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General Computer Thread

got - it I hope.. it is in the extensions or it is now gone from the extensions... :)
 
I came across this and found it amusing. Also makes me feel old... :p :lol:

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LOL, the guy from 18 seconds in that otherwise looked as if he time traveled fresh from 1986... Not merely him, the video actually shows a rather sad state of affairs, all these kids mewling over how tedious it is when kids growing up with those big beige boxes being in vogue knew how to do a lot more, FWIWW and with the smallest amount of instruction... Now have the kids code assembly language, or code with punched cards, or try to program within a limitation of 128 Bytes... thank free open source software for everything they're not going to code on nowadays.

And by 5:42, hitting the RESET button sometimes makes it easier to reboot, without adding the electron-inducing stressers of turning the pre-ATX power switch off then on, never mind ATX is essentially power-on all the time, but there are pros and cons to each system and what developed from them for similar and/or modern updates to those technologies...)

Oh well, at least every scene changes are accompanied by a really slick swish noise! :D

Up next, diatribes of "get off my lawn" and "My 3 year old son has started using voice control apps to get around learning how to read and spell to actually understand anything, so how oh how do I get him to do all the ancient things we did when worshiping around Stonehenge and thinking the Earth was flat... oh, wait..." A world of users not understanding what's created and why. Kinda like that Torchwood show where characters get all smug and recite how they know how to work things as opposed to the understanding in making them work since things break down (dang laws of thermodynamics and physics and magic and stuff.)
 
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I've got an original IBM XT 8088 4.77 Mhz 1 360K DS/DD Floppy drive and a Seagate ST 225 R RLL drive, also a IBM AT well at least a cobbled together machine with an original mainboard that I found in a dumpster with discarded electronics, also found a working Slot A Celeron 333Mhz there, glad I could save the mainboard, 80286 6Mz 512 Mb RAM and a 128Kb memory extension card so in total it has 640 Kb RAM boah! I do have an early clone 80386, Essex Electric mainboard with a 80386 DX 20 chip, and a socketed 80387 Co processor, at 20 Mhz this is an early one, memory is 2 Mb and in SIPP format, tech moves fast.. in 2004 I had a AMD Duron 850Mhz, it was SO damn fast compared to my Cyrix M II PR 200 and the Pentium III 450.
Loved Windows 98SE, Win2K is also one of my favorites, I've got the original IBM DOS 2000 on CD complete with a huge manual..

I build a AMD64 4800+ machine in 2008 or so, that is the oldest machine I still use once in a while, back in the day it was really fast, swapped OS to Windows 7 and that it didn't like too much, a while ago I installed XP on it again and it feels like it did in 2008 again.

Old trick to make an XT faster, find a NEC V20 to replace the 8088 or the V30 to replace the 8086, wonderful chips, even at the same clockspeed they trashed the Intel chips, also because it did contain certain instructions it could run some programs that were 80286 or higher.. :biggrin:
 
https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/x/xt.htm

Extended technology

They were my favorite computers in college,.. the 386 was so fast back then,.. we had just one in the lab,.

My first PC was a 386 25mhz with a whopping 20 meg HDD and no sound card, a 15in colour monitor, and 1 meg of ram.....but i heard a rumour that there was a 486 33mhz that had 2 meg or mem, a 60 meg HDD, and a adlib soundcard all out of the box, but i never believed such fantastic wild stories, how could such specs even exist. lol
 
I still have a 486 DX2 66MHz with a gigantic 8MB RAM a 420MB HDD a SCSI 4 speed CD ROM and a Trident 9400 VESA graphics adapter with 1MB graphics RAM, it first ran DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, later on Windows 95, it has a Soundblaster 16 soundcard... :biggrin: Back in the day this was a monster machine.. and then the Pentium arrived.. the first few were hot, not too fast and really expensive..:shifty:
 
It was built in 1994, so just before the Windows 95 hype, ye gods, so long ago already.. After that my brother and I bought a Pentium 100Mhz machine, changed that a few years later and got an AMD K6 233Mhz with a VooDoo Rush graphics card and I think 32 Mb RAM after that we both started to build machines on our own.
Celeron 300A to Pentium III 450, Duron 850, Athlon 2200+ Athlon 64 3200+ Athlon 64x2 4800+ Phenom II 955 BE (love that machine) and now a FX 8350, the next one will be a Ryzen.
 
I still have a 486 DX2 66MHz with a gigantic 8MB RAM a 420MB HDD a SCSI 4 speed CD ROM and a Trident 9400 VESA graphics adapter with 1MB graphics RAM, it first ran DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, later on Windows 95, it has a Soundblaster 16 soundcard... :biggrin: Back in the day this was a monster machine.. and then the Pentium arrived.. the first few were hot, not too fast and really expensive..:shifty:

Those trident cards almost seemed to be bomb proof:D. We kept borrowing it when newer cards failed so we could get into the system.

