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I still use autoexec.bat and confic.sys files - sometimes you need to tweak manually. I still write dos batch files too.... It's not impossible to use all the above on a modern machine, just a bit tricky (needless to say, I am NOT speaking of my XPPro machines!)
[Edit: my husband and I were just talking today about the early "portable" machines - in 1992 his office had a couple of them. It's a good thing he's strong.... they weighed about 40 lbs.... that was his first and last exposure to computers. He's happy to let me be the techie....]
People would ask "What are those typewriter-TV sets anyways?" - - or more likely,
What are 'home computers' good for?
One rejoinder was that housewives could store their recipes.
That was BS of course. They were fun, that's all.
- Larry
soon, very soon (I can dream, can't I?)
BASIC.
Bubble Memory
Bootstrap Loader (keyed in via the front switches by hand in Octal notation).
NAND Gate (as a separate device/chip)
Hollerith Card
$JOB Card
- PS (I'm feeling old)
The secret of the universe is @##%&**^^^% [b]NO CARRIER[/b]
Punched cards
hmm, I still have a pile of those cards here on my desk (unpunched, of course) and use them often: they are great to handwrite short notes on the back side.
EBCDICand
Mainframe
The Mainfrane is alive and kicking -- ever seen the new IBM z990, called "T-Rex" (64bit, up to 32 processors)?
There are mainframe installations which run 50x or more Linux systems concurrently in just one z/VM partition with all guests dynamically sharing perhaps 2 or 3 mainframe processors, besides the usual dozen partitions of z/OS (formerly OS/390 formerly MVS). While the Linuxes are ASCII based, the z/VM and z/OS are in EBCDIC, as this EBCDIC is still part of the architecture of the mainframe processors.
There is another corporate legacy computing world besides those Intel boxes.
Regards,
R.
When you rolled up a big hand-made cigarette, you could make the roach from the punch cards and the holes served as an aerating filter. Perhaps I should have trademarked it.
For about fifteen years (until XP came out and I was doing more work on Linux) it really seemed like this bug-free bliss of stability would be gone forever - it was nice being able to edit more than fifteen pages at once, but the blue screens and printing errors were a huge time loss.
Not a term, but a lovely sound - your Epson dot matrix printer in 'high quality mode'
Now that really makes me feel old... I'm still using an LQ800 I bought in the 'Eighties. Doesn't sound quite as sweet nowadays though... Do you think Epson still sells replacement heads?
But if you want to go way back, how about 'stroking the grid caps'?
[edited by: jim_w at 3:46 pm (utc) on Dec. 14, 2004]
Anyone still use a FirstClass BBS?
Don't hear Google dance so much these days.
Okay, maybe this wasn't a computer term as such...
Wang
Lotus
L-I-M Standard
...working 29 hours a day down mill...
Wasn't that "down t'mill"?
Carrying computer programs in boxes, not on floppy disks.
Punch cards as storage media.
A line of code = 1 punch card.
Code exploding meaning you dropped a box of punch cards.
Programming in PL1, which I guess meant programming language 1. Old. I feel old.
The 2605 microprocessor.
8 inch floppy disk drives. Columns of 4164 DRAM chips.
The PET. The Apple II (I still have one). The TI/99A.
Win 95 ;)
