Readers fess up to old-skool IT

If you remember, the call for confessions was prompted by Philip Nicholls who owned up to this little lot: a dual-Pentium Pro Overdrive PC running OS/2 with Describe, FaxWorks and WordPerfect for DOS 6.2. If that kit sounds it should be used by men in thin ties to a backdrop of Depeche Mode then Philip bolstered his claims in a subsequent email with a little more colour.

“I have another system in my office which I didn't mention before -- it hasn't been powered up for yonks. A long time since I built it so I don't remember even whether it has a 386 or a 486 CPU. I can have a look tomorrow…”

Yes, yes man, get on with it.

“Anyway it booted into PC-DOS 7 plus WordPerfect 6.2. And...”

Come along now, Philip. The game is afoot and we have not time for dramatic pauses.

“…printing to an electronic typewriter with a parallel port. Yes! The sound of a busy office… The serial immmmPAKT! On multipart forms. And no Y2K problem.”

A typewriter? Is he serious?

Not to be outdone, Tigremarino wrote in with the following tale.

“While our local TV network has a high-speed network for editing newsrooms, video servers, resource management with lots of PCs running Windows XP and expensive software, live titling is still done using a 1989-built Commodore Amiga 2000. Bought almost 20 years ago, the beast still runs great using a Maxtor 240MB hard disk drive, with a 25MHz 68030 processor and 68882 math co-processor running Amiga DOS 3.1, and overlaying graphics to live video using a GVP G-Lock device. It has a total of 10MB of RAM. We have to go around in thrift shops hunting down Amiga 500s, Amiga 2000s for spare parts, keyboards and mice. Even a CDTV was victimised to get a Fat Agnus 8372A chip. The computer runs Scala IC500 as a titling program and it still runs great. We transfer data from the Windows boxes using 720KB formatted 3.5- inch diskettes.”

Now that's old skool and Tigremarino is not the only one using ancient tech to do complicated jobs, says another contributor, ScottJ.

“An active, leading edge semiconductor processing tool uses, nay, lives and breathes with, OS/2. It's the ASM A412 vertical furnace which is the latest and up-to-datest tool for high-temperature toasting your 300mm wafers. While the vendor makes an XP-based upgrade for this tool, the OS/2 base seems happy as long as they can find replacement hardware which peacefully coexists with OS/2.”

Cclemen reminds us that even education has not all gone bleeding edge on us.

“My old public school finally got rid of all its daisy-wheel printers four years ago. Previously, the only laser/inkjet printers were in the office. It is a rural school to be fair, but has 400-plus students. When I went there the entire school was connected to the internet via a single 56k modem. It took about 5 minutes for the Hotmail main page to load.”

Plandream was one of many who seemed proud of his thrifty tech threads.

“I have still got a venerable Pentium 166 MMX with a blistering 64MB RAM, running a BSD distro... Works like a charm and can keep up with all my WiFi bandwidth (connected to a backbone of the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network). On the other hand, my ‘serious' work PC is a Debian-equipped P3/1GHz with 512MB RAM and Serial ATA controller. OS/2 is always [an option]. I haven't seen an OS that can match the sensation of it. So many years later it still is top-notch (my old, half-working 486 still has it). It's a pity OS/2 died. Ten times faster, better, more reliable than Windows. Should be made open source.”

DC is another OS/2 man/woman.

“I'm running eComStation 1.2R (OS/2 4.5 ++) on a Thinkpad T21. It's a workhorse. I'm an entrepreneur, have been for the best part of 65 years, and handle a range of data daily. That's why I stay with an operating system that's based on objects. Every file has an icon (if I choose to work that way) with a right-click menu that can launch the relevant program, and a configurable search engine to help with file management. There is even DragText that allows me to highlight and drag blocks of text from one file to another. I also greatly appreciate the OS/2 community's willingness to help an end-user with problems that come up from time to time. Just yesterday, I downloaded Lucide, a plug-in document viewer with support for various file formats from the eCS beta zone. No more struggling with a modified Acrobat Reader V4. Now it's possible to open all the PDFs that come my way, and enjoy scaling, rotation, navigation, text selection, searching, asynchronous rendering, PostScript printing and no worries about malware.”

OK sir/madam, very impressive but what's your kit looking like?

“Lexmark Z51 printer. Microtek Scanmaker E6 connected to an IBM PCMCIA SCSI card made in 1994. A generic 6-in-1 USB card reader for transferring images from digital cameras. Snappy, for single frame video capture (it's a Win 3.1 version that runs in a window or full screen).”

The PCMCIA SCSI card is a sweet touch if we may say so. And your software setup?

“Faxworks Pro, Lotus Smart Suite V1.73, OpenOffice for the *.doc files that WordPro has trouble with, PMMail for eMail, PMView for images, Mozilla/SeaMonkey for browsing, InJoy for dialup connections. And the biggest bonus of all is I have a system that does what I want the way I want to do it, without virus attacks or unexplained crashes, and runs happily on hardware that I can find on eBay for very little money.”

Amazing. Can we see it?

“I'd send a screenshot of my desktop, but there doesn't appear to be any way to attach the file.”

Oh, bum note to end that great symphony on. Never mind, Brad also sticks up for OS/2.

“I don't personally know any persons or businesses still using OS/2 but I do know a bunch of lawyers, and finding lawyers still on OS/2 makes some sense to me. It's only in lawyers' offices that I still see old LaserJet II and IIID printers. And the darling wordprocessor of the legal community, WordPerfect, has undergone very little real improvement over the years. I do know people still using the DOS version. In fact, I know someone still using the DOS version of Lotus 1-2-3 as well. Add not that OS/2 has an absolutely zero threat profile in this day of rampant viruses and malware.”

Craig works for a well known high-street store that he didn't hide the name of but we will for his sake. He's not so happy with his doddering old rig.

“Our till system has been in place since 1989 with no attempt at an upgrade. Only last year did we get a laser printer. Recently, we also had out 17-year-old scanners replaced with ones that are a mere five years old. God only knows where they got them -- a skip, probably. To say the system is antiquated is an understatement. A command-driven till system (our store server is a 486) that's buggy and slower than a crippled sloth isn't the most efficient way to be running an apparently 'modern' store. An example of its amazing speed is that opening an email takes a whopping 45 seconds, and when you get about 10-20 a day its rather a waste of time. A simple task like printing a sheet of stickers also takes a ridiculous amount of time. I'm in little doubt that places will have older systems in place but I doubt a company has such and ageing system spread across 770 stores.”

Craig, Peter, Plandream win prizes. Don't go swapping them for a copy of Windows Vista now. I don't think you've got the mips to run it. µ