I think the first pentium was just coming out when I got my DX2-66 and I felt it just wasn't worth the extra.
 
Those Tridents were nice, and then we got a Pentium 100 with an S3 ViRGE card.. the first 3D accelerator card.. it came with a game called Terminal Velocity and it was awesome.. well, for a while, the ViRGE was rather primitive and demoted graphics DEcelerator soon.. but back then it was SO awesome..
I have more old age graphics card, I've got two cards a Biostar and a Diamond with the fabled i740 chip from Intel, strange beasts, only on the market for a short while, drivers are a bitch to find.
The first generation Pentium chips, the 60 and 66Mhz ones were flawed, ran hot and were not much faster than a well configered DX-100 or AMD DX-133, let alone the 5x86 from Cyrix which was REALLY fast, that one could beat a Pentium 75 which was a fine chip btw, reliable and cool running.
 
The first generation Pentium chips, the 60 and 66Mhz ones were flawed, ran hot and were not much faster than a well configered DX-100 or AMD DX-133

I sold one when they first came on the market and the thing was a pain in the arse (the company I worked for retailed for an Australian assembler). It was the first one sold through the local branch and and was purchased for CAD usage. Can't remember what the problem was but it took me several weeks to get it all sorted out but the user was happy in the end.

The client asked me to help some-one else he knows who got hit by a virus called monkey that pointed the FAT to the MBR. The thing I remember the most (well the only thing really) is that seemed a big deal because they lost 100MB worth of files. Yes, there's time, effort, etc but these days whats 100MB?
 
You guys are proper silicon heads and I'm not being derogatory. I barely remember the configuration of my previous system (or even the current one), never mind the first one I bought twenty-six years ago.
 
You guys are proper silicon heads and I'm not being derogatory. I barely remember the configuration of my previous system (or even the current one), never mind the first one I bought twenty-six years ago.

Hmm 26 years ago it was a NEC Powermate SX with a 16mhz 80386SX, 6MB ram and 2x 40MB HDD.

It gave way shortly after to an Epson AX3/25 with 8Mb ram and a 140MB ESDI drive.

Both had very nice keyboards as well.

But from there on it gets hazy as I built my on machines, had a couple of sun Sparcs, a Mac mini, ran Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and a bit of Linux and even played with SCO UNIX :)
 
You guys are proper silicon heads and I'm not being derogatory. I barely remember the configuration of my previous system (or even the current one), never mind the first one I bought twenty-six years ago.

I remember it because it came with the Dos manual that would give War and Peace a run for it's money in the silly thick book awards. :eek:
Oh and even though the book was massive it has quite good aerodynamics, that i tested quite a lot back then. lol
 
Hmm 26 years ago it was a NEC Powermate SX with a 16mhz 80386SX, 6MB ram and 2x 40MB HDD.

It gave way shortly after to an Epson AX3/25 with 8Mb ram and a 140MB ESDI drive.

Both had very nice keyboards as well.

But from there on it gets hazy as I built my on machines, had a couple of sun Sparcs, a Mac mini, ran Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and a bit of Linux and even played with SCO UNIX :)
I worked in the computer software industry for 34 years and hardly remember a thing about the hardware now I'm retired. I used Sun 2/3/Sparc and Apollo workstations back when it took four big blokes to heft a 500MB SCSI disk drive unit into its enclosure. Sun were good kit back then - a pleasure to work on. Before that I mainly used mainframes - ICL 1906A, Amdahl v7a later v8, a godawful Prime something or other - as well as an HP VAX 11/780 mini I think it was with a bigass 11-inch floppy drive with a capacity that a modern USB stick would piss on. Afterwards came work on several generations of PCs from 16 up to 64-bit - running DOS and Windows but mainly Unix and later Linux flavours. The hardware details are a blur. I can remember roughly the memory and disk storage capacities, bus width, CPU architecture and approximate CPU speed but fine details, nah, forget it. Graphics processor, memory cache, coprocessor details - also forget it. Erased them from memory I have.
 
You guys are proper silicon heads and I'm not being derogatory. I barely remember the configuration of my previous system (or even the current one), never mind the first one I bought twenty-six years ago.
26 years ago.. Philips NMS 9100 XT we replaced the 8088 with a NEC V20 running at a staggering 8Mhz, 768KB RAM a Seagate ST-225 20MB HDD and a Paradise ISA VGA graphics adapter, 720KB 3.5" floppy drive, no soundcard though, it did have a VGA screen which was black and white, this machine is still there, still working that is why I still know the specs of the thing.. :biggrin:
 
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