On 2008-09-26 13:24:29 -0400, "Capt. JG" said:

Anyone remember the S100 bus? I worked with Concurrent CPM for a while.

I remember it and all the rest mentioned. The first time I saw a
Kaypro, I was in lust: A computer that you could carry as a
self-contained unit!

My dad was an early programmer, starting with "flip the switches" and
ending on an an IBM 360. For my 14th birthday, he took me down to see
his baby, then to the Academy of Music, featuring Dvorak's "New World
Symphony", my absolute favorite piece of music (I played French
horn).... That day is burned indelibly into my brain.

Here it is, 40 years later. Now, the machine I take down to the boat is
more powerful than the fastest supercomputers extant then. Dad's
computer was in a temple of technology; we very nearly had to put on
clean suits to enter the inner sanctum. We toss ours onto a settee
without a thought, slightly worry that it might be dropped a couple of
feet.

The march of tech is scary.

--
Jere Lull
Xan-à-Deux -- Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD
Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/
Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/

"Jere Lull" wrote in message
news:2008092614594875249-jerelull@maccom...
On 2008-09-26 13:24:29 -0400, "Capt. JG" said:

Anyone remember the S100 bus? I worked with Concurrent CPM for a while.

I remember it and all the rest mentioned. The first time I saw a Kaypro, I
was in lust: A computer that you could carry as a self-contained unit!

My dad was an early programmer, starting with "flip the switches" and
ending on an an IBM 360. For my 14th birthday, he took me down to see his
baby, then to the Academy of Music, featuring Dvorak's "New World
Symphony", my absolute favorite piece of music (I played French horn)....
That day is burned indelibly into my brain.

Here it is, 40 years later. Now, the machine I take down to the boat is
more powerful than the fastest supercomputers extant then. Dad's computer
was in a temple of technology; we very nearly had to put on clean suits to
enter the inner sanctum. We toss ours onto a settee without a thought,
slightly worry that it might be dropped a couple of feet.

The march of tech is scary.

--
Jere Lull
Xan-à-Deux -- Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD
Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/
Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/



I remember almost buying an Osborne... finally bought one of the first
Compaqs... the luggable.


--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

"Capt. JG" wrote in news:MMadnVnnvp4-
reasolutions:

I remember almost buying an Osborne... finally bought one of the first
Compaqs... the luggable.


--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com



Is your right arm 1.5" longer than your left like mine?....(c;

Everyone thought it was a bowling phenomenon. But, it only happened to us
Portable and Portable 286 owners....

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Capt. JG" wrote in news:MMadnVnnvp4-
reasolutions:

I remember almost buying an Osborne... finally bought one of the first
Compaqs... the luggable.


--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com



Is your right arm 1.5" longer than your left like mine?....(c;

Everyone thought it was a bowling phenomenon. But, it only happened to us
Portable and Portable 286 owners....



Yeah, but my golf game improved significantly. LOL

My first actual computer that I owned (I shared the Compaq with someone
else) was a Televideo (no harddisk, two 8" floppy drive). I got it in trade
for some work I was doing for a modem protocol company, where I could
actually talk on the same line as the modem tones for 30 seconds or so until
the modem dropped. Finally, I got sick of swapping floppies, went to a
computer show and bought a 17 meg HD for $450 (on sale). I had to put it in
an external box, and the cable was about 2 inches too long, which meant I
got a lot of crashes.

I suppose I should have kept mine, as it seems to have held it's value:

http://cgi.ebay.com/TeleVideo-TS-803...17103002r20375


--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

"Capt. JG" wrote in message
easolutions...
"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Capt. JG" wrote in news:MMadnVnnvp4-
reasolutions:

I remember almost buying an Osborne... finally bought one of the first
Compaqs... the luggable.


--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com



Is your right arm 1.5" longer than your left like mine?....(c;

Everyone thought it was a bowling phenomenon. But, it only happened to
us
Portable and Portable 286 owners....



