When DVDs were in their infancy, they actually used DLTtape for mastering because nothing else could hold 4.7/8.5 GB reliably at the time. Nowadays, a 16 GB flash key costs $10.
It did, but unless you were a college student or someone working at one of the DoE labs (or another research facility), it wasn't terribly useful or easy to access. NSF was instrumental in building the original Internet backbones in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and selling them off so they could build Internet2 (a new research and educational network) was what made the current commercial Internet possible.
Also, is it just me, or was there a big emphasis on being able to work on long flights back in the early notebook days? I'm no executive or middle manager, so I have no idea what you'd even do on a flight between NYC and LA with no Internet and no media players.
I just wonder what all someone's boss would have them be doing with a laptop on a long flight. It seems like these are people that either have to type a lot of multi-page reports about something (like a sales proposal or a 10-K form), or their boss is a dick and giving them busywork like they're still in grade school.
Man, was it really that hard to connect LANs in 1991? All the options they mention involve either Ma Bell, X.25 or both. :P I guess ISPs didn't really exist yet.
And hahahahahah NO, I'm not paying $12.80 an hour for access to your BBS, PC Mag. (I couldn't have anyway; I was a poor 14-year-old at the time.) Imagine if we had to pay those kinds of connect charges now; $9000 phone bills would be really common.
I first used the Internet from the PC labs at UVa in 1991, when my mom was there doing her WordPerfect labs. (She was going to the nearby community college, and so she could do that, apparently.) I didn't have an always-on connection until 1995, though I did play around on BBSes, including one that had a Usenet feed, starting in 1992-1993.
Also, is it just me, or is PC Mag of this era kind of...stodgy? It seems like most PCs were sold to boring middle manager types who wouldn't get fired for buying IBM, and who wanted to get rid of their System/3x machines. PC Mag isn't nearly as dull after about 1993 or so, and especially not after 1995 (since by then, regular people were buying computers and not just corporate fleet accounts or graphics people).
BYTE was great back then, as were PC/Computing and even PC World, to some extent. My favorite was Computer Shopper...I couldn't buy anything out of it (poor teenager and all), but it was still fun to window-shop, and the columns weren't as pointy-haired as PC Mag.
I also really liked MacUser, since I knew next to nothing about Macs in 1990-1991 and I wanted to learn. I actually leaned a lot of what I know about DTP and prepress from it.
Someone handed me an old notebook here at work, and it's kind of an odd bird even for 2005. It has a VIA chipset (remember those?), and the processor is a Mobile Sempron...a K8 with the AMD64 turned off. Classy. :P (Probably just as well, since the maximum RAM is 1 GB.) Oh, and you have to remove the bottom case to get to the hard drive. Apparently they thought aping the original iBook was a good idea. :(
Still, it seems like a nice little laptop. I'm putting Debian on it it and seeing how it does.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
...I want to see a picture of this, for some reason.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
One odd thing about the silver laptop: Its MMC/SD reader is ISA PnP. Not PCI MMC-class, not USB Mass Storage, ISA PnP. I have never, ever seen an ISA MMC/SD reader before.
BYTE was great back then, as were PC/Computing and even PC World, to some extent. My favorite was Computer Shopper...I couldn't buy anything out of it (poor teenager and all), but it was still fun to window-shop, and the columns weren't as pointy-haired as PC Mag.
My dad used to buy Computer Shopper now and then. I remember the thing was absolutely huge (doorstopper size) and mostly ads.
Odd confession: I wouldn't mind tracking down some old business software from the DOS era (old versions of things like 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Harvard Graphics) just to play with. 1-2-3 wasn't that great, from what I remember (SuperCalc included a few games, believe it or not, and Quattro Pro was just plain cool), but WordPerfect 5.1 was so much fun to dink around with. It was to DOS of the time what emacs is to UNIX. (WordStar was vi, natch.)
In other news...I think the silver laptop is too much of an orphan to use. The manufacturer is out of business, VIA doesn't support the onboard video in anything past XP, and the Linux UniChrome driver isn't stable in any distro I've tried save for GRML (even the version in Debian stable makes the screen go bonkers if you switch to a text console and back). Debian testing locks the computer up when X starts.
