A blast from the past.

[Shao Feng-Li]

Old Computers

Computer Closet

Man, some of these look dangerous.

[Mr. SmartyPants]

these are so amazing!!!! shao hit the jackpot!

[Shao Feng-Li]

Hmph. Don't everybody come in at once.

[shooraijin]

Some of those I also have (a few of), actually.

[Arnobius]

Those things were considered top of the line when I was in High School. I had an Atari 800XL, a lot of my friends had Commodore 64's (with the world's slowest disk drive). Osbournes and Kaypros were used in the Computer labs at school. Once in a great while, someone'd have a Apple IIe. Almost NOBODY had a hard drive (too expensive) and dual floppy drives were the best way to go. Most of them had incompatible versions of DOS...

This is why I get kind of annoyed when I see people bashing MS and Windows-- compared to what we had then, this is practically paradise...

[shooraijin]

You think the Commodore 1541 was slow? Try the Datasette (took 20 minutes to load Impossible Mission -- that's *twenty*).

The Epyx FastLoad was a godsend, night and day when we got it shortly after buying the 128. It accelerated 1541s and 1571s 5x and had a built-in sector editor, machine language monitor and file utility. All of my Commodore 64s and 128s are fitted with one now.

Compared to what we have now, though, a "blue screen" on a Commodore 64 is what you get when you turn the computer on (instead of the BSoD now). Viruses were infrequent and so were Trojans (unless you called those "naughty" BBSes). Turn on the computer and you were already booted into BASIC. Maybe that's why I still have a Commodore 128DCR on my desk next to the G4.

In fact, until I got a Mac in 2000, that 128 was my only computer. I had a SwiftLink serial accelerator (increased the serial port throughput to 38.4kbps) and a Zoom 33.6 modem, and used Kermit/64 to connect to the university dialup. From there I could use the Unix shell, or a web browser I wrote myself ( http://www.armory.com/%7Espectre/cwi/hl/ ). I wrote documents in nroff and latex, read mail with Elm, and read news with nn. No viruses, no crashes.

The 128 now has an Ethernet hookup using a Lantronix UDS-10 and a faster Turbo232 (57.6kbps) serial box. The UDS-10 appears as a modem to the 128, which then can "dial" up hosts over Telnet using regular Hayes commands. Instant broadband for the Commodore. (By the way, this device works for any computer with a serial port. I presume if you dug your Atari out, it would work fine with it too.)

Anyway, myself, I'd rather be back in the mid 80's. Maybe that's why I'm such a classic computer nut.

[Arnobius]

I remember the Commodore 128-- it was the new kid on the block. A friend got one, and it had two modes, 64 (which is where all the games were) and 128 (which had a sort of lime screen) that didn't have software.

I seem to remember that the disk drive for the 64 was slow. Load a game, go out to play for awhile and go back in and it might be done. Atari tape drive was faster. OH, yeah. How about the weird: Load "whatever",8,1 you had to do for the Commodore? Old Atari was able to boot from disc when turned down if you held the option button

We didn't do too much modem stuff back then. One friend had a modem, but they basically dialed other people's phones and communicated one on one. You started hearing about the BBS close to when I graduated. I seem to remember that they charged a pretty good amount to get on the BBS, which is why few used them.

The old Atari is long gone. I wonder if all the old software (legit anyway-- back then, everybody copied games and shared with their friends) would be worth anything. I remember the super hi-tech Ultima II-IV being available back then and was incredible back then. Had an old B/W TV for a monitor.

I remember when the school got a Mac when they first came out. We had a hard time grasping the fact that you had to shut off the computer internally before physically shutting the machine off (in the old days, you just turned off the computer when you were done playing) and the Mouse We couldn't figure how the computer could know that this thing was moving around.

If I went back in time, I'd probably have a hard time being able to adapt back though... I'm the opposite of you and like the present

[shooraijin]

How about the weird: Load "whatever",8,1 you had to do for the Commodore? Old Atari was able to boot from disc when turned down if you held the option button

The first computer I touched was an Apple II, so I didn't understand the ,8 business at first until my later systems with multiple drives. Now that I have three disk drives, some of which are less compatible than the others (the 1581 3.5" drive, for example), I need the ,8 to specify which one. 8 is the first device, 9 is the second, 10 is the third ...

The Apples do this too, although it's usually just D0 and D1. However, you can only boot from D0.

The ,1 says that this is a binary (not BASIC) and should be loaded to its exact position in memory instead of trying to relink it for BASIC text, sort of like BLOAD and BRUN on the Apple II. I don't know what the Atari DOS equivalent would be.

Interestingly, the 128 will autoboot from device 8 -- if you have a disk with an encoded boot sector, it will boot and run it. There's a hack where you paste up data in the cartridge memory range (which is now RAM with the cartridge out) and switch to 64 mode using the 128 Kernal jump table. In 64 mode, the memory isn't cleared and the "64" thinks there's a cartridge in, automatically running your code. This means with a 128, you really can boot 64 software if it's written to support it.

The Atari 130XE had some of the same problems as the 128. No one really wrote much software to take advantage of its extra memory. However, there were some productivity applications for the 128's 80 column 2MHz mode, and Kermit/64 could use the 80 column chip (still accessible from 64 mode) if it was set up that way.

