Computing terms not heard any more

Dig deep into those memory banks...

[Essex_boy]

Micro computer- when talking about a home computer, I used to find his one very annoying for some reason.

[Jon_King]

Turbo Pascal

GW Basic

Peter Norton

Sidekick

[larryhatch]

Hey Jon: I really liked Turbo Pascal!

It got me away from BASIC (hahahahahaah!) and into a real compiled language.
I was forever tinkering with BASIC to improve my mathematical algorithms,
but limited by the speed of interperter languages.

I used a Prime Number Generator as a sort of benchmark.

Along game Borland's Turbo Pascal, and BASIC lost me forever.
Now I'm into straight C language, and Pascal is left behind.

I never got into 'Object Oriented Programming', and suspect that
OOP is more for bragging rights than getting something done.

Best wishes - Larry

[HarryM]

EDLIN - Aargh!

[Edwin]

external rampacks
chiclet keyboard
PC Junior
AT/XT
KB (nothing significant ever gets measured in KB any more, at least not as far as specs are concerned)
ROM (used to be a big deal how much of the OS/bundled sw was in ROM)
EEPROM
lightpen
optical disk
bubble memory
print head
IBM compatible
OS/2
Joyports (what joysticks used to plug into)
Overdrive processor
VDU
C:> prompt
Null terminal
Concurrent users (well, these still "exist" I guess but limits aren't usually relevant these days)
EBCDIC
computer magazines with whole programs in them, just waiting to be typed in
interrupts (always tricky when programming the C64)
raster display/vector display/bitmap display
voices (for sound)
luggables
line printer
using x86 to keep track of processor generations
turbo switch
mhz displays on the front of computer cases (can probably still be bought as a gimic, but they used to be on most PCs)
MSX
floptical
newline / carriage return (these days it's just "Enter")
baud rate
dongle
click of death (Iomega zip drive)
microcassette
GUI
WYSIWYG (and actually finding people who knew what this meant!)
page memory
upper memory
"out of memory error"
sipp
white lightning / prolog / forth / logo (and other dead computer languages)
LSI and VLSI
print buffer
10 base T
token ring
information superhighway (it turns my stomach to see the occasional journalistic references even in 2004!)
8 character filenames
bitmapped fonts
cyberspace
Arpanet
mail gateway
bulletin board (in the old dial-up sense)
hdd compression tools
"z" and "x" for left and right (for some reason hundreds of games used to use that particular combination)
form feed

[Jon_King]

>>Hey Jon: I really liked Turbo Pascal!

Yea I was really a fan. Man that thing could crank through 100k lines of code fast on my 8088. Long live Philippe Kahn!

[Essex_boy]

EBCDIC - Learnt about this an IT student you can imagine the fun we had mispronoucing it>.. Children, Children.

Pascal, isnt that widly used anymore?

[Jon_King]

Off topic
>>Pascal, isnt that widly used anymore?

Pascal was invented by Niklaus Wirth as a teaching language for structured programming. It found its way into some commercial and academic apps for a while but its been a long time since I've heard anyone talk about using it. (Algorithms and Data Structures by N. Wirth was probably the best book I ever studied to learn programming.)

[TheDoctor]

AFAIK, Pascal morphed into C, which then led on to C++ (which was the inspiration for Java).

Back in the 1970s, I was a whizz with PL/1. Bizarrely, I met a PL/1 programmer this summer (in a non-IT context, which was what made it bizarre), so old languages never die, they merely turn into legacy systems.

[olwen]

C was round before Pascal I think, or around the same time. It's true that C++, and now C# was derived from C.

Delphi is a version of Pascal that I think is still around

[olwen]

There's a timeline of programming languages here. [levenez.com]

[Jon_King]

It has been a while. If I'm reading the chart right Pascal in its object oriented form from Borland ceased to exist in 1985. So I guess it is no longer used as a teaching language either.

