I once overclocked my old Timex Sinclair using a twist-tie off a bread sack and a Bic lighter. [:o)]
My atari still works for simple word processing.
I’ve worked on the “Trash 80’s” at college, but never owned one.
Also still in the attic is the TI-99-4A. I’d bet it still works, but finding a TV with a twin-lead antenna connection might be a problem.
The Tandy 1000SX in the attic probably still works, too. I upgraded that with a 40 Mb hard drive (you read that right). It was nice not to have to boot from the floppies…
When I first got involved with ‘mini’ computers at the Chessie TSC’s. The ‘mini’ was the size of a refrigerator - just the processor. The 10 MB - that is right Megabite disk drive was a 12 inch platter that operated in an electronics filled cabinet the size of a two drawer file cabinet. The operating system for the ‘mini’ computer was loaded into it on punched paper tape.
Indeed. When I was at Vandenberg AFB, providing weather support for missile launches. the operators (I was maintenance) would punch the results of upper air (balloon) soundings on paper tape, which was then sent all the way to Cape Kennedy for processing, then the results were sent back (also via teletype). A number of parameters were computed on the mainframe computer at Kennedy.
At one point we got a small computer that was supposed to do that in-house. I don’t think it ever did - all we ever did was it was play tic-tac-toe. It wasn’t the size of a file cabinet - more like an oversized typewriter - keyboard and monitor all in one case.
The tic-tac-toe aspect was interesting. The machine would learn from it’s “mistakes.” You could use a series of moves maybe twice, then the computer would block you. Until you turned the series 90 degrees. Thus one series of moves could garner you eight wins.
The TI99-4A only had 16K of RAM, but would handle two cassette recorders for storing data and programs.
Nowadays one’s phone has more processing power than that mainframe at Cape Kennedy, and my micro computer has a terrabyte hard drive in it…
As long as we’re trading ‘old geezer’ computer stories, I’ll relate mine. In the late 1970s as a defense contractor field engineer I assisted with some Army operational tests. Our equipment was used by the field artillery to estimate target location. Back at their fire direction center where calculations were made, they were using a large refrigerator sized computer in an oversize trailer. Their computer tech showed me the insides - all discrete components on large plug in cards.
That monster was definitely on the way out as their ‘backup’ computer (usually preferred) was a HP or TI hand calculator with a stored program strip. Not sure what they use today, but for quite a while now the size of a typical military use ‘computer’ is ruled by interface circuitry and connectors for related sensors.
My old computer story is back in '65, the utility where I worked built a new Generating station with PDP process computers that used black paper tape for its data transfer. (shades the player piano days) but when it was being punched it filled boxes with little paper dots. So come Easter time, little boxes arrived in the interoffice mail to many of the other Engineers and Technicians in the office. When people opened them, they found a colorful plastic Easter Egg which naturally whetted their curiosity. So they opened them covering their desk and laps with thousands of little paper dots. Magnetic tape is much cleaner though it had its issues.
Ah, chads.
The chads from punched cards are retangular, and of heavier stock.
Teletype “five level” tape was punched either with chads (clean holes) or chadless (little flaps).
The little buggers aren’t too popular at weddings either…
They weren’t very popular in Florida a few years ago, either…
Who wants a chad hanging?
No serious person surfs the web without using an ad blocker, of which there are many. I’ve always had them on my machines, whether that was for Firefox or Chrome, and I have a standing rule that any site that asks me to disable the ad blocker or white list them automatically gets scratched off my list of sites to visit, the same as with sites that insist I subscribe to read content(mostly news sites like the WJS, NYT Forbes, etc.,. If your news stories are that good then give my 5 free views per month, because if it’s not local news it’s not something I’m going to be reading daily.
Happy to not be a serious web surfer…
They have now deleted two threads about this ads on the Model Railroader side, as this one reaches 70 posts…
Sheldon
Your point?
The rules are clearly different over here, but in any case the ads are still in place.
And I am already reading less…and posting less.
Sheldon
Ok. That’s nice, I guess.
Here’s a little tip for “paywall” news sites: Many of them give you 2 or three “free” articles you can read per month, and then once you go beyond that amount, they hit you up to buy a subscription if you want to continue. (cookies, basically)
You can totally thwart their strategy if you use a “live” distribution of Linux that boots from optical media…such as knoppix. Such sites will still set their cookies, but it will be set in memory only since they are unable to write to your CD or DVD. So, a simple reboot and you are able to resume reading without getting hooked by their scheme.
I’ve got three browsers installed on my knoppix disc, Chromium, Firefox, and Konqueror so I can run each one up to their limit individually before having to reboot. And then there is “Tor” for a 4th one, that I really haven’t used much.
Incidently, as it pertains to the “slow loading” problem that is often lamented here, I’ve been using knoppix here going on two months without ever experiencing the “slow load” that I had cyclically experienced here with windows requiring me to periodically nuke the cookies to restore responsiveness. So this further supports my suspicion that the slow loading is in some way caused by obsolete cookies.
In 2014, Microsoft announced that they would no longer support XP, so I traded it in on a new laptop with IIRC Windows 9. (MS automatically upgraded it to W10). Best Buy was giving a discount for XP trade-ins. Later Microsoft backed down and continued to support XP, but I am happy with my new faster laptop.
When Microsoft came out with their Sunset date for XP I bought a W8.1 replacement for it - I later upgraded the W8.1 machine to W10. The W10 Desktop is my primary machine, the XP machine is a node on my local network in addition to a W10 laptop and a Vista laptop. The ‘data’ I maintain is backed up on each of the machines.
I don’t trust Clouds. Clouds can rain data in locations it is not authorized to.
Beside using a live Linux distro, a well designed cookie manager is very helpful.
I use the Firefox extension ‘Cookie Quick Manager’. On news sites that only allow a few views, you can delete current site cookies and local storage, refresh the page and you should be good for a few more views. Not sure if this particular extension is available on other browsers but there should be something similar.
My Dell XP laptop was a hand-me-down from my wife when I retired. It was mainly for browsing the web and was not very powerful, and was getting cranky. The Geek Squad told me that to upgrade to Windows 8 would take up most of the RAM, so I was ready to trade it in for something more up to date.
I am amazed by these tales of old computers and their sizes…[:-^] In 1963 I worked for an engineering consultancy firm ( I was a go-fer/ engineering tech [8-|] ) At that time many commercial IBM machines were just punch card sorting devices…We had all the data that covered an engineering traffic and transportation study for s dizeable metropolitan area… It had been colated and was represented by box after box of computer cards ( It took the capacity of a 1/2 ton Chevy van to load and ha