Quasi game for the tech heads

[SteeleDragon78]

so a recent gravekeeper post got me thinking... there are a lot of systems out there that are no longer used, a few were great, some not so great. so i thought i would pose a question to our resident geeks, can you remember the multitude of systems you have worked on over the years? for clarification i dont mean specific brands of windoze boxes, more the old meaning of system like qws3270, unix III, fortran runing on a vax, etc.


ill start and see how many of you embarrass me with your geekdom.

ive worked on several qws3270 print server systems, the Apollo system owned by united air, an at&t unix V based ams oddly enough for at&t, and several versions of windows. my favorite by far were my comadore64 and apple IIe.

so let the games begin......

[Pedersen]

Most of the Commodore line: Vic-20, Commodore 64, Commodore 128D, Amiga 2000. Those were all owned by me. Worked on friends computers which had variations on that (Commodore 128, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500).

Apple ][ series (][e etc).

Mac series (early B&W ones, can't remember models). An OSX laptop, some OSX desktops.

A plethora of Linux boxes.

A multitude of Windows boxes.

An Atari ST (though only at a friend's house).

An HP-UX box that was big enough that the housing was, basically, the size of a rack itself.

Some Cisco 6509's (though light work, heavy Cisco Admin work was done by others in the department).

Some IBM box that was a cluster setup, with 30 separate nodes in the box. Basically took up a rack by itself, too. Ran AIX. Some of the people I worked with on that project managed DB2 on AS/400 setups.

Solaris boxes, though they were single server setups. One of them had an external hard drive array.

Yeah, I think that about covers it.

[Geek King]

Nothing special here. I first programmed on a TRS-80 with a cassette drive--mainly entering BASIC from magazines. My first program designed from scratch was a school project on an Apple IIe -- I did a computerized version of the AD&D treasure tables where you'd just select the treasure type and it would roll everything up automatically, including random magic items.

[Andara Bledin]

I had a summer school class working on Mac IIc computers running MBasic.

And my aunt owned some flavor of Timex Sinclair.

^-.-^

[Ironclad Alibi]

The ones I can remember are:

Fortran IV - early 70s in college
Fortran II - mid 70s working for the USAF
TI-99/4A
Apple //e - DOS 3.0

On various IBM compatible computers, many which I built myself:
MS-DOS 3.0 to 6.22 (still use 6.22 on one computer)
Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95 2nd ed, ME, Vista, 7
Droid X Android OS

I doubt any of these challenge the OP, but I'm posting the list as a test of my memory.

[protege]

Let's see now...

First one I remember was the Xerox "desktop" computer of some sort at my dad's office. That thing was huge, had no graphics (other than ASCII) at all, no hard drive, and was entirely based on a set of 8-inch floppies. Daisy wheel printer as well. Dad actually had a pair of them in his office--surprising, since they cost as much as a couple of new cars at the time Both ran CP/M, which was similar to DOS. At least fixing them could be accomplished with a soldering gun...and a sledgehammer. And yes, I'm being serious

Shortly after that, he bought an Apple III...which was basically a II that could run DOS. Again, not much in the way of graphics (his video card--a Hercules--sucked). Still, there were games to play, and lots of easy BASIC programs.

By then, dad wanted to work while on vacation...and bought a TRS-80 laptop. I remember this thing being OK, but the display was tiny. Only a few lines of text could be seen at one time! But, it was a step up from the TI 99-4/A my brothers and I played games on

Then TRS, and Apple went the way of the dodo. Couldn't get software, or even parts then. Both got sold, and we got a used IBM clone. That would have been the late 1980s. Again, the graphics sucked somewhat (no color monitor), but at least I got to mess around with programming.

Somehow, I started off with CP/M, and ended up with Windows 7...with variants of DOS, some Unix (most of which I forget now), Windows 95/97/98, XP, Vista, ME (which sucks, BTW).

[FArchivist]

so a recent gravekeeper post got me thinking... there are a lot of systems out there that are no longer used, a few were great, some not so great. so i thought i would pose a question to our resident geeks, can you remember the multitude of systems you have worked on over the years?

HP-UX 11.00 to 11.20, specifically on the Predictive software function. The main focus was updating that crap on client systems in order to be Y2K-compliant, which it really, really wasn't. I would like to note that HP-UX Predictive Software was EOSed in June 2003 and good riddance.

[Imprl59]

I forget the names of some of the old stuff these days. I was in Point of Sale and Inventory Control back in the mid 80s so I got to work with some really cool things for the time.

We supported an accounting system that ran off a 16port conroller with a Z80 processor. I remember the HUGE 80MB MFM hard drive we bought for one of them. That drive was almost 1K and I kept it for years because we paid so much for it.

There was a company called MSD that made these super cool Inventory Control systems that ran off 8" floppy disks. An amazing sytem for the time but the video controller loved to drift and you had to hold the clamshell open with one arm and snake your other arm up above the picture tube to adjust the pots. I still have several elbow scars from jerking my elbow out of that contraption when the high voltage got hold of you. I can find no mention of the company ever existing with my internet searches.

Another company the was leading the industry at the time was DataSym that made boards you could tie in to a standard cash register and connected back to a pc to give your scanning and inventory control.

Another one that is worth a mention.. I worked for a company that had a custom board built to catch the printer output from a cash register and directed it to a computer that ran a kitchen video system. The entire thing was custom built from the ground up. We called it the FMC for F$%^#@$ Magic Computer. I wonder if anyone here will recognize the initials from their employment past. I doubt anybody even read this far so probably not likely.... This was one of those projects that never should have worked but work it did

[Chromatix]

I still have:

- BBC Microcomputer Model B (2MHz 6502, 32KB RAM plus "sideways" expansions, and an actually decent BASIC dialect - also, 5.25" floppy drives).

