What old technologies do you remember?

OkieinMinny

This was our first TV. Later we converted it into an aquarium.

haha - we were just talking about these yesterday and when it went out, it became the entertainment center for the new TV!

I miss atari - life was so simple with PONG

dwoodmanjr

so, I sit here at work decrying to teh heavens on the slowness of my computer in running a 5,000-live case through an actuarial software (it's been all of 3 minutes), and this thread actually reminded me that 25 years ago this same case would have taken all weekend on the mainframe my first employer had

dwoodmanjr

tthat should be "the heavens" and "5,000-life case" darn fingers won't listen to the brain (they just did it again with "the", but I caught it this time ;-)

AliciaStinger

This was how you found crap in the library before computers:

AWESOME!! Sadly, if computers ever broke down, I'd be one of the last people in my generation to be able to find things.

Lift_This_

i still have my atari and when i was in grade school those were the computers we used till one day the school got a grant and we got computers that used 1.5 inch discs....lol

TXtstorm

Sadly, I am old enough to remember ALL of the above. :blushing: :sad:

Yes, me too!

When I was in college, we used keypunch cards to program the computers. The hard drives were floor-to-ceiling models that had to be kept in a separate room where the room's temperature had to be constantly cool or the drives would overheat and shut down completely.

Umm, yes, well me too again, except that this was the way of my first fulltime job. I was a computer operator on an evening shift. We would run each evening's "batch" of processing from programs that were loaded to the mainframe computer off of card decks. New data was added to the system by inserting a HUGE stack of input cards into the middle of the program deck (the data cards were keyed by a pool of keypunch operators upstairs during the day). Lord forbid that we should drop a deck, because getting it back in order was a HUGE pain, and if done incorrectly would make the program blow up!

As far as the hard drives, yep, they were huge. We had a raised floor with special CAHU (cooling and heating units) that blew cold air under the floor and perfed tiles under/around the machines to cool them. Even further back than that I used to go to work with my dad occasionally on the weekends. In his data center not only did I play with the keypunch machines (I had memorized a simple program that would generate biorhythm charts on the wide greenbar paper... would type up my program cards and add data cards based on friends' names and birthdates!), I recall the huge, removable "cake cover" disk platters. They were stacks of hard disks contained inside plastic covers with twist locking handles... want to change data sets? Lock and lift out one stack and load another!


Good times, good times....

TropicalFlowerz

rabbit ears on top of the t.v.

Lift_This_

I remember using the "latest" technology when I typed up book reports on an electric typewriter after capturing notes on 3x5 cards at the library and hand writing the report. My typewriter was very advanced - complete with white correction tape that I thought was so much better than whiteout.

we still have one....it is outside in the garage in a large suitcase!!!!

WestCoastPhoenix

WolffEarl

WE had to use slide rules in high school still as calculators were just becoming available then. Had to ask my sweetie to type my essays on a manual typewriter unitl I finally was able to buy a $ 2000 MAcplus with a whopping 512 k internal memory, yep 512 K. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. WE had but 2 channels on TV and shows were only on for about 2 hours in the evening.

eml48341

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I can't even imagine doing this. Wasn't there an old movie based on that? Rock Hudson or something?

Monica
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Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk! The whole movie was about their connection from a shared phone line...basically Rock Hudson was the original man to use technology to create a false identity to trick a female lol

JDwashere

I remember using the "latest" technology when I typed up book reports on an electric typewriter after capturing notes on 3x5 cards at the library and hand writing the report. My typewriter was very advanced - complete with white correction tape that I thought was so much better than whiteout.

This is how I learned to type in high school...haha

hwold454

I remember my first hard drive in my IBM clone 8088 PC. It was a Seagate ST-225, 20 MB. Cost me around $500. If I'm doing my math correctly, to equal my current 1TB drive, I would have to have approximately 50,000 ST-225's at a cost of $25 million.... How times have changed.

JanaCanada

:laugh: OMG, Westcoastphoe..I stil have my kids' Lite Brite! I suuure don;t miss stepping on those d#@! buggers, though!

BondBomb

Load "*",8,1

dcurzon

i remember when the abacus first came out... my goodness, it was a revelation! you could add, simply by sliding markers along

arewethereyet

OOh this is fun!

