OK, wreckers. It's 'fess up time!

[makesawdust]

I once had a room mate who had a Wagner Power Sprayer. In addition t the drips, it shocked you every time you pulled the trigger

-- makesawdust

[Morris Dovey]

Nah. First computer I programed had no transistors and no RAM. It was a Bendix G-15 with a rotating drum memory. It was a challenge to distribute programs around the (2K) drum so that as each instruction finished executing the next would be (almost) at the read head. It did double duty as a space heater.

About that same time a friend of mine built a computer (stored program calculator) out of telephone relays. Noisy thing. As I recall, he had to be careful because if too many relays picked at the same time, it blew the power supply fuse.

[mark]

Ha! That's funny. I loved those machines. They had the best gui. Gem Desktop, I think it was. I had a garage business going where I would solder in the sockets and pop in the chips to turn the Atari ST520 into the ST1040. Then you'd get your host controller, your external drive enclosure and you were smokin with a 20 meg HD. I still get warm fuzzies thinking about all the bulletin boards I dialed up way back then. Remember how frustrating it was to get the constant busy signal on the really popular ones?

[rcook5]

Cassette recorders? Cassette recorders! Hell son, I wrote the book on cassette recorders for computer data storage!

Literally. I was even paid for it, although the company never published it -- for some odd reason.

The really odd thing is that you can find the book listed in several on-line book stores. :-)

--RC

"Sometimes history doesn't repeat itself. It just yells 'can't you remember anything I've told you?' and lets fly with a club. -- John W. Cambell Jr.

[rcook5]

I can remember when IBM maintained no one would ever need a hard drive larger than 10Meg.

Was it the kind with the removable disk packs that you loaded and unloaded through the top of the machine?

We had an incident once where the brake mechanism on one of those broke and the disks didn't stop spinning when it was shut down to change disk packs. The operator lifted out the disks without realizing they were still spinning -- until he tried to turn and the gryoscopic forces slammed him into the wall!

Ah, memories!

--RC

"Sometimes history doesn't repeat itself. It just yells 'can't you remember anything I've told you?' and lets fly with a club. -- John W. Cambell Jr.

[foggytown]

I can remember when I was the envy of my block because I had a Casio pocket calculator! IIRC the most impressive thing I did with it was to type in 07734 then turn it upside down. (You have to remember how the LED numbers were formed.)

FoggyTown

[Gino]

I was first on my block to have one as well. Later I bought a TI programmable scientific calculator. It cost more then the price of a fully loaded computer does now. But it got me through college math. It was so new the professor didn't realize it could be programmed to do the work for you.:)

[Tim Douglass]

Heck, I remember when a 10MB drive was the size of a washing machine and cost the earth.

Tim Douglass

[Tim Douglass]

You're going to make me think now. I'm pretty sure I did 40 track, so

185K.

Tim Douglass

[Tim Douglass]

Stuff's only worth what you can get for it. When the company I worked for closed out a product line many years ago (software) we dumped all the old masters. Some of the variations ran 40 5 1/4" floppies (Apple II). We had different master for each system and often had both double-sided and single-sided sets for the same thing. They were also all duplicated in 3 1/2" disks (again often both single and double-sided). The upshot was that we almost filled and entire dumpster with nothing but disks - probably more than 10,000 all told. The guy with the garbage company actually called the office to make sure he was supposed to be dumping all that stuff.

Tim Douglass

[Larry Jaques]

On 5 Jan 2005 15:38:44 -0800, "foggytown" calmly ranted:

That number was 710 77345 and it looked like SHELL OIL when you inverted the calc.

-- "Menja bé, caga fort!"

[jo4hn]

Fascinating. Somebody had written a cross assembler for the Verdan that ran on the G-15. Certainly better than nothing. The first computer that I ever tried to program was a Burroughs E-101. It was externally programmed and at the approximate size of a desk, did about as much. j4

[Morris Dovey]

Fascinating indeed. Way better than nothing. The machines weren't much by today's standards (although the G-15 was capable of true multiprocessing), but they were such an incredible jump ahead of everything that had ever gone before.

We hung a tapedrive onto the Bendix, then a Calcomp plotter, then an IBM 407, and eventually a "mark-sense" card reader. By the time all the 'upgrades' were in place the poor thing had a MTTF somewhere between three and four hours.

The G-15 was about the size of a refrigerator - and churned its way through a lot of calculations before finally being replaced with an incredibly faster IBM 1130 (8K of 16-bit words with 320K word cartridge disk drive and a snazzy Selectric console printer.)

