Missing computer company's

[1Mech]

A bakery in Indiana is still using Commodore 64 computers as cash registers.

Indiana bakery still using Commodore 64s originally released in 1982 as cash registers — Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg sticks to the BASICs

If it ain't broke...

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Langanobob]

I recall that Burroughs became Unisys? No?

 

[kenmbz]

A guy I worked with back in the early 80's had gone to school with Wozniak and had an Apple 1 that had wires soldered in by the Woz himself.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

I don't think that's correct. Yes, NT 3.1 came out in 1993, but it was not true multitasking, it was an early form of re-entrant multitasking. Essentially, you could switch between applications, but the one you switched away from had to stop running, it would not continue solving a large simulation problem while you toggled over to MS Word to type a document.

I also ran OS7 in my personal Mac at the time, which for the time was a very nice operating system. But like NT 3.x, it was not true multitasking, it was only re-entrant.

Mentioning Windows NT: To keep us all on our toes, Microsoft named their home products Windows 95 and 98, but then they re-named Win NT 5.0 to Windows 2000. So, many thought the upgrade path was from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, but really 98 migrated to Me (Millenium) and NT 4.0 migrated to 2000.

I did a lot of programming on NT, it was definitely truly multi-threading. The consumer versions of Windows (ie W95) were re-entrant, as you said.

 

[ultrarunner]

A guy I worked with back in the early 80's had gone to school with Wozniak and had an Apple 1 that had wires soldered in by the Woz himself.

He is someone you would never forget…

The story of Apples founding is interesting in that there originally were 3 individuals…

The third was living in a trailer park having bailed very early saying the others were juvenile for lack of a better word.

 

[WinterDeere]

I did a lot of programming on NT, it was definitely truly multi-threading. The consumer versions of Windows (ie W95) were re-entrant, as you said.

I think there must have been a difference in the way early NT (e.g. 3.1 - 3.5) handled multi-tasking, versus later NT (e.g. 4.0 - 2000), as I clearly remember processes halting or going at a very clipped rate when you'd toggle away from them in early NT. I suppose it could have been just poor/coarser time slicing or scheduling, prior to the implementation of modern program priority calls (see Task Manager), or even just software manufacturers taking too long to catch up with the options NT was providing them.

I run computer simulations that take hours each, on todays hardware. On the computers of 1995 - 2005, we could only run much more simplified models, and a single solver run would take between a half day and all weekend! We used to run separate computers for the solver and daily chores (e.g. email, MS Office), but now just run everything on a single PC with two dozen cores or more.

 

[kenmbz]

We found modern CPUs with multi-threading slowed down older programs as the first thread would wait for the other threads to finish.
We turned off multi-threading for older programs and they really flew.

 

[flyerdan]

I've got a lot of old stuff kicking around. Have three original IBM XTs, a bootable 8088 in the shop, bootable Win 98 and XP machines. Keeping with the theme, here is a Bondwell, t powers up but probably needs a cmos battery to boot. Main battery is toast, of course but the charger will start it.

 

[Slowpoke Slim]

Let's see, off the top of my head...

Encore, Gould, Perk & Elmer, HP (HP-1000), DEC (PDP-11's, VAX 11/785's, microvax's, vax stations), IBM, Honeywell. Probably forgetting a few... Worked on each of the above at one point or another.

 

[MossRoad]

Windows NT:
Not Today
Next Time
Nice Try

We got a service bulletin on NT saying to reboot the machine every X days to keep it operating well.

We wondered how they ever got to X days in the first place to figure that out it barfed so often.