Cyber Nostalgia

Here is a link to remind you of the old days of PC's. How many of the ATS members remembering using these things???

www.cyberden.com...

Golden days, j-flieger.

It's like old LP (album) covers: CD's will never come close.
Working in DOS and parking the hard disk: it all comes back.
And I'm not sure that my Pentium-4 whizzo-box is any less frustrating!

One day, whole art galleries will be devoted to Betamax tapes and 8-track cartridges!

Yes - on some of those LP's, the art work was better than the music. Those were the days when a 20 Meg (yes, Meg kiddies) was considered extreme. The really advanced guys had 1200 Baud modems. Yours truly once used acoustic modems (those were the kind you plugged a telephone into the side). Also used punched cards and PAPER TAPE. Dropping a box of cards was always fun. I even used the ASR-13 (even before the ASR-33) teletype as a keyboard.

well i've still got my LP collection, going back to the 80'sand some 45's as well

I had a Betamax video and still have some tape's, although there no good now, found them while packing last week (moving house next weekend) its amazing what you find when you move?



blackwidow

I think there are still a few places that can still convert Betamax videos (but it is pricey). And Estagon, yours truly never had the problems with DOS based systems that you can have know. If you had a system crash then, you could usually figure out what the problem was. Now you get mysterious crashes for no apparent reason. If you are really interested, I could tell you about the first computer, I worked on.

I remember my ZX-81 and my Commodore64 and how I was happy when I bought my first CD-ROM 1X for my antediluvian first computer.

Got me to thinking, and rummaging in the closet... I still have my old Timex Sinclair... was the hot thing at the time, complete with the extended 16K (yes, kilobites) memory module.

I'd love to read about your first computer, j-flieger.
And you're absolutely right about about version 6 and earlier DOS.
When it was there, and highly visible it was lot more friendly than it became when Windows tried to hide it.

I wanted a Commodore 64 -but the price then was outrageous: 350 pounds plus tax! That was almost $1,000 US then (2.8 exchange rate) and a lot of money.

So, I ended up with an amazing old thing called an ORIC 1: it had 16K RAM!
And, as the 1.44 floppy becomes history, the first Sony disk drives had just over 200K.

And -as I was but a mini-Estragon then, an Atari for games!

I was the geek with 5 1/4 inch floppies, (they really WERE floppy too). I remember being jealous of people with 3 1/2 inch floppies

I found some recently and they had mould on them!

[Edited on 19-5-2003 by Netchicken]

Originally posted by Estragon
So, I ended up with an amazing old thing called an ORIC 1: it had 16K RAM!

16 K ? WOAW, you was a rich man. My ZX-81 had just 1K. Until I bought the 16K module.

When I see my new computer and think about our old former pc's ( commodore, zx-81 and so on ), I'm not sure if we ever had them or if we just have dreamed that we had them.

LMAO I had a Timex Sinclair and a Commodore 64! Seems like eons ago.

You have never lived until you used punched paper tape (or mylar). The mylar tape was better. One neat thing you could do with your old program tapes was to hold the tape sideways and pull out the center. The tape would spiral out in a most satisfying fashion. The first computer I ever worked with was plumbed. That is right, it was plumbed (water cooled). The Univac 1212 was designed for ship board use (likes of water). It had 32K 30 bit words and cost $400,000. Back in the old days, printers used to cost more than what people are now paying for PC's.

I know just what you mean about was it a dream, U-P. It's much the same with one's first cars.

I remember seeing an Altair -which I think was the first in the days before homecomputers turned into PC's.

And I remember drooling when I saw (only in "Popular Electronics", of course) the Apple Macintosh! A GUI, a Mouse, MacPaint,MacWrite!! the Motorola 68000 !!!
$US 2,500 in 1984!