# Technology knows no bounds



## Janderso (Dec 13, 2021)

Do you ever just stop and think how the world has changed in just the past 20 years?
I'm bored. I'm at work with nothing to do. 13 days left.

I'm going through my drawers and files.
Look what I found!! These were state of the art for about a week and a half.
Remember the 56K modem? dial up!!
Heck, we get over 400MBPS and a short few years ago we were waiting for pages to download forever it seemed.
Where are we going to be in another 20 years?


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## benmychree (Dec 13, 2021)

Dial up? Yes, I remember well ---- took forever to download anything.


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## matthewsx (Dec 13, 2021)




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## Janderso (Dec 13, 2021)

matthewsx said:


> View attachment 388400


Why?
You could ask me the same question


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## matthewsx (Dec 13, 2021)

Janderso said:


> Why?
> You could ask me the same question


Several years ago I was at a Christmas party at one of the founders of US Robotics home, snapped the picture there.

I don't go back quite that far but I did have a 300 baud modem that I upgraded to 1200 baud....

John


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## vtcnc (Dec 13, 2021)

My 24 year old, about 10 years ago, was going through some old boxes. He grabbed a handful of 1.44MB floppy disks:

"What are these?"


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## gunsmither (Dec 13, 2021)

vtcnc said:


> My 24 year old, about 10 years ago, was going through some old boxes. He grabbed a handful of 1.44MB floppy disks:
> 
> "What are these?"


I still use them!


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## vtcnc (Dec 13, 2021)

And not too long before 1.44MB floppies, there was this:









						New item by Bryan Lund
					






					photos.app.goo.gl


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## gunsmither (Dec 13, 2021)

vtcnc said:


> And not too long before 1.44MB floppies, there was this:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Wow, that looks like a 1950's Flash Gordon type Space Craft! First puter I ever had used the 5" floppies, and the 1.44's. I use the 1.44's in my 2007 Haas, and for writing programs for it on my Windows 7 puter. Could upgrade to the thumb drive, but for as often as I do a new program, the 1.44's work fine. Getting hard to find I'm told, so I stocked up on a few.


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## Eyerelief (Dec 13, 2021)

Yup.  My kids found an old rock 8 track (Rush, a farewell to kings) I had in a box.  They couldn't understand how something that big could only hold a few songs.  I told them "yea, but it least the sound was horrible and you had to jam paper in the top to get the head to line up." My son said "Who's head?"


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## f350ca (Dec 13, 2021)

Some time in the mid to late 80's we got our first hard drives. Two wapping 100 mb units housed in a rack mount that took two people to lift into position. Remember thinking, what will we do with all this storage. Up till then it was all 3/4 tape and 3m data cassettes.
Back then it was XJ mobiles, key the mic, the operator would come on, you gave her your XJ number and the phone number you wanted. They operated on vhf frequencies, some provinces you could hear one side of other peoples conversations, others both sides.
About the same time as the hard drives, we got two way satellite systems to transmit data from the field. About a 5 foot dish with a transponder the size of a cooler. You could use it as a phone as well, with a 2 second lag as your voice was digitized bounced off a satellite to our ground station in Denver, that was a huge dish, 30 or 40 foot as I remember, then back to a land line.
Our first interface to the computer used thermal paper to display what you typed and the response back from the mobile main frame. Computers made by Digital, PDP 1134's. Then we got a suitcase computer with an orange monochrome display to act as an interface.
But that was a huge set forward from totally analog measurements with data displayed on rolls of Kodak film 8 inches wide in 100 foot rolls. The recorder was a massive camera that used galvanometers with mirrors attached to sweep a light beam across the film. They were a marvel of mechanical ingenuity.
Yah, we've come a long way baby.

Greg


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## gunsmither (Dec 13, 2021)

Eyerelief said:


> Yup.  My kids found an old rock 8 track (Rush, a farewell to kings) I had in a box.  They couldn't understand how something that big could only hold a few songs.  I told them "yea, but it least the sound was horrible and you had to jam paper in the top to get the head to line up." My son said "Who's head?"


That's funny! I still have some 8 track tapes hanging around somewhere in my junk piles. They were "hot stuff" in the 60's, 70's. Now
you can get all kinds of oldies on your phone and Bluetooth them in your car. Amazing time we live in!