[TheDoctor]

C was round before Pascal I think,

I stand corrected. My memory is obviously beginning to fail through the onset of old age.

I notice from the time line diagram, however, that C is descended from, logically enough, B - which I'd never heard of before (amazing how these things pass you by, isn't it).

The time line reminded me, however, that Pascal was the basis for Ada, which also seems to have come to an end.

Of course, as the web page itself admits, the time line misses out a number of lesser-known programing languages [quark.physics.uwo.ca].

[eurotrash]

I was actually in a PC World in Edinburgh today and a gentleman asked for an IBM Compatible computer. Was going to send him to a travel agent for a flight to China.

I remember the 2400 modem used by me with my Apple Portable with a 20mb HD and sending an email from Machu Picchu. I had carried it round in my backpack through half of South America. I eventually through the modem out in Brazil to make room for a hammock.

I also read murray code and morse code but not too fast nowadays. Anyone remember the Siemens T100?

[jim_w]

Garbage collection

(Especially bad on the C64 and the ZX81/Timex-Sinclair)

[graywolf]

edit autoexec.bat

[Brett_Tabke]

Chicklet Keyboard
PC Jr.

[eurotrash]

Topical:

Commodore 64 reincarnated on a chip:
[news.com.com...]

[rocknbil]

Univac.
Rand.

:-)

[Shane]

The Osborne portable computer.

Burroughs computers.

The A3. (Anyone know what that is? I be surprised if anyone did.)

Convergent technologies. (The ICON anyone?)

..... Shane

[TheDoctor]

Anyone remember the Fifth Generation and the hype surrounding it?

Or for that matter, the Last One - claimed to be the last program that would ever be written, it was supoosed to generate all other programs by itself. It disappeared without trace.

[httpwebwitch]

IBM OS/2

[bcolflesh]

...the Last One

[c2.com...]

Do you have a copy of this?

[Shane]

4GL

hee hee he

[TheDoctor]

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheLastOne

Looks like the same people, but the version I remember being hyped was not intended to generate BASIC programs on a microcomputer but major mainframe systems. The author and his backers kept promising that they had just a couple more problems to sort out before releasing it. And just a couple more....nearly there....just a couple more things to sort out...

Someone hadn't heard of Kurt Gödel [miskatonic.org], methinks.

The Fifth Generation project, that I mentioned in the same post, was also a hyped-up failure. It was meant to create a new generation of computers that would genuinely think. It quietly dies - apparently leaving no web pages to mourn its passing (references to the fifth generation I found on Google all referred to other things).

[HughMungus]

POKE commands on Apple II's in high school. I have no idea what a "POKE" command was but we used to scare our somewhat clueless but sweet instructor with one poke command in particular that made the screen look like a piece of metal in a microwave oven.

IRQ conflicts -- haven't had a problem with that in a long time.

And I'll never forget when I got my first real video card capable of displaying .jpg's in photo quality. Wow.

[local]

UARTs
16550 UART's (they had a buffer!)
MNP4 and MNP5
V.32, V.32bis, HST

DoubleDOS, Desqview
Echomail, Fidonet

[knighty]

VESA Graphic Cars (Diamond Stealth 8MB used to be the best!)

Boot disks - one for games to get all the drivers loaded into HIMEM

[RussellC]

Oh that reminds of those 3D addon cards for games. I think the Monster 3D card was the first to come out. It used the 3Dfx Voodoo 1 chip with 4MB of RAM. It piggybacked on your 2D graphics card by plugging in to a PCI slot below it and then running a VGA cable from your 2D card into the 3D card and then to the monitor. Those were the days.

That was my first vid card that had over 512K of Memory.

[HarryM]

LDA, STX, STY, ZAP, etcetera

[coopster]

john_k said:

"why use more than two digits for the year?"

There you go. hehe. Not that long ago, but now a memory...

Y2K 
Y2K-ready 
Y2K-compatible