I don't know about you guys, but I'm really into retro computing. Despite the fact that my primary laptop is a pretty new Windows 10 computer, I find a lot of joy also in using some of the operating systems which I grew up with.
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I'm currently typing this out on a Toshiba Satellite 2800 laptop, which came out in 2001 and runs Windows Millennium Edition. It doesn't support Wi-Fi, so it relies on a wired connection at all times, and its battery is incredibly worn out, to the point where it will not operate unless it is plugged in, but it has a working audio system, a working screen, and two working external media drives (DVD/CD and floppy).
Another retro computer I own is an old Dell Dimension 4600 tower from 2002, running Windows XP. It has the same external media drives as the laptop does. I saved this computer from the floods of 2013, and it still works just great, though it also requires a wired connection.
Finally, though this computer is not quite as old, I own an early 2008-era white MacBook. This computer is in... rough shape, to say the least. Its CD drive does not work, and its screen is fidgety, sometimes turning off without warning; however, it works fine when hooked up to a monitor. Luckily, it supports WiFi, though!
(Detailed descriptions of my retro computers above.)
Is anyone here still accessing CP on Windows XP? Any macOS Leopard users here? Anyone still stuck on DOS?
Does anyone, like me, keep their old computers for posterity? Or is this just a 'me' thing?
In any case, discuss old operating systems, old computers, and the like here.
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Then somehow when I was older, I got a hold of one of these puppies. I really have no recollection of how I came by it (maybe some old lady died that my parents knew or something? No clue at all).
It was pretty sweet having a laptop that weighed 250lbs.
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And for the record, Windows 98 was the bees knees. I miss that OS.
My favorite retro games from PC were Encarta 96 and Dangerous Creatures!
This was the original Wikipedia for you youngins:
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And this game still kicks butt:
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This was a fun trip down memory lane
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I finally offloaded my oldest machines a few years ago. PIII 400mhz from the late 90's running Windows 2000. I was using it with an ATI TV card as entertainment in the workout room.
While disposing of old stuff I wanted to get everything off some even older hard drives. One was an 80MB drive. Fortunately I was able to plug it into the PIII system without to much hassle (had to manually configure the heads cylinders etc). Unfortunately I didn't feel it spin up. With nothing to loose, I opened it up while powered on and gave the disc a manual spin. That was enough to power it up and get 'er going!
The problem was this drive was compressed with Stacker, which if you don't know, was a disc compression software that come out before Doublespace, which, if you don't know, was what everyone used to double their hard drive space when these things were expensive. It was included with DOS 6, but we were running DOS 5. So the only way to get to the data was to actually boot from this drive. It was a major flashback to watch all the commands being processed! Unfortunately the other drive I had in the machine was NTFS, which couldn't be read, so I had to find another old drive, format it through DOS and was financial able to copy the data in an uncompressed format to a drive I could put in my Win 7 box.
So I took the data, created a VHD on my win 7 box and copied the contents, then installed Microsoft Virtual PC. I was able to install Windows 98 and mount the drive. Success! The fun part was finding one of my brother's old school assignments form grade 7 (written in Framework III - on old "office" type suite). It was a "what do you want to be when you grow up. It basically described his current life, marriage, becoming a pilot, giving up ski racing... very accurate. So I gave it to him at his wedding.
When I get some time I'll tell y'all about the time I went through emulation inception to access Mac files through windows network using appletalk.
Last edited by Fuzz; 04-27-2016 at 05:54 AM.
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I'm still using this today (Model 4825SX), though there's a Samsung SyncMaster(TM) 3 connected to it.
The 486SX runs at an amazing 25 MHz! It has a whopping 8 meg RAM. The monitor's not really in use, as I can ssh into it. I run a custom Debian linux off the floppy. The Conner Peripherals 160 meg hard drive is used as storage and swap space.
The machine's my mail server. The only time it's been shut down in the last 17 years is once when there was a power outage and another time when I had to replace the main breaker for the house. The 20 watt PSU is still rock solid too.
I wish components were this well-built today.
Haha! Just found an old review of the machine....
Spoiler!
http://www.atarimagazines.com/comput...5_SX_Tandy.php What if I told you that you could get the performance of a 486 computer, service from a local computer retailer, and state-of-the-art video and hard disk performance--all for about $2,000? If you're in the market to upgrade your computer to a high-end business system for graphics processing, you'd probably ask for a telephone number. And what if I told you that the system I just described is a Tandy? You'd probably say, "The folks who brought us the RL 1000?" ...
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I hope to one day rebuild a Tandy 1000 like I used in elementary school...install Logo on it and figure out how I managed to make fractal art on it which somehow convinced my teachers I was a genius when I was just fooling around.
I also would like to build a proper DOS machine but good vintage CRTs of the correct age are really hard to find actually. Most people have recycled theirs. Without the correct monitor, the entire vibe isn't there so I might as well just do emulation.
Here's my story. It's long, but I'm feeling nostalgic
In grade 6, our classroom got an Apple II+. It changed my life. Our teacher was taking a BASIC programming class, and taught us whatever she learned. I think that cemented my future as a software developer.
Somehow, my brother and I convinced our parents to buy us an Apple IIe - $2400, and later an Imagewriter dot matrix printer for $1200 more. I don't know how they afforded it. Our first game was Castle Wolfenstein, which we could play together - one of us moved the guy, the other aimed and fired the gun. It was a tense game, punctuated by SS shouts in german that would make us jump.