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## vtcnc (Dec 13, 2021)

Eyerelief said:


> Yup. My kids found an old rock 8 track (Rush, a farewell to kings) I had in a box. They couldn't understand how something that big could only hold a few songs. I told them "yea, but it least the sound was horrible and you had to jam paper in the top to get the head to line up." My son said "Who's head?"



Omg. I totally forgot about having to jam paper in there to wedge into place. Usually pieces of a cereal box did the trick.

My Dad would let me use his 8-track in his shop in the late seventies/early eighties. I was six or seven. First time I heard Styx, Kiss, Journey and Led Zeppelin.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## RJSakowski (Dec 13, 2021)

gunsmither said:


> Wow, that looks like a 1950's Flash Gordon type Space Craft! First puter I ever had used the 5" floppies, and the 1.44's. I use the 1.44's in my 2007 Haas, and for writing programs for it on my Windows 7 puter. Could upgrade to the thumb drive, but for as often as I do a new program, the 1.44's work fine. Getting hard to find I'm told, so I stocked up on a few.


If you run out, I've got more than 150 of them.


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## NCjeeper (Dec 13, 2021)

Only 8 track I still have.


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## tonydi (Dec 13, 2021)

Here's a small comparison on some computer tech....
1990 Seagate ST251-1 hard drive vs a run of the mill little 16GB micro SD card like in your phone.  There are much higher capacity and speedier versions of these card.

Micro SD card 372x more storage, 1440x faster, 1/100 of the cost in a package that's 1/9333 of the size.


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## Larry$ (Dec 13, 2021)

vtcnc said:


> My 24 year old, about 10 years ago, was going through some old boxes. He grabbed a handful of 1.44MB floppy disks:
> 
> "What are these?"


I kept my first office computer. An Epson  running Lotus 123, two 5" floppy drives with a 9" green screen monitor.


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## tq60 (Dec 13, 2021)

Janderso said:


> Do you ever just stop and think how the world has changed in just the past 20 years?
> I'm bored. I'm at work with nothing to do. 13 days left.
> 
> I'm going through my drawers and files.
> ...


Banana phone...

I serviced those back in the day.

Case screws were left handed so the spacers inside would not attach to the screw.

Kept folks out too.



Sent from my SM-G781V using Tapatalk


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## jbolt (Dec 14, 2021)

Don't knock the 56k! 

15 years ago I setup a remote weather station and usb camera at a friend's mountain home so they could monitor the weather conditions and driveway. Broadband only became available a few years ago. The system has dailed into a ftp site every hour to upload a photo and weather data for the last 15 years without fail. 

Even more suprising is the system was built on a 5 year old used HP PC running win xp that has run 24/7 for almost 20 years.

I recently asked if they wanted to update the system to take advantage of broadband but they declined stating why mess with what's working.

Sent from my SM-G981U using Tapatalk


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## davidpbest (Dec 14, 2021)

My first computer programming job (1966), the source code was fed into the computer (a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8) via paper tape on a Teletype ASR-33.  It's truly astounding how things have advanced throughout my 50+ years in high tech.  And stil, I look at the Norton gearbox on my PM-1340 lathe, or the J-head on my nearly new mill, and marvel at how some things have remained the same.


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## Dabbler (Dec 14, 2021)

My first computer was a very nice IBM 1130 minicomputer, that I was allowed to use for 1/2 hour each week.  It executed instructions at 120K per second and only had 16 Kwords (32 Kbytes memory)  It stored characters in 6 bit format.

My big upgrade at University was to go back 8 years to an IBM1620 computer - oh we had a state of the art 370 series M, but the only one I could use with impunity was a 55 KHz resistor-diode logic 1620 with 1.2 Mb hard drives with 7 - 16" platters - by punch card only.  Fortran II and assembler.  No floating point, no integer multiply.

Computing is nearly free.  Memory is nearly free.  Programming often crap, because very few know how to write efficient or maintainable code...
But somehow we still manage to build OSes with 200M lines of code.... go figure.

@davidpbest - I scrapped my PDP8i just 10 years ago.  I even had an ASR33 to go with....

