For those interested in old computers

[Michael Hodgson]

17 minutes ago, Enterprisingwestern said:

 

One??, I'd need 3 or 4!

 

Mike.

So could I.  Unfortunately I only saved one of each at the time.

[MyRule1]

As this RMweb my old computer story brings together computers and railways. In 1971 I joined Barclays Bank's computing department and at that time it was merging it's systems with those of Martin's Bank which it had recently taken over. The Martin's staff told us that a few years earlier they had installed some new  disks drives. These were the 14 in platter type and I remember we were told during training about how the read write heads floated at a height of less than a human hair diameter above the platter. Martin's discovered that they had a very high failure rate. It was then realised that the data centre was in Willesden and the vibration from passing trains was causing the failures.

[2E Sub Shed]

5 minutes ago, MyRule1 said:

Martin's discovered that they had a very high failure rate. It was then realised that the data centre was in Willesden and the vibration from passing trains was causing the failures.

Worked for a company and we had equipment containing Winchester Drives aka hard disks, and two data centres, one at Warrington and one in London, with a common spares pool , this sometimes required transfer between sites.

 

After a couple of "Dead on Arrival" incidents when trying to fit a spare that had been moved between sites out of hours, it had to be impressed on staff, that motorcycle couriers were not to be used to move them.

Edited August 29, 2023 by 2E Sub Shed

[RFS]

When I started work the company had just installed three of these "high capacity" devices - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell

 

Each of these devices could hold up to 400 Mb of data - ie two-thirds of a CD no less. Needless to say, they were very error prone....

[pH]

23 minutes ago, MyRule1 said:

These were the 14 in platter type and I remember we were told during training about how the read write heads floated at a height of less than a human hair diameter above the platter. Martin's discovered that they had a very high failure rate. It was then realised that the data centre was in Willesden and the vibration from passing trains was causing the failures.

I worked with a woman who had been in customer support for ICL in central London in the late 1960s/early 1970s. They took patches/data etc. to and from customer sites on removable magnetic data and had terrible problems with data corruption. Someone eventually twigged what the problem was, and they were told not to travel by Underground.

[Hroth]

9 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Yes, they were replaced by the 3½ " (non-flopping)  floppy disc.

The design specification for which was "must fit in a standard (North American) shirt pocket".

 

AKA a "stiffy".....

To some people anyway!

 

Of course, Amstrad inflicted the consumer with the 3" disk when they introduced the PCW 8256 wordprocessor/CPM computer!

I suppose the spec for that was that it "must fit in a standard (European) shirt pocket"

 

 

[John M Upton]

Ah, the Amstrad PCW 8256!  Did most of my college work on one of those and their short lived NC100 portable machine too (Still got that!)

 

The PCW came with the slowest dot matrix printer known to mankind, I set it late one night to print my final assignment, went and watched Prisoner Cell Block H (so it must have been a Tuesday night after News at Ten) and it was still printing some five hours later....

 

Oldest still regularly used bit of old tech I still possess now is a 2000 vintage HP Jornada 720 PDA, revolutionary at the time with its intergral proper keyboard although it does require me to still use semi obsolete Compact Flash (CF) memory cards and I have a Really Useful Box full of broken ones (including the basically identical 710 and 728 versions) to keep me supplied with spare parts.

 

It has never been bettered in my opinion.

[KeithMacdonald]

3 hours ago, Hroth said:

Of course, Amstrad inflicted the consumer with the 3" disk when they introduced the PCW 8256 wordprocessor/CPM computer!

 

I'm told they inflicted the consumer with a few other things as well.

 

Around that time, we were custom-building SQL database servers at the time with (gasp) a 20MHz 80286 motherboard, and (gasp) 200MB SCSI hard discs. Specially air freighted from the USA. Explaining the very concept of a database server was uphill work with some of our customers.

 

Anyway, shortly after Amstrad released their first PCs with a hard disc drive (10MB?) we had a visit from a Seagate sales rep, as we were in the market for "big" hard disc drives.  The Seagate sales rep told us his sorry tale of trying to sell Seagate hard drives to Alan Sugar. But misunderstanding his target customer, the Seagate sales rep had boasted of their three year warranty, saying that was worth paying extra for. According to the sales rep, Alan Sugar exploded in rage - "Three years is no f***ing good to me, I'm only offering a one year warranty, these drives only have to last one year and one day. Now f**k off and come back when you can give me a better price".

 

IIRC the Amstrad PCs had some weird BIOS as well. While we able to add 8-bit networking cards to other PCs with no problem, the Amstrads never liked them. I still have a pile of coaxial Ethernet cables left over from that - anyone want some?