My best friend and I started writing more and more code together, and soon we had dreams of writing games. We wrote some small text adventure games based on our love for Zork, but couldn't match Zork's incredible parser. Then we started playing with hires graphics and page buffering for animation, but started to find the BASIC interpreter was way too slow for the type of action games we wanted to write. This began our foray into learning machine language on the 6502 processor. It was slow going since resources were so rare. We began with peek/poke charts from Beagle Brothers. Nibble magazine sometimes had small articles on assembly. I found a BASIC-to-machine language compiler, but it was not always reliable.
One day, we discovered our local library had an actual 6502 reference book with all of the op codes and descriptions. It was, unfortunately, always out, and months went by without it being available. It was our unicorn, a phantom book that drove us crazy by its absence. And then, one fateful day at the library, we saw it sitting there on the shelf, as though it had been there all along, untouched. We checked it out and began to fill our heads with information about accumulators, registers, jumps and compares. We were only about 12 at the time, but it's surprising how much you can learn when you were motivated, and on a time limit. We returned the book a couple weeks later, and then never saw it again. I ended up writing a little space invaders type game.
Fast forward to last year, walking out of a Co-Op. There was a "leave a book/take a book" bookshelf in the exit lobby. I took a quick glance and kept walking before something registered deep in my psyche. It was the glimpse of a black spine with yellow font that made me stop in my tracks before I could process why. Sure enough, there on the shelf was the 6502 Assembly Language Programming book, again sitting as though it had been there all along, untouched. I snatched it up and went home feeling like I won the lottery. I thumbed through it, reminisced, and then laughed. I now possessed what I had wanted for so long, but no longer had any use for. It had come 30 years too late, but strangely, I still cherish it. I may even try to write something using one of the apple emulators.
Spoiler!
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I saved up money from my after-school job to buy a Commodore 64 and the disk drive, the 1541.
LOAD "$",8
Buying a box of 5 1/4" single sided disks and using a hole punch to notch the corner on the other side to turn it into a double sided disk.
Copying and trading games - Summer Games, Summer Games 2, Winter Games, World Games, Bards Tale, Racing Destruction Set, Archon, Mule, etc.
And for the record, at work I still have a database running on a PII 400 (running Windows XP) . It doesn't need any more than that. I should just migrate it to a VM, but haven't done so yet.
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Its funny because like, thanks a lot reading all of your stories makes me feel really old.
My first home computer was a Timex Sinclair kit computer, that you built and it had a chicklet keyboard. You wrote all of your apps, pre basic in binary and machine code.
My parents bought me a Commodore 64 when I was an early teen with the tape drive and the RGB monitor. I still remember the load "blah blah",8,1 and putting the tape in and then walking away for an hour while the game loaded. I had a 9 pin dot matrix printer as well. If I wanted a game, I picked up a copy of a magazine and they had games in the back that you had to code in. But first you had to use basic to write the compiler then you would enter in line after line of three digit numbers, and god forbid you screwed one up.
I remember when I saved up $1000.00 and got a one of the first 1541 disc drives. It used the 5 inch floppy, and we were over the moon when we learned that we could cut a notch on the opposite side of the disk from the original notch, and it would allow you to use both sides of the disk.
We learned about using 8 colors, and sprites and superbit maps to write games. When we wrote applications, we used a box and shadow box to give it a cool 3d effect.
I remember upgrading to a Commodore 128, which was awesome because it had three modes, a 64 mode, a CPM mode and a 128 mode. Oh my god we weren't stuck with 16 bit memory blocks anymore we could do 32 bit memory blocks. On top of that I got my first C compiler and I left basic behind.
Then my buddy got an Amiga, and gaming was never the same, an independent sound and graphics processor, and 64 colors, it was so far ahead of its time.
That's why it felt like a downgrade when I went to university and my parents took me out to buy a new computer which was the Commodore AT. Do you need a hard drive sir? Nah these two floppies will do. What about a mouse sir? Get the frack out of here.
I remember putting the dos disk in to book it up, running wordstar using two disks, a applications disk and save disk. It had a CGA card in it, and speaker sounds. I remember my first game was Ancient Art of War , so amazing.
I remember learning Dos, and its 8 million commands. Putting in a 5 mb hdd which at the time was $2000.00 and then buying digital DrDos with the drive doubler which gave me 10mb. Man I'd never fill that up.
In our day we proudly said we didn't need no windows interface (DosShell), give us a right facing arrow and we're good. And if we wanted to change how the program worked we rewrote the Autoexec.bat file.
ah yeah, you kids with your vintage computes with their fancy Pentium chips, and 8 mb of ram, you don't know the pleasures of a 286 with a mb of ram, 10 mb hdd, EGA video card, Sound blaster 16 and a 8 color monitor.
Salad days baby.
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Ah to be young, when a 2001 laptop is considered "retro".
My first computer was a 386 SX-16. It had a turbo button to boost it up from 10MHZ to a whopping 16MHZ. The game "Snake" was crazy at those blazing speeds!
It had an 80MB HD, and I had DOS Shell installed. I later upgraded to Windows 3.1, and it totally blew my mind!
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I shudder when I think about how much my first few computers, peripherals and software cost me. And I'm also thinking of the sheer number of computers and parts that have passed through my doors... has to be 5000 easily...
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I’m always amazed these sportscasters and announcers can call the game with McDavid’s **** in their mouths all the time.
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As someone who has a touchscreen laptop, I'm inclined to agree w/ you, rico, but as someone who also used 8 with a keyboard and a mouse, it's stupid. So stupid. It's just dumb.
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^ nope, just a simple shell change and boom, youre good to go.
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I’m always amazed these sportscasters and announcers can call the game with McDavid’s **** in their mouths all the time.
Hey, this is supposed to be a retro thread. Where's 3.0, 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 4.0, WFW and Bob? I suppose there is windows 1 and 2 as well, but did anyone ever use those?
The Retro Computers/Operating Systems Thread
