MAJOR WIN 10 UPDATE COMING

[Lee B]

Microsoft is releasing a major update for Win 10 on April 11th.

If you don't want to wrestle with all the changes, turn off your automatic update setting until after tax season

[Abby Normal]

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

So glad I didn't 'upgrade' to 10.

[ILLMAS]

Good thing I am still on Win 7 Pro.

[Catherine]

Justifiable homicide.  That is (or should be!) the nickname of this "major update" and I thank God that I am still on Win7Pro64-bit.

[Roberts]

Good thing I'm still using DOS 3.1

[Abby Normal]

When I finally have to move to 10 (sad day), I'm going to consider using the Enterprise version, but that decision is years off.

[Jack from Ohio]

21 hours ago, Roberts said:

Good thing I'm still using DOS 3.1

I still have a sealed package of 3 1/2 disks of DOS 6.22.

[Catherine]

I still have the installation disks for Word 5.0, too.  Not sealed, though.

[Abby Normal]

20 minutes ago, Jack from Ohio said:

I still have a sealed package of 3 1/2 disks of DOS 6.22.

And no disk drive to put them into.

[jklcpa]

Check out what I still had in the closet:  a storage box for 5.25" floppies with disks inside.  AICPA's ATB program from 1990-91 and DOS 6.2 Plus the enhanced tools. Chessmaster too.   lol   That disk is high density, mind you, and holds a whopping 1.2 MB each. I could scrounge up some old blank cassette tapes too if anyone needs some.

   

[Jack from Ohio]

1 hour ago, Abby Normal said:

And no disk drive to put them into.

I have the drives, but modern motherboards do not include a serial plug on them.  I even have 5" disks and drives.  Same issue.  No place to plug them in on new motherboards.

[Roberts]

In college we "learned" a version of a word processing program, a spreadsheet type program and a database type program. This was before MS offered any such programs that I'm aware of. All three programs came on a single 5.25". My first version of Lotus 123 I bought used - it was something like 25 3.5" floppies.

That computer class was 1 semester and 1/2 mainframe and 1/2 PC oriented. I could do all the PC stuff, my fraternity brother handled the mainframe program. You didn't even have to submit a program - you submitted a printout of the program on green bar paper. Weird times.

[Catherine]

I still have a Macintosh 180c laptop - that still runs!  8" (or so) *color* screen.  Built-in trackball (and no laptop since then has ever had any system so nice for screen maneuvering).  Still has "KidPix" on it that my girls used when Gwen was 1 1/2 (she's my younger girl, the 24-year old who just bought a house last fall...)  And I still make the sounds like the KidPix narrator made when something got erased.  

[jklcpa]

One of my computer classes was to learn COBOL, to write a simple program for a task and run it.  If it wouldn't run, we had to debug it too until it worked.  This was before PCs were everywhere and so we had to reserve time to use one of my school's few terminals and had to log in remotely to time that the school purchased on Stanford U's system.  

[Roberts]

Judy, my wife has a cousin who makes a very good living still programing in COBOL and FORTRAN languages.

It's bizarre but we have a local company that has a few old programs that run those languages and they've determined it's just cheaper to pay her a large salary to keep them running than pay a massive amount one time to replace them. When she retires in 5 years - they'll just declare the programs have died and the clients who use the information it generates are out of luck.

[Abby Normal]

Anyone here remember the old 8" floppy disks. SS SD. I can't remember the capacity.

[GeneInAlabama]

I remember the 8" floppies.  The firm I worked for at the time had three computers that used those.  You would enter the information into the computer and it would take 20 minutes for the computer to process it and print out  a report.

[Catherine]

I remember 8" floppies - the secretaries used them at DEC (Digital) to keep copies of letters etc.

My first foray into computers was with keypunch cards.  A LONG wait to punch your cards, hand them in to the mainframe, come back in an hour to see where your program barfed (fortran), wait in line for the keypunch machines while you tried to figure out how to fix the mess.  Rinse and repeat.

Anyone remember the paper terminals and telephone-handset audio-coupled modem connections?  We had a choice between 300 and 600 baud rate - but the 600 only worked late at night.  Which is when mainframe time was cheaper anyway.  Yes, we were allotted a budget to pay for mainframe time.  Something like $20 for the semester.

[Gail in Virginia]

And I remember learning to flow chart as part of the programming process.  Only part of it that I still find helpful, although I don't usually use the different shaped boxes. 

This thread is reminding me that I need to clean out and throw away somethings that have become useless over time -including old programming discs ( some 5.25, some 3.). I remember my first home computer had a hard drive with something measured in MB, and I thought it was huge and would never run out.  Ha!

[ILLMAS]

Anyone remember the I-Omega Zip disks?  100MB, 250MB & 750MB 

[jklcpa]

Zips. Yes, I used them in the transition between 3.5" and CDs because they held a lot more, but they were expensive. Was that during the time when CDs first became writable or able to rewrite them.  I threw a bunch of those zips away a few years ago. I think the last XP machine I had, I added that drive on it so to read those zips.

 

[BLACK BART]

10 hours ago, Abby Normal said:

Anyone here remember the old 8" floppy disks. SS SD. I can't remember the capacity.

Even I didn't ever use those. 

On the other hand, I had a Radio Shack TRS-80 that recorded programs on cassette tapes.  I used it to write programs in BASIC and composed my own program for income averaging (remember that?) when we were still doing returns by hand.  Had some problems though: (1) If I left the computer "on" for more than two hours it would overheat and my calculated figures would go haywire (2) When typing out a program one day, a message popped up on the screen of my little 4K rig which I had never seen before and never expect to see again: "END OF MEMORY." 

Funny thing, later on when upgrades started coming out by orders of magnitude (16K, 32K, 64K) I remember some guy at a tax seminar who was ridiculing the trend and asked us "What could anyone possibly need with 128K of memory?"

[Randall]

Got rid of my DOS machine a long time ago.  Last year, the Win2000 and WinXP went.  This year I'm getting a new W10 machine and the W7 goes.  The Win8 will be my backup.  Getting older, need to clear out the junk.

 

[Abby Normal]

This is my Drawer o' Technology:

It's mostly cables and power cords now, some have never been used. That Hayes Anniversary mode in the upper left has a lot of sentimental value. It sat on your monitor and you could use it as a speaker phone.

[Roberts]

I just purchased a refurbished computer to operate solely as a quote terminal pretty much.

i5, 8GM ram and an SSD instead of HD (I'm only doing SSD from now on) and a new power module  - $201 delivered.

Bought a refurbished laptop to run as a Plex server and bittorrent sync backup location at home - same information and it was $270 with a brand new battery.

Using SSD will change your life. If you are buying a new computer - spend the extra $50.