On 11/2/05, James Knott wrote:

Jerry Feldman wrote:

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Most systems are coming through today with no floppies. My desktop system at work does not have a floppy, but does run SuSE 9.3 Professional. I just have not installed 10 on it.

Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

You forgot about tape based primary storage and punch cards. Used all of those circa 1980. Something I never used was core memory. Little magnets with wires wrapped around them. One magnet per bit. I'll let the old guys on the list brag about those. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century

* James Knott [11-02-05 19:13]:

Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Wordstar -- Patrick Shanahan Registered Linux User #207535 http://wahoo.no-ip.org @ http://counter.li.org HOG # US1244711 Photo Album: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/gallery2

On Wednesday 02 November 2005 18:31, James Knott wrote:

Patrick Shanahan wrote:

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* James Knott [11-02-05 19:13]:

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Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Wordstar

Ah, the good old days! Zenix, Esix, CP/M, low level formats, MFM, RLL and the like. I remember installing a 16550 Uart chip so I could get the bbs up and running on a USRobotics HST modem. I had this one computer based on CP/M that was built like a frick'in tank... I'm sure if you had two of these, you could drive you're car up on em to change the oil. I also had a ISA card for RLL drives that would take a say 20MB hd and put it at around 40MB. Can't recall the name though. And Wordstar, great program... and it worked just fine off of Wyse terminals. How about LANtastic? ;) Dana

On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 21:18 -0700, Dana J. Laude wrote:

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On Wednesday 02 November 2005 18:31, James Knott wrote:

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Patrick Shanahan wrote:

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* James Knott [11-02-05 19:13]:

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Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Wordstar

Ah, the good old days! Zenix, Esix, CP/M, low level formats, MFM, RLL and the like. I remember installing a 16550 Uart chip so I could get the bbs up and running on a USRobotics HST modem.

I had this one computer based on CP/M that was built like a frick'in tank... I'm sure if you had two of these, you could drive you're car up on em to change the oil. I also had a ISA card for RLL drives that would take a say 20MB hd and put it at around 40MB. Can't recall the name though. And Wordstar, great program... and it worked just fine off of Wyse terminals. How about LANtastic? ;)

Dana

I certainly remember tape drives - though that would have been grade school - I still have an 8" diskette from my Navy days - I also remember he wonderful days of BBS and 1200 baud modems and using procomm to download 40kb of data (it took hours!) I stepped away from computing for a few years and low and behold jumpers were practically a thing of the past and memory was geater than storage ever used to be. Don't throw away those hayes smart 1200 modems. we use them because our security system do not have real modems, instead they are created in software. so they are very slow (40-110 baud). The newer modems don't go

On Wed November 2 2005 20:43, Chris Edwards wrote: that slow. -- John R. Sowden AMERICAN SENTRY SYSTEMS, INC. Residential & Commercial Alarm Service UL Listed Central Station Serving the San Francisco Bay Area Since 1967 mail@americansentry.net www.americansentry.net

* James Knott [11-02-05 20:33]:

Yep, used Wordstar 2000 at work a few years back.

Wordstar was my first "word processor", on cp/m. -- Patrick Shanahan Registered Linux User #207535 http://wahoo.no-ip.org @ http://counter.li.org HOG # US1244711 Photo Album: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/gallery2

On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 19:50 -0500, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* James Knott [11-02-05 19:13]:

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Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Wordstar

WordSTAR 7.0 D still running just fine on hda1 still can not duplicate its ability to print justified formatted ascii anywhere else. -- _______ _______ _______ __ / ____\ \ / / ____|_ _\ \ / / | | \ \ /\ / / (___ | | \ \ / / | | \ \/ \/ / \___ \ | | \ \/ / | |____ \ /\ / ____) |_| |_ \ / \_____| \/ \/ |_____/|_____| \/ | \ /|\ || |\ / |~~\ /~~\ /~~| //~~\ | \ / | \ || | X |__/| || |( `--. |__ | | \| \_/ / \ | \ \__/ \__| \\__/

Allen wrote:

PDP machines are actually quite useful as someone brought them up on here not long ago. they have to be big from the looks of them.

Generally, they were installed in large cabinets. However, there were also some microprocessor versions (LSI-11) that weren't much bigger than today's desktop systmes. There was even one from Heathkit.

