Grumpy Old-Skool Men witter on again

BECAUSE YOU asked for it, because you demanded it, because I can't find anything else to write about, here it is… the third and final part of our series on Old Skool IT.

You have written in your droves to describe datacentre cables from the Neolithic age, chips carved out of flint tips, tribes of hairy foragers hacking kernels, business intelligence systems that can only be understood by studying runes, metadata tags that are based on the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs.

And don't think we're not grateful but, come on, pack it in now. A joke's a joke and we don't want to come across like some Hollywood exec trying to figure out a way to get one final installment of the Star Wars franchise. And anyway, there's no cash in this particular game. So here we go with one last round-up of your dusty old IT rigs.

Paul kicks us off with tales of stuff he keeps in his garden shed -- always a worrying start.

“I still run an old Amiga 2000, with a 250MB Quantum HDD. It still had the old 8MHz 68000 in it until recently when I upgraded it with a 68020 accelerator card running at 33MHz. It has a full system store of 9MB of RAM. It uses Workbench 2 and still runs my MIDI synths just fine using Octamed Sound Studio 1.03C, the last version ever made AFAIK. I use it predominantly to listen to my older musical compositions. I wanted to make an archive of all my really old C64 music, so I dragged it out of the shed, fired it up, found the old 5.25-inch floppy and, voila, the thing started and I had music coming out at me.”

Now why can't I get that picture of Paul Hales with an A Flock Of Seagulls haircut and cavalry shirt out of my head?

Another reader doesn't even bother stashing his stuff in the garden shed but makes do with that other safe zone for teenagers the world over.

“I have a Compaq Deskpro 286e under the bed. I think the 40MB HD died, and I'm not sure about the 40MB tape drive but the ISA hard card (and you thought the 8800GTX was big) worked last time I checked. I think it has 3MB RAM now, 1MB onboard and 2MB on an ISA expansion card that takes 30-pin SIMMs which we had to get because by the time we wanted to upgrade we couldn't get Compaq's proprietary memory expansion cards. Other upgrades included an Adlib card, later replaced by a SoundBlaster Pro, and a Diamond Stealth 24 ISA to replace the onboard VGA after messing with cryptic dipswitch diagrams.”

Aye, I told you not to go messing with those cryptic dipswitches, but would you listen?

“As for laptops, I have a Texas Instruments 4000M. 486SX25/4MB RAM, 7-inch colour dual-scan 640x480 LCD, 127MB HD, and get this... an external SCSI port! Someone once told me there was no such thing as a SCSI laptop. I sent them a picture. It still works perfectly, has DOS and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups on it. Not much it can do since it has no USB, no network card, and I never bought the 2x CD-ROM docking station that would make it 10 pounds.”

I remember the TI notebooks, as it happens. Very nice bit of kit and sporting an early, quite elegant, example of the multimedia docking station. They sold under the TravelMate sub-brand, cost a fortune and were advertised in the Sunday supplements. Acer bought the TI division in the end, as witnessed by this very Web 1.0 page, here.

Of course it was only a matter of time before somebody brought up a PDP. And that somebody was mdburkey.

“We still have a system in our lab that we have to fire up two or three times a year to generate new data tables for our current software. The table-creation software is all written in some very nasty, undocumented Fortran and we have never made the effort to port it to anything newer.”

Glad to hear of that indomitable spirit.

“It is an old PDP-11 system with 8-inch floppies and still runs like a champ. Additionally, the e-chem dept at the local university still has an old PDP-8 they use occasionally for doing some chemical analysis -- the analysis is well proven and known to work. Unfortunately, there is no source or written version of the program still around -- only the existing paper tapes (and when they ever finally wear out that'll be the end of it).”

Don't sniffle, pal, it's unmanly.

Michael writes in with details of a notebook from the days when Bros rules the charts and mad Maggie Thatcher ruled the waves with that dreadful old battle helmet of a hairdo.

“I do use a rather old Toshiba Laptop. It's a T5200 with 4MB RAM, i386 with additional i387 coprocessor, monochrome plasma display and -- here comes the clue -- two full length ISA slots for extension boards. One is populated with a 3Com Ethernet board, the other with a Clio acoustical measurement system card. The display is sunlight readable and rugged.”

Indeed. In those days Tosh built notebooks as tough as tanks and of similar weight and proportions.

“A hard-disk update a few years ago went almost flawlessly, apart from the need for special software to enable boot of that giant 6GB HD -- there was no native BIOS support. I upgraded to a i486 upgrade chip that was available a few years ago to speed up calculations by 100%.”

Hey, don't go throwing your money around, son.

“The laptop has an internal power supply, no battery of course and is built like a tank.”

I just said that.

“The system performs independently of USB soundcards, Windows Mixer and other W98/2000/XP sound issues and is always good to show that you know your basics, in IT and in acoustics.”

And that you're a tightwad who doesn't like to create a dust cloud by opening the wallet stuffed with white fivers, Michael.

Jason Looney (ahem) writes in with a note on a previous entry.

“The 20MB hard drive was probably a Seagate ST225 and the bad sectors were listed on the top of the drive. You had to invoke the low-level formatter by calling:

g=c800:5

Good times...”

Yeah, good times, like in the war with rationing, powdered egg and hair lice.

Bertho has the final say, supporting all our Grumpy Old-Skool Men:

“The first rule in computing is: if it ain't broken, don't fix it. The second rule in computing is: the boss has more money to spend less. Therefore, crap cannot die because it would cost money. The third rule of computing is: new installs always run less stable than old ones. They just don't make 'em as they used to. The fourth rule of computing: go to rule 1.”

Or as Chris puts it:

“These old systems just work (and probably always will). They won't burst into flames, won't bug you into reporting program faults and won't blue screen, etc…”

Yes, yes, you're probably right but if everybody took that attitude there'd be no market for media parasites to live off. Now, off you go and buy Vista and quad-core processors. µ