[SteveyDee68]

51 minutes ago, John M Upton said:

Ah, the Amstrad PCW 8256!  Did most of my college work on one of those

Having been the only male student to do touch typing at sixth form college*, I invested in one of those for doing my degree, as I could type much quicker than write plus I would get (and still do) writer’s cramp due to the way I grip my pen (way too tightly, basically).

 

I added a second drive (effectively making it an 8512!) but those 3” disks were an absolute PITA to find, and double the cost of 3.5” disks!

 

I even, post degree, invested in a box that connected to the expansion port and provided me with MIDI IN/OUT to use with a music sequencer written specially for that machine.

 

Of course, eventually IT moved on so looking for a computer in the early 90s I was advised - because I was not techie or interested either in programming or messing about with the commands needed to do anything in Windows - to buy Apple Mac! 
 

So I did! An Apple Mac LC (the original “pizza box” Mac), later upgraded to a Mac LC465, then a Performa 6410/180 (with a subwoofer built in to the tower case, perfect for a musician) and then a Performa 6320 desktop which had been upgraded so was actually far more powerful than the spec suggested!

 

When I started working for the Department of Linguistics at the University of Manchester in the mid 90s, I was working on two Mac Classics (the ones with the tiny screens) before these were upgraded to first generation iMacs! Yes, I had a Bondi Blue machine with a slot drive CD player - and an external floppy disk drive because Steve Jobs scrapped them in his new machines!

 

Then the day came when the department upgraded the computer lab to eMacs (the oversized iMacs) and I found all the old equipment in a skip! Quick check, and I mounted a rescue campaign!

 

For a while, I had a Mac Museum in my loft, all pre-G3 chip but still usable. I cleaned each hard drive, stripped the cases off (as they had yellowed with age) and spray painted them with whatever luminous Plasticote paint was on offer at Halfords, before donating them, preloaded with system software and free to use educational software to a friend for use in her primary school. (She had BBC Micro B computers she left out at night in the forlorn hope they would be stolen (they never were - even druggies knew they were sh1t and nobody would buy them!) and several PCs that simply never worked, and one (1) Mac that the kids made a beeline for because “it just worked”) Her class had the most colourful computers - dayglow orange, yellow, pink, green, and gloss black, signal red, and chrome effect - and they all got used! 
 

I set up an all-in-one 5440 (follow up to the original Mac of 1984 advert fame before Ives reinvented Apple with the iMac) for my ex-wife’s nephew. I even picked up an Apple 20” CRT monitor off eBay for all of £60 (nearly killed myself failing to put it in the loft - it was heavy) so had a dual monitor set up! Useful when doing music arranging.

 

When I left the University in 2004, I was told to keep my iMac and printer, which upgraded me beyond my previous macs. I won a PowerBook on eBay which was stolen a few weeks after my daughter was born, from my work place on my first day in my new job as a post-16 lecturer - sadly, it had the only copies of the photos we had taken up to that point; regrets? To not have done a CD ROM backup…

 

After splitting up in 2017, I finally let go of so many of my old machines, as I now had a 2007 20” screen Intel iMac. However, I have kept two original iMacs, and a Mac Classic (all in one 9” screen - state of the ark, baby!)

 

These days, my “main” machine is a 24” screen 2011 iMac (defunct, man!), and a 2012 PowerBook (used exclusively for gigging), all sourced (as was my 4th generation iPad) from eBay.

 

These are all “old” machines by today’s standards - my iMac is 12 years old! - but still function even if not running the most up to date software.

 

However, I invested in an iPad Pro when I started my new peripatetic role in 2021, which is probably more powerful than all the computers I’ve ever had combined!

 

Floppy disks? Someone please explain to me why I still have boxes full of them? And a box full of manuals for long defunct software? (I need to let them go, I know!)
 

Mind you, I also have a minidisk audio recorder/player, as well as a Digital Compact Cassette recorder/player and tapes and those are also defunct technology but, like the old Apple Classic**, still work!
 

However, my mum wins when it comes to reminiscing. She qualified as a typist/secretary and one of her first jobs was working for Marconi computers, where she would “type” the programming cards for the computers! She vividly recalls the pressure to be 100% accurate, as a mistake rendered a card useless and she would need to start all over again. How the world of computing has moved on!

 

Steve S

* I spent half my classes un-jamming mechanical typewriters (a) because I knew how from using my mum’s portable typewriter at home and (b) because the teacher was sexist!

** I last ran my Classic earlier this year, after being stored since 2017 - it chimed, and shortly afterwards was running (System 6, no less!) ready for work. Slow, mind - glaciers probably move quicker!

 

Edited August 30, 2023 by SteveyDee68
Corrected footnotes!

