Batesmotel Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 The University of Utah sold computers with the new “massive” 40mb internal hard drive. A few days later they released the new version of Word Perfect. The University had declared the latest WP was what everyone would use. The new computers could not run the new WP with only a 40mb drive. They had to buy all of them back and sold them as surplus. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Eric Posted November 30, 2020 Author Administrators Share Posted November 30, 2020 1 minute ago, Batesmotel said: The University of Utah sold computers with the new “massive” 40mb internal hard drive. A few days later they released the new version of Word Perfect. The University had declared the latest WP was what everyone would use. The new computers could not run the new WP with only a 40mb drive. They had to buy all of them back and sold them as surplus. Do you remember Word Star? Back in the day, I really resisted transitioning to Word Perfect because I was more comfortable with Word Star. Long time ago. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Eric Posted November 30, 2020 Author Administrators Share Posted November 30, 2020 5 minutes ago, Batesmotel said: The University of Utah sold computers with the new “massive” 40mb internal hard drive. A few days later they released the new version of Word Perfect. The University had declared the latest WP was what everyone would use. The new computers could not run the new WP with only a 40mb drive. They had to buy all of them back and sold them as surplus. 1 minute ago, Eric said: Do you remember Word Star? Back in the day, I really resisted transitioning to Word Perfect because I was more comfortable with Word Star. Long time ago. Today, I mostly use Nano as a text editor from the command line on servers and it doesn’t look a hell of a lot different. I coded a lot of BASIC on Word Star though. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Batesmotel Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 20 minutes ago, Eric said: Do you remember Word Star? Back in the day, I really resisted transitioning to Word Perfect because I was more comfortable with Word Star. Long time ago. I don’t remember it. But my high school only had three computers and only the one in the electronics lab worked. Word Perfect was out when I finished went to college. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kerbie18 Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 Good grief I can't believe I still remember coding in BASIC 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
railfancwb Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 8 hours ago, Eric said: Do you remember Word Star? Back in the day, I really resisted transitioning to Word Perfect because I was more comfortable with Word Star. Long time ago. I used WordStar on CP/M and DOS. Had an add-on which would properly place footnotes at page bottoms. Even wrote a few printer drivers. Found a programmer’s editor which used all the WordStar commands but did not set last letters high for word wrap. Skipped Word Perfect and driven kicking and screaming to Word for Windows. By that time I had no need for anything complex so never learned most of Word. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
railfancwb Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 On 11/27/2020 at 6:11 PM, Historian said: The industry is young and changes frequently. What is in vogue today was not realistic 10 years ago. Not anyone is up to date..unless you're a true industry insider. I have said that Windows converted me from a guru to a barely adequate user. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Historian Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 40 minutes ago, railfancwb said: I have said that Windows converted me from a guru to a barely adequate user. People get comfortable with what they know. It was like the jump from Windows 2003 to 2012/16 that caused people to install software that made the new OS looking like the Old OS. Big changes like the one you are talking about are challenging. Increasingly, i am see demands for system managers to know Linux as well as Windows and have more of a Dev Op system of management. It's not just running an OS....but being able to run it by programing skills. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pipedreams Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 CP/M and DOS are history. My company sent me to a 5 day 8 hour a day Unix training class and now the only thing I remember is how to spell Unix. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
railfancwb Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 57 minutes ago, pipedreams said: CP/M and DOS are history. My company sent me to a 5 day 8 hour a day Unix training class and now the only thing I remember is how to spell Unix. I know early versions of Windows had to set atop DOS - kinda like an upside down pyramid. Does Windows 10 set atop DOS or was that kludge eliminated at some point? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GT4494 Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 go to search on windows and........... There sits DOS. I understand that all systems run on DOS and are just interfaces. I'm not a computer wiz so I may be wrong but its there if you want to use it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
