I remember when green screen and 8 hertz was the upgrade.
teletype was cool!
anyways I would just like to say thank you to all involved with the development of linux and OpenSuSE.
I have a quad core now, but for some reason I like to change software ALL the time.
I change my software around as often as I login to the darn thing.
that is both a good and bad thing?
I started with slackware on a 300 baud modem.
I used to be productive on a computer but now it is fun.
L8r.
I’m obviously lagging behind you; I started using computers with green screens for productivity reasons and, apart from an Amstrad 6128 for home use, didn’t have a computer with colour graphics until 2000 when I had Windows 98 and Linux on the same machine. I soon discovered that Linux allowed me to be even more productive and, over the past few years, my productivity has gone through the roof - perhaps one day when I’ve stopped having fun being productive, I’ll just be able to have fun.
Yep, I started too started with green screens and dip switches to raise the onboard memory from 8mb to 16mb, and adding a second 5 1/4 floppy was an upgrade. Those were good and annoying times. Mostly annoying because it all IBM for me. IBM was ahead of the curve but they tried to keep everything proprietary and couldn’t keep up with the demand or development. By the time IBM started lowering prices and releasing hardware for their PS/2 Multichannel PCs it was too late, ditto with their OS/2 operating system, it couldn’t catch up with the ease and popularity of Windows.
FWIW, even though Windows 7 is a fairly good release of Windows, the underlying base still feels like a DOS.
After 25yrs, competition from Apple, BSD and Linux why does Windows still have a registry? Using NTFS file systems? Or need to reboot after an update? Or why applications are still not isolated from failing applications?
You’re absolutely correct. Linux has a way to make its users more productive. I don’t know if its the abundance of apps or generally more informative error resolution or what but IMO over time the Linux user does and can do so much more than the Windows user. Of course hanging out in openSUSE forums tends to skew results and hw works just works with Windows, but how many avg. Windows users vs. avg. Linux users query about setting up servers?
>
> Yep, I started too started with green screens and dip switches to raise
> the onboard memory from 8mb to 16mb, and adding a second 5 1/4 floppy
> was an upgrade. Those were good and annoying times. Mostly annoying
> because it all IBM for me. IBM was ahead of the curve but they tried to
> keep everything proprietary and couldn’t keep up with the demand or
> development. By the time IBM started lowering prices and releasing
> hardware for their PS/2 Multichannel PCs it was too late, ditto with
> their OS/2 operating system, it couldn’t catch up with the ease and
> popularity of Windows.
>
> FWIW, even though Windows 7 is a fairly good release of Windows, the
> underlying base still feels like a DOS.
> After 25yrs, competition from Apple, BSD and Linux why does Windows
> still have a registry? Using NTFS file systems? Or need to reboot
> after an update? Or why applications are still not isolated from
> failing applications?
>
> You’re absolutely correct. Linux has a way to make its users more
> productive. I don’t know if its the abundance of apps or generally more
> informative error resolution or what but IMO over time the Linux user
> does and can do so much more than the Windows user. Of course hanging
> out in openSUSE forums tends to skew results and hw works just works
> with Windows, but how many avg. Windows users vs. avg. Linux users query
> about setting up servers?
Careful, youngsters. You’ve got company on this forum whose start with
microprocessors goes back to the Intel 4004, bootstrap switches, and hex
keyboard/display. Oh, and I did the pcb layout and fab for that first one
as well. Big day when we got to 1k of RAM and an ASR33 teletype or even
better, an ASR35 with PAPER TAPE! Some others were already old hands by
that time as well.
It’s interesting to look back and trace hardware performance alongside the
amount of useful output and the quality of that same output. There is no
doubt in my mind that the hardware advances far, far out stripped the
application advances.
I don’t have a fancy computer.
Though i remember that my first screen had a white on black monitor. A friend had bernstein (this orange/yellow color) color monitor which i always thought was cool.
In my computer i only have a dual core which i have for a couple of years now. The only thing new is a new harddrive.
