Back in the olden days...

[jdhurst]

Geez, I cannot stop laughing. My first computer was an IBM 8088 PC1 desktop. [...] Still, I have been hooked up and telecommuting for longer than some of you dudes have been alive. ... JD Hurst

How do you telecommute with an IBM 8088 PC1 desktop? Wheelbarrow?
HAHAHAHA

Also, did you have the Media Center version of the IBM 8088? Is it true it came with a gramophone?

I'm having too much fun

With due respect, laughing is ignorance in this case. I had several different programs for telecommuting and Bulletin Boards (My own program that was used by hundreds on people in the company I worked for at the time), PC-TALK3, PC-Communications, Kermit and others. My own program is interrupt-driven and still works today in XP for highly specialized needs. I recall putting that program on a Toshiba DOS laptop, putting in a British modem (different at the time) and using email and file transfer from London to Toronton. PC-TALK3 used polling in Basic, and had real limitations, but did work and did support file transfer (as my own program did). All that stuff lasted about 7 years from 1981 to 1988. The AT-class machine I got in 1988 had a hard drive and still ran DOS and that went until 1993. In 1994 I got a Windows 3.1 machine with a 28.8 modem, Netscape Navigator 0.9, Eurdora and WS_FTP. Slow, yada yada yada, but it did much of what today's machines use. I have the same email address I started with.

... JD Hurst

[Thinkpaddict]

How do you telecommute with an IBM 8088 PC1 desktop? Wheelbarrow?
HAHAHAHA

Also, did you have the Media Center version of the IBM 8088? Is it true it came with a gramophone?

I'm having too much fun

With due respect, laughing is ignorance in this case.

Hello,

Sorry to have caused the wrong impression. I didn't mean to offend you, really. I was just having some fun thinking about how much computing technology has advanced in a relatively short amount of time, and I thought the idea of someone "commuting" with an IBM 8088 PC1 desktop in a wheelbarrow was humorous.

It sounds that you go back quite a while in your experiences with computers. I am a fellow software engineer (to-be, graduating this June hopefully), and I can appreciate and respect that.

By the way, just to piss you off a little bit I know there are people with more computing pedigree than you. One of my Professors shared with us very fond memories of submitting a program (perforated cards) for execution, and then going to the beach for the day, since that's how long it would take for the job to be accepted and processed. Then, coming back to find there were some bugs. To put things in perspective about how much computing technology has evolved, he made the point that whereas now if you want a memory update you just go to a computer store and order a small stick of RAM, in the early days if you wanted a memory upgrade you were likely to first talk to the architect (to make some room in the building). Really illustrative.

Regards.

[jdhurst]

No problem - you neither offended me or otherwise bothered me - Cheers.

Now I go back that far as well. I have written lots of punched card programs (although I always hated punched cards and used disks and even tape wherever I could).

I guess the first actual computer I used was an IBM 1620. So to move this thread totally off topic, the list is like this:

IBM 1620 Assembler and Fortran (1965)
IBM 1710 Assembler and Fortran
IBM 7040 Fortran IV /77 / Watfor
IBM 7044 Fortran IV
IBM 1460 Fortran
IBM 360/65 and numerous variants Fortran IV
GE 115 <- This sucker could be force loaded with a one card program.
Honeywell DPS8 - numerous variants. The OS was GCOS
VAX (I forget the model)
IBM System/38
IBM AS/400 - numerous variants including the first real 64-bit machine
IBM PC 1 8088 - DOS 1 - 3
IBM PC AT - DOS 3 - 4
IBM PC 30-286 - DOS 4 - 6
Toshiba Clamshell laptop - DOS 6 <- functional world machine. 5 pounds
IBM PC 300 GL 80486DX2 - Windows 3.1 <- First internet machine in 1994
IBM PC 300 GL -upgrade to P75 and Windows 95
Toshiba Libretto P75 with Windows 95 <- a functional 2 pound traveller
IBM PC 300 PL P3 500MHz - Windows NT4 quickly followed by Win. 2000
IBM NetVista A30 P4 2.4Ghz with Windows XP Pro
IBM TP365 with Windows 3.1
IBM TP380 with Windows 95
IBM TP600 with Windows 95
IBM TP240 with Windows 2000
IBM TP240x with Windows 2000
IBM TP X22 with Windows XP Pro
IBM A22e with Windows 2000
IBM T23 with Windows XP Pro
IBM T30 with Windows XP Pro
IBM T41 with Windows XP Pro (2005)

All of the IBM and Toshiba computers going back as far as the 8088 had / have remote access. The Toshiba clamshell, the Libretto, and the T41 have functioned cheerfully half way around the world. The other laptops have worked through North America, but that's no particular challenge.

