Brother, my first box was a Commodore 64...Originally Posted by johnvanvliet
Let the nostalgia posts commence!
Last edited by acrosome; 12-11-2017 at 08:05 PM.
Was there a windows 1 or 2? The OS's I remember from then are DOS of course, and I remember the Apple 2, and was it the Atari OS(?) there was some sort of windows like GUI before windows that I remember. And then the first windows I remember is 3.1.
GEM from digital research was much more fun than Windows 1 or 2.
Of course, I was always partial to my old Apple ][. The tape drive (err, cassette player/radio) port on the ZX-81 was just too much hassle and the keyboard was too tiny to do much at all with it. Of course, I still have the old ZX-81 and the Apple is long gone...
The biggest problem with the command line for a lot of folks is that it's inherently non-discoverable. WIMP lets you poke at stuff once you master move and click. A command line means that you need to know at least a few things to start typing to get anywhere at all.
Last edited by waldronate; 12-11-2017 at 10:37 PM.
Yes. Windows 1 was something of a toy. It didn't do much, but it was a pet project of Bill Gates to show at starting level where a PC could go in terms of graphics. Commodore, Atari, GEM and others already were doing some graphics, where IBM PC-DOS and Microsoft's MS-DOS were character-based systems designed to support the IBM PC architecture, which was intended to be a data-crunching machine and nothing else. In the late 1980s, Windows 2.0 appeared. It still didn't do a lot by any modern standard, but it was a necessary GUI application for programs like Aldus Pagemaker desktop publishing or Microsoft's own new Excel spreadsheet. However, Windows 1 and 2 were GUI applications for MS-DOS, not operating systems. Both Pagemaker and Excel were delivered with runtime versions of Windows 2.0, which had only the parts of Windows necessary to run these programs. With the release of Windows 2.11, Microsoft shook the PC world up a bit. To run it without any hitches, it required an 80286 or 80386 processor (IBM AT levels). That rather quickly made the basic 8086 and 8088 processors (IBM XT) obsolete. A lot of the world wanted then to run the current version of Excel. One could run Windows 2.11 and Excel 2.0 on an XT, but not everything worked.
These were different days. MS-DOS and PC-DOS were the main PC operating systems. Word Perfect was the leading word processor, with Microsoft Word No. 2. Lotus 1-2-3 was the leading spreadsheet program with the combined Microsoft Multiplan and Microsoft Chart running far behind in sales. Ashton-Tate dBase was the database program. Microsoft had no database of its own, but it did sell someone else's product. My recollection is that it was called RBase.
Then 1990 came along. Excel already started bypassing 1-2-3, Microsoft Word for Windows bypassed Word Perfect, and Microsoft Access gradually outpaced the two leading databases, dBase and Borland Paradox. Today all these once great names that kept Microsoft in the corner as an operating system producer are only fading memories of old farts like me. So it goes ... so it went.
Mark Oliva
The Vintyri (TM) Project
RBase is correct I think. It offered a bit more in the back end as well IIRC. I never dabbled with it too much, but someone I was working with was trying to link it up to AutoCAD. AutoCAD came on something like 15 x 5.25" floppies and required a dongle in the parallel port to work. The plan was to produce a drawing that would produce a cutting list that would then be sent off to engineering, but it would also allocate the materials in the stores for the job, remove from stock and do the costings. Sort of early ERP stuff. I don't know how that went because I switched engineering for science.
I remember GEM and thinking it was more of a toy than anything. At least its PC implementation. There was no 'multi-tasking' like we consider it now. Mice were still for draughtsmen in specialist drawing packages. If you needed something remote you had to know the full path of its location and get it using FTP, no pointing and clicking on files. Also it was com.cartographersguild for URLs rather than the way round they are now. I think there was something called Gopher that could search for stuff. When I was at Uni there was a transition from terminal based VAX systems to PC networks. They were set up in clusters using 10Base2 at first. They had Windows 3 on them I think with VAX in a terminal window.
You have a great memory! I recall all of it - especially the 15-floppy AutoCAD package with the dongle, along with the illegal software that got one around it. I don't know how everyone else sees it, but those weren't the good old days for me. I much prefer working with Windows 10 Pro and the software I have today!
Another thing were all of the good and bad Windows versions, according to general opinion and the PC-Press:
Windows 1: Hardly anyone knew it.
Windows 2: Known mostly only in it's runtime version but drawing some fans of its own for Paint.
Windows 3.0: A superstar in it's time.
Windows 3.1/3.11: Ditto, except for moaning over 3.0 programs that didn't run under 3.1 and 3.11
Windows NT through 3.5: Known mostly only to IT types. Not fully Windows 3.x compatible.
Windows 95: Superstar for private users. (Business was moving toward NT.)
Windows NT 4.0: The first really solid Windows version.
Windows 98: For private users, a somewhat better Win 95.
Windows 98 2nd Edition: A somewhat better Win 98.