I called only free BBSes. We had an account on QuantumLink (the Commodore-only ancestor of AOL), but didn't use it much since all we had was a 300bps modem in those days and the connect charge burned. There were a lot of free BBSes locally, and we won 50,000 download credits (my friend and I) for being the last login on December 31st some year, and the first on January 1st, respectively. I think we drained their entire file subs after that.

I didn't touch a Mac until 1987. At that point, it was the most powerful computer I'd ever encountered, with an 8MHz 68000, 1MB of RAM and 30MB of hard drive space. The SCSI disk got whomped when one of the kids bumped it while the heads weren't parked, though.

I miss the 80s.

[Arnobius]

Hmm, I guess we lived in the same era but took different memories out of it. I guess in its favor, it was a lot harder to wreck a computer than it was today

[Shao Feng-Li]

I guess in its favor, it was a lot harder to wreck a computer than it was today

Amen to that.

What could a person do on something like the Osborne pictured above? The screen must be too small to do anything on.

[Mithrandir]

Ah hah. Hmm...

Too small to do anything on... Right. I'm just going to ignore that. I don't even have to LOOK at your age to see you're a Net Genner.

It's funny how quickly Technolgy that many of us considered "cutting-edge" at one point in our lives is becomming "oldschool" (meaning before you were born).

Hey shooby, do you remember how excited we all got when you could finally plug a phone line DIRECTLY into a computer, rather than using those nasty coupler devices? *sigh* Those were the DAYS, man!

[Magekind]

I may be a "net genner", but I still know what you guys are talking about. C=. The guys at work look at me and say, "You were alive?!"

Origin's Times of Lore.

[Shao Feng-Li]

I don't even know "Net Genner" is. I wasn't joking. I want to know. These old things are cool.

[Mithrandir]

A member of the Net Generation or "Net genner" is what academia calls people who were born between the early 80s and the early 90s.

I'll spare you guys the details. It's the generation that came after "Generation X."

[Shao Feng-Li]

Though I don't really understand this Generation thing...

Then I suppose you don't know what a person can do on that Osborne computer?

[shooraijin]

It runs an older operating system called CP/M and targetted as a business laptop; people mostly used it for those sorts of applications. A popular word processor called WordStar was a common application, but it was really pinched by the screen; to see the whole line, you usually had to bounce back and forth. In fact, I think WordStar came with it, as well as some programming languages.

[Mithrandir]

OK. You've gone 4 posts without saying it, so I will.

http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/

is certainly an interesting link off that page...

And SFL, I'm just playing with you. I cut my assembly programming "teeth" on a "portable" AT with a screen about the same size as the ozborne. It weighed about 12 lbs, if I remember right (that's about 5.5 kg for the non-states peeps).

Anyway, sorry if I came off abrasive there...

[Arnobius]

What could a person do on something like the Osborne pictured above? The screen must be too small to do anything on.

Heh. You got used to it where a BIG screen was maybe 12" and part of the unit (While I was one of the people bashing the iMac for having the screen built in, a lot of old computers did it that way). The original Mac I think had a screen less than a foot across. This was before the days of EGA, XGA, VGA or any of the others. It was possible to plug your computer into a TV and be able to read it. 8-bit graphics were top of the line. Most monitors were monochrome-- even the Mac. MIDI was used for sound when sound was available (most computers didn't have sound). When Wing Commander II came out with the ability for hearing people talking instead of reading text on the screen was BIG! Of course you had to be one of the lucky ones to have a "soundblaster" card (expensive back then)

Games for these things were mostly text based. Infocom's Zork series... (graphics were so primitive, Infocom used to be pretty dogmatic that text based games were the way to go). The Apple had the public domain program Eamon. If you didn't have IBM (if you had a graphics card), Apple, Atari or Commodore, you were very limited with graphics based games. I doubt you'd even to find online references to the games we had back then. Origin and Epyx were *rivals* of EA, not subsidiaries.

I guess games are the one place I do miss the 80's. I never adapted to the realtime games and fps. I liked Ultima 1-4, thinking Ultima V and beyond was unnecessarily complicated.

I hadn't thought about these things for years... Interesting how drastically different things are today when you think about it...

[shooraijin]

Actually, Epyx was one of the few that didn't get bought by EA. Its assets were variously spun off and most of the games are now owned or licensed to by UK licensee Ironstone, which used them for the C64 DTV joystick. I think some evangelical Christian software house (as it happens) has, or had until recently, the actual catalogue.

[Mr. SmartyPants]

http://www.retrojunk.com/media/163/

this is something pretty funny, related to the COmmodore Vic-20

[Shao Feng-Li]

A member of the Net Generation or "Net genner" is what academia calls people who were born between the early 80s and the early 90s.

With all do respect, I think I prefer Asian Kung- Fu Generation.

[shooraijin]

No, the Kung Fu generation would be the 1970s.

(mouth speaks several syllables)
Dubbed voice: No.

[Kireihana]

With all do respect, I think I prefer Asian Kung- Fu Generation.

You talking about the band?

Hmm. I remember my parents spazzing out when we got our first color computer. But that's about as far back as my history with computers goes.

[Shao Feng-Li]

You talking about the band?

But of course.