I'd never thought about it until just now; but that old Bendix had a better MTTF than did my 80286 PC running Windows 3.1 (:

[Silvan]

I had one of those as well. Still do, somewhere. I saw something similar the other day at Wal-Mart for $3.99 or something suitably ludicrous considering what that thing set my parents back in the '80s. Which was probably only a quarter or less what you paid for yours.

I remember paying $1200 for a VCR too, and $80 for a blank tape. Or being aware of it happening around me anyway, mind you.

Wow. That's actually kind of interesting in a way. $1200 for a VCR. That's a pretty firm memory, and I think that's right. That was a hell of a lot of money in 1981 or so. We had two channels on TV. Why the hell did my parents pay $1200 for a VCR? That's probably something close to $5,000 today, I'm guessing off the top of my head. Hell's bells man. Short of a house or a car, I can't think of a thing I'd ever spend that much on. Maybe a metal lathe. If I had $5,000 to spend, which I sure don't.

I guess with VCRs going for $20 a pop now, which is probably $0.75 in 1981 dollars, it probably explains why the VCR repairman has gone the way of the dodo. When the thing used to cost as much as a car, it was worth fixing.

So I guess an equivalent VCR in today's money would go for about $18,000.

Now I'm all confused. That calculator let me cheat my way out of learning math. :)

[Silvan]

I remember paying $800 for a CPU. Just a CPU. I probably put that damn thing on my credit card, paid $25,000 for it, and haven't paid it off yet. (Two more years. Oh the terrible, terrible price of stupidity.)

In contrast, I paid $300 for my last computer. Complete with everything but a monitor. Good grief.

[Silvan]

Yeah, and the really schmootzy ones had two or three phone lines.

Back then the only real-time chatting you ever did was with the sysop. Sysops could never type worth a damn.

I find the same is true more broadly of the general population now that instant messaging stuff is abundant. I never have been able to adapt to real-time. I don't IRC or ICQ or AIM or blah blah blah because I can't stand to sit there for 45 minutes waiting on the putz on the other end of the line to finish a sentence.

I don't type fast enough to pass a typing test for a secretary job, but I type leaps and bounds faster than anyone I've ever chatted with online. I find it all but impossible to believe that vast numbers of office types can hammer out words faster than I can.

Wow, now there's a thought. Best non-woodworking thing you ever bought. Has to be the Microsoft Natural Keyboard from 1991. I forget how many millions of words I've typed on this thing, but it's up there. Hrm.

4,500,000 as a very, very conservative estimate. It might be up to three times that.

Damn I yack a lot.

The new ones are crap, and this one exceeded its life expectancy several million switch cycles ago, I'm sure. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I really, really, really hate the new ones. Anybody want to get rid of an early '90s vintage Microsoft Natural Keyboard, from before they redesigned it, when they were still made in the USA?

[Glenna Rose]

Gee, my first computer was state-of-the-art with dual disk drives. LOL And very, very expensive compared to today's.

Two years later, when I bought the 10MB hard drive and could run more than one program at once, I thought it was heaven!

Now my first flash drive holds 256 MB; the external hard drive . . . won't even go there as I do video work where 5 minutes of raw video uses 1 GB of space. Back in 1982 and 1983, we "home users" could not even begin to imagine a hard drive of more than 800 GB, and that being small. LOL

How time flies, and technology moves forward.

Glenna loving Panther!

[Glenna Rose]

It does seem odd now, doesn't it? $20 bucks a disk.

I wish there were someplace for me to sell the 8-inch floppies I have here, a full box of them, and I'm talking storage box, probably 100+ disks in it. I'll likely wind up cutting them in half and dumping them (they have data from another secretarial service bureau obtained in a sale from her to me). It'd be great to be able to wipe the disks and sell them, or even give them away. I'm a horrible recycler and don't like tossing things that can be used, especially if they fall under serious pollutant standards.

Of course I have hundreds of 5-1/4s from my own business and many, many dozens of 3-1/2s. Now, it's stacks of CDs. How times change.

Glenna starting on DVDs for storage now

[Silvan]

I'm still holding out for those little 1" lucite cubes that are supposed to hold 50 TB of data. Why aren't they here yet?

[Joe Gorman]

Yes, we were the first navy class for the new HD with a removable disk pack, with enclosed heads with the pack. It was replacing the hydraulicly operated head HD we had just finished class on. If you overrode one or more interlocks, you could remove the pack while it was still spinning. since it was a training situation we all got to do that. Interesting to do, more fun to watch the smaller class members wrestle with it. Joe