The computer brands graveyard

[Dos_Box]

You can find out what happened to the Elonex PC business in this article here: Elonex: the end of an era ? The Channel

[truebluesteve]

Morning

 

I have a copy of 'Your Computer' magazine from 1983 in my draw (initially found in the loft at my mums!) so I thought I'd have a quick look through for some blasts from the past and this is just some of what I found

 

 

You're going to be old...er I mean a computer veteran to remember them!

[daveyboy]

OES, Groupwise & ZenWorks are STILL great products !!!!!!

 

[Danp]

Evesham - our first PC at home was Evesham

[ATTACH]36079[/ATTACH]

 

I knew quite a few people who lost their jobs when Evesham closed and all the talk about what the owner had done with the money etc, it was a right mess. The owner son is a racing driver in the BTCC and their garage is 10 mins walk from my house, as well has Honda's BTCC team.

[synaesthesia]

Mmmmm Atari 800. I cut my teeth on an 800XL. Was also my first successful component level repair (For the parents of the forum, don't let your kids go near your toolkits when there are electronics around!)

[Fazza]

Who remembers and their computer?!

[AJWhite1970]

OES, Groupwise & ZenWorks are STILL great products !!!!!!

 

 

Absolutely. My first major job was migrating 30 servers from Netware 4.11 to 5.0 (and rapidly after that to the more stable 5.1) along with Zenworks 2 and Groupwise 5.0 on 1500 Windows XP workstations.

 

I was and I suppose still am a Master Certified Novell Engineer (MCNE) and a Certified Novell Instructor (CNI) although it's been about 10 years since I was that proficient and about 7 years since I last used Netware in anger....

[daveyboy]

Cool... I know who to ask about IPX/SPX then........

 

[Dos_Box]

Morning

 

I have a copy of 'Your Computer' magazine from 1983 in my draw (initially found in the loft at my mums!) so I thought I'd have a quick look through for some blasts from the past and this is just some of what I found

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]36150[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]36151[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]36152[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]36153[/ATTACH]

 

You're going to be old...er I mean a computer veteran to remember them!

 

Wow! Some memories there, and I may have even brought that issue!

As defunct brands go, I used to visit the Silica Shop when I visited my nan in Sidcup. It used to specialise in Atari 8 bit machines (the 8 bit range was only discontinued in 1992. 13 Years after being introduced!) and was always packed out when I visited. IIRC the orginal Silica Shop went bust in the 90's.

The name is now used by an outfit in Hastings by the look of it.

As for the Mattel Aquarius...the horror, the horror!

[DavePa]

There is a shop local to me that started out making sideways RAM boards for the BBC Micro - in effect a solid state disc and from which they took the name Solidisk. They moved into PCs and had a measure of success with a few branches dotted around the country - I believe at least Southend, Chelmsford, Manchester and Birmingham and possibly a couple more as well. As the PC market consolidated they closed all of the the shops apart from the Southend one switched to providing custom built computers for education and as far as I know they still do that - we were buying computers from them up to about 4 years ago. The website now is just a front page and none of the links work but this was once a company you would have found in computer magazines in the late 80's and through the 90's

[AJWhite1970]

Cool... I know who to ask about IPX/SPX then........

 

 

inetcfg and then bindings if my memory serves me well

[SpuffMonkey]

Absolutely. My first major job was migrating 30 servers from Netware 4.11 to 5.0 (and rapidly after that to the more stable 5.1) along with Zenworks 2 and Groupwise 5.0 on 1500 Windows XP workstations.

 

I was and I suppose still am a Master Certified Novell Engineer (MCNE) and a Certified Novell Instructor (CNI) although it's been about 10 years since I was that proficient and about 7 years since I last used Netware in anger....

 

And it had features that I'd still like to see in MS products today - like a list of logged in users etc

[LeMarchand]

Who remembers [ATTACH=CONFIG]36154[/ATTACH] and their [ATTACH=CONFIG]36155[/ATTACH] computer?!

 

Any relation to ORAC?

 

[Dos_Box]

Any relation to ORAC?

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]36165[/ATTACH]

 

*pfft* iMac prototype

[brookesandrew]

In the late 80's as an apprentice at GEC Telecommunications on placement in Contract Implementation dept. we used a CAD system (Pafec DOGS) running on Apollo DN3500 systems.

