Discussion on:

10 IT relics I really miss

The Core memory allowed you to switch off the "computer" at any time and switch on the power again later and the program will continue where it stopped.
So a lecturer tried to pull rank on us and dominate the system over lunchtimes - so - Write a short routine to "wait 5000" and then loop ringing the bell with no exist on the Teletype. Start the program and drop the power at the wall.
Lecturer rocks up, settles in, finds the power off and then loses control with the bell ringing incessantly only stoppable by switching the power off again, A few times and then we had the Varian back for our own use over lunch.

Oh yeah and a stack of cards blowing across the campus on a rainy day. I still have one or two around somewhere. I should dig them out and show them to my nephews. They're only 10 and 12 and have never seen anything like it.

those were fun days - luckily, we had a card sorter, so as long as you were punching a card number in the last 8 columns (I was doing FORTRAN at the time), it would sort the cards for you (although it took a few passes if you had lots of cards...).
The good old days!

12 boxes of cards for the program and eight for the data. Every time we had a change in one of the major data sets, it took several runs of the system to get the downstream stuff come out right - and I usually had to recalculate and punch about another box full of cards to sort it all out.

I was using a 35k memory writer to fill out punch card sheets so the operator at state headquarters could manually input the order. Talk about ironic! The memory writer was light years ahead of the stupid punch card machine they were still using! But then, the Army always was slow as molasses to upgrade tech in those days.

and Programming on them in COBOL, and RPG2. Then running the data cards through a card reader or mounting a tape reel.

Raised floors and special access to get into the computer room... reading out registers.... Those were the good old days.

We had a sysop in college who would occasionally decide he didn't want to run any more jobs that night. Just to make his point, he would drop whole boxes of cards, at 1000 to the box.

Handing in your pack/box of cards only to have the reader spit them out in a huge arc all over the floor!!! Next to flying type from the steel-belt line printer, this was not fun! The fun came in writing programs so the line printer would "sing" Mary Had a LIttle Lamb" or maybe getting back 2 boxes of cards from 20 card input. Oh, the good ole days, eh? When computers were in glass rooms and run by men in white coats. And the only thing you got was printouts. Then you filled in form fields so the experts could punch them in on consoles larger than Apollo craft boards. Where did Fortran and Cobol go?

As a way to present programs in magazines but bipass the tedious typing, a company came out with a device that scanned a type of bar code that could store the binary program file. The scanner was stored in a plastic tube-like device and ran along a track to scan the image. It worked very well but while the image stored more than a source code listing, program sizes grew exponentially and the device had poor demand.

I agree with you, the keyboard that came with my HP desktop last year, actually a mini-tower, was so flimsy I refused to use it. Some of the others, like BBSes and shareware subscriptions, the reason they are not available anymore is because you and all of the rest of us abandoned them and if someone tried to bring one back you would abandon it again very quickly. I think what you really long for is the simpler time of the early days when the world was young and so were you.

I still use my 1982 IBM keyboard (stamped on the bottom). It's bullet-proof. 30 years and still working fine. I got a PS2-USB adapter so I can continue using it with my laptop (when I'm at my desk only -- too heavy to travel with). No Windows key, though, and the Putty color shows the grime

She went away for a few weeks, so I took her old 25 Mhz 386 desktop apart and upgraded it to a Pentium 166 Mhz system for her because she was complaining how slow it was. Simple job, take out boards, put in new motherboard with decent on-board graphics, new hard drive as boot drive and keep the old one as a data drive, reload DOS and Win 3.11 as she didn't want Win 98 SE at the time. Check everything out and it works perfectly, just quicker and looks better - - - except I forgot to check out her favourite game and very Early version of Tetris.

She comes home late at night and decides to relax in front of the computer playing Tetris for a a while before going to bed. Household gets woken up by the sound of her shout of "What the F**k!"

Later investigation showed the Tetris was the old one that was locked into the system clock, so a whole game now played out in about 1.5 seconds due to her lack of player input. Game starts, colours flash down screen, game ends with low score.

I laughed for weeks over that, and all unintentional.

But yeah, to be able to use USB devices I have to the the bloody tower sitting up on the corner of the desk as my back don't let me crawl under the desk umpteen times a day, and as for DVDs and CD - forget it when it's under the desk. Only thing worse than a tower, the micro thin desktops some of the vendors use, can't put decent expansion cards in at all.

Same thing happened with this game after we upgraded our Compaq 386 with a Compaq P4000 at work. Could never get it to slow down enough to enjoy the different bombs and projectiles you could choose from. It was over in the blink of an eye.

