Posted on 11/20/2020 8:31:22 PM PST by dayglored
The PC revolution started off life 35 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, to succeed MS-DOS. It was a huge milestone that paved the way for the modern versions of Windows we use today. While Windows 10 doesn’t look anything like Windows 1.0, it still has many of its original fundamentals like scroll bars, drop-down menus, icons, dialog boxes, and apps like Notepad and MS paint.
Windows 1.0 also set the stage for the mouse. If you used MS-DOS then you could only type in commands, but with Windows 1.0 you picked up a mouse and moved windows around by pointing and clicking. Alongside the original Macintosh, the mouse completely changed the way consumers interacted with computers. At the time, many complained that Windows 1.0 focused far too much on mouse interaction instead of keyboard commands. Microsoft’s first version of Windows might not have been well received, but it kick-started a battle between Apple, IBM, and Microsoft to provide computing to the masses.
[LOTS of pics and text and whatnot at the link...]
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
My Buddy at ASU had a 486 25.
That prompted me to get the DX 40.
That stuff was expensive. I still have an unopen box
of 5.25 floppies.
“Sorry to get sidetracked.”
No problem. For me the migration from Windows for Workgroups to Win95 wasn’t too bad. Most of my software was MS-DOS based and 95 let you use the command line pretty easy. IIRC that started to go with Win98 and completely disappeared thereafter.
When XP came along I was pretty happy with it so of course they proceeded to replace it with Vista. MS just can’t leave well enough alone can they ?
Questio...
I currently have a Win10 machine that I hate. None of my old software will work on it.
Is there anyway I could download XP onto the same machine and use XP whenever I wanted to?
I’m horribly deficient in the computer knowledge field. The ever changing Windows releases made me throw up my hands and give up long ago.
“That stuff was expensive. I still have an unopen box
of 5.25 floppies.”
Use’em as coasters or find some way to use them as “art”.
Things WERE expensive back then. My old 386 had been upgraded a couple of times. It had come new with a 5 mb drive, was upgraded to a 10 then finally to a 20 just before I got it.
I later added a, at the time, blazing fast 14k modem.
The $30 phone I’m using to access the net now has MUCH more ability than that old 386 Sx.
Yes, you just have to run Windows XP in a “Virtual Machine”. There is free virtual machine software available such as Virtual Box or VMware Workstation Player, or if you upgrade Windows 10 to from Home to Pro you can use the built in Hyper-V. The cheapest way to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Pro is to buy a license on eBay. I don't actually know why the eBay licenses keep working but I haven't had any of them go bad. Just pick one of the cheapest vendors who has a good feedback over a period of time.
You have to do some work arounds to get sound to in a Windows XP virtual machine in Hyper-V so if you need sound, it would probably be easier to use Virtual Box, or the free VMware Workstation Player. It is really not that difficult and has some advantages over a physical machine.
I have hundreds of 5.25” floppies along with old computers all the way back to XT clones that have the drives. I have an expansion box for a TI-994A that uses 5.25” floppies, Commodore 64s with 5.25” floppies, and Atari home computers all formatted to a different standards of course. One of these days when I get the time... I am going to see if I can some of them to work. I of course have emulators for all of them, but the old physical computers are more fun.
As for the expense... it depended mostly on who you bought them from. Thee was always vendors selling them cheap through computer shopper or other magazines.
If I could go back to 1985 with $10,000 knowing what I know now, I would be a multi-billionaire today.
During the 1990s, I mostly built my own computers (and for others). I hated all the junk apps the store-bought computers had on them. I was really big on doing "clean" OS installs, so I would frequently back up my data and format my hard drive so I could do totally clean installs of MS-DOS and Windows right from the source disks. I also edited my autoexec.bat and win.ini file to eliminate most programs and processes from running at bootup. That approach did make my systems run lightning fast.
Indeed.
Thanks, I’ll check them out.
I’m pretty computer illiterate but I think I can make something simple work and if I hit a snag my landlord works in IT at Liberty U while he works towards his Masters degree.
Sounds like you have your personal computer museum. ;-)
I have four laptops in the closet with various flavors of Windows. All are missing the power cables and they aren’t cheap anymore.
Maybe I’ll take them and try to find some cables just to see what I have.
I know the oldest is an HP with maybe 95 or98 on it, one is a Toshiba with XP and no idea about the other two.
They gravitated to me over time. The Toshiba I bought new and used it for many years. The hinge broke and it was cheaper to prop the lid up when I used it. The power cord to that one went into the ether several years ago.
Oh well.