The truly great hybrid lathes out of Korea are astounding:  The motor is built around the spindle, has absolute positioning and no gears whatsoever.  The lead screw is completely electronic, and all feeds are by encoders.  They can take CNC commands or do manual machining.  I cannot afford to ask how much!


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## davidpbest (Dec 14, 2021)

Dabbler said:


> My first computer was a very nice IBM 1130 minicomputer, that I was allowed to use for 1/2 hour each week.  It executed instructions at 120K per second and only had 16 Kwords (32 Kbytes memory)  It stored characters in 6 bit format.


Yea, I worked on the 1130 Disk Operating System (Core Load Builder and RPG compiler specifically) for IBM in 1967 when they ungraded the system with multiple hard drives and added some peripherals from the /360 line.  Very familiar.  The 1130 was a terrific machine.


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## Dabbler (Dec 14, 2021)

@davidpbest  My hats off.


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## addertooth (Dec 14, 2021)

Yep, I remember the old Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) PDP series computers. I remember when the university was getting ready to pitch their old PDP 8, and I strongly considered snagging it.  I just couldn't convince my wife to give up the entire living room to house it.

My main focus was in the opposite direction, Altair 4004 and 8008, Kim1 (programmed by setting dip switches for the data and address buss, and pressing the WRITE button), etc. And yes, you had to write your own math libraries.  The old BCD math libraries could be expanded to a crazy number of digits, but was slow.  There were the invariable 6800, 8080, 6502 and Z80 design days.  My first 1 Million Instructions Per Second computers was a Motorola 32032 processor single-board computer.  It was a marvel.  Of course, that million per second were "NOP" commands. The first computer I owned, which was assembled from the factory had two 4-bit processors (Tandy PC-1, and I still have it).  The PC-1 had the distinction of having 24 DIGIT Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) math built in.  They were beloved by NASA.  A Decade later, they put out a call, to try to gobble up all that remained in people's hands. They were perfect for off-the-cuff space launch calculations. HP later came up with a "desktop computer" which had a silicon on sapphire math co-processor with matrix-math natively processed on it.  It could invert a 256 by 256 array in less than 5 minutes, this was unheard of.

Back then, most of the early adopters of computers were not people with "programming degrees", they were Electrical Engineers (or high-end electronic Techs).  The boss would say "we got this new thing, and it has transistors and chips, so I guess it is your problem".  Those engineers and techs defined all of the common roots of programming we enjoy today.  They were the masters of interfacing all kinds of things, to the newly harnessed processing power.  There were a lot of custom buss computers, until finally much of the industry standardized to either the S100 buss, or the HPIB (later GPIB) buss. 

My first hard drive was a whopping 5 Megs (not a typo).  It ran in a Heath-Zenith computer. It was before the day of MFM and RLL controllers, it was custom and mated with the disk.  My first floppy was a single sided single density full-height drive, about 160K of storage.  It was mated to a 6502 processor running Rockwell Forth as a kernal OS and programming language (back then, they were not two separate things).  There was no Disc operating system, it was block-read and block-write instructions. 

Those were heady days, and most the engineers were doing things undreamed of just a year before.   It was a different industry too, where great ideas were openly shared, instead of snatching up and patenting/copywriting ideas.  Everyone wanted to see the industry grow.  The industry was much like the Machinist groups still are today, with open sharing of ideas/tricks/gizmos which improved everyone's life.


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## Janderso (Dec 14, 2021)

I was the first to get a PC at work here at the dealership.
It had a 1 gig hard drive. We were all very impressed with that. I think it had 256K ram.
It was around $2,000.
Times are changing fast.

I have fond memories of our family Apple II GS. My wife said we just had to have it???
All I ever did was help the kids play with the art stuff.


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## gunsmither (Dec 14, 2021)

davidpbest said:


> My first computer programming job (1966), the source code was fed into the computer (a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8) via paper tape on a Teletype ASR-33.  It's truly astounding how things have advanced throughout my 50+ years in high tech.  And stil, I look at the Norton gearbox on my PM-1340 lathe, or the J-head on my nearly new mill, and marvel at how some things have remained the same.
> 
> View attachment 388449


First CNC mill I ever saw was a Bridgeport using a tape drive. Hot set up around 1972 if I recall. Fascinating to watch it do it's thing!


