Posted by Michelle/AL on 3/1/07 9:46pm
Msg #177826

OT: Memory Lane - Old Technology

I remember when someone typed cc: at the bottom of a letter it really meant there was a true "carbon" copy. I remember dot matrix printers. I remeber DOS. I remeber word processors that were as big as a chest of drawers. I remeber when fax machines were introduced into the office with that wierd, slick type of paper that curled up and changed colors within a few days. I remember manual typewriters. I remember calculators that were as big a typewriters. I remember when there was no such thing as overnight mail and when you wanted something delivered fast, you drove and took it yourself. I remember office phones with dials not buttons and phones that didn't have a hold button. You just put the phone down and came back to it later. I remember microfilm being an important part of every office and having to use it. Okay...my software has finished downloading. I can stop daydreaming and get back to work. I can get back to work

Reply by Charles_Ca on 3/1/07 9:56pm
Msg #177830

But do you remember nibs and blotters? Or sleeve protectors and green visors or gaiters for you sleeves. I remeber when the IBM ball was the greatest thing that ever happened in the office environment and then they topped it by coming out with automatic correction. I still have my old Smith-Corona portable in its leatherette zippered case that got me through college becuse my penmanship was so bad that I coldn't get a good grae in English Composition

Reply by Lee/AR on 3/1/07 10:03pm
Msg #177834

The Tandy and the Vic 20... computers with a whopping 16 mb of memory... and you couldn't do anything good with 'em because printers were way too expensive or not even around yet. (Don't remember-- & old as dirt.)

Reply by MelissaCT on 3/2/07 10:22am
Msg #177882

We had an Adam & Commodore 64 -- both hooked to the TV n/m

Reply by Gary_CA on 3/2/07 10:37am
Msg #177883

OOPS... off by a factor of 1,064

Now I'm really showing my nerd colors, but your Tandy and/or Vic 20 didn't have 16mb of memory, they had 16kb... or more often 32 KILO bytes (my school had one super model with 64 that could play monopoly)...

It's a little thing, but it was in 1989 (year of the earthquake) that I got one with 16 MEGA bytes... that was a super-duper 386, capable of drafting house plans. ($5 grand and 50 pounds by the way).

P.S. These high end 386's were the pinnacle of personal computing. Oh, yes, the hardware has improved a gazillion times since then and the price is a fraction... but shortly after that Windows was born, and no amount of software will ever fix that mess.

Reply by Gary_CA on 3/2/07 10:39am
Msg #177884

Before you get TOO blury eyed, remember...

in those good old days, every bank and every title company had a notary that would notarize anything you asked them to...

for free.

Reply by christiSocal on 3/1/07 10:03pm
Msg #177833

I remember when, if someone kept walking around talking to themselves we'd call the men in white jackets... Now you just figure eh, they have a bluetooth. Come to think of it- back in the day, if you told someone you had a blue tooth they'd look at'cha real weird and feel sorry for you!

Reply by Charles_Ca on 3/1/07 10:05pm
Msg #177836

I love it, that was great Christi n/m

Reply by christiSocal on 3/1/07 10:07pm
Msg #177838

;) n/m

Reply by Glenn Strickler on 3/1/07 10:51pm
Msg #177843

I still have a typewriter and carbon paper ... Still know how to use it. As far as old computers, I have a Timex/Sinclair that still works on machine code and transmits to a tv set.

Reply by Charles_Ca on 3/1/07 11:01pm
Msg #177847

Timex-Sinclair, that actually was a cool little machine

I had the fore-runner the actual Sinclair and then I sold it on eBay a few years back. That was my first PC. I had an HP-41CV while I was an engineer. It was the little hand-held calculator with the little magnetic cards but that Sinclair was great because you could program it with a language. When I was in College I learned to program in Fortran and Cobol and I remember having to stand in line with a box of punch cards waiting for my turn to load them in to the care reader. There was a gal in line in front of me one day who dropped her cards, what a mess. She had to wait until everyone else was done after she sorted her cards out. I am sitting here with my laptop and this has more computing power than the computer we used at Bechtel which took up one whole floor at 50 Beale, a San Francisco high-rise, if there has been one thing that has been exciting throughout my life it is the growth in computer technology, at least in my opinion.

Reply by Glenn Strickler on 3/2/07 12:15am
Msg #177851

Re: Timex-Sinclair, that actually was a cool little machine

Maybe I should put some of my old stuff on ebay. Never know .....

