30 Years Later - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

MTI · #1 08-11-2011, 02:09 PM

The IBM Personal Computer (5150) was introduced on August 12, 1981. It used an Intel 8088 processor and an operating system from Microsoft.

Somewhere in my papers, I have the receipt for a 5150, dual floppy, 64K, monochrome monitor and parrallel printer/joystick card and Epson MX-100 wide printer from ComputerLand. It was somewhere north of $2,000. Shortly thereafter were purchases of Wordstar, SuperCalc and eventually Lotus 1-2-3 and an AST Six Pak.

Honus · #2 08-11-2011, 02:17 PM

In 1979 I went to work for a company that made gear boxes. They did their structural analysis on main frame computers owned by somebody else. The data was entered onto punch cards which were read into a machine and transmitted by modem or something to the mainframes. They had one guy in the office who was seen as the resident egghead/oddball. He had a thing called a floppy disk that he said was going to change everything. He got a fair amount of good natured ribbing from the other engineers who thought of themselves as being quite cutting edge.

raymr · #3 08-11-2011, 02:22 PM

In the 80's we thought how radical would it be for kids to go to school with their own floppy disks in their backpacks. Now floppys are obsolete.

MTI · #4 08-11-2011, 02:25 PM

Discs are obsolete, even optical . . . yet backpacks are still around.

LandYaghtLover · #5 08-11-2011, 02:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MTI

. . . yet backpacks are still around.

And so are kids!

The Clk Man · #6 08-11-2011, 02:36 PM

My first computer was one of those very small Macs with the 9 inch screen. The first job I did on it was a 64 page technical manual. It took me two weeks to get the job done.

LandYaghtLover · #7 08-11-2011, 02:36 PM

Wonder what things would have been like if Xerox has pushed the GUI to market instead of Apple. Apple saw what they did at Xerox, and knowing it could indeed work, came to market on their own.

I sorta miss the sound the old hard drives used to make. Those 5MB drives has that wisp and soft beep that was really cool. Oddly if you watch CSI, you will notice the sound editors STILL insist that new machine make these same noises. Even the reading of a floppy disk though none around! lol

LandYaghtLover · #8 08-11-2011, 02:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Clk Man

My first computer was one of those very small Macs with the 9 inch screen. The first job I did on it was a 64 page technical manual. It took me two weeks to get the job done.

Only two weeks? Geez, back then you must have been perceived as a miracle worker! I have a few of those Macs around. Its funny that they still boot and open apps faster than a new Mac.

raymr · #9 08-11-2011, 02:42 PM

Friend of mine had an original TRS-80. It booted off a cassette tape recorder and he had a string of floppy drives off the side which had to be cooled with 3 or 4 strategically placed room fans. The big application was a customer mailing list consisting of a few hundred names.

aklim · #10 08-11-2011, 02:45 PM

I remember writing programs on those. Assembly language on an 8088 processor. Good times.

The Clk Man · #11 08-11-2011, 02:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LandYaghtLover

Only two weeks? Geez, back then you must have been perceived as a miracle worker! I have a few of those Macs around. Its funny that they still boot and open apps faster than a new Mac.

The worst part was the small screen. I did so much scrolling that my arm almost fell off.

Hatterasguy · #12 08-11-2011, 02:56 PM

Ahh before my time, I did catch the tail end of the real floppy discs at my middle school though, we had two ancient machines that still ran them.

I wonder in 30 years how computers are going to look? I have a pretty powerful machine by today's standards but in 30 years I have a feeling its going to look as obsolete as the 5150.

MS Fowler · #13 08-11-2011, 02:59 PM

I was building houses then. My boss and I wanted to use Critical Path Analysis to help control our projects. When that first IBM came out, there was no scheduling software for it, Harvard Business manager (I think) was still some time away.
We wrote the program on a Commodore 64. The first time we ran it, it took overnight to calculate one house. We then complied it to machine language and it ran in about 20 minutes. I had enough RAM left for a short loader program to take the data set for each house and calculate the Critical path and print the chart. After that, I think we had a 6 bytes of free memory.

R Leo · #14 08-11-2011, 03:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Clk Man

My first computer was one of those very small Macs with the 9 inch screen. The first job I did on it was a 64 page technical manual. It took me two weeks to get the job done.

Gawd, I remember those days. I used to do graphic design on a MacPlus...it was like trying to do design work while looking through a pipe.

Queered me of Macs forever.

pj67coll · #15 08-11-2011, 03:24 PM

My first job fresh out of the army back in 87 was operating mainframes at a newspaper. We had one of those old IBM's sitting on our desk. Didn't even have a hard drive, just the two floppies. Booted it up on one and used the other to upload reporters stories up to the mainframes.

- Peter.