hehe:And, for early multitasking GUI environments, who else remembers this half hearted attempt by IBM after they split the sheets with Microsoft? The colors have mostly faded off the mug but you get the picture.
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Old farts reminiscing about computers
- Thread starter HankLloydRight
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Yup, i had same USR adapter with same setup. I bonded occasionally when downloading new dev versions from work.
I connected RJ11 into second line of house phone wires and purchaced some two line anolog phones. Didn't have the nerve to disconect primary pots line, and i had two teens in the house. This was before i bought my first cell phone.
This was before "Internet Sharing" was a thing so I installed WinGate service to run on NT for NAT.
We did that at a client site (back when I was a consultant) -- we had one machine tied into their lan, and ran WinGate so all of us could get online. Except we only had the trial version of Wingate, so every 90 minutes or so someone would shout out "reset wingate please!" and whoever was closest got the honor. We did that for months. I have no idea why we didn't just buy it, we were billing out to the client for hundreds of dollars per hour each, plus travel, meals, and two apartments in town.
IIRC I bought the licence once i knew it worked. It was the verizon ISDN rates that was a pain, Had to pick a plan of minutes and watch to try and avoid the overage fees. Probably why overpay for unlimited plans now.
Edit: typo
aesculus
Still Trying to Figure This All Out
A few days ago my Millennial daughter texted me and asked if I ever heard of FORTRAN before. Turns out some of her peers in physical science were complaining about some old code they had to use to run some experiments. Funny thing was that I might have touched some of that code way back in the 70's. 
Reciprocity
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Instead of cluttering up other threads, I figured this might be a fun topic.
I'm 50. My first experience with real computers was messing around with a DEC PDP-8 that my dad had to run his collection business. It had 4k of real magnetic core memory and big 8" floppy disks. It ran DIBOL, which was the first language I tried to learn. Not the best language for a first-time programmer.
All that changed shortly after that I was in a Radio Shack buying parts for some electronics project I was working on, and they had a TRS-80 on the counter. I watched as someone walked up and typed in:
Code:10 FOR I=1 TO 100 20 PRINT I; 30 NEXT RUN
When it printed those 100 numbers on the screen, I thought I was seeing pure magic. I memorized the code, when to my school's brand new APPLE ][ lab (just three computers), typed it in, and it worked. My second program asked for your hourly rate and how many hours you worked and calculated your wages. I was a sophomore and the computer classes were only available to seniors. By the time I was a senior and could take the class, I was correcting the two teachers who were trying to teach programming. They didn't like me very much. By then I was also doing 6502 machine language programming. Good times, good times.
My dad was literally Mr. Robot from the show and I was the kids helping around the shop. He used to work for radio shack and sold TSR-80s or as we jokingly called them trash 80s. Then he opened is own store and sold commodore computers. 4032 and 8032 initially. The number coincided with the screen characters across 40 or 80 and 32kb of memory. They took 5-1/4" floopies. Then he sold Amigas and eventually CPM and dos PC's and clones of all sorts. I used to do memory upgrades for customers by removing the chips from the sockets and putting in upgraded chips. We had bbs systems in our basement running on 1200 and 2400 baud modems. We even had a packet radio bbs system. This was 30 years ago before the internet and wifi.
My first computer was the commodore Vic 20 then commodore 64. Good times.
When I first got dialup (as a kid) with a 110baud modem... My family didn't like that I tied up our one phone line for hours trying to download something.
My brother figured out he could whistle just so in one of the phone extensions to make my modem disconnect.
And of course there was no "resume your download". A disconnect and you had to start all over again.
Those first modems were "acoustic coupler" where you put the phone handset into speaker/mic cups on the modem.
Over the years I kept upgrading modems... 300 baud... 2400 baud... 9600 baud... 19.2kbaud. 38.4kbaud. 56kbaud etc. Anyone remember Telebit trailblazer modems?
My brother figured out he could whistle just so in one of the phone extensions to make my modem disconnect.
And of course there was no "resume your download". A disconnect and you had to start all over again.
Those first modems were "acoustic coupler" where you put the phone handset into speaker/mic cups on the modem.
Over the years I kept upgrading modems... 300 baud... 2400 baud... 9600 baud... 19.2kbaud. 38.4kbaud. 56kbaud etc. Anyone remember Telebit trailblazer modems?
thecloud
As rhythm raced inside, the ship came alive
Was scolded more than once for tying up the line all night ("what if there's an emergency and nobody can call in?"), as I would run an extension cord from my 300 baud USRobotics modem out to the phone jack in the next room. Good times. Even better times once I could afford the upgrade to 2400 baud.
Some years later, around 1990-91, I eventually got a Telebit Trailblazer T2500. It was a howling beast, the pinnacle of speed. (Edit: well, I thought it was fast but that was just my memory of it, apparently it was only 9600. I forgot about going to 28.8 and 56k soon after that.) After a while, modems didn't really seem to get any faster, just smaller. Then they stopped being external, and an RJ11 jack was just another port on the chunky ABS-plastic computers of the '90s.
