Outdated Computer Terms

[VK3DRB]

QWERTY keyboard

Obviously, QWERTY keyboards are everywhere, but not everyone is acutely aware of the term...

In our country, the awareness is better. We have AZERTY, and are surrounded by countries that have QWERTY and QWERTZ, so buying a cheap laptop on the webshop of a company 100km from here, can cause trouble.

I have had to use a French keyboard a few times. Damn near impossible to get used to. Worse than driving on the wrong side of the road in down town Rome!

cheers,
Dave

[Galenbo]

I have had to use a French keyboard a few times. Damn near impossible to get used to. Worse than driving on the wrong side of the road in down town Rome!

It is, even for us, nearly impossible to program C on it, so I switched to Qwerty.

Azerty's everywhere around here. But It's only good to type letters about Wine and Cheese.

[VK3DRB]

A few others...

Microchannel architecture
EISA
OS/2 Warp

Reasons why OS/2 died...

1. No innovation in marketing OS/2 by IBM.
2. It could only run 16 bit Windows applications.
3. The dreaded BSOD (more often than on Windows 95).
4. Overpriced.
5. Idiotic menu hierachy.
6. Bill Gates was far shrewder all any IBM executive.
7. Greed (also the reason why micro-channel architecture failed).

If IBM had the foresight to give every university student in the world a free copy on OS/2 Warp 2.0, maybe things would be different.

Did you know...

1. Microsoft actually wrote OS/2.
2. By far the world's biggest customer of OS/2 was... IBM.
3. Apparently (a rumour only) one reason for the success of Protel (Altium) was that the founder stuck with Windows 3.1, against advice he should switch to OS/2.
4. It was illegal for IBM'ers to buy competitors products for work. Hence we used OS/2 up until about 1998. IBM could not admit to its employees it had screwed up badly with OS/2, however eventually much to its own embarrassment it had to ship Aptiva PC's with Windows installed.

[Tepe]

Doubled Sided, Double Density

0,0012 GB of space ! What's that in TB :-)

Let's see, a DD HD disk with Amiga FFS would be 512 bytes/sector * 22 sectors/track * 2 tracks/cylinder * 80 cylinders/disk = 1802240 bytes/disk.
That's 1802240/(2^40) TB or ~0.0000016 TB. 

(DOS tended to use only 18 sectors/track for DD HD so that would be 9/11 times the above figure  )

Note how I managed to sneak in terms like sectors and cylinders...

[codeboy2k]

8" shugarts 

[mrflibble]

Note how I managed to sneak in terms like sectors and cylinders...

[Tepe]

8" shugarts 

RAMAC

[dfmischler]

At one point I had to program some equipment my company built to talk 3270 bisync.

[madires]

I didn't see it mentioned but did anybody else ever get to play Star Trek via TTY?

You can also watch Star Wars in ASCII: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

[mrflibble]

I didn't see it mentioned but did anybody else ever get to play Star Trek via TTY?

You can also watch Star Wars in ASCII: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

That thing is still up? Awesome! 

... hey didn't the Star Wars logo used to be done with @@@ characters instead of 888's?

[peter.mitchell]

I've got a bone to pick with:

And lets not forget computer icons that no longer make sense.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx

Bookmarks: It will be a very long time until people don't know what a paper book is, and because of that, the same thing applies to bookmarks, not only that, but the fact that it doesn't have to relate soley to paper books, and can be applied to electronic books will continue it on even further. The word contains book and mark, if you want to make multiple places in a book, electronic or paper, you use a bookmark.

Address Books and calendars: Not so much address books, but calendars, these will be around for a heck of a long time too, even if it isn't a physical calendar, due to the way it is laid out, it is a very convenient way to view months and days so it will be displayed in this fashion for a long time.

Manila folders: again. paper storage is mandatory in a lot of places, not going anywhere and even if it does, they are still great at storing other things aside from documents, like labels, so until we can produce displays cheap enough to replace paper labels....

Binoculars: uhhh... these seem even less likely to be replaced than any of the above things.

Microphone: this type/design is pretty standard still. will be for a long time.

[nitro2k01]

QWERTY keyboard

Obviously, QWERTY keyboards are everywhere, but not everyone is acutely aware of the term...

In our country, the awareness is better. We have AZERTY, and are surrounded by countries that have QWERTY and QWERTZ, so buying a cheap laptop on the webshop of a company 100km from here, can cause trouble.

