Do you feel old yet? - Page 2

[Reverend Jim]

I bought an external hard drive for my Amiga 1000. It was a whopping 40 meg and cost me over $800. Mind you, when the OS fits in 720k, 40 meg goes a long way.

[Dani]

My friend had an Amiga, but I had an Apple IIGS. I still remember that you were meant to hit Ctrl+Open Apple+Reset to boot into BASIC.

[Reverend Jim]

The Amiga booted into an actual operating system, not an mmos.

[rodmastar]

yea you all 1st.. mine, first, I had to memorize and toggle in 18 lines of 16 bit hex a decimal code to boostap the computer.. before anything worked. and then they ran using 4K memory modules stacked to 64K ..was big those days.. lots of tiny donut like farous magnet beeds woven by tiny copper wires.. Actually the truth, used on our cruise missiles.

[Reverend Jim]

It was called "core" and every computer I used until the mid 70s had it. Even a few into the 80s.

[jwenting]

hmm, the first "computer" I had was an electric typewriter with memory for one page of text, where you could enter a text, go through it and apply formating (on a screen holding about 10 characters), and then press a button and it would print the formated text...

You could (and I did) even buy memory modules so it could hold a whopping 4 pages of text, and retain them with the machine turned off (EEPROM, not flash, RAM).
Oh the days...

[mrzoon]

Amiga Forever is a really cool thing. Really, a decades-long labor of love. I've upgraded to each new version just about every year since it came out. But since I still have real Amigas, it use it rarely :) But it's pretty frickin cool.

[Reverend Jim]

ARS Technica has an ongoing history of the Amiga that makes for interesting reading.

[JamesCherrill]

The first computer I ever used was am IBM360/30 with 64k ram and a 3.6 meg hard disk. Programmed exclusively with punched cards. I was lucky, the people who went through IBM new employees training one month before me started with some machine that was programmed by moving plugs and wires on huge plugboard. (No, I'm not kidding.)
The OS had no real support for disks, just read and write by cylinder & track & block number. We had a flip chart in the project room where people reserved parts of the disk for their own files, and if forgot to check it you upset people by writing over their files.
Do I feel old yet? Go on, take a guess.

[mrzoon]

We are not old, we are the demigods. Never let them take that away.

[Maywyn]

I am old.
The first time grandkid spoke to me on the phone, he said,"I can't see you."
I wish I had a mirror to see the look on my face. After the awkward pause, son breaks in to say the other grandparents have skype.

[happygeek]

I must be old as I consider Skype to be the work of the devil. It's bad enough having to talk to people (including family) on the telephone, let alone enable them to see me and my reactions to what they say. Hmmm, are misanthropic tendencies another sign of aging?

[ChrisHunter]

I'm only 24 and I don't use Skype but I know I'm old because I think the best thing about going to a party is the food! I'm only 24 but when I were a lad we were always the first to the buffet and first to go for seconds.

I'm going to an 18th on Saturday and I bet non of the teenagers eat any of the buffet... I just don't get it

[Reverend Jim]

I use Skype frequently but almost never for video so I consider it a coonvenience rather than the devil's handiwork. I would say that 90% of the time I use it for interactive messaging and the other 10% to save on long distance charges to talk to my older son. The video never works that well anyway.

Incidentally, did anyone see episode 5 of Silicon Valley where the head of the Google clone is trying to use the latest tech to communicate with an employee? It's priceless. First he tries holography (a technology purchased for 2 billion from a startup). This fails miserably. Then he tries Skype which also cuts out followed by the same thing over cell phone. It's a great example of how often the technology fails to live up to the hype.

[Stuugie]

I got my first personal computer doohickey in the early 90s, I think 93 or 94. I don't remember the specs because, like diafol, I had friends back then and I didn't really care about the specs. I know it had windows 3.1 though and a huge monitor with a small viewing screen. I remember the mid to late 90s when I first got onto the internets though, the good ol' 28.8K modem I got that first got me there. I was so amazed. My wife hated the wait times and never really got my excitement, or into computers for that matter, until about 2009. LoL, even now she gets impatient with load times over a couple seconds.

[expertmagician]

In college, I used punch cards. And my first real job involved converting a paper tape 110 baud speed to what the bank call "medium" sped (9600 baud) to the Federal reserve bank.

Radio Shack TRS-80's (Trash 80s) and Atari was also popular way back then.

[vmanes]

My first personally owned computer was also a Timex-Sinclair 1000 - with about all the add-ons I could add on. At the same time I was using Wang PCs at work and original IBM PCs (with both monochorme and color monitors attached) at the college. The mainframe lab had just converted from punchcard to online terminals when I started there, so I never punched cards. (Did a lot of paper tape in the Air Force)

[vegaseat]

In 1977 an engineering friend and I put together a MITS Altair computer. You had to use the front panel toggle switches to code in machine language. A few years later I progressed to Radio Shack's TRS-80 that used a cassette recorder for storage and you coded in BASIC. If I remember right, it had a "huge" 64k memory.

[expertmagician]

I doubt it was 64K ???
MMM, I see to remember my college computer which was the size of a large room (Xerox Sigma 6/7) had 128KB of core memory.
So I doubt that a Trash 80 had that much memory ???

[expertmagician]

I just check the original TRS-80 had 4K or memory and later models had 16K.

[almostbob]

I have a flashdrive with MSDOS 3.31, and several DOS versions of programs, 123, wordstar, just to play.
3 second boot and zero delay in loading programs, makes me wonder why we have wasted so much on bells and whistles
I'd be happy (almost) with a text UI
Linux dont load that fast

[expertmagician]

Flash drive ? Why not a 5.25" floppy disk ?
:-)
I think I have some of those old disks with Lotus 123 :-)
Maybe even Visicalc :-)

[almostbob]

Of course I still have the disks, and the pc, its in the basement, still works. The flash drive is so I can boot modern hardware to DOS

[expertmagician]

:-)

[almostbob]

forgot the link, get 5¼ floppy disks shippped in from floppydisk.com