Grumpy Old-Skool IT men ride again

BACK IN FEBRUARY, I foolishly said that the correspondence on old-skool IT was officially closed. That didn't stop you writing in though and that's a good thing. I had forgotten the first rule of business: when you've got a franchise, squeeze every last drop out of its.

It worked for Police Academy, MASH and Cheers on TV, and you can still see The Doors, Beach Boys and The Yardbirds in concert, despite the fact that, like a lot of the kit our readers collect, they're missing key components.

So join me, Denis Norden, as we hear more readers in an amber-and-black trip down Random Access Memory Lane to a simpler past when a CPU and a GPU were very different things, printers made a hammering noise on your cerebellum, and you could have any colour PC you liked so long as you liked beige.

Peter had a university job repairing Teletypes and so was always a candidate for joining in the fun. Here is his contribution:

"I used to work for Data General (‘We engineered the anxiety out of computing') and still have a Nova 3 front panel in my attic. I also have a Motorola MEK6800D2 evaluation kit, with big, clunky buttons and six digits of LED display for address and data. Old-skool stuff is fun to keep around, just so you can show these young punks how far the tech has come. Maybe now, they'll actually believe how we had to do all our computing one line at a time on 10-character-per-second Teletypes... and yeah, I have one of those in the basement."

That's the stuff, Peter, I bet the grandkids can't wait to visit for another sight of those Teletypes.

Scott writes in with a highly impressive collection, especially given that in the old days you could just lob your electronic rubbish in landfill.

"Probably too late to ever see the light of day, but I thought I'd chime in with some of my ancient nasties," he begins.

Not too late as it turned out, Scott, glad to have you along.

"The oldest machine I have running is a ThinkPad 701C, the one with the ‘butterfly' keyboard."

Stop right there. I remember them well and we all thought these were going to be huge. You pressed a button and, presto, you had a huge keyboard that spilled over the edges of an A4 laptop. Genius! But somehow it wasn't a hit. Remind us of the spec if you will, omitting no detail, no matter how trivial it might seem.

"It has 20MB of RAM (a 32MB chip is on order from Ebay), a 486 75MHz processor, a 640X480 screen that's surprisingly good, and a 730MB hard drive with some bad sectors."

You're still using it, then?

"With a Cisco Aironet 340 wireless card and Windows 95 I can limp along on the web with Opera, but it's painful. I wonder if this computer is so old it's UART chip limits it's connection speed."

Mebbe. What else have you got then Scott?

"An SGI Octane and O2. The Octane was seriously cool looking but at 175MHz pretty slow, and not much in the way of software was available for it."

We remember those Unix boxes. Looked a bit like James Dyson might have designed them. Very cool at the time, as you say, always supposing you find some Irix apps to run. What else?

"Compag 4500 quad-processor server: four blisteringly fast 166MHz Pentiums; each on a separate card with 2MB of cache. Feeding this monster was an ISA (!) based SCSI raid array built into the tower, and it had 448MB of SIMMs chips, back in the days when 8MB would break the bank."

Cripes, what were you running? The back-end of a bank? What else?

“An IBM Displaywriter: 8086-based beast with 8-inch floppies and a two-inch thick keyboard that looked lifted from an IBM Selectric. Booted and ran, what else could I do? Also, an IBM Personal Typing System: another 8086 beastie in the same line of thought as the Displaywriter, this time in a tiny case. To hook up any accessories you had to buy an ISA expansion box that connected underneath it, which came with its own power supply. It also had a 20MB ESDI hard drive, and the weird noises it would make when running are the same computer background noises you've heard in countless games like Unreal. I kept it briefly to try and make it an email reader, back when people still used modems and text-based Unix email was fashionable.”

‘Fashionable' in the sense of geeks rather than supermodels and pop stars doing it, obviously. Anymore for anymore?

“I also have a not-so-old-skool Jornada 720. Painful to use it on the web, but darn good for taking notes, keeping track of spreadsheet items, and so on.”

Scott, you're a genius. Thanks for your reminiscences.

James Mansella, you're up next. I see you're from the Big Apple. I seem to remember a bit of correspondence about that city and an AMD fab… anyhow, let's have it.

“I like these articles but I believe they should be limited to people that still use the things. I have all sorts of equipment from 1980 up, but I wouldn't include them as they aren't in use. This laptop is still in use and still for the same use...”

Go on then, what is it?

“I have a 386DX laptop with a pop-up black-and-white screen that weighs over 20 pounds. It used to play porno films in a small loop while we worked on other computers.”

Surely there's scope here for a joke but we'll leave it in the capable hands of our readers.

“Very classy. It still works but is stored in a relative's attic.”

Let's hope Aunt Maud doesn't switch it on then. What are we driving these days, James?

“The computer that I run still is a c128. I have a 1200-baud modem which I dial up to a local college. I have some expansions on it that allow me to take digitised still photos of live video. I still run Epyx's fast loader cartridge on it. My monitor was originally monochrome amber for the first year of its use. I was blown away by RGB. The 1200-baud modem allows me to go on the web using Lynx. In 128 mode, I have 80 columns of characters which gives me the ability to telnet in PC fashion. I am still searching for a second sound chip and solution to get the stereo function working for my SIDS. I think I have about 400 or so complete SID songs. Axel F and Metallica One are probably the most memorable SID songs."

Memorable is one word to describe that music, as in ‘hard to dispel' that is. By the way, there's a new format these days - ah, never mind.

“At a later date I found Tom's Diner, a rare and good find if you can get the right mix. I actually buy crap from the UK or GB or whatever dictatorship is running your country at the moment I am not sure exactly.”

Currently, it's the Blair dictatorship but not for much longer, James. Anyway, politics aside, what else have you got to say?

“Thanks and keep posting! I love these articles and I am all about this sort of computing. I am currently in the market for the Commodore-compatible 20 megabyte hard drive but I haven't seen one around recently.”

Drop James a line through us if you have this ancient storage kit.

OK, time for just one more. Ronen writes to say:

“I got an old laptop from Microsystems. It has an NEC v30 (x86) processor with 640KB of RAM, external floppy drive that is using some weird parallel port which takes 720KB FDs, and DOS 3.1 in Japanese embedded in ROM.”

Wow, I wonder what Abort, Retry, Fail looks like.

“It has an internal NiCad battery (which is quite small, about the size of 3 AA batteries) and another backup battery module, that takes 10 AA batteries. The CGA screen has four shades of grey and it has some weird expansion ports which has text all in Japanese.”

Well, to be fair, Ronen, it does sound quite a lot like a Japanese computer.

“It's quite light for its time as it was made in 1988. It still works and can boot DOS 6.22 using a trick to convert 1.44 FD to 720.”

Hey Ronen, compared to some of our readers, you're using a state-of-the-art box there. The INQUIRER welcomes old codgers to share more of this some sort of nonsense.

See Also
Readers fess up to old-skool IT
Old-skool IT gets even older
Grumpy old-skool IT men witter on again