Computer Nostalgia Thread

Thought this would be a cool thread, I have a few photos of old-school stuff (like myspace, what.cd, dd-wrt, teamspeak, hex-editing wolfenstein: ET, old video cards:

https://imgur.com/a/Ieo5JvF

I'm sorry but old time for me goes back to the 1960s I started with Fortran on a mainframe using punch cards. It's a relative thing.

I'd love to play Wizardry one more time on my Apple 2e, but that machine is long gone. It had a duel floppy drive....cutting edge!

In the ancient archives at my mom's place, my Apple IIe clone still resides. Assuming the disks still work, I have 5.25" floppies with various titles, including The Oregon Trail, and various programs I wrote myself in BASIC when I was a kid. I also have a blue & white Power Mac G3 from the late 90's, still working last I booted it. I have original disks of games from the DOS / Win 3.1 and Win95 eras that I might someday play again in a virtual machine… games like Stunts and Master of Orion II. Also, I still have 3.5" AOL floppies! ^.^

woodenpotty said:

I'm sorry but old time for me goes back to the 1960s I started with Fortran on a mainframe using punch cards. It's a relative thing.

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Dang dude that's so cool! Old-school binary punch-in!!! Suprised they just never made holes in ribbon tape. (like 35MM IMAX film)

dogboy said:

I'd love to play Wizardry one more time on my Apple 2e, but that machine is long gone. It had a duel floppy drive....cutting edge!

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Dank!!! Haha Good ol' floppies.

Sapphyre said:

In the ancient archives at my mom's place, my Apple IIe clone still resides. Assuming the disks still work, I have 5.25" floppies with various titles, including The Oregon Trail, and various programs I wrote myself in BASIC when I was a kid. I also have a blue & white Power Mac G3 from the late 90's, still working last I booted it. I have original disks of games from the DOS / Win 3.1 and Win95 eras that I might someday play again in a virtual machine… games like Stunts and Master of Orion II. Also, I still have 3.5" AOL floppies! ^.^

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Nice... AOL XD I had a apple II accessory screen for a bit but I gave it to a old friend of mine

I remember the first PC I had ran windows 95 on like the 20 floppy install and still required a key, but I had internet and AOL since I was 8 XD

I didn't even know what networking was, and one day me and a younger friend (he must have been 5) were trying to get internet on his PC and he was just like "Just tie the cables together" so we tied them in a knot and still didn't have internet because we didn't have a extension adapter for the plain old phone line haha XD

Ah the good old days of Dial Up, DOS and floppy drives.

Pretty sure I still have some old PC parts lying around somewhere, Floppy Drive, IDE Cables etc, I remember me and my brother tying to Civilisation 1 working (DOS) on our first PC which ran win 95.
Got an Amiga and ZX Spectrum sitting up in the loft as well.

Oh and there there were those big CRT monitors that took up half the desk.

But yeah good memories of old school computer stuff...but I would rather have my modern PC with it's 3 screens and a CPU and GPU (1080) that were half the cost of my rig

paper tapes

Musashi said:

Dang dude that's so cool! Old-school binary punch-in!!! Suprised they just never made holes in ribbon tape. (like 35MM IMAX film)
Punched paper tape was what the early CNC machines used for input. I've run some of those and you put a tape in and started the machine and off it went. It was REALLY amazing in the 60s & 70s





I believe this is 64k of punch cards.

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oh, the pain.....

woodenpotty said:

I started with Fortran on a mainframe using punch cards.

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:thumbsup: FORTAN.... talk about basics.. been there.... beat COBALT hands down... that was biz systems language.

After big blue for a few years with 4-screen plasma screens and two PCs as coop... went for a VERY short coop at US Steel Fairless Hills PA. Entering the gates was like going through the time tunnel... old nasty offices. Lectured manager (sarcastically with some humor to boot) on what PC disks I carried with me in an orb-looking holder (3.5 not 5) were and how that was at the future not PUNCH cards.

Wrote programs on pads. Send to "union" punchers. Get cards back. Go through them and remake most cards on punch machine as they didn't punch what was written, DRIVE to another building (and had to track mileage - couldn't walk... unsafe, go do ancient Burrows system. MOUNT OWN TAPES, run cards. Go to restroom and puke that such a place still existed... Realize this is one reason why steel industry was a disaster. Leave in two months...back to big blue ----- yeah!
Deploy 1st Thinkpad 700C 1st beta.. still have one of them. Must be a collectors item.. along with many generations since. RISC, Luggables P70,Still use Thinkpad T series religiously (this is an older one that's turbo charged (T430S)....

year 2000

BoyLuc said:

:thumbsup: FORTAN.... talk about basics.. been there.... beat COBALT hands down... that was biz systems language.

