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

[ultrarunner]

Still have my Apple // with two drives and IEEE card and my Apple LQP daisy wheel with original boxes and literature... plus Visicalc.

Have to say my Apple never crashed... next to it is my Windows 98 that I still use once and awhile.

In the shop is an old teletype with tape reader/puncher I use to program my Bridgeport tape mill...

My parents were never early adopters... except when Dad came home with a color TV... all the neighbors came over to view and were in awe... most programs were still black and white... Mighty Mouse as all color and the neighbors came back on Saturday morning to watch again.

Within a few months, I think everyone had a color set.

Dad would be 86 now... owned three TV's in his life... one black and white, that color Zenith and us kids bought him a new Zenith in 1978... it is still the one Mom uses daily... the quality goes in before the name goes on!

 

[ultrarunner]

Don't know about the rest of you guys, but sure would be nice to have the $$$ back I spent those first 25 years.
I read an article last year that if instead of buying a Mac desktop in 1990, I think it was, if you had spent the same dollars for Apple stock how much it would be worth now - staggering

David Sent from my iPad using TractorByNet

I bought apple stock in 1981... sold it and cleared $500... only stock I ever made money on.

 

[dmccarty]

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.

A few years ago, our lab was being cleaned up and there was a cabinet that was pad locked. That cabinet had been there for years and nobody knew what was inside. I had a big set of bolt cutters in the truck so I was elected to cut the lock. :laughing::laughing::laughing:

This cabinet was about 6 feet tall and at least 3-4 feet wide. Inside it was stuffed with copies of Lotus 123 and some other software. The software was so old it had was for DOS and DONGLES for copy protection which meant those packages had been locked up for 10-20 years! :shocked: Someone spent a BUNCH of money, locked it away and forgot about it. There was tens of thousands of dollars in that cabinet. Most likely the person was layed off or fired many years ago...

Later,
Dan

 

[dmccarty]

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.

Yes, yes I do. Funny thing is that the tape always recorded. I don't remember loosing any of my programs but it sure was SLOW.

Later,
Dan

 

[crazyal]

A few years ago, our lab was being cleaned up and there was a cabinet that was pad locked. That cabinet had been there for years and nobody knew what was inside. I had a big set of bolt cutters in the truck so I was elected to cut the lock. :laughing::laughing::laughing:

This cabinet was about 6 feet tall and at least 3-4 feet wide. Inside it was stuffed with copies of Lotus 123 and some other software. The software was so old it had was for DOS and DONGLES for copy protection which meant those packages had been locked up for 10-20 years! :shocked: Someone spent a BUNCH of money, locked it away and forgot about it. There was tens of thousands of dollars in that cabinet. Most likely the person was layed off or fired many years ago...

Later,
Dan

I got news for you. I work on semiconductor processing equipment that still uses DOS, :laughing:. Chips in all of today's high end electronic equipment was made on tools running an operating system from almost 20 years ago.

 

[doxford jim]

Just found this thread LOL and it sure brings back somememories.
I went to university in 1972 and there we worked on a PDP mainframe - don't remember the model (8?). We used to combine lab work and the computer by writing programs in Basic using the blue tape. Once the tape was finished it was then fed into the PDP and our calculations were done for us (from the original lab experiments).
I never owned a computer until 1993 when I bought a locally made 386 (I think). I upgraded it so 3Meg of ram so I could go onto the interenet and boy was it slow. Not sure, but think I had a 14,400 modem. The windows program was pretty basic and the office program I had was Wordperfect - not sure of the version. Anyway, I have three or four computers since then and now spend lots of time on different sites for different reasons. I'm 68 so I guess I might just qualify as an "old fart" and remember when the first colour TV's came out.
Thx
Jim

 

[buckeyefarmer]

I still have a lot of sw on floppies, and some old computers with modems.