I loved that game! Funky bombs, rollers, napalm for the win! This game united my family through devilish competition. I was around 10 and my college age sister wouldn't pay a bit of attention to me... until I pulled up this game. Then it was ON!

I lament having relinquished my compuserve email account... my house is in the very first test market for internet over cable, I was spoiled with speed early on. It was ever upward, history be damned, and I abandoned compuserve when I discovered better weather services available on the internets.

a free Compuserve subscription came with some software I got, and I was very excited at the thought of getting all that data over a 1-800 number! I couldn't wait to throw away all my encyclopedias! HA! That and bill board services were the true beginning of the internet in my opinion.

It evolved a bit very quickly from the outset, and ended up a smorgasboard of services that somewhat resembled the internet that followed.

I remember unwrapping my brand new Tandy 286 laptop and thinking the same thing: all the libraries of the world are now obsolete! The universe of knowledge at my fingertips! And that's become true, so long as your universe revolves around cats.

Do you remember those shrink-wrapped mags with included a CD loaded with freeware, shareware and demos? With internet, I haven't been to any magazine shop for decades.

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Used to love getting that mag (I don't remember what it was called before they changed the name) but there was some pretty sweet demos I had fun trying out. But most of it was coaster-ware.

I think I may still have all the issues somewhere in the attic.

I miss the manuals in three ring binders. DOS and Lotus came in cloth covered binders with dust jackets. It explained how to do things, it was a ready reference to such things as a list of every command with all the switches for each command. Now, if you want to find how to do something in Windows 7, you have to have access to the Internet. Does not work well when you are having an Internet problem. Now a $300 software package comes with a 20 page pamphlet. BTW, I still have the cloth dust covers; I use them to store the pamphlets.

prepared to pay for them. I got copies of most stuff hanging around somewhere.

It lifts the monitor to a more engonomical position. A lot of people are using manuals or whatever to try and lif their monitors to an acceptable height.

It also seems that more and more flat monitors are not height adjustable anymore - as if we have desktop cases.

Oh jeez, where do I start?
- 80 column Hollerith cards (punch cards, fed into an 029 card reader
to load source code etc. into the computer - circa early 70s)
- 5 1/4 inch floppy disks (140K capacity), which preceded the 3 1/2 inch
disks containing all of 1.2MB
- a 16K memory upgrade that cost $50 to add to my Apple II
- two IBM 360s powering a large international banks applications

Yeah, I miss the days when booting your computer took 15 seconds, and the C prompt was ready and waiting for your commands before you could take a sip of coffee.

People used to think you were a genius just for getting them printing, if you had memorized a few Worperfect tricks or Lotus1-2-3 formulas nowadays user's expectations are so high and they are so hard to impress . . .

When you used to get a real manuals that actually had usefull information.

Find any regular keyboard made these days that lasts almost 10-years, much less 20......

I love the sound of the Buckling-Spring keys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard). Sure it is noisy, but it is solid, reliable (doesn't have that annoying Windows key).

I use the same on my main desktop unit. Love the sound, and you know if the character typed or not from the feel and sound. I'm not sure the vintage of mine, I've had it since at least 1997.

I still use an IBM keyboard, without the Windows keys! But it is noisy, every time I use a letter, special characters or numbers can be heard from the other room. But I can clean and remove every single button and put it back, once cleaned. I can use alcohol or other kinds of detergents without fear to damage it. The spiralled cable, very long, terminates with PS2, so I can use with pc that still use it. In the near future they will use USB, and I hope they will provide some adapter as they used for AT connections. I am not interested in gaming, buit I cannot find another keyboard that can match with my old IBM for speed and precision!

The keyboard maker started with North???. It claim to fame was the functions keys across the top and other double row of function keys off to the left with number key. The left function keys were handy with WordPerfect 5.1. No windows key, Windows was other 8 years down the row. I use this keyboard with my 286 & home build 486 (first build computer for me). I use Windows 1 on 286, it was free copy for testing the system for my company.

IIRC...

You were close! The old Norhgate computers came with the extra function keys which were programmable. I think the actual keyboard was made by Keytronics.

I remember as a kid, using a hex editor to alter C64 games.
Not sure if the term, 'hacker' was invented then but you sure felt like you were doing something cool!

Back in the day, monitors were expensive thin clients, so companies would set up rooms with a pool of shared monitors where you would go to work on your software if one was available. If not, you had to sign up for a time slot and wait for a free monitor. I remember the day when I thought I was in heaven - each software engineer got a monitor (Digital VT100) installed at their desk. You kids don't know how good you have it today!