Outdated Computer Terms

[madires]

How about BBS and Sysop. I was Co-Sysop of the Blazing Inferno BBS. Those were the days... I mention BBS to my kids, and they look at me like

There are a lot of telnet BBS' if you like to show your kids the good old days ;-)

[manzini]

There are a lot of telnet BBS' if you like to show your kids the good old days ;-)

interesting !!!

[Cdngreybeard]

... and there was The Source. 

[johnwa]

Does anyone remember the school exercise books with the list of "commonly used computer terms" on the back?  Even when I went to school, they were hopelessly out of date (ALGOL, SNOBOL anyone?), but I think I saw one for sale quite recently with virtually the same set of words on it.

I was going to post a scan, so people could have a bit of a laugh. However, despite extensive rummaging in the attic, I was unable to locate one. Perhaps someone else can take a picture and upload it?

[Terabyte2007]

How about BBS and Sysop. I was Co-Sysop of the Blazing Inferno BBS. Those were the days... I mention BBS to my kids, and they look at me like

There are a lot of telnet BBS' if you like to show your kids the good old days ;-)

 I knew there was a couple here and there, but I did not know their was a lot of them! Is there a list anywhere you know of?

[GK]

What about Leisure  Suite Larry
and by far my all time favourite Elite!!

Don't have either of those, but I just loaded up Samantha Fox Strip Poker on the 1541  . Check out the graphics!

[AlfBaz]

@GK...LOL
I remember years ago my brothers were showing me this C64 program that had a picture of a scantly dress woman. When you moved the joystick back and forth the clothes would start scrolling down revealing her naked body. To get the clothes to go lower thereby revealing more nakedness you had to wiggle the joystick faster. So fast in fact that you ended up hunched over with the joystick in your lap moving your hand furiously... Like an idiot I didn't realise the joke until they burst out laughing

[GK]

@GK...LOL
I remember years ago my brothers were showing me this C64 program that had a picture of a scantly dress woman. When you moved the joystick back and forth the clothes would start scrolling down revealing her naked body. To get the clothes to go lower thereby revealing more nakedness you had to wiggle the joystick faster. So fast in fact that you ended up hunched over with the joystick in your lap moving your hand furiously... Like an idiot I didn't realise the joke until they burst out laughing

LOL, yeah, there were several games like that, played the exact the same way. The most famous was probably Sex Games. Humorous and censored video here:



Pretty sad really, but EVERYONE I knew who had a C64 back in the day had a pirated copy. The games final scene was pretty bad.
Now look where we have taken such a wholesome thread topic...................

[TheBorg]

There are a lot of telnet BBS' if you like to show your kids the good old days ;-)

interesting !!!

Telnet Zork is quite fun, even though I was not even a part of that era.... Never wanted to buy a TRS-80 more than when I tried it!

[ampdoctor]

How about Fortran77?
And of course we should never forget the dismal failure that was Rambus.

[Rory]

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

[SeanB]

Yes.....

[peter.mitchell]

it's starting to look like this one will be soon...
x86

[Fsck]

debugging in it's original definition.

[JohnnyGringo]

9-Track tape drives

[codeboy2k]

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

Yes. on a volker-craig terminal.. over a 300bps modem, on TOPS-20 who remembers that?

[dfmischler]

How about Fortran77?

FORTRAN77 was an upgrade.  You don't want to know how ugly FORTRAN66 was.  About 1983 I had to write some code that had to run on almost anything that could talk to our gear with minimal changes, and C had not penetrated far beyond Unix yet.  I know it ran on DEC RSX & VMS, DG AOS & AOS/VS, IBM Series 1, TI DX10.  Can't remember what else...  You heard right: at one time a dumbed-down version of FORTRAN was the most portable high level language available.  It sucked pretty bad, though.

[GeoffS]

And lets not forget computer icons that no longer make sense.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx

[justanothercanuck]

SRAM

it's still out there, if you're into retro design and repairs.

ZIP drives!

sadly, mine died ~5 years ago.  neat little device, except for when the drive decides to clamp the heads together and shred the media, then rip the heads off the spindles.

VT220

it's also still out there...  we still use dumb terminals on some of our unix stuff at work.

3c509

i love these cards (509,905, etc)...  i know they're not manufactured anymore, but i think i have like 10 of them at home.

Let's see...  How about AS/400?  OpenVMS?  SCO Unix?  We still have an AS/400 server.  The OpenVMS server finally died a few years back.  Sadly, we still have an SCO server too.

[johnwa]

And lets not forget computer icons that no longer make sense.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx

And he didn't even notice that the first television icon had the colour bars in the wrong order!

Speaking of televisions, I have met quite a few computer users who are convinced that the 'save' icon is actually a picture of an old console TV set...

[Zero999]

I also like the TV with rabbit ears one. It's probably US specific. Here in the UK most TVs are connected to a large yagi array on the house roof. Very few people use indoor aerials and in that case, they're mostly loop or a mini-yagi, a telescopic dipole (is that what the rabbit ears are?) is rare.

[manzini]

Well, my 640Mbyes Fujitsu MO (Magneto-Optical) firewire of course are alive   O0

I never will miss the hateful RPG programming language. Although even today for IBM AS400 keep asking programmers.

[Galenbo]

Doubled Sided, Double Density

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

[Galenbo]

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.

[VK3DRB]

Token Ring and OS/2
IBM Wangaratta

At IBM Wangaratta, I installed the very first copy of OS/2 in Australia on a PC AT. We had a diskette replication facility in Wangaratta and I pinched a pre-release copy of OS/2 the very morning the diskette images arrived. I felt like king dick later that day when I could print on my dot matrix printer at the same time as running other DOS commands. Another first was installing the very first token ring network in Australia using two PCXT's on the manufacturing line. 4 Mbps! That tiny network grew to about 600 machines.