Reminiscing Moments in ICT

[tech_guy]

I must be sad as I came across this the other day and went all nostalgic:

win95.png

[sonofsanta]

I must be sad as I came across this the other day and went all nostalgic:

win95.png

I might change my background for old time's sake
Clouds.jpg


@X-13... there is no way I am ever getting into a teleporter, knowing how they work. I'm all for assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia, but only when I'm actually terminally ill, not just when I can't be bothered to drive the hour to work :/

[sted]

all the screaming awful faxesq noises frm loading a tape game on a sectrum (not mine had an acorn electron).
Games like turrican 2 on the amiga
dragging a pc (p120) to the pub on a wednesday evening to play lan games with friends mainly duke nukem (i think i spent more time making levels than playing it lol) or command and conquer
colege introduced te new win98 and did a poor job of locking it down so using ie renamed sage acounts on al pcs to sage and onion

remembe playing a lot of virtual pool as well

[X-13]

@X-13... there is no way I am ever getting into a teleporter, knowing how they work. I'm all for assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia, but only when I'm actually terminally ill, not just when I can't be bothered to drive the hour to work :/

The whole "destroy, transmit, re-create" creeping you out?

Don't worry. We'll test it on the French first. Make sure you keep your memories and what-not.

[stevenewman]

Whilst I've been working in IT since the 70s (on ICL 1903T running GEO III),I got my first PC in the mid 80s, an Amstrad 1640 with a huuuuge 20 meg hard drive and a GEM interface. (Although I had previously had a CPC 6128 running CP/M).

Many happy evenings spent with Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest and Space Quest.

[Dos_Box]

Rex lies in wait! (really showing my age here).
Spending a fortune on a Voodoo 2 card then playing Quake II and never looking back.
Getting my first CD burner and watching the stack of failed disks grow higher and higher. I don't know what failed more, the burner or Win 98. All hail CD writer buffer technologies!
Playing Star Raiders on a friends Atari 400.

[DaveP]

When I was doing my 'O' Levels our Biology teacher built his own computer. This pre BBC Master days and so, as I recall, it was our first experience of seeing a computer up close. He wrote a program to run on it that gave the user the task of navigating a maze [viewed from the users' perspective at 'ground level]

The graphics resolution was very low and mono. Despite this we were suitably impressed by his computing prowess.

[sonofsanta]

The whole "destroy, transmit, re-create" creeping you out?

Don't worry. We'll test it on the French first. Make sure you keep your memories and what-not.

Have you read Kraken by China Mieville? It has a rather creepy demonstration of the whole "being atomised every time and hoping your new clone continues in a manner you would be happy with" angle.


Duke Nukem 3D's Build editor was brilliant... that and tinkering with rules.ini in Red Alert probably occupied a couple of years of my life. It's almost sad that I am so spoilt for choice with great games these days and can't devote myself utterly to a game like that anymore.


And Elite - did he ever actually release the algorithm that seeded the Universe for that? One of my favourite examples of efficient programming that, absolute genius.

Enough of this reminiscing! I have switch statistics to be collating. Wonder why I'm so easily distracted from such an exciting job...

[shenley]

Audio coupler modems and rotary dial phones. One knock and it's bye-bye data integrity.

8inch floppy disks and drives like twin tubs. Reel to Reel tape drives with the "suction tubes". "Big red power switches" on IBMs.

.

Oh dear, oh dear...I still have an MDA card in a cabinet somewhere..

I have a load stuff that I used in the big iron days. I still have a box of 8 inch floppy disks, and they are the expensive double sided, double density disks too (500kB). They date from when I worked on IBM System 34s, back in the 1980s. I have an 1200 foot reel of tape too, although a lot of it has gone. It's great for tying plants in the garden. I also have a Lace card, an IBM flowchart template and my most prized possession, an IBM System/360 Green Card. There is a PDP/8 programmers manual on my book self too.

[Oaktech]

being shown how to reset the platter and heads on a 100mb bull enterprise hard drive (about the size of an old school vertical spin dryer) following a head crash, i was 13 and on work experience!

Playing with some wierd cartridge storage things (about 8" square and about 2" thick) that went into a drive that looked like a beige toaster... still have no idea what they were.

[Earthling]

Going on shift in the (mainframe) computer room at Cardiff Uni one Monday at 4pm (evening shift 4 -10.30), taking a handover from Day Shift Leader,.... 'There's an aircon engineer out the back (in the plant room), he says he might have to switch the aircon off for five minutes or so. Work-wise <system programmer> is doing some testing on the new Multijob version.'

Me: 'Ok, cool, see ya later, have a good one'.

Stand around for five minutes, reading the shift diary and half-listening to the systems guy nattering on about stuff that's completely obsolete now, all of a sudden there's a loud bang and CO2 starts pouring out of the fire-suppression system. The systems guy says 'Is it supposed to do that?', 'No, it's not, you'd better get out, quick'. Hit the Emergency Off button, vacate the computer-room, and watch through the windows in the door as the room slowly fills with CO2.

I remember, when it was all fixed and the aircon had pumped the room out, everything covered with sticky brown droplets, the ICL engineers going into overdrive to inspect everything, and the air, funnily enough, tasting of lemonade.

I miss mainframe operations. Sometimes.

[synaesthesia]

I got my first PC in the mid 80s, an Amstrad 1640 with a huuuuge 20 meg hard drive and a GEM interface. (Although I had previously had a CPC 6128 running CP/M).

1640.... why does that ring a bell - did it have a hard drive mounted on an expansion card? I think I bought one of those for a mate from a computer fair!

[tech_guy]

And how about this then from 1997:

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[tech_guy]

And did anyone else (who's old enough) get sucked in to Lords of Midnight on the Sinclair Spectrum back in 1984:

lords.gif

[jinnantonnixx]

Reel to Reel tape drives with the "suction tubes". Line at a time impact printers with acoustic shielding.

That takes me back. I worked on the mainframe versions of IBM AS/400s (B & E series) and occasionally loaded up the reels. I think the E series loader had vacuum pots, but you had to manually spool the tape on the B series.

Oh and co-ax concentrators feeding into rack mounted boards.

Them was the days.

Spectrum>QL>PC (IBM AT/XT/PS/2 Model 50 anyone?)>DEC Vax VMS>IBM AS 400> OS/2/Warp/ > Unix Balance Transputers (what became of them?)> Sun Sparcs>RS/6000>and back to flamin' PCs.