PCs have changed a lot

[winemaker81]

In the Post a Photo thread, there's a few posts about ancient PC technology. I've got an interesting story.

In 1989, I replaced the 10 MB hard drive in the office server with a 40 MB drive. The price had just come down to $750 USD, we were out of space, so the office head authorized it.

Ten years later I replaced the HD in my PC. I figured the per MB cost for each:

At 1989 prices, the 1999 HD would have cost $750,000.​

​

At 1999 prices, the 1989 HD would have cost about $0.02.​

A HD I installed in 2009 would have cost something like $45,000,000 at 1989 prices.

 

[Christopher Anderson]

Two months ago, my company got rid of some Dell video servers with 10 Terabit HDD. They say properly dispose of them. which I did. Into our vehicles and upgraded my servers at home. The problem is we stream so much, and I can just stream what I want and not "record" anything off the stream.

 

[winemaker81]

I've a couple of IT support horror stories, and this thread is as good a place as any. Story 1:

I was the unofficial desktop support guy for a small satellite office of about 20 people, plus for a program office of 5 people. It was a MacIntosh shop, back in the Mac Plus and Mac SE days. The main part of the company used IBM PCs (had to be IBM!) and I helped with that if folks from the main office came to our office.

Guy shows up, says he can't read his floppy disk. It was a 5.25" floppy. He pulls it out of his back pocket, and unfolds it. Yes, he had folded it in half and carried it around in his back pocket. The only copy of some important work was on the disk. He had been doing this for months.

I was honestly surprised that the disk had ever worked after being folded in half.

Upon examining the disk, the media inside was broken from repeated folding. No chance of reading it. I had to tell him the disk was unreadable.

 

[winemaker81]

Story 2:

Our office had an AppleTalk network with a 100 MB server. At the time, this was a HUGE amount of space, as Word and Excel files were often 3k to 7k in size.

A woman comes to me with a 3.5" floppy (which were actually rigid, unlike the 5.25" and 8" floppies). She had 6 months of work on the disk, and it had failed -- unreadable.

I had previously badgered the office head to authorize purchase of 3 different sets of management & recovery tools. Why 3? When I needed to recover files from a floppy (all too often), one of the three usually worked.

I tried all 3 on her floppy. No dice. It was dead, unreadable. I thought she was going to cry, for reasons I understand.

"Why didn't you save a copy on the server drive?"

"I don't trust the network!"






The moral of these stories?

BACK UP your stuff!!!

 

[winemaker81]

Regarding installing Linux:

As long as the BIOS is set to boot from USB (flash drive) before the HD, that works great. Balena Etcher (free program) will create a bootable flash drive using the ISO (disk image) of Linux installers, which can be used to boot the PC or install the OS.

I have a couple of flash drives that I use to play with Linux on occasion. Shut the PC down, insert the stick, and turn it on, and it boots Linux off the stick.

This works great with my generic desktop (I build my own) and my old Lenovo laptop. Anyone who knows Microsoft will not be surprised that I've been unable to boot my Surface Pro laptop to Linux ....


I realize the above has a LOT of buzzwords. If anyone is interested in creating a bootable Linux flash drive, ping me and I'll translate to English.

 

[Raptor99]

Your post brings back a lot of memories. I think that my first computer (Kaypro) had 64k memory and dual single-sided 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. It cost something like $1500, which is a lot more in today's dollars.

Somewhere in a box in my office I have an 8" floppy disk that I got from my dad. It was fun to take it out once in a while to show it to people.

 

[Sage]

Just lit it up

 

[winemaker81]

Just lit it up

Hmmm ... Win XP? That's a dinosaur.

There may be nothing wrong with the PC. It's just slower-n-tar in January. (well, January in the northern hemisphere).

My in-laws' last laptop (Win Vista, 14+ yo) took 15 minutes to boot. I ran an update, it took 12 hours to complete. At that point I convinced them to buy a new one. The old one is so slow that Linux doesn't run well on it. Better than Windows, but using it is an exercise in masochism.

 

[winemaker81]

Interesting factoid: I worked with a guy who had been an IBM PC sales rep. He said they called selling PC's "pumping iron". The old IBM PCs had cast iron strips in them to give them weight. Management felt the light weight of the CPU gave the wrong impression. Adding weight made the PCs more impressive.

Having carried enough old PCs ... assuming he was correct, IBM management were idiots ...

 

[Sage]

I have 2 sitting here running on XP. I use one for books. It has never been on the internet for at least 15 years. Not corrupted, not hacked, not damaged. Starts up in just a couple minutes.

 

[winemaker81]

I have 2 sitting here running on XP. I use one for books. It has never been on the internet for at least 15 years. Not corrupted, not hacked, not damaged. Starts up in just a couple minutes.

I hope you have recent backups and have tested them.