Allen wrote:

PDP machines are actually quite useful as someone brought them up on here not long ago. they have to be big from the looks of them.

for editing, I use Vi and Emacs. Vi is way older than DOS ;)

Real programmers use ed. :-) Vi is for sissies. Vi is just a front end for screen display, but under the hood ed is still very much alive and kicking. With ed you can turn a MB text file (about a 1000 page book) into garbage at the drop of a hat. Ed has only one error message: ? (pronounce: Huh?) So you'd type in 1,$s/\([0-9]*\)\([a-zA-Z. ]*\)$/\2 \1/ to (yes!) interchange all student numbers and student names in a document and ed would come back with Huh?, because you forgot the couple of spaces between number and name. But after a day of trial and error it was very rewarding to have those two columns, in fact, interchanged. :-) OTOH you might have turned the whole file into garbage. So ed taught you to back up or else... Regards, -- Jos van Kan registered Linux user #152704

On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 06:18 -0500, Allen wrote: <SNIP>

Currently looking for some older machines but can't find any. I don't want to use Ebay so I'm trying to at my college get some of their older stuff.

Looking for these right now:

A WORKING 286 machine with the software for it.

A 386 working with NIC, at least 500 MB HD and monitor and mouse.

A few 486s because I find them useful. We have one at work I use every weekend I'm there to play Doom and Wolfenstein

I'd like a couple of these though with NICs, Monitors, A mouse, keyboard, needs to play Doom

I have this for these machines:

PC-DOS 6.3 (All original, and it works well, I got it to install on a 2.40 GHz processor box with 128 MB Nvidia card and an 80 GB HD and 512 RAM. It didn't find all of it but it booted. DOS looks cool on a 17 inch monitor lol.

Windows 1.0

Windows 2

Windows 3

Windows 9X

I have immages of the install disks for Win311 and somewhere outside its case a disassembled 486 with extra printer port needed by directionality for use with IOMEGA zip. I think it still has the 8 1mb memory cards still plugged in. Working when replaced. Case was rusted so it went to scrap. Win98SE needs to install over existing win311 and also requires boot disk to make work. Although I have a iso if you have a DVD. It was on a small partition. I am not sure where the sound and graphics are for that old 486. It was a DX2 66 last I ran it. -- _______ _______ _______ __ / ____\ \ / / ____|_ _\ \ / / | | \ \ /\ / / (___ | | \ \ / / | | \ \/ \/ / \___ \ | | \ \/ / | |____ \ /\ / ____) |_| |_ \ / \_____| \/ \/ |_____/|_____| \/ | \ /|\ || |\ / |~~\ /~~\ /~~| //~~\ | \ / | \ || | X |__/| || |( `--. |__ | | \| \_/ / \ | \ \__/ \__| \\__/

Mike wrote:

On Wednesday 02 November 2005 19:11, James Knott wrote:

...

Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

My first computer (SWTC 6800) used cassette tapes - loaded data at a smokin' 300 baud!

I also used 300B cassettes and paper tape, with my IMSAI 8080.

Mike wrote:

On Wednesday 02 November 2005 20:33, James Knott wrote:

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I also used 300B cassettes and paper tape, with my IMSAI 8080.

All those excellent-looking switches and lights...I was always jealous of those. The SWTC was so plain...

Yep, it was a "REAL" computer, not one of those turke^M^Mn key boxes. ;-)

On Wednesday 02 November 2005 10:36 pm, Robert Cunningham wrote:

Don't knock 8" floppies, I still have a working electron microscope here that uses them for it's X-ray spectrometer library via a cpm computer I worked on a Point-of-Sale system that used core memory as a storage device. Since core is non-volatile, when the system looses power, all the data is preserved. We had a power fail board that gave us enough time to save all those registers (accumulator(12 bits), link(1 bit), PC(12 bits)). The printer was a drum printer where we issued to codes to strike the hammers. The modem was simple, sit in a loop for 1200 bps, then either read or write a bit.

When a system in a restaurant needed a software update, we would schedule that to occur after that store downloaded its daily data. The system had 4K 12-bit words (except in Ct where we had 8 K because we had to accumulate both meals and sales tax). If the system crashed and needed to have its code reloaded, a serviceman was called, and he had a case with a paper tape board and paper tape reader. Note that An Wang (founder of Wang labs) co-invented core memories. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 07:22 -0500, Allen wrote:

On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 08:01:17PM -0500, Mike wrote:

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On Wednesday 02 November 2005 19:11, James Knott wrote:

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Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

My first computer (SWTC 6800) used cassette tapes - loaded data at a smokin' 300 baud!

