FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for June 29, 2009

Windows is still a monopoly with 88.42% market share as of February 2009. Jason should sue, now that the democrats are back in office.

Jason-dows ‘98 = LO LLLLLL!!!!

Windows 98 and Windows ME have been obsolete since 2006. My computer still uses Windows ME. Any new software I try to download and run on it will display an error message telling me that I’m running this software on an “unsupportive system”.

What was your first OS. computer, modem, etc?

I started with RS-DOS on a TRS-80 Color Computer with 16 K of RAM and a .48 MHz clock speed. I bought a 300 baud modem and had a 7 pin dot matrix printer called the Gorilla Banana. My first hard drive was 20 Meg. I thought that I was downtown with that !

I don’t remember much about it except it had a yellow screen, a dot matrix printer, floppy drive, and you could play Jeopardy on it.

Then I upgraded to my Apple II. Lol. I found the green monitor way cooler and there were a lot more games.

The earliest I can remember using was Windows 3.1 at school. I don’t remember the make of the first computer we had, but it ran with Windows 95. I’ve used or had all the Window OS since then.

Mine was an Apple II with a pair of the new-fangled external floppy drives that had just taken over from tape recorders. The Basic programming language was built in because there were almost no available applications. My son learned to program on that. We graduated to a Macintosh with 512K RAM, much bigger than the original 128K. The RAM in my present computer is 4000 times larger, and still not a huge amount. Jason often seems to be using a Mac. Or am I thinking of Binkley?

HP 386 SX-16 with DOS 5.0 and 20 meg hard drive. It was actually a good computer and I enjoyed all the operating systems that were out then before Windows took over the market.

Mine was a Texas Instruments TI99-4A with the tape drive and a 13” TV for a monitor.

My first real (IBM compatible) was a Fujitech Jumbo desktop. It was indeed Jumbo, it took up the whole desk top and weighed about 100 pounds. 4 MHz 8086 processor, 640k RAM, 1.2MB 5.25” floppy drive, amber monochrome monitor, 10MB “winchester” hard drive (5.25” double height formfactor), running MS DOS 2.something for an OS. When turned on it sounded like a jet engine starting up.

Vic 20. 5k Ram (actually, 3583 bytes free for use, or something like that). 300 baud modem (although I once used a 50 baud tty). I bought a converter that let me use “any” audio tape player as my drive.

The first computer I ever used was when I was a sophmore in high school. It was an Olevetti 101 that had been donated to the school. They used a TV cart to wheel it around because you couldn’t lift the thing. It was one big unit, You programmed the thing by using punch cards and then entered the paramaters by the built-in keyboard. The only programs available were advanced math programs (yeah, I was a math geek in high school). Everyone thought this computer was the greatest thing ever, but as I recall, before I got out of college you could buy a hand held calculator for about $100 that could outperform the 101. Today, of course, a $3 calculator will do the same.

About the same time my future brother-in-law (the slime bag) brought over his computer, a 10” gold momochrome monitor, a black box with built in keyboard, and a cassette player. He loaded (it took about an hour) a game called Lunar Lander. You keyed in when you wanted the thrusters to light, how long, and how many pounds of fuel to use each time. I never could get better then having a crater named after me.

The first computer my family had didn’t even really have an internal hardrive (that I know of) we had to save every to a disk and boot it from a DOS disk.

Anyone remember the 8” floppy disks? Those really defined “floppy” disks.

My first computer was a Cromemco Z-2 S-100 bus z-80 computer with 16 KB (yes Kilobytes!) of static ram that I built from a kit. The input, output and mass storage device was an ASR-33 Teletype! Programs were stored on paper tape! The 8K basic interpreter for the machine took a half hour to load! I kept the machine for several years, eventually upgrading it to 64 K of ram (the most the z-80 processor would address) and adding 5 1/4 and 8 inch floppy drives (two each) and building a Heathkit H9 monitor for it. As far as the operating system goes I started out with just a boot loader in EEPROM to get the 8K basic into the machine, but I eventually had CP/M running on it.

Rs-Dos on a TRS 80 here as well Kraig, it was the machine at work, and was bought to make the inventorying of Plumbing , heating and A.C. company easier . I got to be the Computer Geek because I had an Atari that I would play dureing Lunch and so on. I recall getting a game for it, Xenos I think it was called, Text based game, the alliens were attacking, and keeping the shovel VS the Shot gun was the way to go, because no where in the game were there any more shells for the shot gun, but you could kill the aliens by smacking them on the head with the shovel.

i remember golf on the APL programmed computer at UniWat when I was a visitng high-schooler on computer science day. pages and pages of written descriptions of what was happening while you played. first home computer was an Amiga 500 which was bought in 1985 just to play games. an ipod has more memory than it did, but i kept (and used) it until last august.

@ musicnut. I, too, remember playing “lunar lander” on a Wang computer at school. we snuck in at night in order to play on the computer because it was only in our school for a couple of weeks at s time. the Board of Ed rotated it between all the schools in the area. mid-seventies era

the earliest i can remember was having a windows 95 or maybe and earlier edition.it was bought for my sister and i was just 7-8 years old and used it to play solitaire all the time

jason dows 98…lol =]

The first computer I owned myself was a “portable” C/PM unit, can’t remember the manuf. anymore. Had two 5-1/4 floppies, a 4” green monochrome monitor between the floppies, about 20 BNC jacks that could be used to hook to equipment, no hard drive, weighed about 25 pounds and could run on a car cigarette lighter!

And yes, musicnut1986, I remember 8” floppies. I used those and reel-reel for data storage on systems I worked with.

Oh, I also remember this smelly beatnick type coming into the store my brother worked at during high school. Guy was trying to get investors for a new operating system he had developed. The store owner threw him out and my kid brother couldn’t convince any family to invest in the stuff this Bill Gates character was selling. Man, my life woulda’ been different if I’d invested $1000 or so in that kid.

I didn’t realize just how old these reruns were, until today. Anyone else remember the Timex personal computer? Plugged into your TV for a monitor. I didn’t know enough to understand just how worthless it was, so I was fascinated by it. Boy, THAT was a few years ago.

I remember when computers didn’t have hard drives. You had to run everything from floppies, or in some cases, audio cassette tapes. My Grandpa had a TRS-80, a Commodore 64 and a Vic-20

The first computer i used was a Tandy from the 80’s. though i used it just for the games and word processor. As I learned how to use BASIC, I used it for that as well.

I had a Commodore 64. I soon learned to despise the term Syntax Error. my first modem was a 2800kbps. Took 30 minutes to d/l a standard size picture you find on any fansite. 14.4 was warp speed in comparison.

@mrprongs: I think you mean 2800 bps, not kbps.Usually called 2800 baud. I remember when I got my 14.4 kbps modem, I bragged about the “giant sucking sound” it made pulling in data.

@D-i-c-e-R

Check the date. The Microsoft antitrust case was during the Clinton administration.

I worked with the mainframe at a university using a keypunch machine.