Reply by Gerry_VT on 3/1/07 10:55pm
Msg #177844

Re: OT: Old Technology and customer service

I recently ordered a spare part for my great-grandfather's 95 year old plane (made by Stanley)

Reply by Susan Fischer on 3/1/07 10:58pm
Msg #177845

I was such a happy cave girl. n/m

Reply by Charles_Ca on 3/2/07 12:25am
Msg #177852

Was that CAVE as in Citizens Against Virtually Everything?

In the small town I live in on the Mendocino Coast we used to have an organized group that used to come to all the city council meetings and they went by the name Citizens Against Virtually Everything. They literally opposed anything and everything the city council tired to do. I haven't heard from them in a few years so I don't know if they have disbanded.

Reply by Susan Fischer on 3/2/07 10:13am
Msg #177881

Nope, not that CAVE, Charles. <laughing> n/m

Reply by Ernest__CT on 3/2/07 6:56am
Msg #177855

There's still a Model 33 ASR Teletype in my garage;

I learned about computers by doing field service of peripherals. The Model 33 ASR has a paper tape punch and paper tape reader. Before being retired (and given to me) it had been used to reboot and load a drum memory. (Yes, drum. Long before disks, hard or soft.) The Model 33's communicated at 110 Baud, often via acoustic coupler. Before those I worked on Model 28's; they communicated at 75 Baud. (sigh) Remember dialup? When 1200 Baud was fast? These days probably very few people recognize "eight, one, none" as having meaning. (Other options might be "eight, two, mark", "seven, one-and-a-half, space".)

Then, in the good old days, I hand-assembled 6800 assembler, punched paper tape, and booter the machine using front panel switches so that the tty could be used to load the main program. No, I don't miss doing that at all.

Reply by PAW on 3/2/07 7:12am
Msg #177863

Re: There's still a Model 33 ASR Teletype in my garage;

Hey, Ernest, I got that acoustic coupler right here, somewhere. I remember them "good ol' days" with current loop adapters and paper tape reels all over the place. Anybody remember the Kennedy tape drives? My first full-time programming job (after part-time programming the IBM 407) was writing the microcode for them. First the 7 track, then the 9 track models.

Reply by Ernest__CT on 3/2/07 7:21am
Msg #177868

Sure! 20 ma or 60 ma current loop?

I still remember a multi-drop polled network with Model 28's. The address of the machine I serviced on a regular basis was figures H letters GR letters. It got so much traffic that the rubber would wear off of the part that struck the type-cylinder and the cylinder would get bashed into illegibility.

Remember hitting the selector magnet with a hammer in order to demagnitize it?r

Reply by PAW on 3/2/07 7:24am
Msg #177870

Re: Sure! 20 ma or 60 ma current loop?

>>> Remember hitting the selector magnet with a hammer in order to demagnitize it? <<<

Thanks for the chuckle while remembering the simpler days.

Reply by BrendaTx on 3/2/07 7:03am
Msg #177859

**I remeber when fax machines were introduced into the office with that wierd, slick type of paper that curled up and changed colors within a few days. **

I really hated dealing with microfiche!

You don't mention "teletype" machines. Circa 1979 I operated those at my first real job at the receptionist's desk. I got a promotion and wow, I hit the big time. I got an IBM Selectric (Blue) with five balls and correcting tape. (We still have one of those we use daily in the office I now work in. It's still plugging along!)

The promotion was when I was 20. I worked for a large corporation (Dow Chemical) in Safety and Loss Prevention. The fax machine in General Manager's office was a curious affair. It looked nothing like the fax machines you mention, Michelle. I never saw the output or how it happened but I sent safety reports on it.

To send input **ONE** page at a time was done by a cylinder shaped thing sort of like a laser printer or copier drum. It was about the size of the cylinders you get in the tubes at banks which contain our deposits at drive throughs. You took the middle of it out and clamped the paper to the outside of the drum-type cylinder with the printed side out.

Then you put it back inside of the fax machine --a box thing--which was hooked to desk phone for dialing. We dialed up the Michigan headquarter's office, and if all went well, the report on one page would whirl around inside the box for about ten minutes. Michigan would call us and let us know if it had come through in completion.

My output was important to get to Michigan but my secretarial stature was not important enough to receive faxes so I don't know first hand how that looked.

