Outdated Computer Terms

[coppice]

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 

The ASR33 was so clunky it made a TI Silent 700 family terminal look super sophisticated. :-) Who else did their early professional work on microprocessors using a TI Silent 733 ASR, with all their work stored on cassettes? :-)

[Excavatoree]

My first printer was an old teletype. (the EE that gave it to me built the serial interface for it and put it it a box by itself w/o the keyboard.)  I think Dad still has it in my old computer room, but it's buried. (Dad's a worse hoarder than I am.) I should get it out,  oil some parts, and see if I can get it working.

[German_EE]

I think we have an I/O Error here.................

Teletext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

Teletype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Corporation

In my previous post I referred to Teletext, teletypes are cool though.

[Howardlong]

The equivalent over here in Blighty were the Creed teleprinters. Basically the same thing, but five hole, were the Teletypes 8 hole?

Caps only, and a letter and figure shift to switch.

There were a couple of different codes we used, we knew Baudot as Murray code, and another more human readable code which I can't remember the name of, we used for writing programs and producing output on an old Elliott 803.

Maintaining them was a bit of an artform, we had one guy who was an absolute wizz at it, I reckon he could have completely stripped one down to its constituent parts and re-assemble in a day.

They were terribly unreliable though.

Chad, now there's a word you don't hear these days. Used to be common parlance back in the day http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_(paper)

[NiHaoMike]

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. 

If only it caught on... The move from floppies to CDs took a step backwards in that the media was no longer protected. That flaw remained with the move to DVDs and then Blurays. At least even the Blurays are slowly going obsolete now...

[cosmicray]

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 

The ASR33 was so clunky it made a TI Silent 700 family terminal look super sophisticated. :-) Who else did their early professional work on microprocessors using a TI Silent 733 ASR, with all their work stored on cassettes? :-)

Did mine on a KSR-33 (no papertape) with all the work stored on cassettes.

[SeanB]

did anyone mention "tsenglabs" yet?
or "CYRIX" cpus?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tseng_Labs

How about the gold flashed ceramic IBM 6x86 processor I am looking at right now?

Made in USA in 1995.........

[n45048]

"CYRIX" cpus?

We try and forget about those

AMD aren't far behind.

[EEVmarty]

BBS
NO CARRIER
Telix
Xtree Gold
Fidonet
Fossil Driver
Qemm & Desqview
OS/2
Windows 3.1/3.11 / Windows for Workgroups hehehehe
mouse.com driver
287/387 co-processor
sip ram (AT 286 m'boards)
Sound Blaster
Acoustic Coupler

[n45048]

BBS
NO CARRIER
Telix
Xtree Gold
Fidonet
Fossil Driver
Qemm & Desqview
OS/2
Windows 3.1/3.11 / Windows for Workgroups hehehehe
mouse.com driver
287/387 co-processor
sip ram (AT 286 m'boards)
Sound Blaster
Acoustic Coupler

All among some of my favourite things, except maybe not "No Carrier"

[madires]

BBS
NO CARRIER
Fidonet
Fossil Driver
OS/2

Not as outdated as you might think Today most BBSs got telnet access and Fidonet is still alive (I'm running 2:240/1661). OS/2 isn't dead either, I know a few OS/2 Fidonet nodes. And some nodes happily use a FOSSIL driver for the ISDN card. BTW, my ZyXEL U-1496EG+ is running fine for about 20 years now. There's also a spare EG+ and an USR V.Everything somewhere in a box.

[Mechanical Menace]

BBS
...
Acoustic Coupler

I can remember "helping" my dad making the latter so we could get the BBC onto the former.

Hard to believe that in my lifetime there was a period when you couldn't just plug a modem into the phone line because the phone was hardwired and you didn't own it. If you wanted an extension or second phone you had to get the telco in to do it...

[EEVmarty]

Cassette data (game) tapes
CRT monitors lol
EXPENSIVE ram & cpu's
Any HDrive that doesn't have "TeraBytes" on it. lol
256kb sim memories
ISA 8 bit slots
Full length graphics cards
Mono (paper white) monitors
Greenscreen (or Amber) CRTs
FAX (almost gone)
games that only used 100's kb (usually on 1 disc).
Dual floppy Drives - copy A: b:
Commander Keen.
Mouse with only 2 buttons and NO scrollwheel
parallel printers
dot matrix printers

sigh.....

