Old computer technologies that lasted a LONG time

[LouieAtienza]

I remember way back when as a little kid, playing with the old DOSSHELL. It's funny that to this day, almost 40 years later, I still use CTRL-C, CTRL-V to copy and paste, ALT-F-X to close a program, ALT-TAB to switch between programs or windows. In fact for my CAD and CAM programs I use keyboard shortcuts whenever possible. It's also amazing how many of the commands available at the command prompt still exist.

I also remember in the late 90s or early 2000s, when I built a computer for my brother, using that old PC-AT case. I bought one of the first AMD Athlon boards in AT format, and the screw holes still lined up with that old PC case, and the Molex connectors were still the same. It's also amazing how long IDE cables and PCI slots lasted.

On my home CNC and home computer, I still run WinXP SP3 and still think it's one of my favorite OSs from Microsoft. Win7 is pretty good too, but for XP to last as long as it did is pretty amazing to me. I have a copy of Windows 1 at home, somewhere...

[sachi]

Originally Posted by LouieAtienza

I have a copy of Windows 1 at home, somewhere...

You have my sincere sympathy!

[Xtremca]

I watched on an episode of 60 minutes that's our nations intercontinental ballistic missle defence system is operating on 8" floppy's. Talk about feeling secure in the old school tech.

[Scootch]

I too have Windows 1 upstairs. It's on 5 1/4" floppies and has a coupon to send in for a copy on 3.5" disks.

I've often thought about mailing that in

FWIW, the first version of Windows was even worse the Millennial Edition. There was a bug in the print drivers.

[fazool]

Yeah, I'm with you Louie. I am an old school user too. I prefer keyboard shortcuts and am very fast with them.

I still use a dosshell every now and then to do something - usually IPconfig stuff.

Other weirdness though are mostly the mechanics of it all.

DB15 VGA ports, RJ45 jacks, original USB form factor, micr USB (the power connector that doesn't), 1/8" headphone jacks, expansion cards (PCI/PCIE, etc.).


And my absolute favorite:

The car cigarette lighter which, itself, is a holdover of the cigar lighter (which is the reason for its size) and we have these monstrous adapters to charge our phones in a cigar socket.

Many have seen this:

Say friend, did you know that the US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches.

That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

I see, but why did the English build them like that?

Because the first railway lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Well, why did they use that gauge in England?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did their wagons use that odd wheel spacing?

Because, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads. Because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads?

The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The Roman roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts?

The original ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by the wheels of Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.

And the motto of the story is Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's *** came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war-horses.

So, just what does this have to do with the exploration of space?

Well, there's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was originally determined by the width of a horse's ***.

[LouieAtienza]

Well there is the rumor.that the Russians still use tubes in their space equipment.

Yes, it`s amazing mobos still have a standard phone jack (I suppose for fax capability) and VGA D sub connector. A lot of laptops still have them because most projectors have them.

The mechanical mouse lasted a long time. MIDI ports are still around, as well as RCA jacks on audio I/O boards. Even XLR is still around. And the 3-prong power connector, the same it was over 40 years ago. I heard newer computers do not have small speakers inside for POST beeps.

[cpmusic]

Originally Posted by LouieAtienza

I remember way back when as a little kid, playing with the old DOSSHELL. It's funny that to this day, almost 40 years later, I still use CTRL-C, CTRL-V to copy and paste, ALT-F-X to close a program, ALT-TAB to switch between programs or windows. In fact for my CAD and CAM programs I use keyboard shortcuts whenever possible. It's also amazing how many of the commands available at the command prompt still exist.

I've been using computers daily since 1987, when I first got one at work. It was an AT-compatible machine running DOS-something, so there was no mouse, and I still prefer the keyboard for a lot of commands. Since my hands are already on the keys, it's just faster than moving to the mouse and back again. The latest version of MS Office doesn't respond quite as well to key commands as older versions, but copy, cut, paste, save, print, and others still work in Office, IE, and other Windows programs.

