My best friend is a dead man...!

[palmettomoon]

My friend who may or may not end up in a early grave due to his most recent prank.
He sent me this youtube clip and the email was titled:
If you can recall doing this.
Congratulations, you are an old fart..!

Got him back though.
In my reply, I politely (maybe not so) that he was only a year younger than me.
Still, he didn't have to be so mean and remind me that I'm getting older.
Maybe I'll get his kids a drum set and trumpet for the tot's birthdays.

Whoah. Blast from the past.

Windows was not the primary operating system.
The system booted into MSDOS and then the user typed the command at the dos prompt to start the Windows application or the command to start the applications which were not yet compatible with Windows.

Notice the size of the hard drive is 431 mb.

The commands executing at boot are to load the drivers for this new thing called a CD ROM drive, the top of the line sound card called a Sound Blaster, and to disable write behind caching.

Yes, I am old.

I can remember using DOS (at the beginning of my career as an analyst) and using DOS applications. (Windows was frowned upon almost as badly or worse than an Apple II desktop) Depending upon the work I was performing I'd use one of 5 different autoexec.bat files on booting.

When I was working for IRI Software I'd freak out younger whipper snappers (in the late 90's, early aughts) by using DOS to perform functions against files rather than application software. The looks I'd get, LOL. Sometimes it's fun being old.

 

[aFarewellToKings]

Whoah. Blast from the past.

I can remember using DOS (at the beginning of my career as an analyst) and using DOS applications. (Windows was frowned upon almost as badly or worse than an Apple II desktop) Depending upon the work I was performing I'd use one of 5 different autoexec.bat files on booting.

When I was working for IRI Software I'd freak out younger whipper snappers (in the late 90's, early aughts) by using DOS to perform functions against files rather than application software. The looks I'd get, LOL. Sometimes it's fun being old.

I still use DOS, er, I mean Command Prompt, regularly.
And, that new-fangled Power Shell when I have to.

 

[rbstern]

My experience pre-dates personal computers. A Honeywell mainframe via a modem (phone earpiece/mouthpiece cups) and attached printer terminal. Dial the mainframe manually, listen for the tone, put the handset in the cups. The terminal used a roll of thermal paper.

Then, my high school, very advanced...three teletype terminals connected to a PDP mini computer in a closet. To start that beast, you had to toggle in a sequence of about 20 bytes of startup code via 9 on/off switches, working from a cheat sheet: Set the first eight switches based on a pattern on the sheet to get the desired byte, throw the the ninth switch to load that 1 byte into the computer. On to the next byte, until all were toggled in. Took a few minutes to boot that computer.

Seemed miraculous in those days.

Eventually moved up to a TRS-80. Pixels the size of a thumbnail, but could control them individually, so that meant I could program simple games and pattern-type interaction (think Tetris or Pong).

The original IBM PC, predating the one in the video, with its expansion slots, seemed like a quantum leap forward.

 

[BillsCamino]

Linux for the win......

Our first was a Packard Bell 286 w/512K ram and 10MB HD
Panasonic dot matrix printer

 

[palmettomoon]

My experience pre-dates personal computers. A Honeywell mainframe via a modem (phone earpiece/mouthpiece cups) and attached printer terminal. Dial the mainframe manually, listen for the tone, put the handset in the cups. The terminal used a roll of thermal paper.

Then, my high school, very advanced...three teletype terminals connected to a PDP mini computer in a closet. To start that beast, you had to toggle in a sequence of about 20 bytes of startup code via 9 on/off switches, working from a cheat sheet: Set the first eight switches based on a pattern on the sheet to get the desired byte, throw the the ninth switch to load that 1 byte into the computer. On to the next byte, until all were toggled in. Took a few minutes to boot that computer.

Seemed miraculous in those days.

Eventually moved up to a TRS-80. Pixels the size of a thumbnail, but could control them individually, so that meant I could program simple games and pattern-type interaction (think Tetris or Pong).

The original IBM PC, predating the one in the video, with its expansion slots, seemed like a quantum leap forward.

1st "machine" with memory I had was a typewriter. Then HP came out with a "computer" that used cassette tapes for memory, then I got a trash80. Oops. Forget the Commodore 64 (C64).

 

[StuP]

431MB?? Wow, you were lucky. Mine had 20MB.

I still have one of those, somewhere!
Although it's pre-Timex - a Sinclair ZX-81. Only runs BASIC. A whopping 2k memory (I think).

I used to make the motherboards for the ZX-81 back in the old country !

 

[Gunanddoglover]

1st "machine" with memory I had was a typewriter. Then HP came out with a "computer" that used cassette tapes for memory, then I got a trash80. Oops. Forget the Commodore 64 (C64).

Something like this relic from a past life

 

[AmbiEncE]

Getting old is awesome, being old sucks

 

[Klif]

In late 1983, while waiting on our first child to be born, I went to Target and bought a Commodore 64 and a cassette drive. Shortly after that I invested in a floppy disc drive and a Commodore color monitor and then a dot matrix printer. My first program was Zork I, and I played that for hours (text adventure game). Followed by Zork 2 and Zork 3 right after the birth of my daughter. I bought a disc notcher so I could write to both sides of the 5 1/4 floppy disc which cost about $1.25 each. Later on I got a 300 baud modem. Dial the phone, if a computer answered unplug the handset and plug the cord into the back of the modem and start hitting the enter key. Sometime you got lucky and the BBS would answer up and you were "online".

Other computers came later with big hard drives and faster modems but there is still a warm spot in my heart for that old C-64.

 

[rbstern]

1st "machine" with memory I had was a typewriter. Then HP came out with a "computer" that used cassette tapes for memory, then I got a trash80. Oops. Forget the Commodore 64 (C64).

I remember those memory typewriters. All the rage in their day.

"trash80" was a great PC. Mine was the Model 3: Had the cassette when I first got it, eventually added dual 5.25" floppies. The grinding noises of those stepper motors...classic.

It worked for about than 30 years, including getting banged around a lot in moves and storage. Let the smoke out of it one day while showing it to my kid.