Comments on: Shall. We. Play. A. Game?

By: Former Lurker

Former Lurker — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:22:01 +0000

Weasel,

Yeah, I think you need the controller for the floppy drive. Back in those days, I believe those were an “accessory” item. Or maybe it was just the hard drive controllers I’m thinking of…

Gosh, I’m really helpful, aren’t I?

By: S. Weasel

S. Weasel — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:21:46 +0000

I brought a 5¼” drive with me, Sigivald, but I don’t have the connectors. Looking at the thing, I remembered that the ribbon connector was different for the old drives, and I surmised you’d need an old floppy disk controller card for it. Wouldn’t you?

By: Sigivald

Sigivald — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:25:39 +0000

Try here? You can probably buy or thrift-shop a 5.25" drive for a PC, and various places seem to have versions of the "teledisk" program those images are used with. So you can probably make that stuff work with a little effort and almost no money.

By: S. Weasel

S. Weasel — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:15:43 +0000

Hey F’Lurker! Good to see your smiling ASCII again.

I love these threads. They bring out the geeks.

By: Former Lurker

Former Lurker — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:25:29 +0000

Oh, dear. I started with a Commodore 64 and would have died for an SX-64 (the portable version!).

I cut my CP/M and Wordstar teeth on a Xerox Model 820-II. I learned how to program laser printers to draw graphics with Wordstar and Xerox’s IP (InterPress) language – a predecessor of PostScript. Ah, the good old days…

(Hey Weasel! I haven’t been around in a while, but I’m back! Great to see you’re all still here!)

By: dfbaskwill

dfbaskwill — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:59:16 +0000

A true beauty! I have my model of the original Babbage machine and my first Palm Pilot from US Robotics. Can’t let go of them!

By: Uncle Badger

Uncle Badger — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:50:21 +0000

I’m with you on Wordstar, GrannyJ. Once I’d nailed all those commands into my brain, I never did quite unlearn them.

And there’s damn-all that Word offers that I find an improvement (which is why I wont use it).

By: GrannyJ

GrannyJ — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:43:34 +0000

I still have two, maybe three, Osbornes sitting in various closets, plus manuals & software. I became so addicted to Wordstar and Supercalc that I didn’t switch to the Microsoft product until I got an iMac two years ago.

By: Uncle Badger

Uncle Badger — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:50:37 +0000

Войска ПВО makes an interesting point. As I said to The Weasel only few minutes ago, there isn’t a great deal of basic business grind that I couldn’t have done with my Osborne – other than handle graphics and store gigantic amounts of data.

And that was its attraction: it handled the core business applications (WP, spreadsheet and database) and actually came with those programmes which, bought separately at the time, would cost damn near the price of the machine. That was Adam Osborne’s stroke of genius.

The small screen was a pain but easily remedied, ISTR, with the purchase of a cheap, separate amber monitor which lived on top of my Osborne.

I still have find memories of CP/M and remember how scandalised I was when I later encountered Microsoft’s rip-off replacement.

But then came the whole, sorry, Apricot saga, which the USA was spared. And a version of Billyshit’s MSDOS which wasn’t IBM compatible.

These were(n’t) the days.

By: MCPO Airdale

MCPO Airdale — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:47:55 +0000

HA! This is a computer! http://tiny.pl/36xw