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diy solar

I can't even express the right words....

MurphyGuy

MurphyGuy

It just needs a bigger hammer
Joined
May 20, 2020
Messages
4,129
Oh man.. It was back in the early 80's when I was using a computer called a TRS80 made by Radio Shack.. Then sometime in the late 80's, I upgraded to a computer with an Intel 386 and had a math co-processor installed to run AutoCad.. Damn, that thing could take 8 hours to render a single 3d drawing...

For you folks who have never used a phone modem measured in the 300 to 56k baud rate, you don't know what you missed...

If you (could have) started downloading a 1080p movie at 300baud back in the early 80's, I bet it would still be downloading today..

 
I was active on a few BBS's back in the late 80's. I could only afford a 1200 baud modem. That worked fine for posting but downloading anything took forever. I still have the receipt for my system memory upgrade from 640k to 1MB. $310 back in 1989.
 
+1

Had a 300 baud Atari modem. In the early 90s... 14.4kbps!!!! WTF!!!!???

I came through school the year after they trashed the "TRASH 80"s and their 8" floppies. We got the Radio Shack Tandy 1000s with CGA!!!! OMG!!!!

8087 FTW!
 
Ah, the good old days of computers. I spent hours at the mall Radio Shack typing BASIC code into their TRS-80. Bought an Atari 800 in 1980. It had 16kB of memory. Spent something like $200 for a second 16kB memory upgrade. Connecting to BBSes on a 300 baud modem was a treat. Always needed to be sure to call using a local number so I didn't cause a large phone bill. The wrong prefix 10 miles away could cost $0.25 a minute in those days. Nothing worse than waiting an hour downloading a few hundred kilobyte file only to have mom pick up the phone to make a call not knowing I was on the computer and the modem connection would get lost.

A 300 baud modem could download 30 bytes per second. A modern movie of say 2GB would take 66,666,667 seconds. That's 771.6 days! Now we complain if that takes over 15 minutes. :)
 
TerryH said:
I remember carrying around boxes of punched cards in Fortran when I was in college. lol... Those were the days.
Click to expand...
I did that one semester in college as well. Nothing sadder than seeing someone who had dropped their stack of cards and had to spend hours trying to get them back in the right order because they hadn't taken the time to number them.

OK, one thing is sadder - dropping your ice cream cone on the ground after one lick.
 
corn18 said:
I still have the receipt for my system memory upgrade from 640k to 1MB. $310 back in 1989.
Click to expand...
In '83 my high school got an IBM PC XT with a 10MB hard drive. That was like $1000 just for the hard drive. We were in awe. How could we ever fill a hard drive that held the equivalent of 30 5-1/4" floppy disks? These days that would hold about 4 pictures from your phone.
 
MurphyGuy said:
Oh man.. It was back in the early 80's when I was using a computer called a TRS80 made by Radio Shack.. Then sometime in the late 80's, I upgraded to a computer with an Intel 386 and had a math co-processor installed to run AutoCad.. Damn, that thing could take 8 hours to render a single 3d drawing...

For you folks who have never used a phone modem measured in the 300 to 56k baud rate, you don't know what you missed...

If you (could have) started downloading a 1080p movie at 300baud back in the early 80's, I bet it would still be downloading today..

Click to expand...
About 4 years to download. 4GB movie at 300baud

But yeah I remember those days, use to sell people 1GB 5.25" disk drives for $1000 for their BBS

110 baud teletype in my garage back in the 1980's
 
Ah the good old days, I recall helping my high school guidance counselor set up an Apple II (maybe an Apple II+)at her house, she lived on the same street, I grew up on, was friends with my parents, etc. She had been assigned to evaluate the educational potential of the Apple II for the local high school before they bought a few dozen of them for a computer lab. Fast forward nearly 40 years and I found myself helping her setup a wifi repeater, and a Roku for her youngest now teenage grand kids to use when they evacuated to her house for a few weeks when hurricane Ida hit near their home outside of New Orleans a couple of months ago.
 
I bought a Tandy 1000 back in the day. Thousand bucks for a computer without a hard drive! Had 2 five and a half-inch floppy drives. I was awed when they introduced a 20 mg hard drive for the Tandy, it was $450. A cheap smartphone now has a thousand times more processing power than my old Tandy.
 
Ok,

While most of the post hit on some good notes, by 2001 (ish) we had some decent computers and your OS was still below 500 megs.

Now a days your video card almost certainly has 500 megs just for the driver download.

I have to keep wondering, how did the code grow that large? What is really going on in there?
 
Loadtoad said:
I bought a Tandy 1000 back in the day. Thousand bucks for a computer without a hard drive! Had 2 five and a half-inch floppy drives. I was awed when they introduced a 20 mg hard drive for the Tandy, it was $450. A cheap smartphone now has a thousand times more processing power than my old Tandy.
Click to expand...

Was it the "hard card" that installed in an XT bus slot? My buddy got the hard card. The storage was amazing, but it performed little better than the floppy speed wise. A year later, I learned about interleaving on my first Seagate drive. Turned out that turd needed to be interleaved at 4:1 instead of 2:1. Performance improved dramatically.
 
rmaddy said:
I did that one semester in college as well. Nothing sadder than seeing someone who had dropped their stack of cards and had to spend hours trying to get them back in the right order because they hadn't taken the time to number them.

OK, one thing is sadder - dropping your ice cream cone on the ground after one lick.
Click to expand...

That was me! lol...
 
TerryH said:
That was me! lol...
Click to expand...
Had to boot a PDP8 with the front panel toggles so it would read a paper tape that had the boot code then the PDP8 would run the card reader that sent the FORTRAN code to the Control Data mainframe where we could execute our program on a computer that was less powerful than the computer in my Apple watch.

And the smart kids coded their punch cards with an order number so they could be easily resorted if you dropped your deck.
 
NwCali said:
I have to keep wondering, how did the code grow that large? What is really going on in there?
Click to expand...

This is one of my biggest gripes. Back in the day, code had to be written tight and efficiently to fit in the limited memory. Then once memory became cheap and plentiful, code started being written to just get the job done without any care to how much memory it takes.

Besides the TRS-80, one of my favorite computers from the day was the TI-99. Thing was built like a tank with it's expansion cabinet and "clamshell" boards for it. .
 
Texas-Mark said:
This is one of my biggest gripes. Back in the day, code had to be written tight and efficiently to fit in the limited memory. Then once memory became cheap and plentiful, code started being written to just get the job done without any care to how much memory it takes.

Besides the TRS-80, one of my favorite computers from the day was the TI-99. Thing was built like a tank with it's expansion cabinet and "clamshell" boards for it. .
Click to expand...
I learned to program with QBasic. Half the challenge was getting the program to fit on a floppy disk when you finished.
 
i ran a bulletin board for the commodore we were linked to europe and all that there the phone line. one person on the board at a time . you waited your turn. to log in . exciting times commodore ruled ..
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