Back in the old days, when I was in highschool, I took a computer class. These units were old when I started using them in 1984...I believe they were apple's.

Everyday you had to put your floppy in and wait 15 minutes for it to load. Whenever we did any work on this we were using numbers, and the greater than/less than signs (< >) ect. There were no colors or games or anything.


My question is this; What was this dinosaur? Was it before operating systems? Was this a D.O.S. based system?

 

That was an Apple, it did use DOS which b4 Bill Gates stole the word meant Disk Operating System as opposed to one loaded in via front panel switches, paper tape, or cards. It was not the same DOS that was used on the IBM computers which used a derivative of CPM.

 

O.K.

Did these computers actually do anything? Did it even have a calculator on it? It seems we had to program it, or tell it to do everything.

I think we used graph paper to lay out a picture, Then "programmed" the computer with the numbers and signs to print it.

I remember very little about this class so I could be wrong.

 

Well, that old Apple did a lot, very much like a modern computer. It was, of course, very slow by our standards and you had to invest some time to get it to work. Pretty much the same thing is going on behind the scenes in this Dell I'm typing on now but in now I've got a nice graphical interface and a mouse whereas before I had neither, only a programming language and a keyboard. You might have used a tape drive in your old Apple which is not far removed from your current hard drive if you think in terms of basic functionality. Anyhow, they get faster every year but it's still just ones and zeros.
jor

 

My first computor was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III. I believe that was the model and it retailed for around $5000 Cdn. It had a whoppin 48K and 2 floppie drives to load the programs.

Some of the games I had used a portable cassette player and casette tapes to load them.

That was about '82 and I thought I was on top of the technological world

 

He could also be talking about the Commodore VIC20. Which also used either a tape player or a 5 1/4" floppy drive. The Commodores were the first mass production unit and were widely used in school systems in NJ. Ahhh,, those were the good ole days, lmao. Before Bill and his minions stole the market and overran the competition.

 

* "Back in the old days" *
They were new when I started on them.
OMG, am I really that old?
And by the way, it had games, you just had to program most of them yourself. Now was that a "peek" or a "poke"?

10 REM OH NO, I THINK I STILL REMEMBER
20 FOR X = 1 to 1000
30 PRINT " FTE #1 ";
40 NEXT X
50 END

 

That's pretty BASIC man!

 

BTW any one remember using hexidecimal to program the 6800's before they were connected to monitors and drives. Or is that going a little too far back for some?

 

Missing the days of pea-green screens and Pong. Nope, I like the new technology that has been provided. I cannot count how many 5 1/2 floppies I fried by not having the paper holder thing. On the other hand, was I used them for a Frisbee in class?

I think it is funny that kids sit at a computer and if it does not load up in 10 seconds, they are mad. I remember my first computer (IBM clone) you would start it up and do something for a while, like mow the grass or change the oil on all cars before it was finished loading. Ah the good old days.

 

I believe you are talking about the Apple IIe, it was very popular in schools. There was no hard drive, every program had to be loading from 5 1/4" floppy.

If you turned the computer on with no floppy, you would load the built-in BASIC editor, but of course you couldn't save your program unless you had a blank disk in the drive.

Anybody remember Control-Open Apple-Reset?

 

Neither Apple DOS and Apple ProDOS used greater than or less than symbols. They didn't pass more than one parameter on the command line and didn't have redirection or piping hence they didn't need it.

If I recall my Commodore experience correctly, it didn't use > or < as part of the command prompt either (everything they did was a horrible kludge, passing parameters to the disk drive via BASIC commands).

Trash 80s (Radio Shack TRS-80) used them but weren't in wide-spread use in schools.

If it was 1984 and it used those symbols then it was likely either MS-DOS, CP/M or CP/M-86. CP/M came out around 1975-1976. MS-DOS came out in 1981, derived from QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) which was a 16-bit clone of 8-bit CP/M. CP/M-86 was the official 16-bit version of CP/M, came out around 1982. If it was a CP/M or CP/M-86 machine it could have been a Monroe, Kaypro, Osborn, DEC Rainbow 100 (ran MS-DOS as well), DEC Robin VT180, or any number of machines (CP/M ran universally on several platforms).

Have I dated my geekness? I've been programming these suckers since I learned 6502 assembler and BASIC in the late 70's.

 

...err...What the heck did he just say...??
I recognized the work Kaypro, but only cause thats the one that Peggy Hill uses...

 

I never knew that about you dennis. I had an old 486 machine that my parents bought in 92 with windows 3.1 and dos 6.2, and it got old, and we stopped using it in like 99. I picked it back up and got pretty good with my basic programming. Heh, I was only 14 or 15.

 

As I tell my students.

Rule #1 be nice to the geeks and Nerds, because they are the ones that will rule the world and if they do not believe me, I show them my pictures and they all gasp with the normal "Oh my God!"

Nerds RULE!