Yeah, but my golf game improved significantly. LOL

My first actual computer that I owned (I shared the Compaq with someone
else) was a Televideo (no harddisk, two 8" floppy drive). I got it in
trade for some work I was doing for a modem protocol company, where I
could actually talk on the same line as the modem tones for 30 seconds or
so until the modem dropped. Finally, I got sick of swapping floppies, went
to a computer show and bought a 17 meg HD for $450 (on sale). I had to put
it in an external box, and the cable was about 2 inches too long, which
meant I got a lot of crashes.

I suppose I should have kept mine, as it seems to have held it's value:

http://cgi.ebay.com/TeleVideo-TS-803...17103002r20375



Actually, this one is slightly newer than the one I had. Mine only had two
floppy drives. More like this one. I maxed out the memory to 128K! Except
for the crashes, I loved that machine.

http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/...sp?st=1&c=1077

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

"Capt. JG" wrote in message
news
"Capt. JG" wrote in message
easolutions...
"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Capt. JG" wrote in news:MMadnVnnvp4-
reasolutions:

I remember almost buying an Osborne... finally bought one of the first
Compaqs... the luggable.


--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com



Is your right arm 1.5" longer than your left like mine?....(c;

Everyone thought it was a bowling phenomenon. But, it only happened to
us
Portable and Portable 286 owners....



Yeah, but my golf game improved significantly. LOL

My first actual computer that I owned (I shared the Compaq with someone
else) was a Televideo (no harddisk, two 8" floppy drive). I got it in
trade for some work I was doing for a modem protocol company, where I
could actually talk on the same line as the modem tones for 30 seconds or
so until the modem dropped. Finally, I got sick of swapping floppies,
went to a computer show and bought a 17 meg HD for $450 (on sale). I had
to put it in an external box, and the cable was about 2 inches too long,
which meant I got a lot of crashes.

I suppose I should have kept mine, as it seems to have held it's value:

http://cgi.ebay.com/TeleVideo-TS-803...17103002r20375



Actually, this one is slightly newer than the one I had. Mine only had two
floppy drives. More like this one. I maxed out the memory to 128K! Except
for the crashes, I loved that machine.

http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/...sp?st=1&c=1077



Ok, I must be getting old... I had the TS-1603, with the 8088. I recall that
I added an 8087 to it. Damn thing got so hot that it did the big melt down
eventually.

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

"Capt. JG" wrote in
easolutions:

Ok, I must be getting old... I had the TS-1603, with the 8088. I
recall that I added an 8087 to it. Damn thing got so hot that it did
the big melt down eventually.

--
"j" ganz @@
w

Aha! The Math Coprocessor! Going first class so 2+2=4 not
3.999999999992398237049865098712398740129386532847

It would even take a proper square root....er, ah, if it wasn't overheated
already.

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Liqui...uter_20Cooling
Damned overclockers!

"Capt. JG" wrote in news:P8adnVJnxPX_
reasolutions:

bought a 17 meg HD for $450 (on sale)

Wow! a bargain!

For the "new" PCXT, the biggest FULL HEIGHT hard drive was the Tulin
33MB, 4 platter monster. The receipt is still in my file cabinet...

Bought it from Crazy Bob's Computer Warehouse, in Atlanta through his
local store in Charleston. $2,450 in the box. An amazing space on a
DOS computer....(c;

No spreadsheet to wide.....

No document too long.....

Bob came to Charleston with his promo hot air balloon. I bought many
things for our little system at the Metrology Laboratory (Code 132),
Charleston Naval Shipyard....on the sly as parts. That position got me
a nice ride across the area for hours. What a great way to see the
countryside.

At the time, the Navy Department got hoodwinked by the stupid Air Force
into buying these HIDEOUS Zenith PCs because Zenith made it so you could
remove the hard drive in a little carrier and store it in the safe for
the military paranoid schizophrenics. Even after they found it it was a
hideous piece of ****, the contract forced us to buy them for years.
They were stacked up all over. Noone wanted them.

