Something for us fellow older peoples.

[Gingerbread Demon]

I found this picture on the net in my FB feed.

OMG brought back so many memories. Storage was so bloody expensive in the 80s early 90s.. This was especially so if you wanted things like a hard disk or tape drive.

 

[Metryq]

That sounds like the book DROIDMAKER. I know it's an older book, but I hadn't read it until just recently. And what it really drove home for me was the state of computing in the '70s, '80s and '90s. I was there, I remember it. I was one of the few people in the cinema laughing at the tech jokes in TRON.

I hadn't thought about the impossible goal those people had set for themselves back then: making entire movies with computers—what a bizarre notion. There's an old saying, "as impossible as the Moon," or going to the Moon. Wanting the Moon, or going to the Moon seems a comparatively mundane and pedestrian goal by comparison. The Moon is a place; the idea of going there is not such a stretch of the imagination.

But making entire movies with computers, compositing the many layers of a VFX shot, or editing the material with a computer? Fruitcake stuff. Anyone born in the '90s or later wouldn't realize the technical marvels they may take for granted. Everything those early computer graphics pioneers busted their humps to achieve—and fast, voluminous storage was always an obstacle—can now be done with a tablet no thicker than two olde fashioned clipboards back-to-back. One can shoot and edit 4K video, create composite effects, and make realtime 3D scenes. Today there are thumb drives and SD cards that are much faster and offer far more storage than the drive in the ad above.

I may die of a flashback.

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[John Clark]

All I can say is, thank god it wasn't quite that expensive when I got either of my first hard drives (40mb for Amiga and 540 for the PC).
All the components were a lot more expensive then

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

All I can say is, thank god it wasn't quite that expensive when I got either of my first hard drives (40mb for Amiga and 540 for the PC).
All the components were a lot more expensive then

IKR....

But back then chips were expensive to make too and circuitry cost lots.....

But the 80s pushed designs to move forwards. If it wasn't for the home computer boom we wouldn't have had the PC boom and be where we are today.

The 80s also produced lots of interesting ideas like MSX..

 

[Haggis and tatties]

All I can say is, thank god it wasn't quite that expensive when I got either of my first hard drives (40mb for Amiga and 540 for the PC).
All the components were a lot more expensive then

Ha, i remember buying the Amiga HDD, like a big slice of cheese wedge, and a big switch to turn it on and off again, think it was something like 40 meg, ha....40 meg, and we thought that was tons back then. lol

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I used to love using the Amiga 500. It was a fun machine

 

[Santaman]

I have several of these drives lying around, a lot of Seagate ST-225's 20 Mb drives one ST-412 drive of 10Mb, it came with an original IBM XT, the largest and heaviest of the bunch is a 80 Mb Seagate ST-4096 5.25" full hight, its the size of a small shoebox, it has 9 enormous platters and from the sound I think the thing has two spindle engines, one to get the platters to move and the second one to get them to the desired speed, at spinup it draws 40 watts nice detail, they all still work even the 10 Mb drive which is from 1981 or 1983..

 

[Kor]

Those prices were ridiculous.

Kor

 

[John Clark]

Ha, i remember buying the Amiga HDD, like a big slice of cheese wedge, and a big switch to turn it on and off again, think it was something like 40 meg, ha....40 meg, and we thought that was tons back then. lol

True - but for me at least, it's also been adequate. (That said, most of my software was/is run of the floppy disks.) I use it mostly for the office program I had at the time (Final copy nad Maxiplan if I remember correctly). The pc 540mb drive was way too small just going off the initial selection of games/office software I had.

 

[publiusr]

There's an old saying, "as impossible as the Moon," or going to the Moon. Wanting the Moon, or going to the Moon seems a comparatively mundane and pedestrian goal by comparison. The Moon is a place; the idea of going there is not such a stretch of the imagination.

At its simplest, the Saturns were just three water towers stacked atop each other--with a little more wiring and plumbing.

Computers on the other hand--folks who can sit there and code--they have my respect. I couldn't do it.

I think the best way to teach computers is to have a computer class where you teach folks in first grade an abacus--then napier's bones--and you get the latest whatever at the end.

 

[Bagofmostlywatr]

I belong in the stoneage. I'm still amazed that I have every album I own on a usb drive the size of my thumbnail in the car. Seriously, it amazes me every time I think about it.

