Outdated Computer Terms

[codeboy2k]

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've found that lots of people used the Hazeltine 2000s and 1500s but I've found very few people that have used or have even heard of the Hazeltine mod-1 ... we had about 30 of these in the offices and in the field (for news gathering).... They were great for full page editing locally and hitting the send button to send a page of data back to home office, and they had several local pages of stored data, full screen editing, bold, italics, double wide characters. They also had the standard full duplex dumb tty mode.  They were 8080 based, one single combined full size, CPU, memory and CRT controller board in the base, the keyboard was fully detached from the main unit and was cabled. I used to have full schematics, but I can't find them anymore..  I eventually had one at my home hooked up to my Altair (upgrade from the ASR-33 )

[echen1024]

Rambus
RIMM
ISDN
sadly, modem is still used...
Information Superhighway

[Fsck]

Rambus
RIMM
ISDN
sadly, modem is still used...
Information Superhighway

Rambus' patents are apparently still valid and just yanked the rug under ddr

[TerraHertz]

Rambus
RIMM
ISDN
sadly, modem is still used...
Information Superhighway

ISDN = "I Still Don't Know"

Did anyone *ever* know, I wonder?

[carpelux]

The Sinclair Spectrum is on every ones lips right now on this forum, so here's some outdated terms related to that old computer.

Microdrive
Interface 1

[Jope]

How about LOAD "*",8,1 and then going off to toast a sandwich, make a cuppa etc...

Ah, the 1541, the slowest disk drive in the known universe.

It was a serial disk drive, it even had it's own 6502 CPU onboard, yet it was slower than the C64 tapes with turbo loaders. Whoever designed it should have been shot.

It wasn't the designers fault, it was planned to be much faster. You should read the book 'On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore', it contains the story about it. I cannot remember exactly what went wrong, but I think some guy at the manufacturing plant thought that some data lines were redundant on the schematic/layout, or something like that.

[Stonent]

Partition Magic
RPG II
"The Supervisor"

Back when DOS used FAT-12 and you had 32MB partition limits.

[VK3DRB]

Should be outdated...

FOLDER. A term used by those Microsoft controls. The correct term is DIRECTORY.

ASSEMBLER LANGUAGE. There never has been any computer language called Assembler. It is called ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE. Anyone who says "I wrote it in Assembler" don't know what they are talking about.

ARIAL FONT. A bug infested sans-serif Microsoft default font that was created by IBM. One example of a bug is the upper case 'I' is the same as a lower case 'L'. Moreover, compared to Times New Roman, it lacks ease of comprehension.   


















 

[VK3DRB]

Plugboards.

These are mechanically programmable boards used in vintage IBM unit record equipment. Different programs could be loaded into a machine by swapping out the panels. The machines were full of vacuum tubes (valves), wire contact relays, cams lifters, gearboxes and motors. Hopelessly unreliable, and often intermittent faults were very challenging to debug.

[AlfBaz]

ASSEMBLER LANGUAGE. There never has been any computer language called Assembler. It is called ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE. Anyone who says "I wrote it in Assembler" don't know what they are talking about.

Would you consider a butt load of assembler directives such as .if, .else, .endif etc... assembler language, ie. language for consumption by the assembler?

[GeoffS]

Plugboards.

I remember those from the Univac 1004, the first computer I was exposed to.

[tsmith35]

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.

Interestingly, rabbit ears still work fine for HD broadcasts. Some time back, I decided to quit spending $100/mo for cable TV that nobody watched, but the kids wanted to watch the ball drop on TV last year, on new year's eve. So I found a pair of rabbit ears with 300 ohm twin-lead and connected that to a 300-to-75 ohm transformer (yes, I still have a few) to change it over to coax. Plugged it in, and now I get all the local stations in perfect HD. Not bad for being about 20 miles away from the TV towers.

It's funny reading about all those "obsolete" computer terms. I still have a 20mb MFM drive stored somewhere, and I actually used it for storage way back when.

My "SSDD-to-DSDD" converter was a hole punch and a ruler (or a second floppy to use as a template if I as in a hurry). I have an Apple ][ DuoDisk in the garage. Seems like that was around the time when 1200 baud modems just came out, but lots of folks still used 300 baud or 110 baud. Beagle Bros made some neat software, and software came with big, paper manuals.

[sleemanj]

RUN
POKE
PEEK

Line numbers as structural elements of programs.

Manually parking hard disk heads before shutting down.

[Jope]

FOLDER. A term used by those Microsoft controls. The correct term is DIRECTORY.

It has been called 'folder' because of the Windows desktop metaphor.

ASSEMBLER LANGUAGE. There never has been any computer language called Assembler. It is called ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE. Anyone who says "I wrote it in Assembler" don't know what they are talking about.

You are wrong. It has also been called assembler language for decades. Look at this programming guide from IBM (from 1970): A Programmer's Introduction
to IBM System/360 Assembler Language

[tsmith35]

Assembly or assembler... doesn't matter. Real programmers use "copy con program.exe".

[peter.mitchell]

Real programmers

Use soldering irons.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/677635/programmers.jpg

[VK3DRB]

ASSEMBLER LANGUAGE. There never has been any computer language called Assembler. It is called ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE. Anyone who says "I wrote it in Assembler" don't know what they are talking about.

You are wrong. It has also been called assembler language for decades. Look at this programming guide from IBM (from 1970): A Programmer's Introduction
to IBM System/360 Assembler Language

I believe I am right. I researched this in detail a few years ago by tracing the history of assembly language programming and early computing history. After I supplied enough evidence, the open source community which provides Notepad++ changed "Assembler" as one of their syntax highlighting languages to "Assembly". An Assembler is effectively the tool that produces machine code from human readable instructions written in a language called Assembly. However, as someone correctly pointed out, assembly language source code can contain assembler directives.