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## matthewsx (Dec 14, 2021)

You guys are way older than I am, I only go back to the Commodore 64 with a cassette tape drive.  No wonder you have better toys  

John


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## Dabbler (Dec 14, 2021)

I started young.  I was coding in FORTRAN IV when I was 14  (in the 60s) oh, yeah, I guess I  *am*  old!


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## Dabbler (Dec 14, 2021)

Actually when I was in High school I started programming and building 8008 computers, long before the 6502 was thought of.  I even did some code-for- hire  on the 4004 and 8008 platforms.  Boy, was the Zilog Z80 a big improvement!


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## davidpbest (Dec 14, 2021)

It's interesting reading this thread.  @Dabbler and I seem to have some early beginnings overlap.  I took all the computer science classes taught in a single semester at University of Kansas in 1966 - consisting of "IBM 029 Keypunch Operations", "IBM 083 Card Sorter Operations", and "Fortran IV Programming on IBM 1130".  Back then, if you wanted a job in the computer industry, you were not expected to have much actual education about computing, but instead were given a bunch of tests supposedly designed to assess your ability to reason, do basic logic, and look for "got ya's".  I was very lucky to get in on the ground floor of the computer industry in the 1960's, crawled up the industry ladder at General Automation, IBM, Digital Equipment (DEC), Intel, and then into venture capital.  Zero regrets, loads of war stories, but I am thankful to have "shop work" as a consistent avocation throughout.  And yea, I too am old as dirt.


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## Bi11Hudson (Dec 14, 2021)

Not as "old as dirt" but I do go back a ways with computers. In the '70s, the foundry had an IBM 1200 as the machine controller. There was a 360 up in billing, but I never worked up that way. The spectrometer had a PDP-8 with a 33 teletype reading the program from paper tape. Later I worked for Wang Computers, in the Western Pacific area. The machines had 300 meg CDC drives. When we got our hands on a Winchester 8" hard drive, I fell in love with it. Not as fast as the CDC drives nor so easy to change the "pack", but so much technology in so small a package was the shape of things to come. Then IBM hit the market with a "personal" sized machine just a little bigger than an Apple2. Along with Bill Gates and going into hiding ever since.

I didn't go to high school, all I had was experience with "precision electronics" from the foundry. A 5-1/4 hard sectored floppy held the bootstrap loader for the CPU on the Wangs. When I went to work for USSteel, we had a PDP-11/43 for interfacing. The system dated from around '80. It had an 8" single sided floppy for bootstraping. I never was a "customer engineer" as such. Just an old school electrician with a interest in electronics. It led to a number of interesting pursuits over the years. 

Best I recall, the 33 teletype had a 5 bit "Baudot" code that was used on the 19 and the 43 machines. It is where "baud" and ASCII come from. I'm not too sure, but the model 45 teletype may have gotton its' designation from the 45 baud ASCII. I do remember that 110 baud was considered to be fast at the time. So many memories lost. . . 

.


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## jbobb1 (Dec 14, 2021)

matthewsx said:


> You guys are way older than I am, I only go back to the Commodore 64 with a cassette tape drive.  No wonder you have better toys
> 
> John


That would be commode door 64.


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## eugene13 (Dec 14, 2021)

The first computer I ever saw belonged to the University of Arizona.  It was in 1959 or 60 and I was in seventh grade.  It was in two, wheeled cabinets just small enough to fit through a standard door, and set up in front of the stage in the auditorium.  Outside in the courtyard was a diesel generator set with a thick cable leading inside.  When you entered you could smell ozone, and when you sat down in the front row you could feel the heat emitted from the hundreds of vacuum tubes packed inside and hear the fans keeping them cool.  The only features on the black cabinets were few lights.  The professor giving the presentation said that it could do math, and demonstrated it making a calculation.  The answer was presented  in a series of lights on the panel of one of the machines and was interpreted by the Prof..  He talked about the future of computing, and lamented that the only thing holding them back was the size and power requirements.  The next year I got a transistor radio for Christmas and everything changed. 
      A couple of years later I received an analog computer for Christmas, It consisted of an oscillator, four rheostats and two program boards. and came in kit form.  The way it worked was thus; You would set the rheostat on the left pointing to a number, you would set the rheostat in the center to a number, then you would turn the rheostat on the right until you heard no tone in the earpiece (tune to a null) and it would be pointing to the answer. ( 2 + 2 = 4) It wasn't very accurate and I soon lost interest, I think one of my younger cousins ended up with it.


