how about a meme generator thread...

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Y'all should ask @bracconiere about that. He was with one of the original covered wagon trains that went west. THAT was life changing.

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I'll bet 90% don't get this one. Although given the probable average age of the forum, I could be wrong.

I still have a handful. They were needed for installing RAID drivers via "a:\ drives" up until only a decade or so. I haven't thought about them for a while, I suppose I no longer need them. They are with a spindle of like 50 blank CD's and DVD's that became useless when thumb drives took over and everything gained a USB port.

My first computer was a Zeos 8086, pulled from a dumpster at my college, It wasn't much, the 486's were coming out, but it played Sims and so I kept it a while.
 
What was the b:\ drive for?

B:\ was for a 2nd floppy, that's how you loaded and played games or ran work programs.
C:\ for the hard drive, once they started showing up.
D:\ for CD drives, because no one had 2 hard drives, that was an insane idea. but by the time we got there it was easy enough to start naming things what you wanted. Although you still never tried to reassign something like an extra hard drive to A or C, you were in for a world of hurt if you did that from all the things that used those letters as defaults.
 
Once, in high school, I found an old machine, burned a bunch of OpenSuSE .iso CDs, installed it, and tried to play around with it at school.

I'm so glad that LiveCDs came along soon after. 7 CDs to install an OS, and it was sight unseen for me.
 
Or when everything is right, and it was only chaff hanging on that one card that caused my mental breakdown! 🤬
Yeah. People actually didn't realize that "hanging chads" existed before CY2000. Those cards punch machines, in addition to being a monstrosity needing frequent cleaning and dusting, also often produced faulty cards that would clog the compiler loader. Contrast that 800# hunk of iron that you'd have to wait in line sometimes an hour of more just to get access to compared with the 10 oz. Bluetooth keyboard I'm typing on right now, not to mention the instantaneous feedback I get from the countless programs and apps I have instant access to on a computing device that sits on my desktop rather than occupying a 2,000 square foot office space. It's truly a marvel we take totally for granted on a daily basis.
 
Ya know - ink jets are still dot matrix.

Brew on :mug:
Good point! (I was going to say, "Spot on," but decided that one pun was better than two).
I did some work on an 1130 in Fortran II. Anyone else remember the single 14" hard platter, hard case, removable disk cartridges?

Also did some hand assembly coding, and toggle switch input, on a PDP-8.

I did work for many years at the home of the 1401, but never used one.

Brew on :mug:

Ooooh. Remember the early 'portable' computers? You know, the ones that were literally about the size of a full sized Sampsonite suitcase? (Kaypro, maybe?). I remember getting on a small commuter airline flight one day, circa 1980, with some random business traveler having to lug that thing down the airport ramp to drop it off by the airplane's baggage door. The ramper heaved it into the the baggage area on top of a bunch of other unrestrained cargo and bags. Always wondered if the DATA arrived intact, even if the 'computer' did.

Today we all have laptops, in addition to having much more processing power in our mobile phones than a thousand of those early portable computers.
 
Good point! (I was going to say, "Spot on," but decided that one pun was better than two).


Ooooh. Remember the early 'portable' computers? You know, the ones that were literally about the size of a full sized Sampsonite suitcase? (Kaypro, maybe?). I remember getting on a small commuter airline flight one day, circa 1980, with some random business traveler having to lug that thing down the airport ramp to drop it off by the airplane's baggage door. The ramper heaved it into the the baggage area on top of a bunch of other unrestrained cargo and bags. Always wondered if the DATA arrived intact, even if the 'computer' did.

Today we all have laptops, in addition to having much more processing power in our mobile phones than a thousand of those early portable computers.
The early portables were more correctly referred to as "luggable." Several history pages on the web - here's one. Osborne was the first, and Compaq had the first IBM PC compatible.

Brew on :mug:
 
The early portables were more correctly referred to as "luggable." Several history pages on the web - here's one. Osborne was the first, and Compaq had the first IBM PC compatible.

Brew on :mug:

"Luggables". Yeah, that's the ticket. Amazing.

And thanks for the link, that sent me down ANOTHER bottomless rabbit hole! (No, really. It was a cool stroll down memory lane, though one that also consumed way too much of a fine Sunday afternoon ;) ).
 
I'm younger than your sons and I very clearly remember using diskettes.

I think my cousin got an old computer from school that had edutainment games on 8" floppys. School didn't get rid of all of them, though, because I'm pretty sure that we had a couple of those green screen machines in the classroom, while the good Macs with Number Munchers and a newer version of Oregon Trail were in the computer lab, and we didn't get to play those games until after a few rounds of Mavis Beacon.