My mom (born 1933) said her father (born around 1858 or so) used to tell her stories of movies in their home when she was small. In his Irish brog he would tell her of boxes in their living room and they may even be able to HEAR them!!:noway:

Then when I was 11 we went to the police station. They brought us into this ice cold room, with floor to high ceiling 'computers' The police lady giving us the tour told us that one day we would hve one of these in our living rooms. Maybe even on a DESK :noway:

It was such a parallel to my mom's story.

My husband insisted on buy a Tandy from Radio Shack, our first computer. Unfortunately it was nothing more than a $1000 typwriter! Only my nephew could decode all the stuff and get us working again:laugh:

It is simply amazing that we went from no TV to me typing on a computer the size of my hand in 3 generations!!:drinker:

monicalosesweight

It is pretty funny to think that the first computers ran about 20K and today you can get one for under 1K. I hadn't considered the cost though of equaling what we have today.

Does anyone remember the first games - the ones where the computer would stay stuff like...

"You've entered a room. Do you go left or right?"

You'd type "Right" and then it would tell you something else that happens....

I remember one that was a horror story or something. It was something called a text adventure or hypertext adventure.

I remember one being "Leather Goddesses of Phobos" and there were others based on Hitchhikers Guide. They were sorta weird and entertaining. The screen would be black and you'd read and pick what you chose to do and then something would happen to you.

Monica

WinnerVictorious

also, for old school games, Dan Gorlin's Choplifter (circa 1982) was state of the art for the Apple ][ when it came out.



it was very satisfying to land on the little hostages and squish them as i recall.

holly1283

Oh you people are such mere infants. No TV. When I was 3 we had one. When I went to college mine was one of the first to have a computer science lab and computers at that time we almost as big as an entire room. My mom's house stilll has a rotary phone. Last year I trhew out an 8 track tape machine. My typewriter in high school was a black manual that had no letters or numbers on it. Only the privileged got to use the IBM electric ones. We had slide rules. too but there were no calculators for us to use. Ah , yes, we had to be able to use an encyclopedia. Students these days look at you as if you have 2 heads when you even say the word.

HelenDootson

Vic 20, anyone know what that was?

I do - I worked in a computer shop in the summer holidays one year and we sold them along with the Atari 64 and the BBC computer

LaLouve_RK

TheRealParisLove

This is going to sound funny but...my parents still have their old laser disc player and they sorta transferred it to me. Grin. I did manage to connect it to the tv and it's very different in picture quality. I have the original Star Wars movies but they don't look as good as the new stuff. Sigh.



I think this is the machine that I still have. Grin. I did find some obsolete movies and I use it as a converter for transferring out of print ones.

Holy crap! You have the original Star Wars Movies on laser disc?!? Those are worth a fortune! Put that in a safe because those pretty much don't exist any more.

algebravoodoo

Oh you people are such mere infants. No TV. When I was 3 we had one. When I went to college mine was one of the first to have a computer science lab and computers at that time we almost as big as an entire room. My mom's house stilll has a rotary phone. Last year I trhew out an 8 track tape machine. My typewriter in high school was a black manual that had no letters or numbers on it. Only the privileged got to use the IBM electric ones. We had slide rules. too but there were no calculators for us to use. Ah , yes, we had to be able to use an encyclopedia. Students these days look at you as if you have 2 heads when you even say the word.

I still have my slide rule and CRC book from high school Fond memories!

Valm0n

I still have my :-)

JDwashere

This was one of my favorite toys as a kid :happy:

saschka7

Mimeograph machines--I remember all the handouts in grade school had purple ink and that funny typewriter font--back before copier machines.

Digital organizers in the 90's--these seemed to be the huge, big thing...for a minute.

My dad had a calculator when I was very small (in the early 70's) that actually plugged into the wall and was the size of an adding machine.

My mom had a cool hand-held primitive abacus/calculator thingie she used for grocery shopping (also in the early 70's) that enabled her to add up her purchases as she went through the store. It had 4 buttons on top that represented hundreds-place, tens-place, ones-place etc and you pushed down the appropriate button to "add" cents and dollars. That was really nifty to me.

DPernet

Filofaxes, Sony Walkman, ZX-81

VelociMama

I LOVED my lite bright!

Celeigh12

My first cell phone in 1990 was a big Motorola in a bag that was about a foot by 8 inches to accommodate the ginormous battery. They were called car phones back then.