... JD Hurst

[Thinkpaddict]

No problem - you neither offended me or otherwise bothered me - Cheers.

Now I go back that far as well. I have written lots of punched card programs (although I always hated punched cards and used disks and even tape wherever I could).

Wow, that sure shut me up! That is impressive...Sir, I salute you.

I have a couple of questions if you don't mind. What do you mean by saying that the GE 115 could be force loaded with a one card program? I am sorry, but I don't understand the concept of force loading. Does it mean that the basic OS only took one card?

Also, I see that you have an X22 in your list. Like I told Kyocera earlier, I am thinking I might get one of the earlier X series laptops (probably 21, 22, or 23). What are your opinions of the X22? Is it solid and reliable? How about XP performance?

Cheers!

[jdhurst]

On the GE115: It (like any other computer before or since) could hang as the result of a bad program. So I could write (and did write) a program to dump upper memory (or any memory block) onto the printer in 40 characters (or a bit less). Each character took 2 columns on a punched card. You put the card in the hopper, pressed Force Load, and the program ran and dumped memory on the printer. You could usually find the program error this way. You cannot do that with a Windows blue screen so far as I know (at least I have never figured out dump files).

On the X22: It was a decent machine. X's to me feel flimsier than T's, but that's probably just me. It was reliable in the sense that it survived my briefcase quite well. It was the first cut at XP (no Service Pack) and lots of software (BlackICE, Symantec Raptor VPN software for example) did not work well with XP at that early time and I had more crashes than I felt reasonable. Today I feel zero crashes over a one year period is the minimum acceptable performance. It was an 850MHz machine so it ran acceptably well but not spiffily fast like today's machines.

... JD Hurst

[Thinkpaddict]

Thanks for your explanations. I understand now the concept of force loading.

Regarding the X22, I guess I have always felt attracted by the smaller X-series even though it doesn't often a built-in optical drive. Maybe I can buy one of these when they are cheap enough (around $150.00) that I can feel not guilty for buying one just as a toy to load old software and games.

Regards.

[AlphaKilo470]

Well, jdhursts posts make me feel a little more comfortable about my first computer, which actually had a 5.25" drive on it. That was back in the early 90's.

Hmm, today I complain about WinXP slowing my computer down. Ten years ago I had the same complaints about Win95. 13 years ago I was hapilly playing math blaster on a school Apple IIe Platinum. 15 years ago I was playing Win 3.0 paint on my dad's 286. Fun times.

[verktyg]

Now I go back that far as well. I have written lots of punched card programs (although I always hated punched cards and used disks and even tape wherever I could) ... JD Hurst

IBM 360 at CMU via Teletype 1968-9

IBM 1952-5 Pitt, ran punch cards and wired up bread boards for my brother-in-law. I was only 9 or 10 then.

[Toe]

Very impressive! My father has told me stories about such machines, and we still have one in the basement on campus. (No longer working of course)


-Toe

[leoblob]

Wow, this thread takes me back! I remember connecting to bulletin boards in 1984 with my Kaypro 2, with its external 1200 baud modem (state-of-the art compared to the 300 baud modems which were more common). I still have this stuff and it still works, although I'm not sure what I could connect to at this point! This computer runs CP/M, the operating system which preceeded DOS.

My first computer experience was on a DEC PDP-8S in 1969. While we did have a few "high level" languages for it, you could program it in machine language, manually using the bank of switches on the front (in binary of course). More typically, your programs were stored on punched oiled paper tape, that was read into the computer at the blazing speed of 30 characters per second.

I, too, had experience with an IBM 360 mainframe with punch cards, also in 1969. I remember one program which never ran right. After MUCH troubleshooting, it turned out that the punch card machine would punch a "0" but print a "9" at the top of the card... so reading what was printed on the card, in an attempt to find the problem, was of no help.

[BillMorrow]

can i chime in with MY punchcard program..??
it was, well, uhmm, 1960 something when i was a programming student at heald college on van ness avenue in san francisco..
i wrote a "program"..
turned it over to the punch card operators (they actually took the program listing, punched the cards, and handed back a stack of cards..
then i took it to the computer room and handed it to the operator who loaded it in the card reader..
naturally it did not run..
crashed..
<sigh>
my next computer experience was with the first S100 buildityourself box..
a polymorphic systems poly88(intel 8080 cpu chip) and then an IMSAI 8080 (8080 predates the 8088)..
and it went on from there to here..

and i remember the bulliten boards..
which, in time, morphed into fido net and others..

yes, there WAS life before the internet..