Great deal on an OS (joke) or A trip to Hardware Hell.

[A_Brass]

Spring cleaning, in the basement. I found some old boxes of computer stuff its a little trip down memory lane.

In one box a full set of floppy disks for "MS-DOS 6.22 Plus enhanced tools."

What the f*#$ were "enhanced tools"?

I also found an unopend set of disks for a USRobotics Megahertz 33.6 Modem/Ethernet card. How the hell did I install it without the disks getting opened?

I also found an ISA Sound card and a ISA multi-port card(2 ide, 1 printer, 1 serial), and the driver disk. Apparently I never threw out my first CD burner a super slow HP unit, cause I found it. In additon to all that I also found a box of misc floppy disks, that I cant even check to see what's on them because none of my PC's have floppy disks anymore. And I even found my ZIP drive and disks. Both the internal 250mb and the 100mb Parallel port version. You know the one that ran so slow you thought you were going to die before it finished.

About the only thing didn't find were my 2400baud modem, 5in floppy disks, you know, the ones that were actually "floppy". And the one 7in floppy I used to have. Yes before 5in floppy disks they came even bigger. I think it held 64k or 128k.

Wow. Those were the days. I can even remember the cassettte tape drive on the TRS-80. No, really, actual cassette tapes like the ones you could buy at "TapeWorld or "RecordTown". Oh jeeze. I don't even want to hear a comment about records. Whatever happened to those stores anyway?

Well I was going to put the whole lot on e-bay but I think e-bay is where you put stuff you want people to buy. I'm willing to pay to make it all go away.

[ricklous]

thats quite a treasuretrove you have there lol

I was watching a documentary about war films the other day with my housemate and it bought a very dusty memory to the fore, about one of the first computer games that i *truely* got addicted to.

It was on an Amstrad CPC 464, the really posh one with the cassete player built into the keyboard. It took 40 minutes to load the game! haha and I'd sit there for every minute of it, as it slowly drew a picture line by line of the loading screen...and sometimes it would get to the last line and freeze halfway along the line, and youd have to start all over again...now i get annoyed if booting takes longer than a couple of minutes!

Once the game was finaly loaded, that was only the first corner of a long marathon. The game was a simulator of the Dambusters dam bombings, with you taking control of the plane while it was taxi-ing down the runway for takeoff. you'd have to play the part of every crew member, of which there were at least five, and it took me three weeks just to master getting the damn thing in the air.

Once there though, you had to navigate across the channel (lots of german fighter pilots trying to shoot you down) and then you had about three hours of relative peace and quiet while you flew to south germany. if I was feeling cocky, id load the game soon as id come in from school, take off and get over the channel, and then put the plane in autopilot while i had my tea lol returning in an hour or so, it would suddenly get frentic with all these german guns going of around you and youd have to jump from crewmember to crewmember frantically trying to line the damn dam up with the sights and open the hatches and fire at germans...etc etc etc...about 70% of the time id be dead from german bullets (which you couldnt see) within a minute of getting to the dam. thee hours patience and Oops! you're dead sonny!

If you survived the first dam (doubtful) there were another two you could have a crack at.

In two years of trying, i succesfully hit a dam and flew home once....and crashed when i came in to land :o

[ubu]

Spring cleaning, in the basement. I found some old boxes of computer stuff its a little trip down memory lane.

So I couldn't resist looking through my "stash" too. (not good for the WAF - closet space is at a premium ).

In one box a full set of floppy disks for "MS-DOS 6.22 Plus enhanced tools."

Found a pristine manual and disks for DOS 3.3 and a perfect copy of the "DOS Technical Reference" dated 1985 (In a pre-web world this manual was the only place to find all the tips and tricks for serious DOS programmers - like how to write assembler code to directly reference the display adapter's memory ). Maybe the 6.22 "enhanced tools" were the equivalent later? Oh, and the DOS disks are 5.25" floppys of course!

I also found an ISA Soundcard and a ISA multi-port card

Somewhere in the garage I'm pretty sure I still have an ISA "IBM Asynchronous Communications Adapter" (wow! a serial port!) that I bought for my first IBM PC (yup - PC, not XT - no hard drive available) in 1984. Also a 300 baud modem, I think.

