[m_upreti]

Originally Posted by raghu.t.k

How about the 5.25 floppy with project files on them!! Also the HDD those days were far less than the RAM we use today...

And how many still remember writing their first TSR programs!! Hmmm good old days..

Remember Uniplex, WordStar and Lotus 123 before the Windows took over. the PC's, XT's, AT's, and then the 286, 386, Pentium.

[aravindr]

Yes I do !! I have used 8 inch as well as 5.25 inch floppies.. and the days when there was only one floppy drive on my PC and had to diskcopy, move the floppies back and forth. I have used PCs without HDD and had to everytime insert the MSDOS floppy for the PC to read the great Command.com file !!
I am not sure if anyone here belongs to my league where I have used one of the HP PCs where the PC itself was a printer and you can only read one line at a time, and you need to print the program to read it in full.

[TheTeacher]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

The first computerised phototypesetting machine I used had 8-inch floppies. But I don't remember the capacity? It was in Kb, wasn't it?

80KB, IIRC. These were SSSD - single sided, single density. Then were rleased double density, then double sided double density which went up to 320 KB, which IIRC was the max for 8" floppies. Been a while!

Originally Posted by rishab.k

Ever seen a punched card. These preceded the floppies. Had seen them a few years back in my Dad's old files.

My very first job in life was programming on an IBM 1401 mainframe: card reader/punch, 600 LPM line printer, 4 tape drives, 16 KB RAM (core memory). I was part of the team that wrote an exceedingly complex payroll program for it, all on punched cards.

Originally Posted by m_upreti

Remember Uniplex, WordStar and Lotus 123 before the Windows took over. the PC's, XT's, AT's, and then the 286, 386, Pentium.

In my first job, we used CalcStar, Wordstar, etc. on an 8088 based machine running CPM, if I'm not mistaken.

Originally Posted by aravindr

Yes I do !! I have used 8 inch as well as 5.25 inch floppies.. and the days when there was only one floppy drive on my PC and had to diskcopy, move the floppies back and forth. I have used PCs without HDD and had to everytime insert the MSDOS floppy for the PC to read the great Command.com file !!

Yep, wrote "business" software (inventory control, AP, AR, GL) on a "multi-user" machine running MPM (multi-user version of CPM) on a Zylog Z80A machine with four floppy drives and 1 MB RAM!

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I'm afraid we are way off topic now! Maybe the mods can move these posts to a new thread?

[raghu.t.k]

Seen the green monitors while learning DOS. Then ventured into Lotus 123, and wordstar. This was the word processor available to startups for writing resumes to manuals.

TSR was another craze during those days, and most who learnt C would try to write one. and for accounting or custom software it used to be clipper or foxbase.

Batch files and script files were the other craze.

Reg the XT and ATs, tried selling these machines and had a hard time trying companies to look at these or new dot matrix printers. The Lasers and Inkjets were still not seen around.

[sumeethaldankar]

We had a computer made by a Indian co called HOPE (Hindustan Office Products Limited). The name of the computer was Dolphin. I think it had around 8kb memory and really don't know the CPU. This was in the very early 90's.

It had a simple layout with a keyboard and came with a 5 and half inch floppy disk drive.I remember playing Pacman on it and we could write programs in it using BASIC.

[Jeroen]

Nice thread. My interactions with computers predate the PC area by at least a decade. In the mid 70's whilst at naval college I learned to program in Basic and Fortran. And we had to use those punch cards to actually input the programs. Very cumbersome.

Computers and micro electronics were used on board ships from early on. The first time I started using computers in an office environment was in 1986. We had a what I think was called a DEC1144 or something like that. Essentially terminal stations hooked up to a central processor. No floppy, but huge drives, about the size of wheel of a scooty, 1Mb I think, seem to recall.

A few years later we bought our first home computer (Gateway)and got ourselves our first internet. From there on there was a rapid expansion. all our kids got their own PC when they turned 12-13 and all of us went for laptops a few years later.

These days just between my wife and myself we have a HP laptop (work), a 15" MacBook Pro (mine), a17" Toshiba (my wife's), two IPads, a tablet and more smartphones then you can shake a stick at.

Love it!

Jeroen

[honeybee]

Ah, back when I learnt computers, there was no hard drive. And by the way, in those days you just switched off the computer. There wasn't any silly shutdown!

With a single floppy drive you first used the bootable floppy to start the computer and then replaced this floppy with another, such as dBase III+.

Wordstar! MS Word probably still has the WordStar shortcuts.

Good old command prompt. Most developers today can't run a DIR command.

