this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
100 points (91.7% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
1168 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Holy CRAP, am I literally the oldest person here?
CP/M, with the 8" disks
Then DOS -> Windows -> Linux (Mandrake, then tried a few different ones, then Debian and stuck with Debian)
I started with the last version of DOS, 6.2, on PC.
Unless you count the Amstrad CPC464 I had before that? Ran on tapes, disks were futuristic!
Which of us is older? I'm not sure it natters. What matters is that the kids will never understand the elegance of a command line interface or of running out of memory to store your code.
Haha yeah I did some tapes. There was some crazy thing that hooked up to my TV at home that used cassette tapes.
And yeah, BBS culture, and programming on some of the old school machines, PEEK and POKE and pre-OSX Macs, and segmented memory in the 8088-286 era. To this day I have never really understood what the point of segmented memory was, but that was what we had back in the day, and we were grateful.
I also got to do some programming at a place that had one of the massive Onyx2 machines. It lived in a whole separate room and was the size of a refrigerator. Good stuff.
Sounds like my first computer, Tandy Color Computer from Radio Shack. Had it hooked to the TV via RF, & learned to program in BASIC.
Ah, the precious main memory.... Let's see if we can't get this mouse driver to load in upper memory to save me some precious main memory...
Yep, and then DOS 5 coming in like space program technology, that could put the whole OS in high memory and give you 640 kb all for the user programs. And it had a DISK CACHE (which for the most part didn't work).
Godlike I tell you
๐
You're probably about my age. I was just late getting into computers. First attempt at university was dumb terminals connected to some Unix host. Failed everything and dropped out. Went back a few years later and had 8086 based PCs booting DOS off diskettes.
You've got me beat. I've only seen 8" disks in coworkers "check out this shit" collection.
Back when floppies were floppy. Did they then pull out all their reel to reel tapes? Used to have stacks of those.
I have actually used a reel to reel, but it's cheating because it was military gear and it was probably left over from the Vietnam era.
Edit: apparently early 80's. Scary. That thing felt ancient in 1991.