railfancwb Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 2 hours ago, Historian said: People get comfortable with what they know. It was like the jump from Windows 2003 to 2012/16 that caused people to install software that made the new OS looking like the Old OS. Big changes like the one you are talking about are challenging. Increasingly, i am see demands for system managers to know Linux as well as Windows and have more of a Dev Op system of management. It's not just running an OS....but being able to run it by programing skills. At my pre-retirement employer networking entered with a whimper when I networked three accounting computers to run a multi user accounting system on DOS. The Champion Accounting was dBase compiled with Clipper. Used coax and funny connectors. And special network cards. In due course the company went to Ethernet using Netware I believe, but my stepping back to user was happening. About that time an IT person was hired. Think they went to Microsoft Net and later Linux but by then Champion Accounting had been replaced and my knowledge level was who to call if things quit working. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Historian Posted November 30, 2020 Share Posted November 30, 2020 4 minutes ago, railfancwb said: At my pre-retirement employer networking entered with a whimper when I networked three accounting computers to run a multi user accounting system on DOS. The Champion Accounting was dBase compiled with Clipper. Used coax and funny connectors. And special network cards. In due course the company went to Ethernet using Netware I believe, but my stepping back to user was happening. About that time an IT person was hired. Think they went to Microsoft Net and later Linux but by then Champion Accounting had been replaced and my knowledge level was who to call if things quit working. Wow. Vampire clips/taps perhaps? That sounds like what you might have been using for the early networking. Would have been a token ring network, i guess. Talk about the early days. In some ways i miss NetWare as i think it was far better that Microsoft for a long time. Groupwise was a hell of a lot easier to manage than Exchange. . 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
janice6 Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 On 11/27/2020 at 7:19 PM, kerbie18 said: Just promise me the new server won't become self aware. I don't want to be around when your server gains conciousness. Nope...nope...nope... How would the server gain consciousness, none of our nations most important people haven't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
janice6 Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 Ok, I'll admit it. I worked at a company that made main frame computers for many years. (Univac) Our first technical breakthrough in software was: Multi-tasking! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pipedreams Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 And remember telling people not to use the phone because you were on the internet. Starting a download before you went to bed so it would be done when you got up the next morning. The idea that websites with psychedelic colors was a thing 3 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Walt Longmire Posted December 5, 2020 Share Posted December 5, 2020 On 11/27/2020 at 10:34 AM, pipedreams said: Most of the self taught are old timers now, from the days a acoustic modems and tape drives. Trying to keep up is near impossible. My brothers started out with punch cards 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Walt Longmire Posted December 5, 2020 Share Posted December 5, 2020 On 11/29/2020 at 10:11 PM, Batesmotel said: I don’t remember it. But my high school only had three computers and only the one in the electronics lab worked. Word Perfect was out when I finished went to college. My son hired on at Unocal right out of high school. 1993. The entire refinery had 3, that's right, 3 computers, and no one knew how to properly use them. He installed computers all over the plant, networked them and then had to teach everyone how to use them. He has some stories. I still run into people that worked there back then and get to hear about how impressed they were with his abilities. He was loved there by many. He had the first bulletin board on the Kenai Peninsula when he was still in school. Our basement was full of those modems that screeched at you. He dug a ditch in from the street to the house and buried 25 pair phone lines in conduit and installed a metal box on the wall inside to support it and hook all those modems up. I still have a closet full of his books on how to program in all these different languages. While in high school, he was teaching a college class for computers in the evenings at the very same high school he was attending. He had a gigantic ring of keys to the school. He had 24 hr access to it. I went down there with him several times late at night for whatever errands or to pick him up. Was interesting to wander all through this school with him and no one else there. We even went through utility corridors that the teachers who worked there probably didn't even know about. I remember watching him when he had gotten a new programming book. He opened it up, started from the back, scanning pages running his hand over them zigzag fashion as he went down the page speed reading. I watched him for a