How old are you?

[BSONE]

Princo 40

With those Princo's you may find that due to to CD-R disk rot that your Windows XP install is downgraded to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups upon installation
Back in the day I used to backup important stuff with Japan made TDK and Taiyo Yuden, and movies on cheaper media.
Which reminds me, I don't have a CD-ROM burner on any of my current notebooks or desktop, so should probably find one to test my old discs before they deteriorate.

 

[BSONE]

My first computer was the Commodore 64 with a tape drive using compact cassettes to load games. Boy, that was fun especially with games such as Summer Games, Winter Games and World Games, as each event needed to be loaded from tape . I also remember some games using a Turbo Loader which must have used some sort of compression algorithm to load faster. (It had flashing/strobing colors around the border during loading). Fun times.

 

[BSONE]

I also remember Cobol programming on PC

1) Step one : Each Cobol line was punching one card e.g. 1000 punched cards
2) Step two : Reading the 1000 punched cards was punching e.g. 75 cards containing the source code.
3) Step three : Reading the 75 punched cards was generating the hexadecimal machine code.

This was BIG fun

Ironically Cobol as one of the oldest computer languages is probably one of the few programming jobs that will not be replaced by AI in the near future, and all the talent is retired. The other factor is that the remaining businesses that use Cobol are mission critical such as banking and government agencies who are willing to pay real life people to do the work.
Perhaps it might be an idea for some talented younger ones to pivot their skills towards Cobol?

 

[Berny]

Perhaps it might be an idea for some talented younger ones to pivot their skills towards Cobol?

Correct , there is currently a shortage for COBOL programmers !

 

[The_King]

When you rummage through your drawers looking for an old hard drive with information, but find something even more antique...

View attachment 296295View attachment 296295

Antique!?

Good grief the first PC I used you had to install MS-DOS 5.0 using these.

I had to setup AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS just to get the sound and other hardware to work.

CONFIG.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
FILES=30
BUFFERS=20
LASTDRIVE=E
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE
DEVICEHIGH=C:\CDROM\DRV\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001

AUOTEXEC.BAT
@ECHO OFF
PROMPT $P$G
PATH C:\DOS;C:\WINDOWS;C:\MOUSE
SET TEMP=C:\DOS
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T1
LH C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.COM
LH C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001
CLS
ECHO MS-DOS 5.0 Startup Complete.
VER

Good memories for me. sill love using CLi to this day...

 

[Sorrento]

Having to be half intelligent back in the past did keep the idiots off the internet (to a degree) & without some intelligence you could not install a PC, even getting a CD ROM when first introduced (and they were a fortune) was not simple task with having to install drivers for it as with hard drives, all the parameters had to be inputted, cylinders etc there was no auto recognize but I think I loved the challenge, maybe I miss the messing around you had to do then

 

[Antimalware18]

36

so my childhood years were interesting, the first PC we had was a old win95 machine my dad got for free from his job when i was a kid. he had a friend that was Tech knowledgable and he fixed it up for my family. it wasnt really used for anything besides playing Doom95, Wolfenstein and Megaman games (some off of old floppy drives)

I remember using dial-up and when we got high speed.

I also remember the first computer lab my middle school had and how the teachers would lose their minds when a child accidentally deleted somehting because no one at the school knew how to recover anything from the trash