 

[Metryq]

I belong in the stoneage. I'm still amazed that I have every album I own on a usb drive the size of my thumbnail in the car. Seriously, it amazes me every time I think about it.

The equivalent of the "you are here" gag from HITCH-HIKER'S. Real hard to appreciate the album cover art at that scale, though.

Not only has the music media gotten smaller, the headphones have shrunk to nothing, as well. I had a flashback while watching ENTER THE DRAGON and saw the guy wearing these cantaloupe-sized headphones when the girls come to his room. Rare earth magnets now deliver much better sound through bullet-sized "ear buds" that vanish into one's ear canal. Stereo speakers looked like the monolith from 2001 back then, too. And amps went to "11."

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Hey I love my 300mm ferrofluid filled woofers. They still work as the day they were new back in 1988. Nice wood cabinets too and sturdy

 

[Santaman]

I still have a portable reel to reel tape recorder.. it was build in 1961, it still works but take the portable bit with a grain of salt because it weighs around 14Kg...

 

[publiusr]

I like the look of older equipment. To me--in terms of haptics--the 8-track was best. I felt a little like Spock what with the data slates and all. Keep the outer box for an easy grip, and put some blu-ray something in there. I don't like any disks--I always feel as if about to break them. Thumbdrives are fine--but an 8 track box. I wonder if you could have a blu-ray analog laser disk version of those audio-DVD.

Not as much room for art on the * track box as on vinyl--but no need to prize things out of a flat box either.

 

[Metryq]

I still have a portable reel to reel tape recorder.. it was build in 1961, it still works but take the portable bit with a grain of salt because it weighs around 14Kg...

I did a little restoration work on some wire recorders for an antique collector. No bias on those recordings—sounded like a noisy LP.

 

[Santaman]

The one I have has been refurbished along its long life and it sounds quite nice, of course really old recordings will have degraded over time.

 

[Maurice]

I still have an Atari 800 series computer and not only does it work, virtually all of the 5.25" floppies do, too. I got an interface device to connect that old system to a PC and made disk images of all those floppies, so I can use a PC as a virtual drive for the ancient hardware or run all those programs under emulation.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Can you do anything with an old video terminal? Gorgeous mechanical keyboard but wondering if that could be adapted to PS/2 connectors? PC key layout too.

 

[Metryq]

Can you do anything with an old video terminal? Gorgeous mechanical keyboard but wondering if that could be adapted to PS/2 connectors? PC key layout too.

Indeterminate question. If you wish to use the actual VDT and hook it up to a modern personal computer, it will probably require a lot of custom hardware adaptors. There are already a number of scan converters on the market, but that may not solve your problem, either. Computers use a progressive scan (one line after the other), while most scan converters work with interlacing—the idea being to put computer video onto television. There are scan converters for HDTV and computer resolutions far above that, but then you'd still have to find a way to convert down to analog pulses you could feed to a CRT.

(Most computer video cards do not have VGA these days, and any that have DVI are most likely DVI-D, which is digital-only. Although you might find a few DVI-I, which include the analog stream. HDMI is the same as DVI-D, but including audio, and Display Port is digital.)

The keyboard wouldn't be much easier, either. A hobbyist might be able to hack an adaptor between whatever keyboard you have (which VDT? VT100, or something else?) and then remap the crosspointing with software, but it still sounds easier said than done.

If all you want is to indulge in a little nostalgia, there are other options.

Cathode for Mac has a number of themes for making your Terminal sessions look like a VDT, including views with and without the screen bezel (deep, narrow, or none), a heavily curved screen or flatter, different color displays (green, orange, white), with or without a "reflection" of the machine room around you, adjustable amounts of scan ripple running up the screen, adjustable amounts of other video static or twitch (depending on the age of the equipment you wish to emulate) and so on. There may be similar emulators for Windows.

While not the same as actually using an old keyboard—with those deep-throw IBM keys—I remember one Mac hack from many, many years ago that I put on a co-worker's computer as a gag. The hack added typewriter sounds to each key press: click, clack, clunk (Shift) and even the zip-ding! of carriage return.

And then there are "downgrades" (rather than the "upgrade" you want to do) that make new hardware look like old. This "steampunk" Mac mod looks like no Victorian computer that ever existed. And don't forget the all-in-one PC used by Dr. Watson.

All of this stuff is cosmetic, only. Converting an old VDT to work with a modern personal computer may be doable, but I doubt it will be simple.