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

 

[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.