Need a new thermostat

[Bud Frede]

I have the same setup here.

In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them.

A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written.

I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you. If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or something rather than the latest and greatest Office whatever-version-they're-up-to-now.

There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me.

It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less hassle, etc.

I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate complexity." :-)

Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something...

[Clare Snyder]

Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate technology for the information age". In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware which allowed many companies to get into office and retail computerization at an affordable price.

[gfretwell]

That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free.

[Clare Snyder]

in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7 years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible RatShack CoCo - which I still own)

[gfretwell]

The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order the parts and write them off. The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the M/A contract. It worked out well for me.

[micky]

The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20 or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code, without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week later of course they stopped making the Jr.

11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work. I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it, but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything, except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen.

I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been given a bunch.

[gfretwell]

IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines. When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the same, maybe for legal reasons.

[Clare Snyder]

When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi, Shugart, Panasonic, Matsushita, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even used some Sanyo Denki drives.

Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by IBM. You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before the "PC". The old 180KB jobs. By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86

[trader_4]

I agree with that. I never heard of any incompatibility between IBM PC floppy drives their media and the clones. The thing that made the Compaq and later PCs so successful was that they were just about 100% compatible with IBM. If you couldn't take a floppy disk from one machine to another, it would have been a disaster.

[Xeno]

Indeed, the full height soft sectored drives by Tandon, TM100-2 as OEM in early PCs up until the AT, were exactly the same internally as drives in other computers. Might have had an IBM logo on the front plate but that was all. Those drives needed occasional head alignment and that involved an oscilloscope and an analogue alignment disk. You had to adjust the heads until the image on screen was symmetrical. Those alignment disks were A$100 each (in 1980s dollars) so you checked a drive's heads out before you put a valuable alignment disk in it.

Northstar Horizon was the only one I recall that was hard sectored until late in the piece. Earlier there were plenty in the 8 inch drives. There were also a few around running on the S100 bus system. I can't recall the brand now but I sourced one for a friend who had an orphaned S100 based CP/M system and the only way he could get a set of drives was through that bus. The unit was this one;

drives I sourced for the owner were very much like the drives pictured on the right. Got him a heap of blank disks too since they were, at that time, becoming very scarce. He probably still has it.

[Xeno]

Yes, the PC drives were 100% compatible. What did vary between manufacturers (but not IBM and compatibles) was the format (sector size, interleave, etc.) but a friend wrote a PC program that could read just about any disk.

[Clare Snyder]

snipped

I had (possibly still have) an alugnmrnt disk and the software for the Radio Shack COCO with the A-Dos controller that I used for years to check and align 5 1/4" floppies. I think it cost me something like $39 back in about '85 or so.

The CP/M box the dealership got just before I left to run the ADP financial system used single sided hard sectored 5 1/4 inch drives. I THINK it was a proprietory system - not the PC based CP/M 86. I know it only had one floppy and no hard drive - which made booting and loading the system a PAIN. I think it was a shugart drive but wouldnt swear to it. Maybee a Magnetic Peripherals

[gfretwell]

They all wrote compatible data formats. I was talking about the interface. On the 3.5s you could write a disk a clone wouldn't read. Just format a 720 at 1.44. The clone will puke on it. Another IBM machine will work.

[FromTheRafters]

Might have been at the introduction of the double density disk.

[Clare Snyder]

Wasn't much that DID work on first gen PS/2s - and their Micro-Channel???? It was going to "revolutionize" the computer world.

We got involved with a couple of microchannel clone projects - almost killed us - and almost killed IBM too. EISA bus technology didn't do much better but at least it was compatible with the standard ISA bus peripherals

[Clare Snyder]

I remember 1.44s formatted to 720. To read them on a normal PC you just had to put tape over the density selector notch on the diskette case. There was a "switch" in at least some versions of DOS to change the density. the /F: switch seems to ring a bell. I know it was there in DOS 6.2 - not sure about how many earlier versions.

[Clare Snyder]

The convertible wouldn't accept a 1.44 drive?

[Clare Snyder]

Award offered a bios upograde for the portable to support the 1.44 floppy drive. The controller had no problem with the high density drive - just the Bios. Phoenix provided one too.Available within a year of initial introduction of the convertible. (another of IBM's terrible ideas) about the same time the 1.44 arrived on the scene.

[gfretwell]

I never heard of anyone doing it. It would have been a nice upgrade but usually the upgrade was a back pack hard drive. It was slow but you did get lots of storage.

[Clare Snyder]

We sold hard drive addons for the original PC as well as bios upgrades which allowed them to use high density double sided floppies, as well as controllers that allowed use of the high density drives on the original bios on the PC. We also sold bios upgrades for the early PS/2 . Don't think we ever sold one for the brain-dead convertible, but we sold litterally thousands of the "lunchbox" portable computers and tens of thousands of add-on hard drives.(TCR was the largest distributor of hard drives for personal computers in Canada before Computer Brokers Canada ate our lunch) Interesting - through various mergers TCR became part of SYNNEX - as did CBC