The first computer I ever bought is the one I'm typing on. Pentium 3 733 MHz Processor, 128 RAM and 43 GB Hd. Yea, you people are older than shit and got to play with neat toys while I'm sitting here like "uhhhh.... I have Windows 98 CDs!"....

I've actually used CPM, DOS, And Windows 3.

Kids these days have such nice toys. I still use this PII 350 with 8mb graphics and 256mb memory running 9.2. Likely I should add more memory. Multiboot with PCDOS2000 for legacy apps. -- _______ _______ _______ __ / ____\ \ / / ____|_ _\ \ / / | | \ \ /\ / / (___ | | \ \ / / | | \ \/ \/ / \___ \ | | \ \/ / | |____ \ /\ / ____) |_| |_ \ / \_____| \/ \/ |_____/|_____| \/ | \ /|\ || |\ / |~~\ /~~\ /~~| //~~\ | \ / | \ || | X |__/| || |( `--. |__ | | \| \_/ / \ | \ \__/ \__| \\__/

On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 19:11 -0500, James Knott wrote:

Jerry Feldman wrote:

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On Wednesday 02 November 2005 1:44 pm, Kai Ponte wrote:

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Right now, the laptop is hooked up to my corporate LAN and sharing my local comptuer's hard drive, thanks to Samba. (Let's hope the new CIFS doesn't cause all heck to break lose, when that gets released.) Most systems are coming through today with no floppies. My desktop system at work does not have a floppy, but does run SuSE 9.3 Professional. I just have not installed 10 on it.

Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Yup. Used them at a shop I worked at to supply CNC data to a milling machine that was running concurrent dos. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998

From: Silviu Marin-Caea Organization: Field Insights Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:07:35 +0200 To: Subject: Re: [SLE] Floppy drive vs. SUSE 10.0

Ken Schneider wrote:

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...

Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Yup. Used them at a shop I worked at to supply CNC data to a milling machine that was running concurrent dos.

My first computer was a typewriter and it used to store data on sheets of paper.

Can you kids imagine that?

What's a typewriter? Was that what they used to call 286's? - Ian (born in the Carter Administration. Barely.)

On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 19:57 -0800, Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 17:07 +0200, Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

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...

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Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Yup. Used them at a shop I worked at to supply CNC data to a milling machine that was running concurrent dos.

My first computer was a typewriter and it used to store data on sheets of paper.

Can you kids imagine that?

I think we had those in HS back in 1979. They were IBM dancing ball. You had to hand calculate hyphenation and spacing in order to justify paragraphs and pages.

Actually I think the first computer I used was called a slide rule, back in high school, as there were no 'computers' then (late 1960's). -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998

* James Knott [11-05-05 08:05]:

Ken Schneider wrote:

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Actually I think the first computer I used was called a slide rule, back in high school, as there were no 'computers' then (late 1960's).

I also had a slip stick for high school classes. I've still got it and it still boots up without any problems. ;-)

Gee, must have been something going around. I had a slip-stick too in high school, late '50s... -- Patrick Shanahan Registered Linux User #207535 http://wahoo.no-ip.org @ http://counter.li.org HOG # US1244711 Photo Album: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/gallery2

On Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 07:08:29AM -0500, Ken Schneider wrote:

On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 19:57 -0800, Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

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On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 17:07 +0200, Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

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Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Yup. Used them at a shop I worked at to supply CNC data to a milling machine that was running concurrent dos.

My first computer was a typewriter and it used to store data on sheets of paper.

Can you kids imagine that?

I think we had those in HS back in 1979. They were IBM dancing ball. You had to hand calculate hyphenation and spacing in order to justify paragraphs and pages.

Actually I think the first computer I used was called a slide rule, back in high school, as there were no 'computers' then (late 1960's).

Yes there was ;) Eniac was what 194x something. Something most people dont know was that the first programmer ever was a woman and the first computer ws designed in the 1800s.

-- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998

-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

Anders Johansson wrote:

On Monday 07 November 2005 01:49, Allen wrote:

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On Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 07:08:29AM -0500, Ken Schneider wrote:

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On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 19:57 -0800, Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

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> Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M? Yup. Used them at a shop I worked at to supply CNC data to a milling machine that was running concurrent dos. My first computer was a typewriter and it used to store data on sheets of paper.

Can you kids imagine that? I think we had those in HS back in 1979. They were IBM dancing ball. You had to hand calculate hyphenation and spacing in order to justify

On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 17:07 +0200, Silviu Marin-Caea wrote: paragraphs and pages. Actually I think the first computer I used was called a slide rule, back in high school, as there were no 'computers' then (late 1960's). Yes there was ;)

Eniac was what 194x something.

