thats the kind of shop manual i need a large one

 

I've got a couple of those fiche viewers too. Tried to donate one to librarys around the area..they don't want it. It's a lot easier working with a CD, or paper manual.

 

The old computer I was talking about earlier ended up in the MUSEUM of SCIENCE & IND on the south side of Chicago. We upgraded to a newer machine and UNIVAC donated the old one to the museum. Took our daughter there when she was 6 or 7 and they had it on display with terminals kids could enter data on and play tic-tac-toe -- only game available then. I asked the operator if it had a company name written on the inside of doors of the tape drives and sure enough it was ours!!! The technology is better today but the style of the trucks/cars sure is not! dave s

 

Head on down to Radio Shack for the latest! ca. 1989

(LOL, for $8500 you still didn't get a monitor or mouse?!)

 

When I worked for Allied Chemical in 67, the plant bought its first computer, a Univac that they installed in a large climate controlled room they built specifically for it with a large picture window facing the hall so anyone touring the plant could see it and all it's flashing lights. The thing beeped booped and blipped as it ran. They held an aptitude test for employees and selected about 25 to take an on premise class all day for a full year to learn how to program the thing. It was programmed in machine language, there were no operating systems then. The next holiday season the programmers had learned what commands made it produce certain sounds, and programmed it to play Xmas carols! The management was NOT amused!

 

About 15 years ago I got a Truck sized container full of old computers and micro fish stuff and 5.25 floppy's for a school.
There was IBM 8080, 8087, 287, 387, and a couple 487's. Most didn't have any hard drive as they ran off the server. Was a whole lot of fun playing with them and learning DOS syntax. There was no graphics on the little ones. only DOS text cuz they didn't have enough memory to run graphics. Any of ya understand any of this?
I learned a lot from them and still have a few of them.
Oh and a bunch of them was the first Apple or Mac that came out. Never could get my head into them.

 

Yep. My first computer at my store was a HP 87. Used a proprietary HP processor with it's own version of basic. Fortunately there was a plugin slot where you could plug in a daughter board with an 8086 processor that could run CPM. (It ran a program called Dbase II a powerful relational data base manager that was used for my bookkeeping system) The program ran in 64K of ram! The monitor was about 6x8" orange on black 1/2 page text only, built into the console along with the keyboard and 8" floppy drive. It had an accessory that made it king of the hill, in a separate box about the size of a large desktop console today was the first hard drive offered, an 5 MB "Winchester" drive. The whole shebang cost me a little over $10K! An Epson 9 pin dot matrix printer was about 400.00 more.
A few years later I retired that computer and replaced it with Packard-Bell 286 that ran DOS so I could run this obscure intermediate program that no one really understood how it worked, called Windows 1.2 that allowed me to run a new graphics program called Corel Draw!, as well as a DOS version of Dbase II and a "real" word processing program: Word Star. It also came with this neat input device called a mouse. This machine cost me 2400.00 at this new business members only store called Sam's club. I was a real happy camper!

 

I bet ya was happy Ax. Damn that brings back memory's. Back then they said nobody would ever need more than 64K.
I had a few of the old first hard drives. They was big for sure.
And I still miss the Dot matrix printers. Just listining to them work was so cool.
Than to see them actually print a pic or graphic was awesome.

I ran a 286 or 287 with a 60 mb drive with Dos 6.22 and windows for work groups 3.11 for a long time. I got so I could tweak that OS to do most anything.
Than along came win 95 and just ruined all the fun.
I put DOS 6.22 under win XP and was able to run all the old DOS games and other
app's without a problem.
Just bought a new all in one desk top with Win 7 that ain't to bad but nothing like the old one. And a new HP lap top with Win 8. What a joke. My son uses it cuz I can't even open it to the damn desktop without him. What a waist of 600 bucks that was.

 

I started my business career selling for Burroughs computer. We had to start selling calculators. They cost about $700 for a mechanical one the new elec ones were just starting they were the size of a shoe box and cost $1800 they could add subtract divide and mult if we sold one we got to go to main frame sales class and sell the big iron for a million or so I sold 3 in four years and then Started my own service bureau. We went they the whole range of card files to tape to disk to floppies to cd and clouds. Like I said the old technology was not as good as today's but the old trucks still have style and appeal the new stuff can't come close too. Have fun. Dave s

 

Seems like it to me. It seems some FTE members might fit that catagory

 

You had to be there, I guess. There was a time in the '80's when I'd run out early on Saturday morning to get the paper, not to look at car ads, but the computer ads! Or pick up the latest Computer Shopper. Change was happening so fast it made you dizzy. It was a really big deal when CGA graphics were cheap enough for the masses. Cheap, as in $800 for a card and 13" monitor....

 

Hahaha,.... nope had enough of tha old tech stuff at work in the old days. I'm quite happy with my gazillion gigabite computator. punch cards, floppies etc...good for the camp fire. Does any one remember the rolls of tapes the size of garbage can lids and computors bigger than a side by side fridge?

 

I bought one of the first Compaq's, the suitcase style "portable" computer. Wish I had those $$ back 'cuz it would buy a decent bonus built truck today and 30+ years ago that money would have bought a real nice truck!

 

Way back in the 70's when I was in the Air Force, NORAD, we had a univac dct 9000 computer. It had 4K of memory. 4096 bytes. The memory unit was about the size of a household dishwasher. It worked in both paper tape, and ibm cards. We had to be able to read paper tape at 50 letters per minute, or faster. IBM cards were alot harder to read, but we had a machine to print the letters at the top of the card. Booting was done by reading a stack of cards. No magnetic media here, just good old paper.