Another IT Horror Story:

Company I worked for in 1993 had a great backup system that recorded on tape:

• Monday - Thursday: incremental backups, e.g., backup files that changed that day. Tape gets re-used the following week.
• Friday: full backup, all files. Tape gets re-used the following week.
• Last Friday of Month: Rotating tape that gets re-used the following month.
• Last Friday of Quarter: Rotating tape that gets re-used the following quarter.

In a time frame in which storage media was literally 100,000 times more expensive than today, it was a great system. It had been working flawlessly for 3+ years before I joined the branch.

Except ... and you KNEW there'd be an "except" ...

We had a problem, and a co-worker and I spent from 1PM until 9PM trying to get a file from a backup tape. ANY backup tape. The tapes had "stuff" on them, but nothing we did would read the tape. We had a year+ of totally useless tapes.

The following day we reported the problem to management.

A bit over a year later they replaced the backup system.

Anyone not cringing is not in IT ....

 

[jswordy]

Just tossed one of the two last Gateway 2000 boxes from my first, bought in 1993 with a whopping 460k of memory. IIRC, it cost me like almost $2,000. Boxes stored in attic all this time.

 

[Hazelemere]

I have an old laptop using Windows 7 that runs the best software I've ever used for statistical analysis and won't run on anything else. My main issue today is that I believe Microsoft are getting sloppy due to lack of competition and/or an inability to simplify due to so many geek programmers and users wanting so many options on their software. This laptop runs Windows 11 and my wife's desktop runs Windows 10. It can't be upgraded. I'm hoping I can keep running the desktop without having to replace it even if I have to pay for Windows 10 maintenance. Hopefully AI will reduce the need for user manuals in Microsoft software. My wife was a systems analyst in the mid to late 1970s programming Cobol and Basic on mainframe computers, mostly government. She prefers older computers!

 

[Hazelemere]

Your post brings back a lot of memories. I think that my first computer (Kaypro) had 64k memory and dual single-sided 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. It cost something like $1500, which is a lot more in today's dollars.

Somewhere in a box in my office I have an 8" floppy disk that I got from my dad. It was fun to take it out once in a while to show it to people.

My first home computer was a 386SX which I optimized with a killer program "PC Tools" which worked like a dream. Before that I ran Watfiv Fortran at the University of Waterloo starting in 1968. I did my Masters thesis in Chemical Engineering 1972-1974 using an IBM 365 mainframe that allowed you 64K of memory! I wrote Fortran software all of which used 64K or less computer memory.

 

[David Violante]

Our first was a TI-99/4A in 1981 with 16KB RAM, tape backup, small TV as a monitor. We thought we were all that!

 

[Sage]

I have a plan to get my dead one working.. it going to have a new life, as a target. Always wanted to blow the cr.. out of one. I'm going to!!!!!

 

[Ohio Bob]

I have a plan to get my dead one working.. it going to have a new life, as a target. Always wanted to blow the cr.. out of one. I'm going to!!!!!

Pics or it didn’t happen!

 

[Sage]

There WILL be photos of the $#%&^%$#@%^&

 

[dgarzaniti]

I have an old laptop using Windows 7 that runs the best software I've ever used for statistical analysis and won't run on anything else. My main issue today is that I believe Microsoft are getting sloppy due to lack of competition and/or an inability to simplify due to so many geek programmers and users wanting so many options on their software. This laptop runs Windows 11 and my wife's desktop runs Windows 10. It can't be upgraded. I'm hoping I can keep running the desktop without having to replace it even if I have to pay for Windows 10 maintenance. Hopefully AI will reduce the need for user manuals in Microsoft software. My wife was a systems analyst in the mid to late 1970s programming Cobol and Basic on mainframe computers, mostly government. She prefers older computers!

> I believe Microsoft are getting sloppy due to lack of competition and/or an inability to simplify due to so many geek programmers and users wanting so many options on their software.

It's an industry trend, saw it at Cisco. Feature velocity over performance. Concerns regarding System/Hardware requirements were minimized "Customers will just need to upgrade to X.Y.Z to run this release"...

 

[jswordy]

When I bought the Gateway 2000 mentioned above in '93, I was gung-ho to get that modem screaming, Spent a lot of time the first month on aol.com. Then the $440 phone bill came. BellSouth company even called me to be sure it was correct. I honestly said yes and paid up for my mistake. Back then, dialing in and forgetting about time spent online was expensive where I lived!

In my profession, journalism, I went through college using a typewriter, then at my first job we had a proprietary system where the machines did their functions by using a 7" floppy. They were not interfaced; you had to move the floppy from machine to machine in the publishing process. Then the next job went backwards – back to a typewriter and typesetters entering that copy on computers. Then the next job, which I took in '93, was networked. But I still filed remote stories by modem through an 800 number and a Tandy laptop. Very limited but I doubt a more rugged computer has ever been built. I still have one that the company surplussed and let me keep.