Discussion on:

A trip down tech memory lane

Where are the descriptions?

it is a trip down memory lane...if you weren't there it wouldn't mean much..but saying that MS-DOS 3.2 was the best operating system ever

MS-DOS 3.30 was the best version of DOS, although actually some will probably claim 3.21 was really the best - 3.20 was buggy and nasty and quickly replaced by anyone with any common sense

MS-DOS may have been the first "standardised" OS for personal computing, however it most certainly wasn't the best. Microware OS-9 (No, NOT the Apple version) was way better in EVERY way but only really made any kind of mainstream machines on the Dragon 32.

I still have these manuals.

I see these are 1.44 disks. It was a big step above the 720 k disks

I was going to mention that there was not a picture of the old eight inch floppy disks, glad you mentioned it. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/8-inch_floppy_disk.jpg;
http://oldcomputers.net/floppydisks.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlsoldphotos/3056744195/

Who remembers drilling the corner of a normal low-density 720 3.5 disk to make it 1.44 ?

Cut a square into the other side of the floppy to double it

Oh yes, i definitely remember that. I've been doing that during the early 90s.

Resembled a hole punch. Much cleaner than drilling.

Just as 3.5" 720k discs were a big improvement over the 5.25" 360k floppies and I remember working on an Intel development system using 160k 8" floppies. That was before CDs had been invented and the 8086 had not yet seen the light of day. On the other hand, the keyboards were much better quality than the membrane offerings of today - and also much more expensive, but they never wore out either functionally or the lettering on the key tops.
I also remember downloading pictures from the internet in the DOS world when they arrived as a text file consisting of a stream of characters and you had to run them through a program to convert them back into pictures.
I remember when there were no video recorders, no mobile phones, and tape meant reel-to-reel, not cassettes. happy days!

Sorry, history? That was only yesterday!!!!

I guess I'm an idiot for not automatically knowing what all these items are or why they were selected for this trip down memory lane--but for those of us who arent so technologically adept would you please consider adding captions explaining what the items are and their significance? I'm truly interested in tech history--but right now these are just pretty pictures.

Ok--I AM an idiot! I wrote too soon and now I AM seeing captions with many of the pictures. Nothing like jumping the gun without having all the facts!

And disks for Doom, Duke Nukem 3-D, Dos 3.3... a lot of stuff from the mid-1980s too. I don't have my Commodore 64, TRS-80 Model 1, or Altair 8800, though... should have kept those. Thanks for sharing these pictures.

I have both. Neither are much good in this day of WWW.

I still think MS took Amigas idea. Amiga had drawer icons and the graphics where fabulous
in the 80's!!

I recall some computer magazines in the 80s that included bar code like data that could be scanned into your computer. I never had anything fancy enough to scan it in, but I did spend long hours typing in pokes and peeks from magazines!

In an age when the choices are one of three operating systems, in machines differentiated, for the most part, by shape and colour, it's hard not to get wistful about the 'old' days. I have the C64 cyan and blue main screen as my wallpaper on my Win7 notebook. A person's allegiance to any one of the older machines is usually defined by what they first started using. Entire online camps are devoted to the machines of those days; Timex Sinclair, Commodore Vic20 & C=64, Amiga, TRS-80, CoCo, Atari 400/800, Apple II. Some folks even had the Adam computer that attached to their Colecovision. Measured against our current expectations of technology, the old machines are utter dinosaurs, but in their time, what they were capable of was nothing short of mind-blowing. For those of us over the age of 35, that technology is the reason we're employed in IT now. it is only right that we honour our past by realizing that those early days set us on the career paths we're now on.

First machine I worked on had 16k ram and loaded from a cassette or by typing in programs. I still have a working Timex Sinclair.

I have an A4000T which has run non-stop (except for fan, harddrive and P/S replacements) for 15 years now. It wakes me up for work, reminds me to take my meds, waters the apple tree, controls block heater outlet, lights, etc.
it doesn't die, crash, get dropped, broken, stolen, lose memory, like all the portable stuff these days. But I do have to be at home

Save for a few items, I think most of these things can still be found in either my or my parent's basement. I suspect a call to 1-800-dump is long overdue..... yikes!

We are working on the Amiga 4000 still on our TV station. Who does not believe can check on page : http://www.facebook.com/pages/TV-Zivinice/147807568656422

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=148084031962109&set=a.148079158629263.25377.147807568656422&type=3&theater

At least clean the computers before taking pictures on your room's carpet.