1944 I think

But don't forget Konrad Zuse (not to be mistaken with suse) who made the first ever digital computer, completed in 1938

...

Something most people dont know was that the first programmer ever was a woman and the first computer ws designed in the 1800s.

Yes, Linda Lovelace had many talents

Last I heard, she was into "acting". She also hid her age very well. ;-) Perhaps you meant Ada Byron "Lady Lovelace"? http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/love.htm

On Monday 07 November 2005 22:04, pelibali wrote:

On Mon, 7 Nov 2005 03:16:09 +0100

Anders Johansson <.> wrote:

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But don't forget Konrad Zuse (not to be mistaken with suse) who made the first ever digital computer, completed in 1938

If he prepared the first computer, then what should Dr. Google write on the Hungarian "Neumann Janos" ?!

That he invented the computer architecture used in most modern machines, where the program is stored in the data space itself, commonly known as von Neumann architecture.. But that was almost a decade later Besides, I didn't say "first computer", I said "first digital computer". I believe the first "computers" were designed by Pascal (automatic adding machine) and Leibniz (automatic multiplying machine) in the 1600s and 1700s respectively. The first computer that was somewhat general purpose was probably the analytical engine of Charles Babbage in the 1800s There are many firsts

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 05:11:11PM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:

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Besides, I didn't say "first computer", I said "first digital computer". I believe the first "computers" were designed by Pascal (automatic adding machine) and Leibniz (automatic multiplying machine) in the 1600s and 1700s respectively. The first computer that was somewhat general purpose was probably the analytical engine of Charles Babbage in the 1800s Try BCE long before Blaise Pascal and Charles Babbage. IMHO, Konrad Zuse does not get the credit he really deserves. I do believe

On Wednesday 09 November 2005 4:59 pm, Anders Johansson wrote: that he was the first to implement a program controlled computer, predating von Neumann by a few years, but Zuse's work was destroyed during WWII.

Egypt had Computers thousands of years ago. Not like modern of course, but they could computer astrology and things. I've seen one.

-- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

On Saturday 05 November 2005 7:08 am, Ken Schneider wrote:

On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 19:57 -0800, Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

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On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 17:07 +0200, Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

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...

...

Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Yup. Used them at a shop I worked at to supply CNC data to a milling machine that was running concurrent dos.

My first computer was a typewriter and it used to store data on sheets of paper.

Can you kids imagine that?

I think we had those in HS back in 1979. They were IBM dancing ball. You had to hand calculate hyphenation and spacing in order to justify paragraphs and pages.

Actually I think the first computer I used was called a slide rule, back in high school, as there were no 'computers' then (late 1960's). I still have my abacus. I first programmed a computer in 1965. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, James Knott wrote:

Jerry Feldman wrote:

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On Wednesday 02 November 2005 1:44 pm, Kai Ponte wrote:

...

Right now, the laptop is hooked up to my corporate LAN and sharing my local comptuer's hard drive, thanks to Samba. (Let's hope the new CIFS doesn't cause all heck to break lose, when that gets released.) Most systems are coming through today with no floppies. My desktop system at work does not have a floppy, but does run SuSE 9.3 Professional. I just have not installed 10 on it.

Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Yes, I still have a few. -- Boyd Gerber ZENEZ 1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah 84047

At 07:58 PM 11/3/2005 -0500, James Knott wrote:

Boyd Lynn Gerber wrote:

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On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, James Knott wrote:

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Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Yes, I still have a few.

Hard sectors? ;-)

I seem to remember that only some 5-1/4" disks used hard sectoring. They were the ones with a whole slew of holes around the center. Nicht wahr? --doug

--

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At 02:31 PM 4/11/2005, Doug McGarrett wrote:

At 07:58 PM 11/3/2005 -0500, James Knott wrote:

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Boyd Lynn Gerber wrote:

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On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, James Knott wrote:

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Anyone here remember 8" floppies? Hard sectors? CP/M?

Yes, I still have a few.

Hard sectors? ;-)

I seem to remember that only some 5-1/4" disks used hard sectoring. They were the ones with a whole slew of holes around the center. Nicht wahr?

so did the old 8" and even older 13" SSSD Micropolis drives (170k), I still have one of each plus a box of floppys that fit (ex a pdp8). scsijon