New Operating System

[MC Rider]

My first computer I got in I think 1991 used from my parents. It was a Leading Edge Model D, running some old flavor of DOS. Not sure if it ever got Win 3.1 or not.

 

[ncbill]

I have a plug-in card for the Apple //e that uses Compact Flash cards in 'true IDE' mode.

You can load a lot of 32MB (volume limit) ProDOS volumes on one CF card.

Or your GS-OS volumes (on an Apple ][GS)

Here's a version:

https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/reactivemicro-driveturbo-for-iie-and-iigs/

There's also one that uses a SD card to store disk images:

http://www.applelogic.org/PseudoDisk2.html

 

[braumeister]

The first computer I ever dealt with had many tens of thousands of vacuum tubes and a large maintenance crew that mostly just walked around replacing them, so that tells you something about how far we've come.

 

[aja8888]

I still have my slide rule which I used to get me through mechanical engineering college. There were no "ones and zeros" around back then, at least that were available to us engineering folks.

My first encounter with electronic number machines was Fortran I, II, & III using punch card programming. I still have a few stacks of punch cards for solving problems packed away in the attic in a box.

 

[GalaxyBoy]

Sheer luxury!

Cue the Yorkshiremen.

Dear old dad told me when he started in computers in the mid 1960s the mainframe that occupied an entire floor had 4k of RAM and they had to assemble the code by hand into hexadecimal. Extra credit if you know what assembly code is.

 

[Jerry1]

I never got into computers like some here apparently did, but I was and early adopter and maintained a computer since they came available. My main goal was to always have something that was as good as what was at work so that I could learn at home and be proficient at work.

My first computer was a TI-99. You could write programs in Basic and play games. You had to load/save programs onto a cassette tape. My next computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 (Trash 80). It had 640K of memory and dual 5-1/2” floppies. One for the program and one for your data. My first Apple was an Apple IIC. I used that to get me through college. I think the program was something like Apple Works? It had a spreadsheet and word processor. Coupled with a dot matrix printer and I did alright. After that, it was basically whatever work had, I had - so primarily DOS/Windows machines. Got pretty good using Lotus but never a power user. I’ve always maintained that programming (even programming spreadsheets), is more of an art than a science and I just never had a knack for it.

That amazing thing is the cost. I remember that my TRS-80 was $1,200 in the early 80’s. When you see what you can get for under $1,000 today it’s hard to believe how far things have come, especially if you adjust for the value of the dollar. That TRS-80 was probably equivalent of $2,500 in todays dollars.

 

[ncbill]

Cue the Yorkshiremen.

Dear old dad told me when he started in computers in the mid 1960s the mainframe that occupied an entire floor had 4k of RAM and they had to assemble the code by hand into hexadecimal. Extra credit if you know what assembly code is.

I remember that back in college...'solid state' physics lab...built out own logic probes using a sharp sewing needle..."jump not zero"

 

[YB88]

There's always going to be someone who can "one up" you on these sort of memory romps. I got started using cassette tapes to back up my Apple II+ and was excited to later get a 5-1/4 floppy drive, and eventually a second drive. But when I went to work in the software field, there were still 8" drives around. If you started programming using 2nd generation operating systems and paper punch tape and cards, you can talk to people who predated all of that and so on. Dial-up world pre-internet still had some surprising amount of 'connection'.

Working in software it was interesting to go from PC to PC in fairly rapid order. First one was the classic IBM PC with dual floppies, then quickly got a replacement with a whopping 10 MG hard drive --- I could (and had to) dual boot DOS and Xenix with that guy. Then the AT, then ... etc. Overclocking was typical, and at that point there was no central IT department that wanted to somehow control what I had on my PC. Minicomputer to develop then port to DOS to test, using fairly primitive debugging tools, coding in assembler and some C (pre-object oriented programming days). Lean development teams, a lot less meetings ... good (if crazy busy) times.

