Dave (imported) wrote: Fri Nov 30, 2012 8:32 pm More later on tonight but my old MAC died of overuse and old age. Keyboard and Mousepad blew out.

I'm now on a new MACBOOK PRO 13inch screen.

And I can read the damn screen -- WOW

Lost 4 hours of editing that is really a loss.

Hi what model is your old Mac ? what will you do with it ? sell as "parts' or throw it away ? I am curious

Patrickchemcast (imported) wrote: Sun Dec 02, 2012 4:50 am Hi what model is your old Mac ? what will you do with it ? sell as "parts' or throw it away ? I am curious

I will set it in my room of doom where lots of neglected chores wait for me to do something...

Maybe this summer I will get the keyboard and mousepad replaced.

I won't throw it away.

The poor thing was bought in 2005. It's not like it wasn't due for replacement. I knew the keyboard and mousepad were misbehaving and breaking down and simply tried to nurse the unit into next year.

The oldest computer that I am inclined to put to use when it suits my purposes to do so is a Digital Equipment Corp. LSI-11 system. I have some software written for it that is not worth the bother for me to re-write for a different system. The system console is a HP 2647A with dual tape drives, with a Teletype ASR-33 as a backup terminal.

Then there is the Radio Shack CoCo, the Zenith Z-100, the VIC-20, the Commodore 128 with CP/M 3.0, the Tandy RLX-HD...

By mostly getting used, obsolete computers, I have a backup for the spare backup for the archive spare backup, and I distribute my work diversely, including archive storage in a bank vault. Not that what I do is worth keeping...

In the room in which I now am can be found a Quad-Core RISC Mac, a 1.4 GHz eMac, two Dell GX270s, a Gateway dual core thing, a couple Toshiba U305 notebooks, two triple-core HP notebooks, a quad-core HP notebook, a Dell Inspiron 7500, and more, all of which are marvelously obsolete. Trailing edge technology can be cheap. Something quits, I turn on something else. Why pay thousands of dollars for a Quad Core PowerPC Macintosh when waiting for a few years allows harvesting one from the scrap heap for nearly nothing?

As long as it works and gets the job done, it's good!

You know there is nothing about the good old days in the computer field that I would want to go back to.

I remember working on a IBM1401 it had 8k we also had a 4K side unit. It was all wire one of the first 2ed generation machines. I died and went to heaven when I moved to a Univac 90/30 with 96K and we got our first monitor on the CPU. It was a bout 10 years later when we got green screen monitors (dumb terminals) for us to enter information and write programs on, which beat using a form and giving it to the Key Punch department to put into cards.

I don't miss the days when it took a week to sort 100,000 records, nor when we got them on tape and cut the time to 3 to 4 hours to finally building a logical file or view of what you wanted to access. About that time we started getting something new, PC's 386's on my desk, I hated it, plus it had a worthless mouse attached.

No I would not want to go back, I like my wireless keyboard, my Naga mouse, 12 buttons on the thumb 5 on top all programmable and my Nostromo for the left hand with its 17 programmable buttons and as many different profiles you wish to enter times 8. The 6 processors that allow me to have three monitors, one of which is my TV. Where I have 32 gig of memory (a far cry from 8K) and 4 tarabites of disk plus two dvd drives, one is blue ray.

No I would never want to go back, keep me on the leading edge I remember all to well what the past was like and none of it was nice.

The only thing I miss are the old tab cards, they made great note pads and fit nice in the back pocket. God I still remember how to read the holes.

River

River,

I can't get a PM through. Your inbox is full.

Riverwind (imported) wrote: Sun Dec 02, 2012 10:18 am You know there is nothing about the good old days in the computer field that I would want to go back to.

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Riverwind (imported) wrote: Sun Dec 02, 2012 10:18 am No I would never want to go back, keep me on the leading edge I remember all to well what the past was like and none of it was nice.

The only thing I miss are the old tab cards, they made great note pads and fit nice in the back pocket. God I still remember how to read the holes.

River

I know it is a bit off-topic. But as the discussion went in direction of computer oldies...

May be you will be interested: http://translate.google.com/translate?s ... F51256.htm l

A bit of soviet computer history

I tried to write a waving flag demo (in text mode on terminal) on similar machine during a Chaos Constructions event at 2008 or so. In BASIC, on green screen terminal.... I gave up after about 30 minutes... Mostly due to the lack of manual. Another thing that played its role was that the keyboard on terminal was an abomination. Layout was soviet-specific (no qwerty for you, it followed cyrillic letters, so it was JCUKEN), but worst part was a lack of 'shift' key. To get caps letter or symbol you pressed the letter 'upper register' and it stayed that way, until you pressed 'lower register'.

On the other hand I remember some older machines, that were pleasant to use and look at

Like that old SGI Indy workstation I had played with. It was quite an eye candy, interesting to repair and hack (no one remembered root password for that machine) and it was fast for its age.

Oh, and I gladly remember spectrum. Where else few hours of good gameplay could fit on few minutes of audio tape.

Honestly,

I almost understand what you said. The other computer people might comment but I can't.

Well, other than I would be surprised if a Russian language keyboard was QWERTY and not Cyrillic.

Dave (imported) wrote: Wed Dec 05, 2012 4:28 pm Honestly,

I almost understand what you said. The other computer people might comment but I can't.

Well, other than I would be surprised if a Russian language keyboard was QWERTY and not Cyrillic.

http://www.leningrad.su/museum/show_big.php?n=1191 - here is the beast. Probably even the same one, on which I tried to do it.

Keyboard layouts here changed to QWERTY at some point. Probably with spectrum clones and advent of PCs.

Actually I did follow it Dave, fhunter that keyboard is amazing, I love it.

River