BoatBanter.com - Time to retire the name.

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Time to retire the name.

Eisboch wrote:
I've been using the "handle" "Eisboch" since my early days on the net back
in 1989 or '90. I had a super modern 286 computer, 13mhz clock speed and a
huge hard drive with 20 mbytes of storage space. It ran on DOS with a
pre-MSWindows software suite called "GeoWorks". GeoWorks actually had a
windows type format and even included a word processing program called
"GeoWrite". I signed onto an internet access through Prodigy and was
heavily involved in some of the midi sequencing groups and "chat" rooms.
You had to have a screen name, so I became "Eisboch" because I happened to
be drinking a Coors Eisboch blend that night.

Anyway, it's time to retire the handle. Mrs.E thinks it's stupid, and I am
getting kind of tired of it anyway.

From now on I shall be known as ......

"Sam Adams"

Just kidding.

RCE

Man...GeoWorks.....THAT brings back memories! It was the first
graphical interface I used. I was anti-windows, because anything
graphical like that slowed my computer down too much. Besides that,
most programs at that time were still DOS based. Oh, I had prodigy,
also! I remember a guy I was going to school with bought a 386 that ran
at 20Mhz. I thought he was the cat's ass with that thing... I was SO
jealous! Oh, and remember, to get any real speed out of them, you had
to add a math coprocesser!!

Time to retire the name.

Skipper wrote:
Harry Krause wrote:

Eisboch wrote:

From now on I shall be known as ......

From now on, your new name is J. Alfred Prufrock.

Suitable for an East Coaster.

--
Skipper

Skipper, which coast are YOU on?

Time to retire the name.

On Fri, 27 Jan 2006 07:07:15 GMT, "Bryan"
wrote:

I forgot all about dot matrix printers. I realized the other day that my
kids have no idea about the punch cards!

Punched cards were hi tech. I started on punched paper tape with no
real editing capability. We had this huge clunky machine called a
Burroughs Flexowriter with a keyboard which punched the tape. The
computer was a Control Data 160A, as big as a desk, 4K of memory and
it cost about $80K circa 1967. To compile and run a Fortran program
it was first necessary to read the tape with the boot loader, then the
tape with the Fortran compiler, followed by the source code tape
(twice), and finally it would spit out a new tape with the object code
on it. At that point you were ready to re-boot and test your program.

Time to retire the name.

On Fri, 27 Jan 2006 04:10:41 -0500, "RCE" wrote:

"Wayne.B" wrote in message
.. .

What was the name of the network utility that you could use to connect
with Compuserve? That was my first inkling that some sort of
universal connectivity might someday be possible.

Oh, man ... I have a hazy remembrance of that, but forget the name or
details. It was some bizarre way to get your computer hooked up ... It
will come to me.

I'm kind of remembering that it was something like "Telnet" although
that may not be exactly correct. If you didn't have a Compuserve
local number, you could dial into their network and then log onto a
pass through connection to somewhere else. It was very hi tech in the
late 70s, early 80s.

Time to retire the name.

"Wayne.B" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 27 Jan 2006 07:07:15 GMT, "Bryan"
wrote:

I forgot all about dot matrix printers. I realized the other day that my
kids have no idea about the punch cards!

Punched cards were hi tech. I started on punched paper tape with no
real editing capability. We had this huge clunky machine called a
Burroughs Flexowriter with a keyboard which punched the tape. The
computer was a Control Data 160A, as big as a desk, 4K of memory and
it cost about $80K circa 1967. To compile and run a Fortran program
it was first necessary to read the tape with the boot loader, then the
tape with the Fortran compiler, followed by the source code tape
(twice), and finally it would spit out a new tape with the object code
on it. At that point you were ready to re-boot and test your program.

I remember punched tape. In 1973, I worked for a land company that
purchased a computer to keep track of the accounting of property owner's
installment contracts. The computer was made by Singer, of all things. The
program was loaded via punched tape,and the individual property owner
records were on large heavy paper ledger cards. Each ledger card had a
magnetic strip along the long side, retaining the data for each account.
Account activity was also printed on the ledger card by a dot matrix
printer. The same device read and wrote the mag strip and printed the
activity on the card. Presumably the individual account data needed to be
stored on the ledger cards because the computer itself didn't have the
storage capability to do it.

At the same time I was taking a Fortran class in college. I would type code
into a teletype machine and then sometime later go to the computer center to
retrieve a stack of punch cards. The punch cards would then be loaded into
the computer and the program compiled and run and a printout delivered.
Only to find a typo on line 32. Arrrgh! Start over.

Time to retire the name.

"Calif Bill" wrote in message
k.net...

"Bryan" wrote in message
. com...

"Calif Bill" wrote in message
ink.net...

"RCE" wrote in message
...

"Bryan" wrote in message
. com...

"Eisboch" wrote in message
...
I've been using the "handle" "Eisboch" since my early days on the
net back in 1989 or '90. I had a super modern 286 computer, 13mhz
clock speed and a huge hard drive with 20 mbytes of storage space.
It ran on DOS with a pre-MSWindows software suite called "GeoWorks".
GeoWorks actually had a windows type format and even included a word
processing program called "GeoWrite". I signed onto an internet
access through Prodigy and was heavily involved in some of the midi
sequencing groups and "chat" rooms. You had to have a screen name, so
I became "Eisboch" because I happened to be drinking a Coors Eisboch
blend that night.

Anyway, it's time to retire the handle. Mrs.E thinks it's stupid,
and I am getting kind of tired of it anyway.

From now on I shall be known as ......

"Sam Adams"

Just kidding.

RCE

Nice to meet you, Mr. RCE.
You started with one of them fancy high-powered 286's of which I could
only dream! I started with the 8086 xt and a 20, yes 20, MB HDD. I
loved my DOS; I didn't understand why people needed all that Mac and
Windows nonsense. DOS: just tell your computer what to do and it did
it! Simple as that. Remember when the excitement of opening a gif
meant starting the process and coming back after dinner to see if the
gif had finished filling in all the pixels? I actually started with
an Apple (was it IIC?), encountered a mac in grad school, and switched
to the DOS world when I couldn't find a mac program that could handle
the graphical representation (believe it or not) of my lab data. Boy
that was a long time ago!

It is. My super fast "Pal" 286 even ran CADD 1, an early cad design
program. CADD was developed through version 6 as a DOS only program
then was bought out by Autodesk (Autocad). CADD was recently
re-introduced in a Windows version and I just downloaded a copy. It's
like old times.

The Pal had a normal clock speed of 8 mhz, but had a "turbo" button
that, when pushed, took it to a lightning fast 13 mhz.

RCE

I started out on the Internet with a DEC PDP. Probably an 11/05 but
maybe an 11/34. Still have a great spicy peanut noodle recipe printed
on dot matrix printer. When it was a text only world. Except for ascii
art.

I forgot all about dot matrix printers. I realized the other day that my
kids have no idea about the punch cards!

You want some. I still got a couple of thousand. We use them for note
cards by the phone. No holes in them.

Thanks, Bill. I think I'll pass on the generous offer. My wife is an RN so
our home is filled with pads of paper from pharmaceutical vendors.

Time to retire the name.