Outdated Computer Terms

[T3sl4co1l]

Speaking of Quantum, growing up we had a Canon 486 machine with a 325MB Quantum in it.  It made the most fun POST rhythm I've heard a drive make.  If I could even mimic the sound let alone describe it, I would, but I guess this'll have to be one of those "if you've heard it, you'll know" things...

Tim

[rollatorwieltje]

Quantum products were appropriately named. The Fireball was reasonably fast, but it ran about as hot as a meteoroid entering the atmosphere. The Bigfoot was physically big, but horribly slow (didn't they run at 3600RPM?).

[madires]

I had several Quantum LPS SCSI drives, the smallest was a LPS-52. IIRC the transfer rate was about 2-3 MBytes/s.

[Zero999]

But for the usual mr/mrs blobby out there the desktop PC is a thing of the past I think these days.

Makers still use a desktop PC, like before. (internet site maker, photoshop maker, PCB maker, 3D file maker, embedded program maker,...)

Users/Consumers use tablet/smartphone, but it is false to say they don't use desktops anymore. They never did. They never would. They said they would never use a PC. And they were right. They use the screen of a mini portable PC to look at their friend's pictures of children, dogs and cats.

I don't have a smart phone. I've used one before and I do think they're useful but I'd rather have a nice large screen and keyboard for most tasks.

[justanothercanuck]

Oh dear lord...  look what I found in the trash heap at work this evening...



... and 3 four-drive caddy arrays to go with it...  If only there weren't all ancient SCSI. 

[SeanB]

I have the later SCSI CDROM drive, with a drawer. I think the damn thing still works, but I am not going to dig out the Adaptec card, grab the cables and find a space to plug the PCI card in to see if it can still read a CD at it's high speed 2X rate. I know it will be seen as /dev/cdrom0 by the kernel as that support is still there.

[dannyf]

Bitnet.
Vax
Alpha
Mainframe
Cobol

[SeanB]

Head load time for floppy drives.....

And then adjusting it down till it almost would fail a sector read first time.

[German_EE]

PR#3 to switch on 80 columns on an Apple //e. Also the chattering noise of an Apple //e disk drive as the computer booted (there was no track 0 sensor, they just banged the carriage against the endstop).

MEMSIZE ? Which was the first thing to greet you when you turned on a Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 There's also TRSDOS which was their disk operating system.

Grundy NewBrain, what I bought after the Tandy 

Catseye pattern used to align floppy disk drive heads.

The sound of a 56K modem starting up,

[SeanB]

56k modem? I had some 300 baud ones, and upgraded to the high speed 1200/75 baud one later, still with manual dialling. Step up from that was a Hayes compatible one that was able to autodial and also was 9600baud.

There are still a large body of internet users here in Africa to whom the internet is a dial up connection. My ISP friend also has a pool of dial up modems for customers that for various reasons ( line length, no mobile reception and not willing to shell out the cost of satellite links) still use a POTS connection and do mostly email.

[McBryce]

- "The Ramdisk is set up in the Autoboot batch file"
- "Can your V24 modem do Shotgun?"
-"Which floppy drive do I put the data disk into?"

Wow, things were so different back then.

McBryce.

Gesendet von meinem Motorola DynaTEC 8000X mit Tapatalk 2.

[Mechanical Menace]

PC as in the generic term for any personal computer. Micro. ACSI. DMA port as in the one expansion port that could do DMA. MIDI is pretty much dead as a physial standard too.

[HighVoltage]

"Clipper, the dBase compiler"

Clipper was my favorite software in those days.
Had my special toolbox for engineering stuff

[Howardlong]

PC as in the generic term for any personal computer. Micro. ACSI. DMA port as in the one expansion port that could do DMA. MIDI is pretty much dead as a physial standard too.

Not so sure Midi (physical) is that dead, to be honest. Even if it was, it has outlasted an enormous number of other protocols.

Thankfully, the Keytar is pretty much dead though.

[tggzzz]

Has anyone mentioned the term "computer" yet? It used to be a job description, usually done by "educated women"!