Just because IBM once called it Assembler does not mean it is right. IBM made many blunders over the years, many which were never made public. I know first hand, as I worked for them for many years.

But here is one big mistake I made... I worked for IBM for too long. Not an outdated computer term, but an outdated computer company. Now a shadow of once was what a good company.

[Macbeth]

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

Oh wow! All my nostalgia leaked out of my heart at once! I remember those hidden cylinders at 81 and above! Amiga forever!

[TheBay]

Parking the Winchester, haven't done that for years!

MFM, RLL, ISA, Vesa Local Bus, Dos4gw, memmaker, "It is now safe to turn off your computer"
Conventional memory/Extended memory

Fake cache chips

Hercules Graphics

CGA/MGA/EGA/TTL

Hard Card

WANG, Olivetti, AST, Compaq

SIMMS

Panasonic/mitsumi/sony compatible cd rom cards.

I could continue...

[Mechatrommer]

win 3.11

Partition Magic

Back when DOS used FAT-12 and you had 32MB partition limits.

i still use Partition Magic to partition hundreds of GB of my many HDDs (totalling Terrabytes all, FAT32. no i'm not interested in NTFS, not yet), and including my recently bought 128GB SSD. whats the deal with you?

Should be outdated...
FOLDER. A term used by those Microsoft controls. The correct term is DIRECTORY.

are you really sure? istr DIRECTORY is the original name back during DOS and Win311 days, and then the name got changed to FOLDER during Win98 until today.

How you you define an outdated computer term? When IT or electronics people have never heard of it.

then in truth there is no outdated terms, if there is an answer, the answer is NIL, because no one has ever heard of it. you can say whatever you like and its not outdated since we heard it.

[Kjetil]

What sadly seems to be outdated (at least none of the new IT folks I've met the last years) are the brilliant tales of the BOFH. I haven't seen an Etherkiller in years either . Neither of these should be outdated though, they have just faded into history 
I also miss my 3DFX Voodoo-cards, BeOS and 56k voicemodems.

[Zero999]

i still use Partition Magic to partition hundreds of GB of my many HDDs (totalling Terrabytes all, FAT32. no i'm not interested in NTFS, not yet), and including my recently bought 128GB SSD. whats the deal with you?

You should use NTFS as your primary partition. The only real use for FAT32 is on removable media, since ever modern operating system can read it. It's limited to a partition size of 256GB and the maximum file size is 4GB, is more prone to fragmentation (slower, is less stable (file loss/corruption is more likely) than NTFS and doesn't support any real security features.

[Zbig]

i still use Partition Magic to partition hundreds of GB of my many HDDs (totalling Terrabytes all, FAT32. no i'm not interested in NTFS, not yet), and including my recently bought 128GB SSD. whats the deal with you?

And that would be pretty much all FAT32 is good for... bite the dust, that is...

[staxquad]

Partition Magic

Back when DOS used FAT-12 and you had 32MB partition limits.

I still use Partition Magic to partition hundreds of GB of my many HDDs (totalling Terrabytes all, FAT32. no I'm not interested in NTFS, not yet), and including my recently bought 128GB SSD. whats the deal with you?

I use "Disk Management" in XP, Vista, W7, W8 since I'm on Windows, and can partition to my heart's content (but if I have to merge/split, have to unallocate/allocate which is fine with me, copy disk first then partition and move, safer),  so no need for Partition Magic (never sweat more than when I used Partition Magic on the fly and didn't know if the program would complete with data intact.  If I remember correctly I did have a few that said can't continue).

I'm on NTFS for larger partition sizes

screen shot of Disk Management


http://cquirke.mvps.org/ntfs.htm
 NTFS may be faster...
   - smaller RAM footprint as avoids large FAT held in RAM
   - indexed design more efficient for many files per directory
   - small file data embedded in dir level, avoids seek to data chain
   - above factors make fragmentation less onerous than for FATxx
   - 4k cluster size matches processor's natural paging size
...or slower...
   - extra overhead of security checks, compression, encryption
   - small clusters may fragment data cluster chains

NTFS may be safer...
   - transaction rollback cleanly undoes interrupted operations
   - file-level permissions can protect data against malware etc.
   - automatically "fixes" failing clusters on the fly (controversial)
...or more at risk...
   - no interactive file system checker (a la Scandisk) for NTFS
   - no maintenance OS for NTFS
   - malware can drill right through NTFS protection, e.g. Witty
   - transaction rollback does not preserve user data
   - transaction rollback does not help other causes of corruption
   - more limited range of maintenance tools
   - automatically "fixes" failing clusters on the fly (controversial)

NTFS may be more space-efficient...
   - smaller cluster size than FAT32 above 8G
   - may include data of small files within the directory level
   - NTFS's bitmap structure is smaller than FAT32's dual FAT
   - sparse files and compression can reduce data space usage
...or less so...
   - NTFS has large MFT structure
   - larger per-file directory metadata space

I would use NTFS where:

    Users have professional-grade IT admin, including backup
    Users need to hide data more than they need to salvage it
    Applications require files over 4G in size
    Hard drive exceeds the 137G barrier

But while NTFS has no maintenance OS from which...

    Data can easily be recovered
    File system structure can be manually checked and repaired
    Malware can be scanned for and cleaned

...I would avoid the use of NTFS in consumer PCs.

[Zbig]

[..]
...I would avoid the use of NTFS in consumer PCs.

The only reasonable justification for your statement I could think of is that you do paid consumer IT support for a living...