[HighVoltage]

How about

IBM Advanced Diagnostics Floppy

It was the holy grail of fixing an IBM AT and so difficult to get in those days.

[Mechanical Menace]

Commander Keen.

Depends where you are, in a lot of the world IBM compatible PCs were laughed at for gaming until Doom. Commander Keen was obsolete as soon as it came out in those places, where now people actually want to play it for the retroness.

[madires]

FAX (almost gone)
parallel printers
dot matrix printers

In Germany fax machines are in regular use due to a special legal status regarding the evidential value (qualified sending report). My old LJ got a nice centronics port And dot matrix printers are also still used, often by medical offices. They got special flatbed dot matrix printers for the tons of different forms (different sizes, different paper thickness).

[VK3DRB]

How about

IBM Advanced Diagnostics Floppy

It was the holy grail of fixing an IBM AT and so difficult to get in those days.

I had the entire source code to that diagnostic diskette. The test code was actually quite good. I also had the source code to IBM BIOS and IBM DOS. It all fit on 200MB HDD in a machine called The Beast. My job was modifying the code to debug problems and creating automated tests. A colleague at IBM who was also a member of a cult was horrified by the name I called the machine. He believed the machine was satanic (because of the name I called it) and that computers was the start of the end for all of us.

[miguelvp]

Programming with PC Interrupts.
Yup what people call BIOS had specific code to do a ton of things like reading the keyboard, parallel printer, driving the monitor, Hard Disk /Floppy controller code, DMA control, MIDI, Serial communications, Real time clock, Cassette interface, Joystick, extended memory,  etc, etc, etc. Plus a bunch more of vendor specific ones.

Edit: I had the complete photocopied IBM PC ROM BIOS disassembly in a binder, not sure where is at (probably my wife tossed it).

And I believe Basic was somewhere in there as well.

[AlfBaz]

How about

IBM Advanced Diagnostics Floppy

It was the holy grail of fixing an IBM AT and so difficult to get in those days.

Obviously not the same thing but it reminded me of anadisk, a floppy disk utility that I use to use. Still got it on my PC and it still runs in Win7. Don't have a floppy drive so it may not be able to actually do anything if I did

[HighVoltage]

How about

IBM Advanced Diagnostics Floppy

It was the holy grail of fixing an IBM AT and so difficult to get in those days.

I had the entire source code to that diagnostic diskette. The test code was actually quite good. I also had the source code to IBM BIOS and IBM DOS. It all fit on 200MB HDD in a machine called The Beast. My job was modifying the code to debug problems and creating automated tests. A colleague at IBM who was also a member of a cult was horrified by the name I called the machine. He believed the machine was satanic (because of the name I called it) and that computers was the start of the end for all of us.

You must have had some amazing connections to IBM, to get the source code of those packages.
May be it was different in the US in those days.
Here in Germany it was almost unreal, how difficult it was to get a copy of this floppy.
For years it was my most guarded floppy of all.

[Towger]

Using DOS 'Debug' to access the BIOS to configure the 10Mb hard drive, still have that PC!  I can still remember what FOSSIL stands for, does that make me old?

[SeanB]

I bought a new dot matrix printer this year, because nothing else works so well on multipart forms. Plus the ribbon lasts around 3 boxes of paper.

[Sigmoid]

I recently realized, while playing around with microcontrollers, is that programming a microcontroller is exactly the same thing as programming a regular PC used to be back when I was a kid. It just got smaller.

[miguelvp]

I bought a new dot matrix printer this year, because nothing else works so well on multipart forms. Plus the ribbon lasts around 3 boxes of paper.

Dot matrix are fairly new, I would have been more impressed if you got yourself a drum printer like the one we had in the computer lab. we just had to clean the drum every so often with a metal brush.

Oh and the printer paper that was white and green

[Mechanical Menace]

I would have been more impressed if you got yourself a drum printer

Weren't they like an OTT daisy wheel printer with a wheel for each column?

Oh and the printer paper that was white and green

The stuff used with carbon paper?