The Passage of Time

[Cottonhawk]

Sounds like that secretary's job was underpaid.
Selectric was very good typewriter. The transition from typewriter to word processor was a easy one for most people.

 

[Bird]

Yep, Cotton, they were great typewriters, but when you have one that's used 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by lots of different people, they did wear out. I know a couple of years a request for a new one was cut from the budget, while each year, the repair costs for the old one far exceeded the price of a new one.

 

[Soundguy]

I hate to think of al the computer hardware I've had pass thru my hands.

My first PC had basic on rom and ms doss 1.0 floppies.. 2- 360k floppy drives, and a full length cga card. Dinked around with it and uppe d the clock to 10mhz.. added a per-store card and took an old mfm HDD drive and doubled it's space.. added an extende dmemory card and an 8250 seriel card.. picked up an equally old sperry pc with a herculese graphics card and green monochrome screen and serieal networked them together.

before that I had an old CPM machine.. uh.. trs80 /4 and even a few vic/commie machines. Had a couple laptops with nec v20 and v30 processors ( 8088 and 8086 updates ).. moved on to a 286.. beefed that up as much as possible with extra drives, new rom card to support the drives, better 16550aft serial uarts soldered to the m-board.. high speed USR HST modems.. etc.. bumped to a 386dx40 tweaked it to all get out added desqview as a multitasker.. jumped from there to a 486dx40.. overclocked it.. had a few other 486 chips along the way.. overclocked them all.. had a 33 pop to 50 even... when the buggy pent60 came out I waited, and hopped in ith a pentium overdrive83 and replaced a 486dx4-120 ( dx4-100 overclocked ) Played with various ibm chips.. hated them.. liked the AMD chips thru the 386-486 line.. but they bite the weeny after that in my opinion... saw the fall and rise of many of the weird 386/486 slc type chips that were just larger instruction sets on a overtaxed processor..

From there it went fast.. pentium 133clocked to 166.. then up to a p-II 233, then 400 (celeron) and then into the 1-4 gig chips both AMD and Intel over rthe last 6? years now..

So much money .. seems like hardware has always cost the same each time you upgrade.. even though stuff is getting faster / better.. ho-hum.

Sometimes you miss the 8" floppy days and the ribbon cable connectors..

Soundguy

I just replaced the computer that I mainly used to access the net. It had dual Pentium II 333 Mhz cpu's on a Tyan motherboard, 512 meg of ram, and two scsi hard drives. When I built it, it was state of the art. It was replaced with an AMD FX 60 powered machine with 4 gig of ram. The old machine had an 8gig and a 1 gig drive. The new one has a 150 gig raptor and a 320 gig WD SE16 drive. The original 1 gig Seagate drive cost me $500. The new 320 gig WD cost me $74. Computer life is even more accelerated than dog years. On the other hand, our tractors will probably be going long after we are gone.
I'm using Kubuntu OS with Firefox browser. I am enormously impressed with them.
One thing that I have noticed since TBN switched to new software is that when I log in, every new topic sends me to the last post on the topic. It used to send me to the last post that i read. Mostly I don't bother logging on any more.

RonL

 

[jimg]

"I hate to think of al the computer hardware I've had pass thru my hands."

Yes indeed!!! Computer h/w becomes almost worthless overnight and is ever changing. The only constant in this industry is radical change almost over night. For those w/ a short attention span thats not a bad thing.

 

[riptides]

"I hate to think of al the computer hardware I've had pass thru my hands."

Yes indeed!!! Computer h/w becomes almost worthless overnight and is ever changing. The only constant in this industry is radical change almost over night. For those w/ a short attention span thats not a bad thing.

Yes indeed on change. I can remember when I had to chisel figures in stone. Talk about expense! You price granite lately?

-Mike Z.

 

[jimg]

No granite here...been using mud tablets for some time now, cheap and recyclable.

 

[Soundguy]

Anyone here remember pixie tubes?

Soundguy

 

[jimg]

I think so...those were the bulbs w/ the grid used to display numbers/letters?

 

[Phils]

Weren't they "nixie" tubes or something similar? I still have them in a digital voltmeter I built (Heathkit) that resides in the garage attic. Someone mentioned one time that they sell on eBay.

***************

Just looked. yep... nixie. Over a hundred on eBay now. I notice most say "Russian", guess that's where they're made now.

Didn't appear that I'd be getting rich by digging out that old voltmeter and selling the tubes tho. Dang.

Phil

 

[Soundguy]

Nixie and pixe are slightly different.. has to do with the anode / cathode setup.. here's a like that explains some of it.. there is a pixie midway down the page.. and the neon filled nixies at the top.. etc.

Counting & display tubes

Yep.. most tubes are coming from russia now.

And JIMG yes.. those were the ones I was talking about.

Soundguy