My family's first computer, a Win98 machine, had a CD drive, and an even newer version of Oregon Trail. It didn't have a CD burner, though, and I don't know if USB drives caught on until we got an XP machine (I can't remember if my first USB drive was 16 or 64 MBs, but I know it had trouble with PowerPoint presentations). I very clearly remember taking word processing documents to school on floppys, and helping dad swap out disks as he backed up his Quicken files.

Those were some days. The world will never be like that again.

I had a computer class in college where the professor told us that he wasn't going to require a textbook, and we should instead spend that money on a flash drive, since they were going to be the next big thing. I spent about $50 on a 256 MB drive instead of $80 for the 512, because who really needs 512 MB of storage anyway?
 
I had a computer class in college where the professor told us that he wasn't going to require a textbook, and we should instead spend that money on a flash drive, since they were going to be the next big thing. I spent about $50 on a 256 MB drive instead of $80 for the 512, because who really needs 512 MB of storage anyway?

Weren't those 8" floppies about 150KB? Don't get me started on those extravagant 1.4MB floppy disks when you could get all the data you'd ever need on a 720KB diskette. (...said the guy with 16GB of addressable memory, 5TB of internal storage, and two 2TB storage capacity each separate external drives).
 
May you live long enough to think yer current storage is but a percent, or two, of what ya "really" needed. Heh.
 
Our first computer was a Texas Instruments Ti-99. It used a cassette tape player for programs, and had a slot for game cartridges; my mom played Parsec for HOURS on that thing. And I remember getting BYTE magazine, and spending hours typing the basic programs they would have every month. In my house right now I have four laptops (sometimes five if I bring the work one home), three tablets, one all-in-one PC, and of course the ubiquitous phones the spousal unit and I cannot be parted from. It amazes me how far technology has come in just the 40 years since we had that old Ti99.

And, Bill Gates (slight mis-)quote: "64k should be enough memory for anybody."
 
Our first computer was a Texas Instruments Ti-99. It used a cassette tape player for programs, and had a slot for game cartridges; my mom played Parsec for HOURS on that thing. And I remember getting BYTE magazine, and spending hours typing the basic programs they would have every month. In my house right now I have four laptops (sometimes five if I bring the work one home), three tablets, one all-in-one PC, and of course the ubiquitous phones the spousal unit and I cannot be parted from. It amazes me how far technology has come in just the 40 years since we had that old Ti99.

And, Bill Gates (slight mis-)quote: "64k should be enough memory for anybody."

I remember all of that. I remember ENTER magazine with the BASIC computer programs that actually worked, and how long it took to type them in before I knew how to type. And I remember the article they had on the first Dune film. Games on metallic tape cassette. Yep, those were the days.
 
so-confused.jpg


Is this a meme thread, or just a discussion of old computer tech?

I never dealt with punch cards, but I had bought a 64mb SCSI drive that weighed close to 20 lbs in one of my 1st computer builds for about $85. If you told me then that I would able to hold 256 gb on the tip of my finger (for $20), I would have simply asked you to pass me some of whatever it was you were on.
Amazing where technology is going. Can't wait to see what we have in 10 more years?
 
Operative descriptor: "teenage daughter".
My forty+ year old sons barely remember diskettes and I'm nearly certain none of them actually handled one ;)

Cheers!

I'm 38 and I very much remember diskettes, both the 5.25 and 3.5 ones. We had the Radioshack TRS 80 of some sort. No cassette, but two floppy disk drives.

My dad got me a ZIP drive for Christmas while I was in college. Still one of my best presents ever received. He even splurged and got me the 250 mb one.
 
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Is this a meme thread, or just a discussion of old computer tech?

I never dealt with punch cards, but I had bought a 64mb SCSI drive that weighed close to 20 lbs in one of my 1st computer builds for about $85. If you told me then that I would able to hold 256 gb on the tip of my finger (for $20), I would have simply asked you to pass me some of whatever it was you were on.
Amazing where technology is going. Can't wait to see what we have in 10 more years?
Look at the title of the forum this is in. Things meander off the tracks sometimes, but what better place.

Now let's have some more memes.

Brew on :mug:
 
I can think of a time or two I very nearly overwrote Windows XP on the dell laptop I had through college with Damn Small Linux.

I'm so bummed that Damn Small Linux is defunct. They could've gone on as a lightweight distro, but they had to stick to the 50mb footprint.
 
Seriously. It's remarkable how widespread the use of that logging library is. My own infrastructure is riddled with it as it is included in the apache2 web server java support, and I have all kinds of RaspberryPi minions running that web server.

Fortunately none of those wee machines have any inkling of things that are truly important - they exist in their own subnet well away from our pcs and the like. Even if one was compromised about the worst that could happen is one of my fermentation chambers, beer fridges, keezer, or my RO system, could be taken over ;)

Cheers!
 
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