[Thad E Ginathom]

SOmebody mentioned computer terminals where the machine printed what you typed, and printed the machine's output. No screens: just paper.

Those certainly predate me (or, at least, my involvement with computers), but the history is still with us. Why, in Unix/Linux does tty mean terminal? because it actually stands for teletype!

[Fillmore]

Just for the heck of it I checked up ebay to see if anyone was selling floppy discs and checkout the price difference.

50 DVD pack vs 5 Floppy Discs

[honeybee]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

SOmebody mentioned computer terminals where the machine printed what you typed, and printed the machine's output. No screens: just paper.

Those certainly predate me (or, at least, my involvement with computers), but the history is still with us. Why, in Unix/Linux does tty mean terminal? because it actually stands for teletype!

Originally Posted by aravindr

I am not sure if anyone here belongs to my league where I have used one of the HP PCs where the PC itself was a printer and you can only read one line at a time, and you need to print the program to read it in full.

Way before DOS was invented. That's why backspacing would involve typing out a special character, because you couldn't go back and correct what you typed.

[raghu.t.k]

Originally Posted by Fillmore

Just for the heck of it I checked up ebay to see if anyone was selling floppy discs and checkout the price difference.

50 DVD pack vs 5 Floppy Discs

Recently when I cleaned my computer table and cabinet, I found few floppy disk with tools that I used at client site. What I found next surprised me, there was a unopened pack of 3.5" floppy disks, few dat tapes. These days the optical disks themselves are largely replace with memory sticks or downloads. Micosoft these days provides downloads than DVDs..

Thankfully there are some gadgets which I dont recognize!!

How about the first version Prince.

[wantarangerover]

May first memories of computers:

1. Road rash, Prince, Dave then Unreal, Quake, Thief.
2. Win 95 with that lioness wallpaper - and changing the mouse pointer to fancy ones.
3. The melody of that sound the modem made while connecting to the internet (Hayes 54.4kbps I think)
4. The cleaning floppy disk - you put some cleaning fluid and run it on the reader to clean it. - And yes, submitting projects on floppies.
5. The underground game racket in school I will give u nfs 3, get me in on that latest fifa, what say?

[tilt]

Originally Posted by TheTeacher

How many of you have used an 8-inch floppy, let alone seen them or even know they existed?!

Originally Posted by TheTeacher

*SNIP* In my first job, we used CalcStar, Wordstar, etc. on an 8088 based machine running CPM, if I'm not mistaken.

Yep, wrote "business" software (inventory control, AP, AR, GL) on a "multi-user" machine running MPM (multi-user version of CPM) on a Zylog Z80A machine with four floppy drives and 1 MB RAM!*SNIP*

I grew up on CP/M, MP/M and TurboDOS - all 8 bit, on 8-bit Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80 processors with 4 KB RAM and a single 8" floppy drive, before Microsoft even probably existed.

I wrote a complete Hospital Management System (multiuser and networked with multiple computers on ArcNet) on a TurboDOS system with two 8' floppy drives (128KB capacity each) - programs on drive A: and data on drive B: It was even written up in Dataquest magazine as the first time anyone in India has ever attempted such a feat.

The monitors were non-graphic, with a resolution of 80 characters per line and 25 lines height.

I used to write applications in COBOL (a very beautiful and easy-to-understand language); and Ashton-Tate's dBase II.

I remember using tools such as Wordstar, CalcStar, DataStar, FormGen (a tool to create data entry forms for DataStar). In fact we used to joke and call those applications Star Dot Star.

*sigh*, brings back memories.

Sorry, I just realised that the thread topic was re. computing in the 90s and here I am, talking about computing in the 80s! My apologies.

Cheers

[Thad E Ginathom]

My first memories of PCs:

Having spent a few weeks with my first computer, a Unix mini, someone put a PC in my office. My response, after a short exploration: "Take it away, it doesn't do anything!"

DOS was just so dumb. Where were the hundreds of useful utilities? Where were the several programming languages? Where was the elegant, reasonably simple and powerful scripting? Where was the powerful, full-screen text editor (by this time, I was already using vi even for my correspondence )?

Frustration with the MS/PC world continued with early (and not-so-early) versions of Windows. MS distributed a version of Unix that ran on 386 machines: multi-use, nulti-tasking. But their own operating system could not even do more than one file copy without freezing up.

[tilt]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

*SNIP* MS distributed a version of Unix that ran on 386 machines: multi-use, nulti-tasking. But their own operating system could not even do more than one file copy without freezing up.

Xenix Like you said, it was a POS!

Cheers