[Howardlong]

Wow, I nominate this thread for Most Ignorant of 2015.  But it is only the Ides of March.
I really thought EEVbloggers were more intelligent than that.

Do you play Keytar then? ;-)

[Howardlong]

Do you play Keytar then? ;-)

Please help me understand how that has ANYTHING to do with "computer terms"?

We were talking about MIDI, a serial interface used in the music industry for interconnecting instruments between themselves and computers, and Keytars are MIDI instruments from that era.

It's not clear what you're getting all grumpy about, I tried a bit of levity but I guess that was lost in translation :-(

[Mechanical Menace]

D2D recording!

...and Keytars are MIDI instruments from that era.

You ever try playing a MIDI electric guitar and getting it to work properly?

[TerraHertz]

LASTDRIVE=

The DOS command. Last time I encountered this was some years ago, when I needed to show someone a file from a USB device I had, using their PC. The device was supposed to appear as two drives, but only one appeared and off course the file I wanted was on the non-appearing one. At that moment I'd forgotten about LASTDRIVE, so simply couldn't show them the file.

For that matter, the whole concept of giving mass storage devices letter names, and having an inherent sort order. I wish this would hurry up and die.
Full user-specified names for mass store devices, with dynamic mount/unmount, and no system dependence on sort order. Please!

[n45048]

Speaking of MIDI, who can't forget canyon.mid?

(Attached for your listening pleasure.)

Also, "shareware".


My favourite application from 'back in the day' would have to be XTreeGold

[German_EE]

We can also add SC/MP (A.K.A. Scamp) which was the first microprocessor I ever saw, that was closely followed by a UK101 which someone brought to the University Computer Club.

I suppose that UHF Modulators have died out now that digital rules the air waves but I did not shed a tear at the passing of Teletext.

[JohnnyBerg]

We can also add SC/MP (A.K.A. Scamp) which was the first microprocessor I ever saw, that was closely followed by a UK101 which someone brought to the University Computer Club.

It was the first microprocessor I ever used! Guess how old I am
It had a very funny instruction set. I used a teletype baudot type for printing the hex listings
It had a punch reader to, super!

[Howardlong]

I think I was about 12 or 13 when I first set eyes on a SC/MP system, a MK14 I think it was, back in to 70s when a friend of mine had one. Although I was already programming my own hand-wired vero-boarded (non-SC/MP) micro in machine code (no assembler then, we just coded up the hex directly onto paper from our heads), I couldn't figure out how to get the MK14 to do anything. ISTR you had to multiplex the 7 segment display in software, which in itself was a barrier to doing anything at all with it as there was a fair amount of complexity involved to do the most basic thing. I wonder how many of those ended up in drawers?

UHF modulators were the voodoo of the day, nobody knew how they worked, but the black and white ones looked really simple inside. The colour ones were on a different level though. Astec used to make the ones used in the UK, they had that market sewn up.

Beautiful Teletype by the way, I was expecting to see them on ebay when I looked last night, nothing to be had other than parts, it looks like they must be serious collector's items now.

[JohnnyBerg]

Beautiful Teletype by the way, I was expecting to see them on ebay when I looked last night, nothing to be had other than parts, it looks like they must be serious collector's items now.

When printing hex codes on the teletype it had to change case when going from a number to a character. So printing F9A1 made a lot of noise. My parents could not sleep overnight when I was "printing" in the garage. I guess the neighbors could not sleep either. I was using it without ear protection 

[codeboy2k]

I think I had the same growing up experience as you did, JohnnyBerg.

I had the baudot tty too with punch and reader, down in my parents basement.  I mostly used that for RTTY, clickety-clack all night long on the weekends. Later my dad bought me the Altair 8800 computer kit and I added a 33 ASR.

I also got a standalone external high-speed puncher/reader from a surplus dealer. It was a big grey box, about 30 cm square on each side, and it could sit on the tabletop. I hooked that up to my altair and that was used more often since it was faster.   I guess you could call that my backup server LOL.