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## ahazi (Dec 14, 2021)

addertooth said:


> My first 1 Million Instructions Per Second computers was a Motorola 32032 processor single-board computer.  It was a marvel.



One little correction which will date me too... It was not Motorola CPU, it was National Semiconductor NS32032, it was the first 32-bit general-purpose microprocessor on the market. Motorola had their 68020 and 68030.

Ariel


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## Dabbler (Dec 15, 2021)

Hey I built a Motorola 68000 evaluation kit - now that was a wonderful processor:  The instruction set was like a superchatged PDP11 with some VAX style macroinstructions.  A delight to program in assembler!

I never got a chance to try the Nat Semi processor.  shame.


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## addertooth (Dec 15, 2021)

ahazi said:


> One little correction which will date me too... It was not Motorola CPU, it was National Semiconductor NS32032, it was the first 32-bit general-purpose microprocessor on the market. Motorola had their 68020 and 68030.
> 
> Ariel


You are spot on!   Yes, I got my brands swapped.   So many years, So many Chips, So many different assemblers.  
I remember being glad I didn't have to write my own assembler, as National Semiconductor had a rather solid one.
There were a lot of good processors over the years, but some that never seemed to get a toehold in the market.  
There were some innovative designs, but introduced features the market was not ready for, and failed to see sales numbers.

Over the years, I learned a sad truth about the industry.  There were fewer jobs in computer design, than there were in Networking.
The pay in Networking was frequently better as well.  I morphed into the networking side of things for higher pay, and easier work. 
It always seemed a bit of a paradox.  The job doing networking was less technical, and paid as well (or better).  This is especially true
of Networking Security.  I always felt the years spent designing computers gave me insight, (which look like intuition to others), with 
solving networking and application issues.  

We live in a day where those who know what an X and Y register, as well as an accumulator is growing less common.  If you say 
"post indexed indirect addressing", you draw strange looks.  Code has become bloated and sloppy, with re-enterability and ease 
of understanding is a higher importance than economy of memory and raw speed.  This was brought on by companies being destroyed
by losing a lead programmer, and the project languishing, as nobody else understood the code.  Amazing things used to be done with a single 
1k of memory, now C Compilers eat 10k (or more) just to do "hello world", once you include the STD.IO library. The whole industry has
become more "abstract" and less literal and direct.  Modern programmers (by in large) are not as "math nimble" as some of the old
goats who used to code.  If you were to mention using a single register to hold multiple Flag Bits, for different states of process in your 
code, you will draw strange looks.  Today, you be viewed a speaking strange voodoo to the current generation of coders. Perhaps the 
last bastion of old-school coders would be those who write drivers for hardware.  They still have to live in the land of flag bits, registers, 
and multiple hardware states.  

I am in my last decade of working in the industry.   And find myself building up a small shop to tinker with machining after I retire. 
You have to keep the mind active, or it fades away.  I have watched too many brilliant people retire, and their minds slowly erode, not
from anything biological, but rather, disuse.   With the human body, anything not used will atrophy.


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## fixit (Dec 15, 2021)

Is anyone interested in a TRS80 ??


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## addertooth (Dec 15, 2021)

fixit said:


> Is anyone interested in a TRS80 ??


I would, but my collection of ancient and unloved things is drawing the ire of my wife.


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## paradox_pete (Dec 15, 2021)

jbolt said:


> Don't knock the 56k!
> 
> 15 years ago I setup a remote weather station and usb camera at a friend's mountain home so they could monitor the weather conditions and driveway. Broadband only became available a few years ago. The system has dailed into a ftp site every hour to upload a photo and weather data for the last 15 years without fail.
> 
> ...


Remote weather stations are interesting.  A really cool "old school" technology still in use is the meteor burst communications system used by the USDA's Snotel system.  I think the system was initiated in the late 60's or early 70's....


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## EricB (Dec 15, 2021)

Y'all should take a look at a Raspberry Pi. They're a full computer system with general purpose IO running linux on a board the size of a credit card. The current version has built in wifi, ethernet, usb, and HDMI video. More computing power than we used to send men to the moon. All for about $20.


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