 

[rk911]

IIRC Win 95 was the first MS OS that included a TCP/IP stack - might even have been added as an update. Mosaic was one of the first graphical browsers, developed at the Univ of Illinois by Marc Andreesen, I think. He then moved on to Netscape fame. I'm surprised your Win95 had Mosaic, they must have added Internet Explorer later on in an update.

did Mosaic morph into Netscape or am I misremembering?

 

[skyking1]

Not at all a one-up, just an example where we are still using MS-DOS 6.22 .
I have installed and maintained several digital phone systems that have a DOS based Voicemail. They were very full featured voicemail systems that got the job done. It comes on a dozen floppies you load on top of the Dos floppies.
I'm out of the business but the last one is still running and has a couple of cloned spare hard drives to keep it that way.
i always wanted to cobble together remote management but that was a tall hurdle with 6.22
It really was not necessary as you could prompt your way through just about anything using the phone keypad.

 

[donheff]

did Mosaic morph into Netscape or am I misremembering?

As I remember it Andreeden was the primary developer of Mosaic at Illinois. After graduation he joined Jim Clark and they released the Mosaic Netscape browser which they later named just Netscape. I assume it was initially almost all an offshoot of the Mosaic code base. Someone mentioned above that the original MS Internet explorer also built on Mosaic.

 

[RobbieB]

I remember punch cards and the mondo large keypunch machines. Freshman year, 1973, U of M (go blue) Fortran IV.

But I didn't save the cards.

 

[rk911]

And, I'm using vDOS to still run some old DOS programs. vDOS is a DOS environment emulator for Windows. My laptop is W10 64 bit OS. Under W7 16 bit OS, most DOS .exe's still ran on their own, but the jump to W10 and 64 bit caused many, many problems with DOS programs.

On this post, I should have changed my signature to:

CD \
EXIT
Latexman

i recall dumping MS-DOS for L-DOS. i want to say that was a Logical Systems product and I think it overlayed MS-DOS. L-DOS was a lot more user friendly. i taught myself BASIC on the ratshack PCs which came in handy when I was managing our 9-1-1 center's first CAD (computer aided dispatch) which was written in Business BASIC.

 

[Jerry1]

I remember punch cards and the mondo large keypunch machines. Freshman year, 1973, U of M (go blue) Fortran IV.

But I didn't save the cards.

I didn’t hit college until 1980 but I did have a Fortran class with punch cards. I think it was one of the last times that class was offered given the change over to PC’s.

 

[steelyman]

As I remember it Andreeden was the primary developer of Mosaic at Illinois. After graduation he joined Jim Clark and they released the Mosaic Netscape browser which they later named just Netscape. I assume it was initially almost all an offshoot of the Mosaic code base. Someone mentioned above that the original MS Internet explorer also built on Mosaic.

Netscape (and Jim Clark) hired essentially the entire Mosaic group from NCSA. While Marc Andreessen is most visible (still), others did a lot of development, especially Eric Bina and Rob McCool for the browser and httpd server. These guys did well. I think their original name for the browser was “Mozilla”.

I’m from Illinois and remember all that. The university established a technology management office at the time (to oversee tech transfer from public to private sector).

The real creator of the World Wide Web is Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. Mosaic helped popularize it greatly.

[ADDED] There were some undocumented command line options for the UNIX version (at least) of Mosaic that were pretty funny and caused unusual behavior. Those crazy kids…

 

[Davidhelp]

Computers get faster and Windows gets slower.
Cartoon:

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/115/179/459/original/595e9da119b5daa5.jpeg

 

[Marita40]

My computer died a couple weeks ago. I ordered a new one from HP directly, and while waiting several weeks for it bought a little under $170 Chromebook to tide me over. There was a slight learning curve for Chrome but it works great and actually meets most of my computer needs. It will be good to have for travel and backup.


I recall learning to use a computer in the "computer lab" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the mid 80s as I was working on my dissertation. For the longest time I could not, for some reason, compose anything directly on the computer. I had to write it out long hand and then transfer it. I don't remember buying my first computer but I do remember a huge computer desk in my apartment as well as the HUGE computer manuals stacking one shelf that were used quite frequently.