But, alas, I worked in ELECTRONICS and we FIXED THINGS. So, when I open
source ordered PARTS, that was ok. So, we ordered all our computers as
parts from whomever had the best deal. I built a hundred PCXTs for the
shipyard that WEREN'T HIDEOUS ZENITH PIECES OF CRAP! The other benefit
was the IT bureaucrats didn't have anything to track. They were PARTS,
not systems...(c; Sneaky damned yardbirds, we were.

The PCXT we did calibration tracking/reporting/interval calibration and
high speed printing of the Meter Card, a large document made for the
Burroughs' printers, was a PCXT under DOS 3.3. It had twin Tulin 33MB
drives and 256K of RAM. A custom bus card connected it to a NEC self-
threading 9-track mainframe tape drive in a desktop cabinet that cost
more than everything else in the system combined. I forget the big
parallel printer but it would dot-matrix print the multipart form at 600
cps perfectly. The forms were Z-fold in the box, 500 each.

I wrote the system using Dbase III, but as CODE, not the automated Dbase
bugware it wrote itself. The code was long because they kept adding to
my tasking. The system, at 4.77 Mhz, slowed because of Dbase's
interpreter, of course.

Then, Clipper came out with this snazzy Dbase III COMPILER that
assembled the libraries and machine code of your system into a huge .exe
file that, by those standards, ran like greased lightning. My Clipper
serial number is 1700...(c; Navy refused to buy it and we got caught
trying to run around the end, so I paid $495 out of my pocket for it.

The results were amazing. I took control of the calibration system for
over $46,000,000 in mechanical and electronic test equipment owned by
Charleston Naval Shipyard on a PCXT. Pearl Harbor had $10M LESS
inventory in their local system....on a DEC VAX with a whole IT staff,
desks full of cleak-typists, massive outlays of money. I offered my
software to them at a meeting in Norfolk Naval Shipyard, causing quite a
stir.

Some big bureaucrat from NAVSEA got wind of it, a bigwig looking for a
promotion. He came to the lab and demanded I hand over a copy of the
software so he could put his name on it and make GM-99. I popped a
floppy in a drive and copied the COMPILED software off onto it with MY
NAME and CNSYD on the opening screen so there would be no doubt where it
came from or who wrote/installed it. I handed it to him. He knew
nothing of Clipper, only that the system was written in Dbase III and he
could steal DBASE III source code.

God you should have heard him cursing me out on the phone, threatening
to have me fired. I calmly told his majesty that the source code would
die with me if he screwed me over. My boss and his boss agreed. I
would give any entity in the Navy the software customized for their
installation that asked for it. Of course, they got the COMPILED
version and Clipper made a huge mess of the code with all those
libraries interspersed with the code....(c; A 5 line DBASE III program
was over 350KB compiled!...

The cool thing in it was the big tape machine....my idea 100%. I'd seen
these nice 9-track drives with bus adapter cards and drivers in Computer
Shopper for thousands. When we first built the system, all I did was
run the custom database, print perfect Meter Cards so the technicians on
the bench didh't hand write them, which was creating 25 records for one
micrometer, a real database mess keypunched by a faceless puncher in
China Lake, California where all these documents were sent for batch
processing. The replacement cards didn't come back for 6 months. The
trouble was on the nuclear sub overhaul, there were LOTS of
calibrations....regular interval, just before it was used to verify it,
during use every X days while it was being used, at the end of the job
it was used on to make SURE it had not become uncalibrated on a mission
critical part endangering the planet...or a few submariners at least.
Hence, all the manual card generation the old batch processed mainframe
guys couldn't handle.

The local system completely replaced the system....which, of course in a
government bureaucracy, couldn't be turned off by even a diety of your
choice! The micrometer was cal'd...that night, it got a new pre-printed
card from its latest record update...every time it had to be calibrated
ONLY preprinted cards, printed within 24 hours, was used to print it.
If they dropped it and had to recal it twice in a day, they simply
brought me any id number off it, and Gloria, my single GS-3 typist could
dump a single card in a heartbeat....at 600 cps! 40% database error
dropped in a single month to .6% then to zero....and stayed there. Navy
couldn't believe it. Want to know one or all the equipment and its
status at any time? Here, let me change the forms out for some z-fold
tractor paper and I'll dump it for you....(c; Unheard of. The shipyard
commander had a full report on his desk printed Friday night every
Monday morning. Test Equipment that always was in poor condition got
replaced with new...without question...it was here on the report what
was crap this past week.