bit and then asked what he was doing. Turns out he knew what was in the front of the book and was going backwards to get through the parts he didn't know yet. When he got through the new stuff and started seeing the stuff he already knew, that was where he stopped searching and began to study and learn the new stuff. Blew me away. A relative of mine had met my son at a family funeral when he was in grade school. The relative owned a store in Seattle and one of the things he sold was computers. He spent a lot of time in conversation with my son. After we got back home to Alaska I got a call from that relative who I barely knew. He wanted to know if it was o.k. to give my son a computer. He was asking because he didn't want to cause problems by just sending one without asking first. Yes, you can send him a computer. A brand new IBM showed up in the mail. My son put it in his room and disappeared. This was 1986 and he was 11 years old. Not many kids had a computer of any kind in their room in 1986. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricordo Posted December 5, 2020 Share Posted December 5, 2020 In 1971, the US Army offered to send me to computer school. It probably was because of my inordinate skills at, among others, distinguishing between a flat-head screwdriver and a hammer. It sounded like a trap. Moreso because I thought that computers were just a passing fad. I declined. That'll learn them! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
janice6 Posted December 5, 2020 Share Posted December 5, 2020 (edited) When I started working at UNIVAC Computers were only mainframes. The computer could only work on one program at a time. As a consequence, account running the program had to pay for the total cost of all the personnel running the computer, The buildings containing the computers, the environmental control (air conditioning of the buildings) and all the electrical energy to run the tube computers. The electrical power consumption of a tube computer was unbelievable. So, our computers were sold to the Navy. The Navy contracts were billed the hundreds of thousand's of dollars to run the computer. The computers occupied environmentally controlled building space when the company itself couldn't afford air conditioning for its employees. The computer floors were false floors to allow all the inter-rack cables and power to be hidden from the actual computer spaces. We had buildings dedicated to a particular computer. I had numerous times when working with the tube computers where it was more expedient to walk from the top of one computer cabinet rack to another, rather than crawl down to the floor, go a hundred feet to another rack and then climb up to the top again for cable troubleshooting. If UNIVAC had a computer program it wanted to run, but wasn't directly billable to a particular Navy contract, we simply couldn't use the computer due to the horrendous costs of the entire computer. We couldn't afford to use the computers we built for the Navy. Then Multitasking came about. Now our costs of using the computer were billed only on the actual run time as a proportion of the total cost of running the computer. Multitasking made our cost of using the same Navy computer to hundreds of dollars, and now it was affordable. Edited December 5, 2020 by janice6 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
railfancwb Posted December 7, 2020 Share Posted December 7, 2020 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChuteTheMall Posted December 9, 2020 Share Posted December 9, 2020 (edited) On 11/24/2020 at 4:56 PM, Eric said: The box isn't a beast, but it's enough for the site's current needs: CPUs: Dual E-2176G 3.7GHz Hexa-Core Coffee Lake Xeon Processors (12 Cores) RAM: 32GB RAID 10 SATA Array and SSD drives. It is a decent step up from the current box and I switched back over to the Ubuntu Server OS. I never should have gotten away from it. It's got coffee in it, that sounds good. But I don't need a server, I can pour my own. ☕ Edited December 9, 2020 by ChuteTheMall 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Historian Posted December 9, 2020 Share Posted December 9, 2020 (edited) On 12/7/2020 at 1:22 PM, railfancwb said: Ha! I was just reading last night about this very technology. In telecommunications, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing is a type of digital transmission and a method of encoding digital data on multiple carrier frequencies. Would rather read a history book. Edited December 9, 2020 by Historian 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Historian Posted December 9, 2020 Share Posted December 9, 2020 (edited) Time-division multiplexing is a method of transmitting and receiving independent signals over a common signal path by means of synchronized switches at each end of the transmission line so that each signal appears on the line only a fraction of time in an alternating pattern. Frequency-division multiplexing is a technique by which the total bandwidth available in a communication medium is divided into a series of non-overlapping frequency bands, each of which is used to carry a separate signal. Edited December 9, 2020 by Historian 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
railfancwb Posted December 9, 2020 Share Posted December 9, 2020 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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