Windows 2000: Another really solid Windows, successor to NT 4.0
Windows Millennium Edition (ME): Probably the worst Windows ever. Loaded with errors, delighted in crashing.
Windows XP: Goodbye DOS architecture. Possibly the best-liked Windows of all. Most users preferred it to its successor.
Windows Vista: After ME, maybe the second most unpopular Windows.
Windows 7: Many think it was the best Windows of all to date. Maybe it was.
Windows 8: Rather unpopular. The GUI displeased a lot of users.
Windows 8.1: Fixed some of the interface problems of 8.0. Still small sales and installation numbers.
Windows 10: Mixed verdicts. The final judgment has yet to be made.
Then there also are the various Windows NT Server and Windows Server versions. Seeing they seldom serve as a user front end, I won't mumble about them.
I'm curious how Windows 10 will be judged in the long run. The many complaints about device drivers becoming incompatible and other compatibility problems probably won't be taken seriously by posterity. The same problems have cropped up with many past Windows versions too, particularly NT in its earlier generations. I have nothing against Windows 10. I don't use any of the "advantages" the two creator updates have given me, and if it serves me any better in my usage than Windows 7 did, I don't know where. I don't use Edge or Cortana, so they do nothing for me either. But as far as I'm concerned, Windows 10 runs fine. The GIMP is absolutely fast on our machines, but they all have SSD drives and 32 to 64 GB RAM.
Mark Oliva
The Vintyri (TM) Project
I had an Atari 520ST as my first home machine, and used both DBASE and PARADOX at my first couple of jobs. Then I was part of a team converting thousands of docs to Word for a government organisation, and I've used Windows all my life since 3.1.
Though I was always aware that the freedom of the user to meddle with the settings and personalise Windows was being gradually eroded down through the years, I simply didn't realise how much of it was gone until yesterday evening, and Mint.
Now, however, I'm stuck in a quandary.
I'm an administrator/data analyst by trade, so of course I have MS Office, and I need to stay in touch with new developments in business software and have some of it at least on my home PC - this laptop.
Just how difficult would it be to convert this laptop to a dual boot system, so that I could use either Windows or Linux - depending on whether I wanted to work with Office or map something in GIMP/Krita?
Half 'dark', half 'light'
Free parchments | Free seamless textures | Battle tiles / floor patterns | Room 1024 - textures for CC3 | GUILD CITY INDEX
No one is ever a failure until they give up trying
It's easy to dual boot, Mouse. In fact, the Mint installer has that option built in. You tell it what size of partition to allocate to Mint and it does it all for you.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams"
Thanks ChickPea
What extra bits and pieces do I need to get hold of to do that? Or can I just go right ahead and click the 'install Mint' disc on the boot stick I've just made?
Will Windows just let me do that to my PC, or are there certain barriers I have to break down before I start?
(Sorry again for all the silly questions!)
Free parchments | Free seamless textures | Battle tiles / floor patterns | Room 1024 - textures for CC3 | GUILD CITY INDEX
No one is ever a failure until they give up trying
They were good old days because that's how things were. You spent as much time having to know about how things worked as you did actually being productive. With today's software it's probably 'even better now days' because there's more time spent being productive. I could have done an IT degree but I opted for science because I thought that a scientist who knows a bit computing is better than a computer tech that knows a bit of science. I went through uni during a time when if you needed something then you wrote a little program yourself unless you were lucky to have access to something like Minitab for statistics. It was the same for a while afterwards when I was working. Even now, though, pen and book is preferred to computer records for lab journals. Lab journals are generally accepted in court over computer records because someone would have to explain blockchains and timestamps to a judge
The trouble is legacy. An example would be gas chromatography in a chemistry laboratory. A GC can cost as little as £30k to purchase, install and commission, but £40-50k is probably more typical. That's a significant cap-ex for a small company and it would be at least a 15 year investment. The hardware to interface said GC to PC has evolved quite a lot during the lifetime of the GC. Not so long ago a PC running NT with a 10Base2 ISA network card would happily sit there churning out samples day and night. But when that PC fails (as is the case with something that's running 24/7 for most of the year) and a replacement has to be sought, then legacy becomes an issue. Finding a board with ISA is one challenge. Then there's the issue with legacy drivers. The chipset &c. on the new board may not have NT compatible drivers, NT is long since discontinued. More recent operating systems won't recognise the ISA card, and getting them to support that old dinosaur 10Base2...
A failing PC that costs a couple of hundred quid could quite well become an unexpected cap-ex of £30-50k for a new GC. And if you've got a Mass Spectrometer on there too you're looking at another chunk of cash.
I'm not saying that operating systems should still support everything going back to the advent of computers, it would be ludicrous. I think some of the 'more and more bloated' comments are probably due to legacy support in some cases so inevitably some things have to be dropped. It can be quite devastating for a small business for something as relatively cheap as a PC failing though.
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