 

[jollystomper]

I still have the receipt for my first computer purchase. The "original" IBM PC, purchased in 1983 for $4,567 (hardware and software). financed it at 12% interest.

One $375 item on the invoice: the UCSD p-System operating system. Hoo boy a waste of money. Though it was a very portable operating system for the time, other than writing Pascal there was not much else one could with it. Applications were never really developed for it, so it never caught on. Then TUrbo Pascal came along so why even use Pascal on UCSD. PC-DOS, on the other hand, as $20, and the rest is history .

 

[DaveLeeNC]

I remember I got so exciting going from 300 baud rate to 9600 baud rate - At megacorp, we came up with and idea to combine 2 modem connections so that we could have 9600 bits x2 (it later called bonding). As I recall we was using windows 3.0 with netware ipx (tcp is not in fashion yet)

Now I have 1gbs up/down from fiber.

I have a geeky friend who framed what he called the "most useless piece of functional computer hardware on the planet". It was a internal, micro-channel, 300 baud modem.

dave

 

[Car-Guy]

^^^^^
Reminds me of the old joke UNIX users would tell...

Microsoft based computers are like air conditioners. They work fine until you start opening windows.

 

[rk911]

I have a geeky friend who framed what he called the "most useless piece of functional computer hardware on the planet". It was a internal, micro-channel, 300 baud modem.

dave

ahh, the days of the online BBS (bulletin board system). 300-baud ASCII. it seemed like a miracle at the time.

at the 9-1-1 call center we acquired two, Basic-4 mini-computers with 75-MB hard platters. the 'A' system was "live". all of the data regarding the 9-1-1 call, caller, unit assigned, times (call received, dispatched, unit arrival, unit clear and others) plus disposition were all memorialized in the 'A' system. a bit less than one thousand 9-1-1 calls daily.

The 'B' system was not a backup but used for data crunching. at 0200 each morning a data connection between 'A' and 'B' was established through an IMLC board (intelligent multi-line connection) using an IBM protocol (can't recall which). All of the data from the previous 24-hrs (00:00:00-hrs thru 23:59:59-hrs) was transferred from the 'A' system. The 'B' system would then generate basic reports for each of our 27-agencies that were made available by 0800 that morning. Each agency would dial-in on a 1200-baud connection and, using XMODEM protocol, would download their data. We had one-dial in line. We eventually upgraded to two 2400-baud and then 9600-baud Hayes modems. This was all in the late 80's-early 90's.

I spent many a night on the phone with my staff at the center when the IMLC transfer failed to kick off or would hang up in mid transfer.

 

[F.I.R.E User]

We still use DOS.

BBS was the social media of 80s and 90s. Z-Modem protocol was the most stable. All others had too many packet loss.

Win 95 was the first new GUI from previous Win and still to this day in Win 11 it has kept some of the looks of Win 95.

 

[latexman]

I remember punch cards and the mondo large keypunch machines. Freshman year, 1973, U of M (go blue) Fortran IV.

But I didn't save the cards.

Ditto. Freshman year, 1975, NCSU (Go Pack), ChE 205 (the notorius ChE "weeder" class with a Fortran IV lab).

The bright side that semester was, we got a grad student's TSO account and password and we played "Star Trek" every chance we got!

Anyone else play Star Trek off a mainframe?

 

[scrabbler1]

Ditto. Freshman year, 1975, NCSU (Go Pack), ChE 205 (the notorius ChE "weeder" class with a Fortran IV lab).

The bright side that semester was, we got a grad student's TSO account and password and we played "Star Trek" every chance we got!

Anyone else play Star Trek off a mainframe?

It wasn't off a mainframe, but I remember playing a Star Trek game from a friend's Atari home system circa 1979-1980. It was written in Basic, and my friend changed a few lines of code to make the game more difficult. I think it got loaded from a cassette tape, a common method when floppy disk drives were not yet standard.

The main (and fun) part of the game was when the Enterprise entered a grid (a sector in a galaxy) with multiple Klingon ships to battle against. Am I describing the game you mentioned?

 

[jim584672]

We still use DOS.

Really? If you don't mind me asking, what for?