Wow. Those were the days. I can even remember the cassettte tape drive on the TRS-80.

Had to do that with my first two computers - a Timex Sinclair (2K of RAM) and a Commodore 64 (64K - major upgrade ). I still have my Convergent Technologies "Workslate" from 1983 - arguably the first laptop - which has a built-in micro-casette drive for storage. You can even attach audio "memos" to the data so when you load a spreadsheet (incredibly sloooowly) the Workslate announces "This is my spreadsheet that shows all the money I owe to people. Now I'm going to commit suicide" or something.

I'm willing to pay to make it all go away.

I'm too anal-retentive and sentimental to let my stuff go, but I'm not crazy enough to offer to take your stuff. :p

[groover km]

Got to chip in here, the nostalgia trip is too good to miss -

I've got a P90 in the garage with 16MB of RAM; the hard drive is 100MB. Back in the day I used to call this "The Beast" (lol). In fact we are moving house in a couple of weeks and I brought a box of assorted crapola out the loft... ahhh. Last weekend I downloaded DosBox and have spent the past week playing 'Full Throttle' and 'Half-Life' - can't get 'Grim Fandango' to run under XP though

And I've got 4 (count 'em) CRT Monitors of various sizes and ages (and ohgodmeback) weights sitting around that I am keeping "because you never know..." (yeh, right).

But for real retro, I remember having a Sinclair Spectrum (the UK equiv. of the Timex Sinclair above) and having the rooomy 48k memory;wow. Not only do I remember loading games from cassette (the noise the from the cassette deck speaker, the flasing tv screen) and crashing at the last minute; but sitting for HOURS typing in pages of BASIC from magazines, in order to run some crappy game that was (usually) a variant of Lunar Lander.

Aaah, nostalgia.... and the irony is that it is now full-circle because I am constantly chuffed that I can see the PC screen on the TV! Sad eh?

[A_Brass]

Anyone remember the VIC-20? I think it was the Commodore64's evil stepbrother. A third of the brains but had most of the looks? I didn't own one but I remember using one.

I really cut my teeth on the Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 a total peice of crap even for the time. No HD, 2 floppys, which was huge step up from the previous years model. This was the same basic computer that first exposed me to the Tape drive. Its funny, I didn't remember about the slow load times, until I read your replies, god where those things slow. Think about it. What I remember was a standard cassette player with a data port. So it "played/loaded" at regular speed. I wonder how much data was stored on a 60min tape? And who would have waited 60min to load or save that data?

My dad has worked for the local phone company for 35 years, and I can remember testing 1200baud modems with him. I remember him telling me that 1200 was fast but the 2400's were going to be even faster. "But that's as fast as they would get." he said. "You just cant pass data any faster on a standard phone line." Life is really strange because 90% of all telecom gear still have a serial port that is defaulted to only 9600baud. It's the industry standard "craft port". So the phone world moved on at least a little bit. But some parts just stoped.

Technlogy just keeps rolling on.

[A_Brass]

Not only do I remember loading games from cassette (the noise the from the cassette deck speaker, the flasing tv screen) and crashing at the last minute; but sitting for HOURS typing in pages of BASIC from magazines, in order to run some crappy game that was (usually) a variant of Lunar Lander.

Aaah, nostalgia.... and the irony is that it is now full-circle because I am constantly chuffed that I can see the PC screen on the TV! Sad eh?

Man this is too funny, I remember the same thing. The only one I can remember was . . . . worm.. . .. wormplus? Just like you said it was out of the back of some magizine or book of Basic. I also remember trying to save my hours of work on a floppy disk only to have it disappear.

Your observation about the irony of the PC on TV should not be missed. Truly full circle.

Wow, I can't belive I forgot all this stuff?.

[ubu]

But for real retro, I remember having a Sinclair Spectrum (the UK equiv. of the Timex Sinclair above) and having the rooomy 48k memory;wow.