After big blue for a few years with 4-screen plasma screens and two PCs as coop... went for a VERY short coop at US Steel Fairless Hills PA. Entering the gates was like going through the time tunnel... old nasty offices. Lectured manager (sarcastically with some humor to boot) on what PC disks I carried with me in an orb-looking holder (3.5 not 5) were and how that was at the future not PUNCH cards.

Wrote programs on pads. Send to "union" punchers. Get cards back. Go through them and remake most cards on punch machine as they didn't punch what was written, DRIVE to another building (and had to track mileage - couldn't walk... unsafe, go do ancient Burrows system. MOUNT OWN TAPES, run cards. Go to restroom and puke that such a place still existed... Realize this is one reason why steel industry was a disaster. Leave in two months...back to big blue ----- yeah!
Deploy 1st Thinkpad 700C 1st beta.. still have one of them. Must be a collectors item.. along with many generations since. RISC, Luggables P70,Still use Thinkpad T series religiously (this is an older one that's turbo charged (T430S)....

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Been there, done that! The joys of punching cards.
In the 90s I was working as an engineer at a manufacturing company. The year 2000 was approaching. They found out I was the only one who any knowledge of COBOL. Their manufacturing software was all in COBOL. The bad news was I was transferred to Purchasing. My new boss hated me. He found out I was making more than him. He would have loved to gotten rid of me but upper management knew if their system crashed they would go down the sewer. They did anyway in 1998 but not from my efforts.

woodenpotty said:

Been there, done that! The joys of punching cards.
In the 90s I was working as an engineer at a manufacturing company. The year 2000 was approaching. They found out I was the only one who any knowledge of COBOL. Their manufacturing software was all in COBOL. The bad news was I was transferred to Purchasing. My new boss hated me. He found out I was making more than him. He would have loved to gotten rid of me but upper management knew if their system crashed they would go down the sewer. They did anyway in 1998 but not from my efforts.

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I heard some large banks are still in process of archiving things on tape libaries these days. (the federal reserve?) It's federally mandated they can't destroy any data. The guy was sourcing a vaccuum tube for the machine and there was only one person trained to run it (and he was 90+ odd years old training the tech to archive off of the tape libraries before they found the tape vaccuum was broke.)

Personally my earliest memories of computing are windows 3.1x and majong tiles. I also got to sit in my next door neighbor's lap watching him design motherboards for satellite components.

(It was probably a rumor) but apparently someone far up the chain on my father's end did electrical diagrams on the saturn V from langley air force base, but I haven't really found any information on it. Could have been a outright lie- but who knows. The sega dreamcast was my first 3D game console and whatever- The Super Nintendo was my first console but I could never get really past level 1 on super mario. Duck hunt was really fun though- overall eh... I saw an atari going for $25 at the local goodwill today but couldn't get the cash together from my mother's side (even though they owe me about $150) to purchase it to resell for my car's registration. (could have easily sold an atari for $150). :/ oh well. Life goes on, no matter what.

Midnight Rescue was one of my favorite games. This got me thinking. There are other games I used to play, but I can't remember the names of them.

an IBM p/sII desktop with MicroChannel which was really state of the art in 91but I got mine in 99... and I got it to work with M.E. although it didn't have any support ... I also got Flight Simulator, the one bit of MS software that was ever worth a turd. ... and Gates let it go. IBM bet their wad on the MicroChannel, but it was propriety and still is, and the other manufacturers simply went to PCI and almost had IBM in bankruptcy. But, and this important, they had it set up so Bill Gates Folly was the only OS that it supported. It would be fabulous if Linux would be supported.

We should start a possy' in r/sysadmin discord on Reddit.
r/homelab is full of heavy gang activity.


https://discordapp.com/invite/sysadmin

My Handle: Musashi#6350

I'm also seeking employment through r/sysadminjobs so be careful.

Unless anyone wants to hire me here be my guest. lol

I remember back in my childhood there was Windows XP. Good times.

I have a fully functional Apple IIe and it has the dual floppy drives with the original printer. ...and another floppy drive that is still wrapped. That is my oldest computer in my collection, and the only Apple product I own.

Would post a pic, but cannot find out how... I don't post/reply often.

I remember back on Windows 95/98 playing Doom, Baldies, Commander Blood, and Lemmings on DOS. Also I won’t forget about that Ski game because I had no clue what I was doing. XD