I’ve been an I.T. and computer guy since Bob Ross was filming his first season of painting at the TV station I worked with — around 1983.
I see the Forum is running on a platform my browsers will eventually no longer support. I don’t blame the webmaster — technology moves on. I stick with Windows 7 on my main system because I rely on a hundred programs that won’t run on Windows 10 or newer.
These “personal computers” are a far cry from what I used to work with. We ran 120MB disks, 256K of memory, and multitasked 20-30 users on one system. Today’s Windows machines struggle to run a single user smoothly.
I do have a Windows 10 laptop I reluctantly bought for travel and customer support, but I rarely use it day-to-day. Because of this, I probably won’t be participating here as often — and I suspect I won’t be the only one.
I’ll hang on as long as I can, but I’ve seen the writing on the wall since punch cards disappeared and 300 baud acoustic modems went silent.
I worked for International Paper back in the late 80’s and our branches in Kansas City (2 locations), St Louis (2 locations), Oklahoma city, Wichita, Des Moines and Lincoln running a real time order entry system on a single IBM System 36 with 256 MB of RAM (that’s right…megabyte) and less that 1 GB of hard disk space. True it was an old time “green screen” without fancy pretty graphics, but it did the job quite well.
As an IBM marketing rep the first computer I ever sold was an IBM System 34, the precursor to the System 36. I later sold 360’s and 370’s, S-38’s, 400’s and S-1’s.
The first PC I owned was an IBM 5150 with 16kB of memory and two single-sided 80kB 4" diskette drives. I was able to upgrade it a year later to an incredible 256kB of memory!
In the 80’s I sold large system 30 to 80 MB disk drives for $25,000 to $50,000 ea. They were the size of a small refrigerator and weighed hundreds of pounds. The computers that they were attached to required special computer rooms with raised floors and special air conditioning some required chilled water cooling.
I still have the diskettes and manuals for PC DOS 1.0, Visicalc and Microsoft Adventure.
I now have a fanless micro computer that fits in the palm of my hand that has 8GB of ram and an internal 1TB M-2 SSD that I use in a home entertainment system.
Those were the days. I moved from the S36 to the AS400 and went to work for a competitor to IBM (XL Datacomp_) and sold those disk drives. It was a job I hated because I was supposed to show how our disk drives could improve performance so much that they might not have to upgrade. But when you graph seek times in milliseconds and and save 15 milliseconds, it looks impressive on a graph, but in reality was barely noticeable. I left there and went back to the user side for a few years and then back to a hardware sales job. IT was difficult as a third party to sell IBM equipment because you had to have a ‘value add’ in order to do so. But as things turned out, we made a presentation to our local health department and they really liked our bid, but a software company in Alabama had a “value add” and they were forced to use them. All was not lost as nobody in our county was familiar with the AD/400 and I applied for that position within the county - which is where I stayed for the next 20 years.
I learned computers on a System 36 while I worked at EDS. We’d be working in the climate controlled computer room with the raised floors and a sales guy would bring a potential client in and do crap like opening the diskette drive door while we were using it, which caused teh program to issue an error. Gotta love those guys.n
The forum software runs fine with Ubuntu. Why not use Ubuntu or any other Linux? I’m thinking because of Windows 10 dropping support and because of tariffs lifting the price of PCs, I’ll just keep the old hardware and run Ubuntu until something breaks. I have it set up dual-boot now, i will just end up never booting it up in Windows anymore.
This is a good answer. Linux can extend the life of a computer long past the expiration of the latest windoze that it will run. Got bit myself years ago learning on a 386 that had a half a dozen terminals connected and easily supported half a dozen students coding, compiling, and running. Story was the same then; the windoze of the day barely supported one user doing one thing.
My choice is Linux Mint (Mate) as the interface is easy for a windoze user to figure out. Take a “too slow” computer and load it up! Getting help is easy too with internet at your disposal.
I remember when I bought my first PC, a 286 model. It came with 10 MB hard drive and the salesman assured me I would never fill it up! Ah the days of 300 baud modems, Compuserve, and Commodore!
Ah the days of 300 baud modems, Compuserve, and Commodore!