- Amstrad PCW9512, complete with daisy-wheel printer. Need to see if it still works.

- Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3. It takes 3" floppy disks - not the usual 3.5" type.

- Acorn RiscPC 600, a late-model Archimedes variant with a 30MHz ARMv3 CPU. It has a 486 in the second CPU slot, for PC emulation purposes - some day I might swap it for an FPU.

At school I was also exposed to Atari STs, and a classmate had an Amiga of some description.

One of the school PCs was always much slower than it's specification suggested, but I was never allowed to open it to troubleshoot - otherwise I would doubtless have discovered the Turbo button was disconnected. In any case I was constantly having to reinstall them due to DOS' complete lack of security and the propensity of unsupervised children to random acts of vandalism.

[Ben_Who]

I used to have what I called my "antiques collection." It was a variety of ancient computers of different systems. In order to be part of the antiques collection, a computer had to:

1) have all parts in working order
2) have at least one working piece of software
3) have that piece of software be something I could actually operate.

At its peak, the antiques collection consisted of:

a) an Apple IIe computer from 1983 with a handful of video games on 5 1/4" floppies
b) An IBM 8088 with an OS on floppy disks
c) A Zenith 80286 with a 40 Mb hard drive loaded with business software
d) A Mac Plus with a 20 Mb hard drive
e) A Commodore 64 with a new-in-box monitor that ran Pitfall II
f) A Commodore 16 with a tutorial cartridge
g) A TRS-80 laptop with an LED screen

Since the 286, I've been upgrading my current computer Grandpa's-Axe style, so I decided not to add to the collection after that. When a series of setbacks forced me into a shoebox-sized apartment, I made quite a lot of money pimping the collection on eBay. Now that I've advanced my fortunes and am looking for bigger digs, I'm thinking of buying an Apple IIe again before their collector value goes through the roof. ("Collecting" an Apple IIe is like "collecting" a Toyota Camry - they made so many of the damn things that it'll be a while before they cost real money.)

At University in the early 1990s, E-mail was only available through an increasingly decrepit VMS-VAX mainframe hiding behind a forest of cables in a small room off a woefully inadequate computer lab. If you had little computer experience outside of video games, the thing sat right next to impossible to use. Despite the collection, I didn't know much about computers beyond what any end-user might learn, so I called any successful use of E-mail or download from the handful of off-site servers "hacking." (It was really just logging on with a guest account, but man - pre-browser web surfing was a beyotch.)

On the hard drive of my current rig are three plaintext scripts from Series V of "Red Dwarf" - I kept them because they were the first thing I ever downloaded.

Love, Who?

[TheSHAD0W]

Holy crap, I've worked on so many different systems... Lessee...

IBM 360 via Hollerith cards.
IBM 370 w/ VM/CMS
Northstar Horizon I and II, both upgraded to Z-80 CPUs (the Horizon I is still in my closet)
Commodore PET, Apple II, Commodore 64
IBM PC 5150 (5-slot, 16-64K on the motherboard)
Commodore Amiga 2000, 500, 3000
DECPRO running Xenix
Vaxen of various speeds running VMS
Vax 350 running BSD
MicroVax w/ SysV
Countless others.

[RichS]

The earliest system I've worked with was when I went to a week of university between 10th and 11th grade. I programmed PASCAL on punchcards for a mainframe-based system, but I don't recall what it was.

It was weird, because I started programming with Commodore PETs and 64's, and going from a disk-based system to punchcards was an..adjustment.

I told my parents that I wanted a C64, but they misunderstood and got me an Apple IIe. Good thing, though - it got me ready for when the school got the same system for my last year.

I moved on to a Commodore Amiga 1000, the first thing I bought on my own. My first experience working with PC's was my first stint in college with the original IBM PC.

In my collection, I have:

- Commodore 64's, one original, one with the new casing (Amiga 500-like shape), with an assortment of programs on disk and a working 1541 disk drive. I also have a numerous assortment of parts for those.

- Commodore Amigas, my 1000 and a 500, with software. I need to get copies of Kickstart and Workbench, though, my disks are bad.

- TI-99/4A with cartridges.

- Apple IIc complete with monitor and stand.

- Timex Sinclair, except I can't get it to work.

[Seshat]

PDP-11

Dec Vax (11/730 and 11/750), some running Unix, some VMS (?)

Apple IIc

Atari Vic 20

Atari ST

Macintosh (ancient black-and-white models)

More recent Macs

Linuxes and variants

Windows and variants.

[Captain Trips]

Let's see:

Various flavors of Basic on
HP2000 f/g
Imsai 8080
Osbourne.

UCSD Pascal on a Terak "micro computer" (this was before the term "desktop" was in use.)

Assembler on same Terak's

then various systems running MS-DOS 3/4/6 (no one ever used DOS 5.0)

Visual Basic on random desktops.

AS/400 both user and operator

HPUX (HP's unix) on HP 9000's

Solaris (Sun's unix) on Sun servers.


and of course Windoze

[Howler]

Wow... this brings back some memories...

Lessee here-
TI 99/4A
TRS80 (8" floppies LOL)
PC DOS, MS DOS (have MS DOS 6.22 running in a virtual machine right now, just for the hell of it :-) )
Windows 3.1-7
Mac OS 7-X
LINUX flavors (slackware... nummy!)
HP-UX 9
Solaris

Still have my Seagate ST01 SCSI card AND my Miniscribe 75MB SCSI drive (I was the whip when I got it :-D)

Right now I'm on a 15" MacBook Pro, my home server is running Ubuntu, and the wife's desktop (which desperately needs to be rebuilt) is running XP sp3