Posted on 11/21/2014 1:41:49 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Yeh, I’ve done that a couple of times when I had a good specific question to ask.
I an not anti Linux, but if someone is not computer savvy why should they buy it?
Good Lord, a platform flame at FR???
REMEMBER them, he!!, I still USE them.
Mine are on the big floppy disks, and none of my computers will load them. Used to use them on a tandy that bit the dust.
Hah Hah - you got it all right.
I guess I must be more modern than you. My Dos 6.11 is on five 3.5 inch floppies, and Lotus is on a hard drive. I mostly use a program written for Lotus which converted to Excel.
Yep I am older no doubt. My floppies were really floppies - flexible as big as a DVD box. The 3.5 inch disks came a few years later and they weren’t flexible, but people still called them floppy disks.
I am employed like a million others because of Windows. I do Help Desk support and I get paid pretty good. Thanks : )
Thanks for that link. Amazing site. Much work went into it.
Lotus 123 is the very program that turned PCs from toys and hobbies into useful machines that businesses would buy.
Before that, I used an Intel 4004 processor in a recording system to measure driving conditions. It used a Texas Instruments CRT monitor (emulating a teletype printer) and two cassette recorders to store files. The 4004 was Intel's first commercial processor. It was the precursor to the 8008, which became the 8088, the first PC XT processor.
Even before that, I used a DEC PDP-11S, one of the first real mini-computers. It had a whopping 4K of core memory. Core memory stored data on tiny doughnuts of iron with three wires running through the middle of each. The wires could detect and set the magnetic state of the doughnut, whether it was magnetized, or not. There were 50,000 of these doughnuts in the core. Each had three wires strung through the middle, hand wired by humans. The core was a cube, about six inches on a side.
The bootstrap loader consisted of 17 instructions, each entered bit by bit using switches. This loader commanded a paper tape reader (teletype again) to run and enter the programs. Messing up the software, which happened many times, usually meant overwriting the boot strap loader, which would then have to be entered bit by bit, over, and over, again. Fortunately, the core memory would (usually) remember its magnetic state with the power off, so powering off would not erase the programs loaded in memory.
I have no idea about the inner workings of the first computers I used nor the one I just bought.
At work, we had an IBM which used two floppy disks and had a modem. It was maintained by our tech department in a shared computer area. That was late 70s or early 80s.
I had a software program that called banks all over the USA and pulled up balances and transactions so that I could manage the cash for about 100 domestic and international accounts.
A few years later we had Lotus 123 and the info was downloaded and transferred to the spreadsheet. I bought my Tandy several years after I had been using the computer at work, so that I could keep personal financial records, and the kids could play games.
All I can say is, the large floppy’s preceded the 3.5” hard disks on the computers we had at work, and the computers that were available from retail sources where I lived.
The strangle hold that Windows has on every other operating system is the inclusion of DirectX.
I’m pretty sure every time my machine boots its still reading some of that original code....
The PDP11S was from the 60s. The Intel 4004 was in 1974. The IBM PC XT with the 8088 processor and large 5-1/4” floppies was from the late ‘70s. The 3.5” hard cased floppies came after that.
Like I said my experience started with the IBM Pc and used the large floppies, and then the Tandy. Every machine after that I got one with dual drives so that I could continue to us all my floppies. So I had very few 3.5 disks.
After that we had computers with the hard CD type disks.
When I was in college, the computers filled a huge room, and you had to take a big stack of cards and run them through for one of the required classes. I can barely remember it. That was 1971.
To have a computer small enough to be on a desk was amazing to me. Look at all the smaller gadgets today. And this All in one desktop if pretty neat too. Nice big screen so my old eyes don’t have to squint to see the letters. LOL
I have lived in such interesting times and they continue. I wonder what the next decade will bring?
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