Oh, back to my tape drive.........sorry.....

My preprinted cards, properly filled out were input by Gloria for every
calibration done each day. When the "trash box", as we called it after
the database update, got full....I SHIPPED IT TO CALIFORNIA AND THEY
KEYPUNCHED IT ALL IN AGAIN ON THE BIG MONSTER so they would have their
database for our stuff for their bigshot reports. How stupid and
wasteful. I shot off a Benny Sugg (Navy Beneficial Suggestions are a
very nice way to earn extra money for us grunts in the trenches). I
outlined an idea to buy and install a big 9-track tape drive that I
could duplicate all that keypunching on each month and simply MAIL IT to
California USPS. He'd mount the tape, run it and update my database
with EVERY calibration which would keep his database from having
keypunch errors caused by the superbored punchers that were screwing up
our perfect error score, every time....

They bought it! I even got a nice Navy check for saving the Navy
thousands per month on the keypunching workload! The IT bureaucrats
resisted, at first, until our admiral had lunch with their admiral and
their admiral dropped by to see how we were doing it on this newfangled
tiny little PCXT box with the green screen. Cooperation improved and
they created a dummy database for me to trash, as they put it. I pulled
apart our master database with a little Dbase code routine and stacked
the exact data pattern they demanded on the first 9-track tape created
by anyone in the Navy ON A PCXT...and mailed it parcel post! The
database loaded perfectly. I kept sending monthly tapes of our activity
to the database and the nice guy I had contact with threw up his hands
in disgust. "It's perfect!", he lamented. My database, of course, was
only the first 3/4" of tape on the huge reels....hee hee. The IT guys
came to watch me load it all the way from California...a very proud day
for the hackers of the "Metrology Laboratory, Data Division".....Gloria
and me...(c;

That little system ran just the way I left it in 1988 until the day the
Metrology Lab closed in 1992 when the Charleston Naval Shipyard was
closed for good, the finest shipyard in the US Navy....all that yard
talent lost forever. How awful.

I still have the system, however, on some floppies in the file
cabinet...(c; I called Clipper and asked how much was an upgrade from
Version 1.3 about the turn of the century. "What's your serial
number?", she asked me. "1700", I returned. "What's the rest of it??",
she wanted to know. "That's it, 1700. I'm an old customer." She put
me on hold and the CEO came online to confirm my information. He
promised me a return call when he found my receipt in the attic. "Geez,
you ARE serial number 1700!", he said when he called me back. "We had 8
people and were working out of my dining room, then." I thanked him for
the nice software and told him what I used it for at my own expense.
"Give me your current address. I'm sending you a free upgrade and
everything else we ever wrote. You guys kept us in peanut butter during
some really rough times buying our stuff." I still have the new version
in its nice display box on my bookshelf. It even came on one of those
new fangled CD-ROMs for some OS called Windows! How cool!

On 2008-09-26 20:50:43 -0400, Larry said:

"Capt. JG" wrote in news:P8adnVJnxPX_
reasolutions:

bought a 17 meg HD for $450 (on sale)

Wow! a bargain!

This thread is SO off-topic, but I'm laughing too much to say "stop".

--
Jere Lull
Xan-à-Deux -- Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD
Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/
Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/

"Jere Lull" wrote in message
news:2008092701031650073-jerelull@maccom...
On 2008-09-26 20:50:43 -0400, Larry said:

"Capt. JG" wrote in news:P8adnVJnxPX_
reasolutions:

bought a 17 meg HD for $450 (on sale)

Wow! a bargain!

This thread is SO off-topic, but I'm laughing too much to say "stop".

--
Jere Lull
Xan-à-Deux -- Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD
Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/
Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/



Hey, my first modem was a 300 to 1200 baud... $475 new. It was so cheap I
bought three of them! LOL

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com