The rest of the computer still works, but being limited to VGA and VESA modes doesn't sound like much fun.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
For some reason I'm imagining it having been manufactured in some little-known foreign country where more common hardware is scarce
I have older machines at home, but they were also either made by companies that are still in business and providing at least token support (Dell, IBM/Lenovo), or have a good number of fans interested in keeping them going (IBM/Lenovo again, Apple). Also, the machines have video that's well-supported in Linux (ATI or, in the case of my Dell, NeoMagic).
VIA's cachet dropped like a rock once the Super Socket 7 era ended (and the 1-2-3 punch of iffy Windows 9x support, PC Chips using chipsets that identified themselves as VIA, and Nvidia introducing the nForce didn't help, either). VIA has only ever provided minimal support for the UniChrome in Linux, and there just hasn't been enough interest to make it work as well as the Intel, ATI or Nvidia drivers do.
PC Chips, for the unfamiliar, was a bargain motherboard maker with a reputation for bad QC even for cheap PC parts. At a time when PC fit and finish was improving towards UNIX workstation levels, PC Chips saw fit to stay with techniques that would have been fine in the late MS-DOS era; thin motherboards that flexed easily, ASICs that were either poor copies or factory seconds of reputable chipset makers' models, and in a few cases in the late 486 and early Pentium era, fake cache memory. They sold their boards under several different brand names (Amptron was one), and those boards were a fixture at those travelling "computer show and sale" expos in the 1990s.
Again, this is all stuff that no one would have noticed if we were all still running Windows 3.1, but Windows 9x, NT and OS/2 Warp made more demands on the system than DOS did, and you could see the seams pretty easily.
As I understand it, Elitegroup/ECS put a bullet in PC Chips' head several years ago, and I think ECS itself is now gone.lol nope (maybe I was confusing them with Soyo or Iwill? No idea)
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I always misread "Aldebaran" as "Alderaan"
Which just makes me want to destroy your computer with a Death Star, really
Well, Chrome OS on the Eee was a bust because the kernel it uses expects PAE to be enabled, but for whatever reason it's disabled in the Celeron M the Eee uses. So I put Debian back on it with LXDE as the desktop, and it's actually doing quite well.
So I'm playing with my mom's old laptop, and for whatever reason it's running really, really slow (much slower than an AMD64-capable Sempron should), so I install Defraggler and, well...
The disk is highly fragmented, which doesn't help, but that load cycle count is very worrying. There was a Linux kernel bug a while back that was driving up the load counts on certain laptop HDDs, and it looks like this drive was a victim.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Hey Lee
If I wanted a really old 1990s computer for the nostalgia factor, where should I start?
There's lots to choose from, but the easiest place to start would probably be a late-1990s Socket 7 PC, since those are still relatively easy to get parts for. Macs from before 1998 are very quirky and hard to get running without a Mac OS 9 CD; if you really want a Mac, I'd advise getting an iMac G3, Blue & White G3 or Sawtooth G4.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Since I haven't played with it in a while: I unearthed the old G3, and it does a whole lot better with 768 MB in. Also, I found out that FreeBSD for some reason doesn't have GNOME 3 available in ports yet, despite Debian having had it in packages for ages now.
I was curious about what PCs this single-processor G5 compares to, and according to nbench, it's in the same ballpark as the original Athlon 64, the last Athlon XPs and the last PowerPC G4s (7447s). In other words, without the 64-bit capability, it's about as capable as my Mac mini at home. Good to know. :P
One problem I've run into while playing with ancient versions of Debian on VirtualBox: While XFree86 3 supports a whole bestiary of old 1980s and 1990s VGA-compatibles, it rather emphatically does not support VESA, and unlike DOSBox, VirtualBox does not (to my knowledge) emulate something that XFree86 3 would have known about (preferably the S3 Trio64 that was in my old IBM PC 350). So I'm stuck using VGA16. :P
These were the days when video card vendors were starting to get seriously worried about corporate espionage, and started requiring NDAs to get full datasheets. I seem to remember that being a problem mainly with the Matrox MGA (pre-G200) and NeoMagic 256 (an integrated video and sound chip used in some laptops at the time), since the S3 and ATI Mach64 were well-documented, as were most of the old ISA SVGA chips and the IBM 8514/A and XGA clones. NVIDIA was a newcomer then and wasn't really taken seriously until the TNT2 came out.
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