I started with a Commodore 64 and a 1200 baud modem. Used to watch Compuserve load pixel by pixel while my mom complained about not having phone. Used to wait 20 minutes for Temple of Apshai to load from the tape drive, and Commodore’s floppy drive wasn’t much faster.
The day Challenger blew up, I heard the news while waiting on output from our Word Processing Center at work. We didn’t have our own PC’s on our desks at that time. Didn’t until the end of the 80’s, though we did have an Apple II in the office which we used to keep a tool calibration database. I learned to do things in DOS, stored bits of data on 8” floppies (which really flopped), and was kind of disappointed when Windows 1.1 came along, because it was so slow and clunky compared to the DOS commands.
Your experiences roughly paralleled mine during that time period. It is amazing that when set up clean and right that the much lower power hardware we had then had quick start up times and snappy performance for the tasks that we used them for.
I still have a Zip drives and media for them as well. Most of them were 100MB but they had variants that had 250MB and 750MB. I have the Jaz variant and media which have 1GB of storage. I also have the Clik! variant which hold only 40MB but are tiny, barely bigger than a Compact Flash Card. The drive that they use fits in a laptop's PCMI slot. I purchased an expensive little MP3 player that used them. The SCSI versions of Zip drives were considerably faster than the parallel port versions for most applications.
I actually donated a bunch of Zip drive media to the fire department that I worked for. The department used them for a bunch of purposes and when they became hard to find it became a problem. Previous to those drives I had a couple of multi-track tape storage units...
I haven't checked any of these devices out for a long time. The 100MB Zip drives and the Clik! drives are pretty robust but the Jaz drives were expensive and notoriously undependable.
I thought I should post something on this thread. I’m working on another computer downloading data using an old laptop with Windows 98. Except I have to reboot it to have it start in MSDOS mode. It is sort of “buggy” if I try to download the data (from an old data logger) by getting into DOS from the Windows icon.
That actually is what I do have... I had a serious case of ETF (Electronic Trinket Fever) and wasted an unreasonable amount of money on this now mostly worthless collection. I have a hangar full of ancient computer equipment. Some of it has become very difficult to find and have some historical significance. One of these days we will move to a smaller place and I will have to dispose of most of it.
You can probably find a power supply that will have enough interchangeable plugs to handle most of those old laptops. Unfortunately, old laptops can be difficult to revive. The CMOS battery will have gone dead years ago, so you will get some error messages at it starts up. If the hard drive has not been run in years there is a very good chance that it will have problems. Old desktop hard drives often have difficulties as well depending on how they were stored.
Here is a universal laptop power supply that I have had good luck with:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0132ST35Y/
It comes with 16 tips, but you may have to purchase an additional set of tips or a different power supply to get the tip assortment that will work best for your laptops.
I had a 2400 baud modem.
The boards were a hoot.
In a situation where the old laptop is not running right, it is typically easiest and safest to purchase a hard drive enclosure for a few bucks and put the laptop's hard drive in it... then make an image of it or copy it to your other computer. I actually use
$8 ide laptop hard drive enclosure with "free" prime shipping.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DEZ8WP2/
I actually use a hard drive bay for imaging hard drives but they are a little more expensive:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LZUM60A/
or cheaper adapter...
We did not have high speed internet available for quite awhile. I used modem doubling software for awhile and had two 56-Kbps modems hooked up in parallel. We were too far from a telephone switching station to get 56-kbps performance so we got maximum connection speed of 33.6-Kbps x 2. This tied up both of our phone lines but the software we used could detect incoming calls on one of the modems and allow the calls to come through on call waiting without disconnecting from the internet on the other line.
Because websites didn’t use a tenth of the bandwidth that they do these days it really was not bad.
I purchased a directv duo satellite data dish and modem. But after spending several hundred dollars I could not get it to work. Years later I discovered it was because I was the AMD processor in my computer was not compatible with the system but customer support was not aware of this at the time.
Thanks for the link, I’ll give it a try.
I know what you mean about the ETF because I’m a natural packrat. I have stuff I’ll never ever use again but can’t seem to part with.
I’m talking tools at least 100 years old that I’ve forgotten what they were used for. Other things like an updraft carb for a 1950’s International farm tractor. None of it is worth anything.
Two years ago I got rid of half of my “treasure trove” as my wife called it and it was like ripping off a limb. I’m at the point that I need to bite the bullet and dispose of it myself or leave my kids a mess to dispose of.
I tell ya, its enough to make a man want to take up drinking again!
A 2400!?!
On dial up!
You were one of the pioneers.
I was on Compuserve back in the 80’s until AOHELL bought it and started changing it.
Jumped to a local provider who offer internet access only. None of the chat pits or logoffs that AOHELL was infamous for.
The internet sure has changed.
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