You know you're getting old when...


 
Bob Bass said:
Bill... Bought my second "home computer" directly from Big Blue. An 8080 (pre XT) without HD, just a 5 1/4" drive.
First one was a TI 99/4A. Expanded with PEB, tractor feed wide carriage Okidata impact printer, and a whole 300 baud phone cup modem.
ahhh... The simpler days ;)
Click to expand...
Smells like a PC 5150 model.

I took a full pickup bed load of old server equipment to recycle a year or two ago.
 
Worked for AB Dick a lifetime ago. Worked on very crude puters there. Some of the older farts here, may recall the IBM Univac I think it was called. These used a device identical in size and shape to the punch cards that were magnetic cards. And to read and write them they were "shot" back and forth in a device with a magnetic head to read and write.
Then we came out with a device the size of a McDonalds trash can. Used 8" IIRC floppy disks. Then a smaller one designed to sit on a desktop with a small screen and 5 1/4" disks, and made to be "networked" through some crude "token ring" run on coax cable and they had to run in serial configuration. one fed another, then another and so on and back to the original. I installed the first system in the country. Totally blind. No help in a large office/factory. On site for weeks running those stupid cables through ceilings, conduits, duct work, it was nuts. And every day my boss calling wondering what was taking so long but sending no help.
I don't even know what the OS was back in the day. IIRC the machine was made by Cray.
Nutty stuff back then.
 
LMichaels said:
Some of the older farts here, may recall the IBM Univac I think it was called.
Click to expand...
I don't think that Univac was ever part of the Eyetalian Boat Mechanics. It was part of Sperry and/or Burroughs for decades (cut my teeth on 80 column punched card on an 1100/80 running Exec 35R5 or some such.)

The IBM data entry system you're describing is a 374x Data Entry system. Came in both single and double seated models. Trained operators with the right templates load could bulk enter data amazingly fast (spent time on those loading stuff into an Sys/36, around 1988.)

IBM Token Ring generally ran on 2 pairs of 2 conductor twisted cabling, usually shielded, IIRC. Orange, black, red and green insulation. 4 and 16 megabit/sec implementations. From a technical perspective, it beat Ethernet pretty handily. But, from an accounting perspective, IBM wanted an exorbitant licensing fee for Token Ring implementations. Ethernet was free to use, and is the basis of most modern networking.
 
I guess I feel that way because I just called my best friend and classmate who lives on the west coast of FL. to make sure she is hunkered down for the storm heading her way.
 
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