It has always surprised me that some hardware manufacturer hasn't made a modern clone of the Radio Shack TRS model 100. They were a fine tool.

I cant believe someone has that stuff - makes me feel like im not a pack rat at all.

Hey you'd be surprised that those that have kept this crap are those that rebuild our civilization after 12/21/12 LOL. I wager these dinosaurs are far more sturdy, bootable and useable after 20 +/- years then any modern tower, laptop or server 20 years from now. Especially if you consider the infrastructure needed to power, use and network these devices. Go back in time to the post industrial age right after Electricity and Telephones and TVs were (almost) common place, like 1950's and even earlier and you can use all these machines again. Most of our modern equipment needs modern infrastructure to even have a moniker of functionality beyond playing Solitaire for a couple of hours. We can more easily rebuild to post industrial era than we can to this modern era. With these things still around we can surpass what greatness we currently have after a rebuild than we could if all we had were our new fangled contraptions.

MS-Dos 3.2, Star, DBase, bbbs' on a 300 baud modem, Lotus.....buying gray market parts to build a PC from some guy in a garage...I think his name was Dell or something like that......ah it is so nice to remember but this new stuff is so much better...well the hardware...give me the old Lotus any day. And at least with the old DOS you knew where you were and where to find things

How do I get copies of that cool software and the new hardware. My old Apple IIe has just about had the bird!

Ha, I still have the Intel Pentium overdrive promotional shirt I received when the overdrives were released. Plus a handful of keychains with pentium processor cores embedded in plastic.

My first home computer looked a bit like the Minicom in one of the pictures (purchased September 1983, I think, and cost $870 AU with a 6502 processor, a Z80 processor, 64K RAM and 7 expansion slots) . 5 inch external drive - $425; which needed the disk controller card in one of the expansion slots - $85. A 20MHz, 12inch green screen monitor - $273; and card $85 in another slot. A Micom 80 column dot-matrix printer - $550, plus printer interface card took another slot - $85. Micromint Microvox speech synthesizer - $499; and voice card $258; and software $65. To upgrade the memory to 128K needed another slot and cost $395 for the card and $269 for the chips.

If feeling rich you could buy the all-in-one Micom MC-1000 with 6502 processor, 64K RAM, 5 expansion slots, 7inch hi-res green screen, 2x 7inch disk drives, and fold-down 52-key keyboard with 12-key numeric keypad. It was fitted with a 10Amp, 240 Volt power supply. All this for $1995.

My first work computer was a standalone desktop machine with 256K memory. It ran the TurboDOS multi-user operating system and had 32 ports for connecting 16 keyboards and 16 screens in a star configuration. We had BASIC for the programmer, WordStar and SuperCalc for the users and a printer.

Aaaah great times. Although I can't recall producing anything genuinely useful out of it., we did have fun running the 32 cables (max length 250 feet) through the building and between floors.

Oh... Those were the days. HP built the worlds best Test Equipment (now Agilent Technologies) and some pretty capable computers to automate the taking of readings. They weren't drowning in a sea of incompetent management and deciding if they were in or out of the computer business. Life was so much simpler DOS 2.11 Yum yum.

I wrote my first disk editor in 1984-5 in assembler. Norton Utilities used int 24 and 25, if I remember correctly. However, if the FAT or Dir had a problem the Utilities were as useless as teats on a boar hog. I had to use int 13. It was direct read/write. I did have to modify the screen writing routines when CGA color came out. Used it many times in my company, friends companies, to directly modify a disk (floppy and hard disk). Ahh, the simple life.

had a few giggles--worked on several of those fine old machines--at the time each was a marvelous step into the future--we had no idea how far we would progress in relatively a short time

Ahh. Even further back, long before MSDOS. I remember learning to program IBM collaters, keypunch, etc while in the military in 1963. The days of true plug and play. Picture a PBX board (Private Board eXchange). Plug and unplug jacks to modify operation.

We had a guy that wrote machine language for an early IBM before we got the 360 for Cobol compiler and the 1800 for Fortran compiler. He seemed to think in machine language.
I wrote many Fortran 4 programs during the 60s and early 70s. Talking about sense light switches etc. Having to write and call sub routines and sub programs because the small memory wouldn't allow the running of a complete program without storing results while the next part is calculated. I could hold a punch card up to the light and read the line of code.