 

[SPIKER]

I got a new job 5 years ago that the place I left had a couple PLCs (Industrial Computers basically) one of them I tore out & upgraded in early 2008 used a cassette tape to program it. The tape player and tapes contained different programs which were played (Audio) out into the PLC and then a test function to see if it took. Test run again to make sure it worked (can't remember the brand now) but was actually rather reliable other than a couple output card failures. (Those probably failed due to they operated some larger gas solenoids and they never installed any LC circuits to protect the outputs that fired on/off about every 3 seconds. One other electrician and I pulled in all new Wiring, Conduit and the like & I gutted the control cabinet & installed a PLC5 3 rack system. I was looking forward to doing the program but they had outside company do it as they had me start 11 oven/drier all new burner, heating & gas control systems. Fun times...

Mark

 

[Tulkas]

Modem terminal with analog tv monitor connecting to a Xerox sigma-9.

 

[Cat_Driver]

I remember the first hard drive I bought and teh sales guy said Don't get a 1Gig hard drive You'll NEVER fill it up. first IBM PC cost 5K first dot matrix printer cost 3K. first laser printer 5K

 

[Mighty Dodge]

Yup, I worked for a computer company years ago, we had to dial into customers computers using 1200 baud, some customers only had 300 baud modems. And the computers had removable disk packs.
Now I'm gonna have nightmares.

 

[radioman]

yup - remember logging onto bulletin boards with my 386sx and 2400 buad modem. When I started working for ADS then later Honeywell then Xerox, I was in the pc division repairing hardware for them and my first machine I had to take apart was a compaq lte laptop with a trackball in display panel. piece a cake. Nowadays its cheaper to replace it or send in for warranty fix and nobody has a need for a pc hardware repair guy like me.

 

[Wilky]

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.

Early 60's the IE dept owned the university's computer. Required course was fortran for all engineering students. The mainframe was a IBM 360 (not a PC) somedays it took hours to debug a program. That was because of the number of student jobs plus the administration work came. Punch cards were a bear. A couple of years after taking the programming course school decided to require a computer problem with every lab course. I did the problem, punched the cards, submitted the program and received the dreaded ABEND. After a number of card submittals with the same results went to lab assistant he worked on it for an hour could not see a problem then the Ahaw moment. I had started the cards in the wrong column. By the 70's the punch cards were eliminated and you could do direct input.

 

[Soundguy]

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.

on my timex sinclair i used a handheld microcassette recorder from radio shack worked fine...

 

[Soundguy]

Yup, I worked for a computer company years ago, we had to dial into customers computers using 1200 baud, some customers only had 300 baud modems. And the computers had removable disk packs.
Now I'm gonna have nightmares.

anyone remember the bernouli boxes?

 

[mostly_gas]

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.

Yes when I first bought the TI99 I used the cassette recorder. TI had a nicer cassette interface, the screen told you when to start/stop the recorder and played the "program" on the computer speaker so you could hear if the computer correctly picked the end of the load program attempt. I used to use the tape counter to find multiple programs on a tape.

 

[dmccarty]

anyone remember the bernouli boxes?

Yeppers...

Later,
Dan

 

[Soundguy]

how about the stuff thet never really worked out. flopticals.. 2.88meg or so?

i had some somrt of high density disk drive. was external.. took something that looke dlike a 3.5 but wasn't a 3.5 disk.. can't remember the name of that junky thing but it was as slow as molassis.. jumbo drive maybee? ( wasn't a colorado product though ).

i remember when the usb external hdds first hit.. I splurged and bout a 4.3g model... ugh!!

i remember having an old iomega zip back when they were still scsi and not parallel port.

anyone use an esdi drive? ( not ide/eide etc.. ) all the weird stuff.

SLC processors.. ie.. higher instruction set on a smaller core.

 

[sparc]

I remember using a CoCo 2 with a 13" B&W TV for a display and my MFJ-1278 and TS-520S to work RTTY and packet on the ham bands.

When I got my first real PC it was an 8088-1 (10MHz) with a 32MB hard drive. In 1987 that 32MB HD cost $350!!

 

[k0ua]

I remember using a CoCo 2 with a 13" B&W TV for a display and my MFJ-1278 and TS-520S to work RTTY and packet on the ham bands.

When I got my first real PC it was an 8088-1 (10MHz) with a 32MB hard drive. In 1987 that 32MB HD cost $350!!

I had a Kantronics Kam and a TS940. I still work some Digital (psk-31, Rtty, and sometimes olivia and others) but of course with soundcard now.

James K0UA