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CuriousG
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CuriousG
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Speaking of BBSes, everyone that remembers them and did file transfers remember the Zmodem protocol. But did you remember BiModem? Full duplex transfers and chat capability rolled into one. They were mainly used for "education software" boards.
arcus
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I was using Windows 3.11 (Workgroup Edition), then switched to NT 4.0 as soon as it came out (my first PC had "just" the minimum RAM required to run it - 12 MB). Multi threading and multitasking, true 32-bit, SCSI support (had an excellent Pioneer CD-ROM and Philips CD-RW) and networking won me over 95. Even Diablo ran better on NT than on 95
I always wanted to get SMP but could not justify it. What a real pain to run 3D renders on a single CPU.
I don't remember, $20?
In high school, I was working after school at a time-sharing computer company (this was 1982). My boss, a hippy-dippy CPA when to Penn State in the 70s. We started talking about the "blue box" and he tells me that he built one in college from a muilt-generation photocopy of a hand-drawn diagram. At the time, he knew nothing about electronics or soldering, but he figured it out and it worked! He still had it. So I asked him if I could "borrow" it for a while. He brought it in, and this thing was totally homebrew looking. There weren't even buttons -- each "button" was three little triangular tubes of steel or aluminum mounted like stalks, and as you touched all three, the proper tones were emitted. I took it home, and amazingly enough, it still broke through the dial tone, but nothing else worked, not surprisingly. Not wanting to trigger the black suits to come knocking on my parent's door, I only played with it for a day or so. I wonder who created the original plans he used? Was it Captain Crunch himself? Wozniak maybe?
Windows forI was using Windows 3.11 (Workgroup Edition), then switched to NT 4.0 as soon as it came out (my first PC had "just" the minimum RAM required to run it - 12 MB). Multi threading and multitasking, true 32-bit, SCSI support (had an excellent Pioneer CD-ROM and Philips CD-RW) and networking won me over 95. Even Diablo ran better on NT than on 95
I always wanted to get SMP but could not justify it. What a real pain to run 3D renders on a single CPU.
It came with "32 bit file access" and "32 bit disk access" options that were in essence thr routines that were developed for Win95... they significantly increased disk I/O speeds.
And perhaps more importantly, it came with a native 32 bit multi-protocol network stack. You could run TCP/IP and NetBEUI natively (and a limited IPX/SPX)... no more DOS shims, nor the need to license Trumpet or some other 3rd party stack. Reasonably solid network card driver library support was included, and there was pretty strong NDIS support for new cards released.
It also had some cool network-capable apps. It had a fax package, and a mail client. The cool thing was that you could actually send another WfW user a direct email by setting it up to dial them without an intervening server. Binary attachments included.
And finally it game with an NT-compatible workstation network client You could mount file & print shares using a domain account. You could use receive domain-wide network msgs. Some network-aware DDE support was present.
Certainly WfW was nothing like 95 nor NT... but it was had some significant features that made it a much better 16 bit Windows on a network. We used it as a replacement for regular Win3.1 + DOS mode drivers in our org as we cut our teeth on a LAN and started installing NT servers. Our existing installed base of hardware capable of running Win3.1 typically could run WfW without issue. Actually they typically did better, as there was less stuff crammed in to conventional/extended/high/expanded memory.
Unfortunately, MS didn't highlight the NT client aspect, instead pushing the Workgroups functionality. I suspect that had much to so with it's lukewarm success.
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Oh gawd... Don't remind me of WFW, Win3.11, and NT "networking". So many jumpers on cards, crazy config files in the correct order, netmask and gateway settings that didn't follow what unix was doing. It was a mess to set up a heterogenous network with unix and windows PC trying to co-exist. And then there was "token ring". Barf.
I think Microsoft was playing "catch up" with the whole ethernet thing back then. And IBM was pushing to make Token Ring the standard, and have Ethernet go away.
I worked in a building that was wired for "USOC" standard RJ45, so the new ethernet cables required an adapter to plug into the building wiring.
Standard EIA /TIA 568 A EIA /TIA 568 B, USOC, RJ45 Pinout Wiring Diagram
(At least that was better than installing "vampire taps" into fat coax Ethernet.)
I think Microsoft was playing "catch up" with the whole ethernet thing back then. And IBM was pushing to make Token Ring the standard, and have Ethernet go away.
I worked in a building that was wired for "USOC" standard RJ45, so the new ethernet cables required an adapter to plug into the building wiring.
Standard EIA /TIA 568 A EIA /TIA 568 B, USOC, RJ45 Pinout Wiring Diagram
(At least that was better than installing "vampire taps" into fat coax Ethernet.)
thecloud
As rhythm raced inside, the ship came alive
Definitely remember ZMODEM for the resumable downloads. Don't recall BiModem, but do remember the heyday of WWIV and Fido boards, as well as NNTP and Usenet newsgroups (which I think are still going, though I lost track after most major ISPs stopped providing that service.)
CuriousG
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