to "download" programs.

Keith

 

[flyerdan]

I've got a functioning 8088 machine out in the shop. Bought a pallet of old computers from the state surplus many years ago, wanted one for a database out there. Sold most of the others after mixing and matching, still have these three old original IBM machines tucked away. Also have a functioning Vic-20 with tape drive stored away in the shop attic. I also ran a BBS on a C-64 for a while in the mid 80's, 300 baud modem. Remember the disk notcher that would let you write to both sides of a 5.25"?

 

[Larry Caldwell]

The first computer I ever used was an ALWAC IIIe at Oregon State. It used vacuum tube logic, and a rotating magnetic drum about 3' tall for memory. Program input was by punch tape. My lab partner and I entered the program independently, then held the two tapes together to the light to make sure they were identical. A typo meant flunking the lab.

History of Computing in Turku

My first home computer was a Reynolds and Reynolds TC-1000. Z80 cpu, CP/M OS, 5" screen, dual single sided floppies and a built in 300 baud modem. It was originally a smart terminal for a PDP-11. Besides word processing and database (no spreadsheets in those days), it had a copy of Microsoft MBasic. I loved that program. I should have bought Microsoft stock.

Speaking of spreadsheets, Steve Jobs wasn't the genius that put Apple on the map. It was Dan Bricklin, who sat down and invented the spreadsheet for the Apple II. For a couple years, if you wanted a spreadsheet you had to buy an Apple II, which sold all their computers for them.

 

[Soundguy]

Try a Timex Sinclair 1000 - look it up! Apple ][ (not +, not E, nor C!) .. Hayes Smartmodems and US Robotics modems.. ahh, the good old days when you actually had to be smart to get online!

i had a timex sinclair as well. had the 16k ram pack.. and a cassette drive..

trs 80 slant 4

coco

all them old things.

still have an old CPM machine

 

[mostly_gas]

9 in floppies (TRS80), cassette tapes(TI99) punch cards (main frame HP,IBM), 300 baud modem with acoustical coupler.

 

[Soundguy]

i got a set of 8" flopies I ran on a NEC laptop using driveparam as a driver and a custom built external drive cable..

 

[caps]

My first computer was a Heath H8, then upgraded to a Heathkit H89 with an actual 5 1/2 in hard sectored floppy and a built-in monitor. Then the ultimate computer - a Kaypro IV with dual floppies running CPM. The H8 didn't have a monitor - output was in octal via the lights on the front. Programs were loaded from a cassette player or tape drive on a teletype. The 300 baud modem was considered fast.

 

[Soundguy]

oh wow.. mainframes. the supermarket in town had a ibm 360 and a buddy of mine was a manager there and we worked on it. another place downthe street had a wang. I remember repalcing a memory card in that one time. was almost the size of a legal sizewd sheet of paper

 

[The kid]

Yup, and single sided floppies on an Apple II.

Never owned an apple anything till I bought an iPad. I had a Apple clone that ran ProDOS. You remember that?

 

[The kid]

The first modems I used were 2400 baud and I always limited the login access on the BB's I ran to 15 minutes once a day...had 4 hard lines one of which was dedicated for 'CompuServe'...
later I ran an ELM and later yet a PINE (where my moniker came from) server via a leased shell account...

My son and I ran a BBS called the "Borg". I guess you can figure the theme for it. We had hundreds of trek pictures. A bunch of online games. US Robotics offered Sysops a discount on their high end external modem. I got one of those 33.6 which was flash upgradable. Our phone line maxed at a little above that. We had message forums linked thru the Fido network. It was a lot of fun. -kid

 

[crazyal]

When I was in high school we had an IBM something that had iron core memory and reel tape storage. Every so often you would have to blow the memory off, lol. I still can remember the replacement system had green screen monitors that faced straight up and had mirrors that would reflect half the image to one side and the other half to the other side so two people could work off of one monitor. That and a 8" floppy.