Old computers...

[billie114]

Loved Wolfenstein. Still got it on stiffy somewhere but haven't got a stiffy drive anymore.

Word 6...I think it used something like 8 or 10 stiffy disks.

And my first Creative 2X CDrom drive.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by billie114

Loved Wolfenstein. Still got it on stiffy somewhere but haven't got a stiffy drive anymore.

Word 6...I think it used something like 8 or 10 stiffy disks.

And my first Creative 2X CDrom drive.

"Stiffy Disks" We love that saying in the ok (School boy humour )

I have a copy of Wordperfect somewhere, loads of disks

Ive also got a 10inch disk a five 1/4 and of course loads of 3.5's

[Nutty_ZA]

I've still got a copy of Microsoft COBOL... it came on 6 Floppy Disks...

Also a Copy on Visual C++ v1.n

Th first "real" computer I had (i.e. it came with it's own monitor) was an Apple II...
You used to have to boot it from a floppy, and then switch floppys to run other applications...
I did a computer course at college many years ago and we all worked on Apple II's as well

10 years ago I worked on a DEC VAX mainframe... it had removable diskpacks, which were about the size of a 13" tyre.. They were 500 MB big... I used to think, WOW that's huge...

Now you can get 16 gig Flash Drives

[TheGuru]

Originally Posted by Nutty_ZA

Now you can get 16 gig Flash Drives

I saw those yesterday, the 4gb ones arent too expensive either

[madcat]

We used to use a DEC Vax when I was at uni. Primitive systems with green monitors and long commands.. not very user friendly!

I used to think 100Mb was massive, we now have something like 230Gb on our PC and over 30GB of it is music!! How times have changed!

Oh, and installing hardware the hard way before plug and play came in. That was a nightmare. It never used to go right first time!!

MadCat

[billie114]

It might have been tough doing it the hard way...installing hardware I mean, but you sure learnt a lot more than you do now.

A lot of the young IT guys can't work on the older systems. They just never bothered to learn. All they know is Vista and XP and they don't really know how the hardware really works.

I must admit that even though it is clumsy I still like working without a mouse now and again just to remind what it used to be like and how easy we have it.

Still remember the first time I used a mouse...what a joke.

I can't go anywhere without my flash drive. To think those little things can store more info than those huge floppy disks. I used to backup my whole pc onto one of those floppy disks. Now I have to use external drives.

[TheGuru]

Yes the young 'know it all' techies dont know what an IRQ or a config.sys even is

All they say is "have you tried rebooting it"

I remember when adding 256kb of memory meant playing with a handfull of chips. I guess Im sounding like Victor Meldrew now

[madcat]

The number of so called IT professionals that cannot use command line in DOS and have no idea of any commands. I still use DOS a lot, easier sometimes and I dont often use the mouse at all. I prefer the keyboard shortcut keys instead. Most people dont even know you can use the keys instead! Also when you rebuild a PC sometimes the mouse doesnt work, and it's always handy to know the keys!

The new breed of IT Pro's make me laugh. I knew more when I left school than a lot of them now.

MadCat

[billie114]

You hit the nail on the head. I love watching them trying to fix a small problem. They come in with such know it all attitudes and spend hours fiddling, then look dumbfounded when I sort out the problem in two ticks. They look at me as this old lady they can run circles around.

I often work on older pc's as some people like their setup and are too scared to upgrade. Alot of the computer repair shops just want to upgrade or sell them a new pc. Some of the older pc's work better and are more reliable than the fancy setups. The only hassles is getting spares.

Anyway I say if a person is happy with what they have then leave them be.

[Mike]

I feel old reading this thread, however, its comforting to know there are other proper techies out there though

files = 20
buffers = 60

How did we ever manage with 512kb

Ooops sorry I was daydreaming