These were networked on Apollo Token Ring, a couple of workstations had disk, the others booted diskless off those and ran a OS called Aegis. I remember getting into trouble once for shutting down a node one of the other apprentices was working on, if you created a remote process on a remote node then you could issue kill all processes command and that remote node would shut down, naughty and as I learnt shouldn't be done whilst a supervisor is talking to the operator.

I believe Apollo were eventually bought out by HP.

[jdoyle]

Novell is no more, part of the Micro Focus family these days. Netware, Groupwise, Zenworks all great products in their time

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]36147[/ATTACH]

 

loved Novell 3.11.

 

Using QEMM to load/squeeze the network drivers into memory. Token Ring network cards.

 

Users had Multimate for word processing and Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets. cc:Mail for email. All long gone.

[AJWhite1970]

loved Novell 3.11.

 

Using QEMM to load/squeeze the network drivers into memory. Token Ring network cards.

 

Users had Multimate for word processing and Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets. cc:Mail for email. All long gone.

 

Wow, 3.11, the last version with a flat bindery before the introduction of directory service in v 4.0.

 

We also used 1-2-3 but used Wordperfect 2 for the word processor (with the cut out shortcut banner balanced above the function keys)

 

 

Happy days

Edited April 13, 2016 by AJWhite1970

[jdoyle]

Wow, 3.11, the last version with a flat bindery before the introduction of directory service in v 4.0. Happy days

 

had to teach Novell 2.15c to some Russian technicians after Glasnost. That was an interesting time - the delights of CompSurf (if I remember the spelling correctly). 3.11 was a big improvement by comparison

[synaesthesia]

Wow, 3.11, the last version with a flat bindery before the introduction of directory service in v 4.0.

 

We also used 1-2-3 but used Wordperfect 2 for the word processor (with the cut out shortcut banner balanced above the function keys)

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]36177[/ATTACH]

 

Happy days

 

Good lord, entirely forgotten about wordperfect with that! Had that on one of my computers!

[twin--turbo]

In Reation to "TINY" their first product was an 8088 based single or dual floppy PC. It was a little wider than a 3.5" FDD a bit over twice as high and probably 50% longer..

 

So at the time it was Tiny. There was an 80286 Version too.

 

In relation to "Sinclair" apart from the well known ZX and QL range, under Amstrad the produced the PC200 ( a PC1512 in a single case) but also some ultra rare re-badges of the PC7000/9000 .

 

 

 

 

TT

[googlemad]

And it had features that I'd still like to see in MS products today - like a list of logged in users etc

 

And in Groupwise, the ability to retract email if you sent it by mistake from anyone that hadn't read it yet!

[twin--turbo]

I used Netware from 1994 as "netware lite" at home, and from 1999 4.1 to 5 to 6 to 6.5 and OES...

 

GW - vastly better than EXCHANGE is now even 6 years ago!

Zenworks - Life Saver

iPrint - TOP!

eDir - Better than AD

 

only gripe I constantly had was timesync

[DavePa]

...Amstrad the produced the PC200 ( a PC1512 in a single case) but also some ultra rare re-badges of the PC7000/9000

 

I bought an Amstrad 1386 as I couldn't afford the 3386 at the time (£3k!) and used it without a hard drive until I could afford one - can't remember if it was the Conner 104mb one I had at one time or the one I thought I would never fill as it had 200m of space!

[AJWhite1970]

only gripe I constantly had was timesync

 

LOL, timesync.nlm was the biggest pain in the ar$e known to man, only had to be slightly off and everything fell apart. I got into a routine of running dstrace=+s to see which server had lost it's time, repair the time with dsrepair, unload and reload timesync and then run dstrace=*h to force DS back into sync.

 

I still miss it now, at least Netware told you what was wrong rather than AD throwing a strop and not giving you any clues

 

[jdoyle]

LOL, timesync.nlm was the biggest pain in the ar$e known to man, only had to be slightly off and everything fell apart. I got into a routine of running dstrace=+s to see which server had lost it's time, repair the time with dsrepair, unload and reload timesync and then run dstrace=*h to force DS back into sync.

 

I still miss it now, at least Netware told you what was wrong rather than AD throwing a strop and not giving you any clues

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]36182[/ATTACH]

 

think IBM's OS/2 was a bigger pain! :-) Had to use this awful os as part of a system for pharmaceutical reps linked to the RAM mobile network connected to a rake of ISDN lines. Unreliable heap of utter crud. That and a pre release Rank Xerox printer (4235 if I remember correctly) that was a royal pain - wouldn't process the command language correctly.