Old Tech thread

[oganalp]

This took me back to the days of controller cards for my 486 pc. It was damn hard to find one at where I lived.

And, to this day, nothing beats the General MIDI sounds of Sound Blaster AWE32.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

School is where I got to use the PET as well. At first, you could only use the cassette drive. Then the school got a 5 1/2" floppy drive. The speed was fantastic. I could save, search, load work and programs in under 20 seconds!

I remember when we went from cassette tapes to the Sinclair Microdrive, and could suddenly load 100k in six seconds instead of six minutes (or thereabouts). Not that we had 100k of RAM to load it into, of course.

And it was always amusing when someone pulled the cartridge out of the Microdrive without waiting for the motor to stop, and the tape spewed out across the floor.

 

[Alex The G and T]

I found this fabulous relic, about fifteen years ago, as I was clearing out the parts warehouse of a defunct auto dealership, prepping for a remodel project.

No one around me had a clue what it is. I had only seen one once before... ca 1983.

I'm not sure what possessed me to keep it so long. Some notion that it belongs in a museum, I suppose.

Anyone want to guess? If you know what is the deal with the rubber cups on the lid; you're halfway there.

 

[Vladd67]

Telex machine? The rubber bits are where you put the phone handset.

 

[Alex The G and T]

Right about the rubber bits; but this is a much more modern unit than telex.

 

[Vince W]

That is a TTY. TeleTYpewriter.

 

[Alex The G and T]

Think techier. It was a Big New Thing in '82 to '84; but had a limited sales-demand. Not many people had the type of access to need one.

I didn't expect this to be quite so arcane; considering other posts on this thread.

To be fair, the only reason I recognized it was because I was taking programming classes at the time. One of the Instructors brought one into the computer lab, excitedly showing off his amazing new acquisition.

 

[Vertigo]

I suspect it is a remote terminal for connecting to a computer; a TRS-80 I'd guess from the label, but can't read the rest of it. In those days the monitor was effectively just an endless roll of paper so I reckon you'd see exactly what you'd normally see on the monitor scrolling off that printer. And a Thermal printer would be my guess.

It's actually quite possibly worth a few bob.

 

[Alex The G and T]

Spot on, Vertigo. The Top Geek Award goes to you.

PT-210 Portable Data Terminal

 

[Parson]

Whoa! That's too geeky for me. (I did play games on a TS 80 for a while. "Chyssome (sp) Trail" comes to mind and "Space Defender." Didn't much use it as a computer.

 

[Anthoney]

Holy Radio Shack, Batman. I never used any Tandy equipment except when I was freeloading in their stores. They had great AC.

 

[Alex The G and T]

With the excitement about the advent of home computing, upthread, and looking back from today's tech; it's easy to forget that complex computing required access to a mainframe.

Hence the limited demand. To need such a terminal, the user would have to be employed by Government, Military, Academia or a Very Large Corporation in order to have access to a mainframe computer.

 

[Danny McG]

 

[HareBrain]

It's unlikely we'll forget the floppy disk, as it'll probably be used as the "save" icon for the rest of time, and every so often a curious child will ask "what is that?"

 

[Vladd67]

It's unlikely we'll forget the floppy disk, as it'll probably be used as the "save" icon for the rest of time, and every so often a curious child will ask "what is that?"

I did read somewhere that a kid saw an actual 3.5 disk and thought it was a 3D print of a save symbol.

 

[Vince W]

REAL floppy disks are 8" or at the very least 5 1/4".

 

[Edward M. Grant]

When I took my computing course at school they had removable 5MB hard drives. I think they were 12" across?

And, in one of my early jobs I worked with a jukebox of 12" optical disks with an amazing 4GB capacity. That was exciting when trying to read and write to more than two disks at once so the arm was continually swapping disks over between the storage rack and the drives.

 

[Parson]

8 in. floopys were amazing! But I started with the 5 1/2.

 

[Vertigo]

I finally bit the bullet and threw all my old 5 1/2 inch floppies away a couple of years ago. On the basis that I'll probably never even see a 5 1/2 inch drive again and besides the software on them would only run on a computer that hasn't been made for over thirty years. And as it used a proprietary HP operating system, not even CP/M, I suspect even trying to read them with an appropriate drive would be very difficult. Ho hum, life move one....

 

[Dave]

Could you not offer to donate them to a museum?

I hate people throwing things away that have history and where there are no other examples left. There will be other examples of your 5 1/2 floppies, but when everyone has thrown them away, well then there won't be any longer.

I know that archivists working in museums have to go onto ebay to buy Betamax and 8-track tape players so that they can convert video and music to more modern formats. So, they would bite you hand off if you have any of those machines in working order. The same would presumably apply to old computers with ancient operating systems.