[Dru Edwards]

I wonder if there's any nostalgic computer jocks who build computers on the side with vacuum tubes. I'm guessing no, unlike some people who build their own amps using tubes (which do provide a functional purpose, sweet overdriven tube tone).

[LouieAtienza]

Originally Posted by Dru Edwards

I wonder if there's any nostalgic computer jocks who build computers on the side with vacuum tubes. I'm guessing no, unlike some people who build their own amps using tubes (which do provide a functional purpose, sweet overdriven tube tone).

I read the Russians use them because they can function through a nuclear fallout. Though if there was nuclear fallout who would run the machines?

I remember one mobo company, ASUS or MSI, that had a tube preamp for their audio chip right on the mobo. Don`t think it caught on...

[clintj]

A good number of Russian military equipment still uses tubes because they're old, and also virtually immune to the electromagnetic pulse of nuclear weapons. My first ship had a tube based radio set as a backup as well. No one I talked to knew if it worked, though.

I grew up around the time of the Commodore 64 and Apple IIe computers, and still remember when floppies were actually floppy. Newer computers don't even have a drive for the 3.5" ones any more.

[LouieAtienza]

Yeah, the USB stick is the Floppy of today. I remember paying $250 for two 32MB SIMMs. Now you can get a 128GB USB stick for $60 or less!

Compared to my old PC-AT, expanded with 640k RAM, 10MB SCSI hard drive, and two 5-1/4" floppy drives!

I still use the parallel port for my CNC machine, though USB and Ethernet controllers are now popular.

[robj144]

Originally Posted by clintj

A good number of Russian military equipment still uses tubes because they're old, and also virtually immune to the electromagnetic pulse of nuclear weapons. My first ship had a tube based radio set as a backup as well. No one I talked to knew if it worked, though.

I grew up around the time of the Commodore 64 and Apple IIe computers, and still remember when floppies were actually floppy. Newer computers don't even have a drive for the 3.5" ones any more.

Why would tube based circuits be immune to EM pulses? Even if tubes were immune, the rest of the circuit would be fried.

I had a C64 too. I remember cassette tape drives before floppies. A 20 kb program would take 20 minutes to load.

[LouieAtienza]

Originally Posted by robj144

Why would tube based circuits be immune to EM pulses? Even if tubes were immune, the rest of the circuit would be fried.

I had a C64 too. I remember cassette tape drives before floppies. A 20 kb program would take 20 minutes to load.

We had cassette drives at school, connected to a Commodore PET. By the time a program loaded, class was half done!

I had a Coleco ADAM, which also used a tape drive, which was high-speed. The tapes would stretch and corrupt everything on them. I had to constantly make backups.

[Bob Womack]

How about old computer terminology? "Hacking" dates to before computer days. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute there was a student's special interest group that maintained an extremely large and complicated model railroad layout. A practice developed where a student would attempt to see how big a change in the rail layout he could make while others were in class. Changing the layout required cutting the rails with a hacksaw, thus "hacking" the layout. These same students were the ones who became interested in computer sciences when it first developed at the institute and carried the term into that department. We still use the term today.

How about "mounting and dismounting drives?" Back in the early computer days, mainframes were served by large, 10.5" open-reel data drives. The computer operator would literally and physically mount a reel onto the drive and thread up the tape and then logically "mount" it from the disk operating system, during which process the computer would play head of the tape, find the tape's ID and volume table of contents at the head of the reel, and prepare it to be accessed. The name carried on through the original hard disks through floppy discs to modern hard disks to virtual drives.

Bob

[clintj]

Originally Posted by robj144

Why would tube based circuits be immune to EM pulses? Even if tubes were immune, the rest of the circuit would be fried.

I had a C64 too. I remember cassette tape drives before floppies. A 20 kb program would take 20 minutes to load.

Vacuum tubes are far more tolerant of voltage spikes than IC devices, especially the miniaturized ones in computers. I never venture inside a PC without grounding myself to the chassis to prevent any static discharge from frying expensive things. You are right though; some observation aircraft for early nuke testing did suffer minor EMP damage but could still land safely.