Pft, that shouldn't be a problem. You just need to be more AZERTYve in the way you type.

On a more serious note, it should be pretty easy to pop off the key caps and move them around on anything that isn't a laptop keyboard or a newfangled thin Apple keyboard.

[Rory]

Anybody remember teletypes? 

I cut my teeth on baudot teletypes..

.. and who else remembers the term : TV Typewriter

That was an upgrade

Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter attached to a KIM-1!

[Rory]

Here is some of my collection of obsolete terms:

Statmux
Data concentrator
Paradyne modem
Viterbi encoding
Data regenerator
Film recorder
Hatbox
Micropore filters
Bernoulli Box
Light pen
Dot matrix line printer
Tractor feed
Ball-head printer, like IBM Selectric
Daisy wheel
Crosstalk
x.25 packet protocol
colorburst frequency
VR gauntlet
Kansas City Standard
ROM cartridge
NIXIE readout
Bootstrap code sheet, toggling in octal codes (any PDP-8 users here?)
Silent 700
vector graphics display
machine code monitor in system ROM
x-on, x-off
timeshare

and too many more. I think most of what I know is obsolete.

[Zbig]

Here is some of my collection of obsolete terms:
[..]
Viterbi encoding
[..]

Call me old-fashioned but I'm going to hang onto my mobile phone, WiFi equipment and hard disk drives for a while longer, if you don't mind.

[SeanB]

Here is some of my collection of obsolete terms:


Data concentrator

I stripped one of those recently, uses a TMS9000 processor in ot.

Anybody remember ETI had a DIY computer using this chip? The ETI Cortex.

[Zbig]

Speaking of drives, I find SSD acronym, while not technically obsolete, very annoying. I mean, what's there to "drive" anymore? It's kind of contradictive.

[Rory]

Here is some of my collection of obsolete terms:
[..]
Viterbi encoding
[..]

Call me old-fashioned but I'm going to hang onto my mobile phone, WiFi equipment and hard disk drives for a while longer, if you don't mind.

Perhaps I should have said Viterbi encoding as a marketing point... now I suppose it's ubiquitous.

[VK3DRB]

ECBDIC and the Hollerith punch card code. I once knew both fluently. EBCDIC was a different encoding to ASCII, used on IBM mainframes. The latter was used on punch card processing machines.

With punch cards, you'd write a program, drop the desk of cards on the floor, pick them up and sort them out, process the batch, get the printout, fix the bugs, rinse and repeat. Then came along the VDU.

VDU... Visual Display Unit.



 

[peter.mitchell]

Speaking of drives, I find SSD acronym, while not technically obsolete, very annoying. I mean, what's there to "drive" anymore? It's kind of contradictive.

To me "Solid State Drive" seems like electronic vehicle terminology.

[codeboy2k]

At one point I had to program some equipment my company built to talk 3270 bisync.

Back in the day I wrote embedded software on an add-in card that used a z80, 2 SCC's, rows of DRAM, and a bunch of GALS and PALS formed the external DRAM controller for the refresh cycles and glue logic for mapping blocks into and out of smaller RX/TX windows. This was a multiprotocol convertor for the host (a Multibus host) one of the many protocols supported was the IBM 3270 bisync (along with HLDC and SDLC, and Sperry UTS protocol, which was similar to 3270 BiSync)... the add-in card allowed many users on the multibus host to appear to be like many individual and separate users sitting at either a 3270 terminal or one of many Sperry UTS terminals like the UTS-20, UTS-40 or later the UTS-60 color terminal.


[.. ahhh.. the grey beard is thick in this thread, it is ! ]

[Stonent]

ESDI

I remember the stringy floppy from the pages of 80 Micro magazine. I had a stack I got at a flea market when I was about 12.

[staxquad]

Partition Magic
RPG II (fixed-format programming language, column grid)
"The Supervisor" (using the IBM 360 console to send commands to "The Supervisor" within the operating system)


sample RPGII program:

[codeboy2k]

... 80 Micro magazine.

Kilobaud magazine.. I have but just one left from 1976

[westfw]

did anybody else ever get to play Star Trek via TTY?

Yep.  On ASR-33s, Hazeltine-2000s, and TI Silent-700s, using tops10.   (Any other old LIRICS/LICUS people here?)

I always think about those early "computer literacy" classes, where they'd teach people how to insert floppies into the drives, and how not to bring magnets too close to them, and what to do at the C: prompt...