My first computer was a TRS-80 (16K of memory as I recall) back in 1979 I think. I even had a old teletype printer with paper tape punch and all. It made so much noise (printing at 110 baud) that I had to roll into my closet so I could still listen to the TV. Boy, those were the days. lol!
>
> Will Honea;2333042 Wrote:
>> tararpharazon wrote:
>>
>>
>> Careful, youngsters. You’ve got company on this forum whose start
>> with
>> microprocessors goes back to the Intel 4004, bootstrap switches, and
>> hex
>> keyboard/display. Oh, and I did the pcb layout and fab for that first
>> one
>> as well. Big day when we got to 1k of RAM and an ASR33 teletype or
>> even
>> better, an ASR35 with PAPER TAPE! Some others were already old hands
>> by
>> that time as well.
>>
>> –
>> Will Honea
>
> Better make that a KSR33 if it didn’t have paper tape.
>
> Real joy was when we got a standalone PT reader that could feed the
> bootloader at 1200 baud, >10 times faster than the ASR33.
Ha! Bet you could still make a cat’s cradle for the PT as well
Every so often a group of us Old Pharts get to gether and we always get
started on the technology progression. Tales of rotating memory, core
stacks, early disc units with (literally) hydraulic controls, tales of
runaway tape reels abound. A few of us started with analog computers where
the computing power was literally limited by the size of the motor on those
mechanical monsters - ball-and-disc integration, gears, the whole mess.
We always seem to wind up marveling at how we now have more computational
capacity on our desktops than major DP centers had in years past.
But I don’t think productivity has risen as fast as computational capacity; there are still some 1980s programs which offer greater productivity gains than their modern ‘replacements’ - one example being xfig which, in spite of limitations in some areas, enables me to knock out complex diagrams very quickly and easily.
Move over kids. I used an early laptop computer to calculate water flow when we constructed canals in Eridu, Sumeria back in 2312 B.C. In those days we didn’t even have to plug them into a wall socket or charge their batteries. They later became popular and were called “abaci”. Of course that was in a “previous life”.
> On 05/01/2011 02:44 AM, Will Honea wrote:
>>
>> Careful, youngsters.
>
> my first computer used an oil lamp behind the display because we didn’t
> have electricity in the cave…
my first computer used an oil lamp behind the display because we didn’t
have electricity in the cave…
I would like to know just what was on the lamp lighted screen while pondering the possible absence of hypothetical questions?
On 05/03/2011 03:06 AM, jdmcdaniel3 wrote:
>
> I would like to know just what was on the lamp lighted screen while
> pondering the possible absence of hypothetical questions?
on my oil powered Plato (branded) monitor during musings of unasked
hypotheticals were often the reflections of shadows projected on the
wall behind me, made by things moving between the oil lamp and the
cave’s blank wall…
I got into PC’s a bit later, our first PC was a 386DX, Super VGA graphics… I can still remember when my dad got us a CD-ROM (Quad speed), 16-bit Sound Blaster and upgraded the memory to 4MB… heaven on earth for playing games
Now, I don’t get a chance to be productive because I am too busy distro-hopping
Not old really, I started with a neighbors TI something or other. Later on we had an Apple ] that I never used for much of anything besides playing games. It made my Dad a little OCD as a record keeper. Bills, baseball stats, weather events, things like that.
My first system was a HP Vectra 120(?) that ran…LOL…SuSE 6.3 retail box from Best Buy. I still have the fold-out cd case around somewhere. I didn’t know what running Linux really meant as I’ve always been a desktop user. I had my parents Win98 box for running Photoshop 4 and Illustrator 6 (I was a broke college student getting into graphic design).
Since then I’ve built some monster PC’s for gaming, did the Mac thing (G4 MDD dual 800mHz R.I.P.) and now do everything on a HP Probook. I figured my gaming days where over so I went with the intel graphics. Now that I’ve seen Oil Rush and other games that can run on a Linux system; well, I’m kicking myself pretty hard. This thing can barley handle Wolfenstein Enemy Territory or HL2 on low. Ah well, live and learn.