I remember being real jealous of you rich buggers that could afford a Spectrum. It had this "amazing" new feature - a colour display. Even my buddy's "state of the art" Apple II didn't have that! (Since I was using a 9" monochrome TV as my monitor this was kinda moot anyway. The TV's tube was dying so the picture would get smaller and smaller until, after about 40 minutes, it would disappear into an infinitely small dot )

but sitting for HOURS typing in pages of BASIC from magazines, in order to run some crappy game that was (usually) a variant of Lunar Lander.

I remember it well! But you must admit, when you tried to write your own BASIC, learning how to write code that would do something useful in 2K of RAM (well, 48 for you) taught a kind of terseness and economy in one's coding style. I still get appalled sometimes when I look at the verbosity and apparent wastefulness of OO languages such as C# and Java.

Aaah, nostalgia.... and the irony is that it is now full-circle because I am constantly chuffed that I can see the PC screen on the TV! Sad eh?

lol!

I really cut my teeth on the Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 a total peice of crap even for the time.

I think Commodore users referred to it as the "TRash80"

Anybody remember "Maze" (I think that's right) where you navigated inside a "3D" maze which flashed by faster and faster. There were lots of games and stuff you could get for the Commodore 64 (and VIC-20 - I remember those) that had originally been written for the Commodore PET - an earlier and more expensive system mainly used in schools.

Interestingly, the ViC-20, the 64 and the 128 gained a large market niche amongst journalists since, in a pre-laptop world, they were easy to cart around and could be outfitted with a 300 baud modem in an EPROM that plugged in the back of the keyboard/CPU thingy.

[cosmocat]

Hey some of this old kit can still be good...
The sound facilities on my sisters PC died, so when I opened the case and I saw a single ISA slot nestled next to the PCI slots I headed to my "junk stash" and found my old ISA (8 bit mono) sound card.
Then I found the driver disks - they were 51/4 inch floppies! :eek:
No prob though, the card was SB compatible and Win98 worked fine with its inbuilt drivers!

Unfortunately 5 years ago my Mum cleared out some stuff from her house and out went my commodore 64 and my still working Nascom1 - find one of those on ebay!

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be!

[ubu]

My dad has worked for the local phone company for 35 years, and I can remember testing 1200baud modems with him. I remember him telling me that 1200 was fast but the 2400's were going to be even faster. "But that's as fast as they would get." he said. "You just cant pass data any faster on a standard phone line." Life is really strange because 90% of all telecom gear still have a serial port that is defaulted to only 9600baud.

This brought back yet another memory. It must have been around the same time that I knew a guy who worked at the phone company who got me a teletype machine with a built in 300 baud modem for free. They were upgrading to the new generation of teletypes (probably with 1200 baud modems ) and were just junking the old ones.

So I found a free UNIX host I could dial into (found the number on a BBS - Bulletin Board System - remember those?), played around a bit and taught myself a bit of UNIX. I found that if I redirected the cat command to standard output, it would print a text file on my teletype. I couldn't afford a printer at the time so, instead, I'd upload a text file from my Commodore 64, log off, log in again using the teletype, cat the file and I'd get a printout. Unfortunately all the upper case letters came out in lower case and vice versa (some quirk of the Pacific Bell teletype machine) but I noticed the UNIX site had a compiler for some wierd little language called "C" so I figured out how to write a tiny program to switch the case of the characters in a file. That was my first C program!

Man, I was innocent back then! This same site was a gateway to Arpanet and usenet (which I thought was just a "really big" BBS). Little did I know I was using an early version of what was to become the internet.

[wtg]

I wish I could laugh at all of you and think "what a bunch of old geezers"... unfortunately I remember the TRS-80, Commodores, typing in BASIC from computer magazines and 300 baud modems. I remember being just amazed that my 2400 baud modem could download 237 characters a second using ZModem... and I'd sit and watch them tick off... man that was fast!!

Ricklous' account of an old game that tried to give you the "real-time" feel of a bombing run on Germany is a crack up though... to think the game would "fly" for 3 hours before you got there, with nothing to do... and that he was so desperate for computer entertainment that would put up with it. Man that's funny.

30 years from now our kids or grandkids will all fondly recall the "archaic" hardware and software we're using today. "Remember when we only had a terrabyte of disk space?" "You mean hard disks?!? Gosh... I forgot all about those!" LOL