More info from this link: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/fax-machine1.htm

Most of the early designs involved a rotating drum. To send a fax, you would attach the piece of paper to the drum, with the print facing outward. The rest of the machine worked something like this:

There was a small photo sensor with a lens and a light.
The photo sensor was attached to an arm and faced the sheet of paper.
The arm could move downward over the sheet of paper from one end to the other as the sheet rotated on the drum.

In other words, it worked something like a lathe.
The photo sensor was able to focus in and look at a very small spot on the piece of paper -- perhaps an area of 0.01 inches squared (0.25 millimeters squared). That little patch of paper would be either black or white. The drum would rotate so that the photo sensor could examine one line of the sheet of paper and then move down a line. It did this either step-wise or in a very long spiral.

To transmit the information through a phone line, early fax machines used a very simple technique: If the spot of paper that the photo cell was looking at were white, the fax machine would send one tone; if it were black, it would send a different tone (see How Modems Work for details). For example, it might have sent an 800-Hertz tone for white and a 1,300-Hertz tone for black.

At the receiving end, there would be a similar rotating-drum mechanism, and some sort of pen to mark on the paper. When the receiving fax machine heard a 1,300-Hertz tone it would apply the pen to the paper, and when it heard an 800-Hertz tone it would take the pen off the paper.

Reply by Brenda Stone on 3/2/07 7:04am
Msg #177860

Ugh...lots of typing errors there...more coffee... n/m

Reply by Dave_CA on 3/2/07 9:12am
Msg #177877

I remember when...

My first job in computers was selling a "transportable" terminal for time sharing applications.
This beast was an IBM Selectric typewriter with a built in acoustic coupler and could connect at somewhere between300 & 1200 Baud. This was not as much of an obstacle as it might seem as the unit could not print an faster than about 15 characters sec.
This portable unit weighed enough that it came with it's own fiberglass case on heavy duty casters.
You did not want to take this puppy out for a demo and encounter stairs.

Anyway, I just bought 2 Gig of RAM for my PC and it cost less that $200.
Back in 1975 I was working for Memorex and sold the first add-on memory system to Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. This was 1 Meg of RAM to take their IBM mainframe all the way up to 2 Meg.
The cost, $976,000.00 and this was a good deal as IBM wanted $1,500.000.00!!!

When I left Memorex in 1976 I went to work for Paradyne. We primarily sold modems and we had the fastest thing going.
When we came out with a 19.2 Kbps we almost could not build them fast enough and they sold for a buck a bit. $19,200.00 and these were 4 wire leased line modems so you needed one at each end.

Finally, when I first started traveling internationally my kit for connecting to EZ-link for email was a small screwdriver, pliers and alligator clips as in most countries you had to remove the cover from the phone jack or the phone itself and find the right 2 wires to clip to. Then you could work at 300 Bps or so. My connection today is better that 5 Mbps. and I can access it wireless.
It certainly has gotten a lot easier in many respects but much more complex as well.

Reply by Becca_FL on 3/2/07 9:51am
Msg #177879

My first computer was a K-pro. It was portable, weighed about 20lbs, had a fold down keyboard with a built in 5 inch B&W monitor. Remeber 6 inch floppies?

I saw a story on TV a few days ago reporting that an original Apple II went for about $1800 at auction. I wonder what that POS K-pro could fetch today.

Reply by Gary_CA on 3/2/07 10:40am
Msg #177885

The good ole days weren't good for us...

Every bank, title company and real estate office had a notary handy that would notarize anything you needed...


for free!


(Getting her to make a house call would have been a pretty special favor though)

Reply by LCS_CA on 3/2/07 6:21pm
Msg #177954

Re: The good ole days weren't good for us...

But in the 1970's when the borrower was out of town, we called that a "mail away," and we mailed (yes, US Postal Service) the loan documents to the borrower - of course, there were only about 5-10 documents total! No FedEx, no fax, no computer...

Reply by Becca_FL on 3/2/07 11:28am
Msg #177892

Check out this link for dinosaur pictures

http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-10878_11-2788-28.html

Reply by BMoon_FL on 3/2/07 3:49pm
Msg #177935

Back in the eighties my late husband and I owned a towing service and garage. We did all the accounting, statements, calculating storage, etc. by hand as they had since his family started the business in 1934. I finally persuaded him to let me go computer. We got this Tandem with an oki printer. The whole set up cost $5000.00. The first time a tractor and trailer turned over on the interstate and the police called us, I went out in the shop and asked him who all to send to upright it and he told me to send the blankety-blank computer, that for $5000.00 it ought to be able to do everything.