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Old Computers

Black Hole

Black Hole

May contain traces of nut
Ex Libris said:
someone old enough to have formatted floppy disks at work
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How are we supposed to know what your level of experience is? But then again...
Ex Libris said:
I’m not sure how you format an NTFS drive in Windows
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And yes, I still have some 8" floppies (real "floppies" - where they got their nickname from) knocking about somewhere. I even bought a cast-off dual 8" floppy cabinet from work, thinking I might do some kind of home-brew with it. And yes, I have been through frustrations trying to do what *I* want with drives in Linux, far worse than in Windows (the latest Linuxes are getting very patronising).
 
Black Hole said:
How are we supposed to know what your level of experience is? But then again...


And yes, I still have some 8" floppies (real "floppies" - where they got their nickname from) knocking about somewhere. I even bought a cast-off dual 8" floppy cabinet from work, thinking I might do some kind of home-brew with it. And yes, I have been through frustrations trying to do what *I* want with drives in Linux, far worse than in Windows (the latest Linuxes are getting very patronising).
Click to expand...
I can't remember formatting an hdd in Windows. If I ever did it was probably 3.1.
 
Black Hole said:
And yes, I still have some 8" floppies (real "floppies" - where they got their nickname from) knocking about somewhere.
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I have a lot of 5.25" floppies (the much less common hard sectored type); it was the 3.5" drives that introduced the rigid casing.
 
MartinLiddle said:
I have a lot of 5.25" floppies (the much less common hard sectored type); it was the 3.5" drives that introduced the rigid casing.
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It was the 5.25 I was referring to.
The lowest spec machine I used ran CP/M and when copying it would regularly demand the system disc. We may have moved on since then.
 
Black Hole said:
And yes, I still have some 8" floppies (real "floppies" - where they got their nickname from) knocking about somewhere.
Click to expand...
I've got one of those. Formatted from a computer running MP/M and containing programs from c. 1982. No drive to read it with and probably not much chance of the data still being there either.
Black Hole said:
and so big some people were tempted to fold them for carrying in a pocket
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Nooooooooo!
 
Haha. I remember a colleague who wrote a definitive manual on cp/m. It finally got published corresponding to the demise of...cp/m.

Boot from a floppy? We didn't have floppies in my youth...
 
At school we were dragged to the local technical college where we wasted paper tape. A huge machine with a mercury delay line had just been superseded by a desk sized Elliott Marconi.
The earliest machines I can recall in a work context were actually electromechanical NCR machines producing cheques from punched cards. Later on I encountered a minicomputer but a colleague was the only one who touched it. The first hands-on machine was an RML 380Z.
At home I passed on the Sinclair ZX81, couldn't afford a BBC, and bought a QL in Tottenham Court Road the week before it was reduced yet again. Having failed to do anything useful with it I got a semi-compatible Sanyo from Morgan Computers with a version of Wordstar which had been hacked to run on it. I think the first full compatible was a Samsung. It did have two floppy drives, but I ordered an HDD on a ISA card with DOS preinstalled. I remember being grilled by the seller about which version I already had.
 
My first actual bought home PC was an Amstrad 1640, ditto with two 5¼" floppy drives but I fitted a HDD ISA card (a whole 10MB, and very expensive). Prior to that it was PDP8s, PDP11s, Commodore PETs, and NASCOMs at university, and I designed built and programmed my own Z80 system at home.
 
Ex Libris said:
At school we were dragged to the local technical college where we wasted paper tape.
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Very similar experience though I remember little about the hardware - we were programming in Algol, the compiler tape was loaded first, then our program tape which had to have stop characters coded so that the subroutine library could be loaded and then the remainder of our program. Output was half a reel of tape that took forever to print at 10cps on a teletype. (no idea what the program was supposed to do now)

My first PC was a Kaypro 2 luggable which I won in a draw 37 years ago - I can be certain of the age because it was the day of one of the pre-natal classes before sons birth.
 
Black Hole said:
PDP11s,
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Urgh! The PDP11/34 - I did part of my undergrad project using one of those. I seem to remember it was a sod to boot up, had an operating system that had silly commands for copying files (PIP ?) and you had to change disks to get the FORTRAN compiler to work (and probably change again for the linker).
Black Hole said:
I designed built and programmed my own Z80 system at home.
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You're a better man than me, I never got around to doing that - I'm not sure I had/have the ability.
 
I was beginning to get worried that we were going off topic.

Nobody seems to recognise the language used on the Elliott Marconi:

RNT

STA 999..

City and Guilds?

A colleague bought some sort of modular system, possibly Z80 based, in the hope of giving himself some sort of edge and get out of the clerical/executive stream. I believe he eventually died of drink.

At one point I was expected to type in consecutive codes to see if they were actually on the system. I quickly got bored with this and wrote a program in BASIC which would accept variables and record the results to a file (OPEN #1 FOR OUTPUT), from which I would print request slips using Word 5 on a dot matrix printer. This scarcely constitutes high level coding, but we did get a lot of real work done, recovered skiploads of missing items, and technical staff only become aware of it when they noticed unusual activity from our department.

Isn’t PIP a CP/M command?
 
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Ex Libris said:
The lowest spec machine I used ran CP/M and when copying it would regularly demand the system disc.
Click to expand...
Because things overlaid the console command processor in memory which therefore needed to be reloaded from disk.
A similar thing happened with MS-DOS (and PC-DOS), which had a resident part in low memory, and a transient part in high memory which could be overlaid by whatever you were trying to run in your "640K is enough for anybody".
Ex Libris said:
Isn’t PIP a CP/M command?
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Yes (Peripheral Interchange Program), but a lot of the ideas in CP/M were inherited from DEC with the PDP/11 and DEC-10 systems. And MS-DOS inherited those, and so on.
 
prpr said:
Because things overlaid the console command processor in memory which therefore needed to be reloaded from disk.
A similar thing happened with MS-DOS (and PC-DOS), which had a resident part in low memory, and a transient part in high memory which could be overlaid by whatever you were trying to run in your "640K is enough for anybody".

Yes (Peripheral Interchange Program), but a lot of the ideas in CP/M were inherited from DEC with the PDP/11 and DEC-10 systems. And MS-DOS inherited those, and so on.
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I actually understood all of that.
As I recall I hacked AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS to get around the 640K limitation. I wish I could upgrade myself to process "File System in Userspace".
 
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