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Originally Posted by fastninja500
Reading through all these comments just gave me a much better appreciation of how super smart computer geeks were back then. People we worked with and learned a lot from. Those who programmed in 1's and 0's. And Assembler and Fortran and C. Those who could read a memory dump and say: "Ah, there's the problem" ... pointing out a byte in the dump. Probably all retired now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by plwhit
Being handed a 16" thick COBOL source code printout and hearing "there's a problem, charlie just quit and his program won't compile, fix it.
Whoa... eerie ... The guy I had remembered was named Charlie! And it was almost that exact situation that you described, only Charlie had retired and the abend was a s0c4, I think. The program compile listing and the dump was still warm, fresh off the impact printer. Maybe you were in the next cube and heard this?
Whoa... eerie ... The guy I had remembered was named Charlie! And it was almost that exact situation that you described, only Charlie had retired and the abend was a s0c4, I think. The program compile listing and the dump was still warm, fresh off the impact printer. Maybe you were in the next cube and heard this?
Wow...reading through this brings back some major memories. I was born in 1980, but my brother who is the consummate tech geek had a TRS DOS 80 and I remember playing with it when I was a kid. I remember going to a computer show and building my first 286 system with my brother (started with an amber screen then inherited a CGA card and montior). A couple years later we went back and I built my first system all by myself, a 386 DX40 with 4 MEGS of ram, because I was a serious gamer afterall, lol. It cost $400.
The father of my friends down the street ran a BBS and I remember how pissed my mom was when I tied up the phone line while playing Trade Wars. My first modem was a 1200 baud, then I got a 2400 and then made the big jump to a 14.4, lol. Also, I had AOL when it was just AOL. I think it was version 2.5 that gave you access to the internet.
What amazes me today is just how rapidly things changed. Anyone who built a system back in the 90's must just shake their head in amazement at how easy and relatively plug and play it is today.
What amazes me today is just how rapidly things changed. Anyone who built a system back in the 90's must just shake their head in amazement at how easy and relatively plug and play it is today.
Go back to the 80's ... memory wasn't in modules, but individual chips. 9 pieces of 41256 = 256k memory, 18 pieces for 512k, and so forth. Orientation ... make sure the notches line up in the same direction (pin 1). Peripheral cards ... if you have more than a couple, map out the IRQs and addresses separately, and jumper them as necessary so they'll happily play with each other. Nothing was automatic, and beyond the notch cuts into some of the cable connectors, there was not much of any "idiot proofing".
Quote:
Originally Posted by NeilVA
I'll stop too many bad memories of spending hours on end to hsect,fdisk,format a hard drive.
debug and g=c800:5 to access the hard drive controller BIOS. Low level format, interleve 3 ... and in a couple hours, that Seagate ST-225 20mb hard drive (with only 2 bad sectors) is ready for fdisk and formatting.
I'm so happy with the ease and power of modern computers. No need to worry about IRQ's from peripherals and no need to get an Adaptec SCSI card for a scanner.
Back in the Commodore days and early AOL on a disk I could never get to a bulletin board and no such thing as a forum existed to me. Toady I spend lots of time on forums.
First time I took the cover off a monitor, standing in the front looking at the screen while reaching over the tube making an adjustment. ~ ~ Can you say stupid me?
Editing the Autoexec.bat file on a co-worker's Windows 9x system (before he got to work) where the last line also reads autoexec.bat and then wait for them to come to work and then try booting into Windows was always fun.
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