[MartinRS]

I can remember being asked to take a look at a faulty PET 2001 back in the 1980s. It would run small programs but failed when running larger programs. I wrote a small routine to flip and test the RAM and identified one of the chips as being faulty. (I think the chip was a 6550 with 512 bytes). I bought a replacement for a mere £17-50 which would buy a 128 GB SD card now!
 

[Michael Hodgson]

12 hours ago, MyRule1 said:

Martin's discovered that they had a very high failure rate. It was then realised that the data centre was in Willesden and the vibration from passing trains was causing the failures.

 

We installed a computer system in an Accepting House above an Underground station in the City.  We put it on the 3rd floor to minimise vibration from passing trains - it would have been the 4th floor, but that was the boardroom !

[MyRule1]

12 hours ago, pH said:

I worked with a woman who had been in customer support for ICL in central London in the late 1960s/early 1970s. They took patches/data etc. to and from customer sites on removable magnetic data and had terrible problems with data corruption. Someone eventually twigged what the problem was, and they were told not to travel by Underground.

During my employment with Barclay's that I referred to earlier one of our tasks on the evening shift was to take the back up tapes from the City of London to a site just off Tottenham Court Road for safe storage. This was had to be done by taxi as allegedly the attempts to take them on the underground led to corruption of the the data. It many years later that I found out that I had visited one of the "secret" deep level bunkers built in WW2.

[Michael Hodgson]

When my employers were appointed run the controlled management and subsequent liquidation of Bank of Credit & Commerce International, I had to take control of the computer system at Head Office, and my first task was to ensure that I got backups safely off-site.  I couldn't take the tapes with me to London, as that would be contrary to Luxembourg's banking/data protection laws, and we didn't want to let the tapes out of our direct control by depositing them with one of the local banks.  Fortunately we still had a vault at the local branch of Banco Ambrosiano, the bank involved in the Vatican banking scandal, which my colleagues had liquidated a few years before.

[Classsix T]

On 29/08/2023 at 21:01, Hroth said:

 

AKA a "stiffy".....

To some people anyway!

 

Of course, Amstrad inflicted the consumer with the 3" disk when they introduced the PCW 8256 wordprocessor/CPM computer!

I suppose the spec for that was that it "must fit in a standard (European) shirt pocket"

 

 

All I remember from obtaining disks for the Amiga was, it wouldn't take double sided but it was ok with double-density, or perhaps the other way around? It was a long time ago. Which instantly made data backup (an actual necessity for disk-based games lest your original copy got corrupted) a worse situation.

 

I felt all that was fine as long as cartridge based consoles dominated, however I passed on the first CD based PlayStation but the inclusion of a DVD drive in the PS2 saw me make the leap away from the Amiga.

 

C6T.

[Guest]

On 30/08/2023 at 01:22, SteveyDee68 said:

I added a second drive (effectively making it an 8512!) but those 3” disks were an absolute PITA to find, and double the cost of 3.5” disks!

But the drive mechanism was apparently cheap as chips so Sir Allan was happy.

[Kickstart]

On 29/08/2023 at 11:41, Michael Hodgson said:

Yes, they were replaced by the 3½ " (non-flopping)  floppy disc.

The design specification for which was "must fit in a standard (North American) shirt pocket".

 

On 29/08/2023 at 21:01, Hroth said:

 

AKA a "stiffy".....

To some people anyway!

 

Of course, Amstrad inflicted the consumer with the 3" disk when they introduced the PCW 8256 wordprocessor/CPM computer!

I suppose the spec for that was that it "must fit in a standard (European) shirt pocket"

 

 

 

I beleive that the reason for the design of the 3" disk was that the 3.5" disk did not fit into the standard Japanese mail envelope. The 3" disk was designed to do this.

A massive number of drives and disks were made, but were a sales failure. Hence Amstrad could buy them cheaply for their computers, with the Amstrad CPC664, CPC6128, PCW8256 and PCW8512 using them, along with some late versions of the Spectrum.

From my experience with my CPC6128, they worked well and (for the time) had plenty of storage. Down side was that they were expensive (a box of 5 cost me ~£20 in 1985)

 

All the best

 

Katy

[TheQ]

Did I mention I used to live in Bletchley park? One day I'll go back and find out what of the museum is in my old room..

 

Big horizontal metal disk drives? Phoenix drive, once drove from MK to RAF Leeming to find the fault on their phoenix disk drive... 

It had a plastic peanut packaging under the roller controlling the read write head...

Some Pollock decided the computer clean room would be a good place to unpack electronic boards from their boxes...

Unfortunately I didn't get called out before they'd wrecked their working disk, their reserve working disk and !!!!!!

 

Their master disk....

[Torper]

I bought my first PC in 1993 from Locland Computers, Glasgow.  It was a 486-255X VESA with 8MB DRAM, 170 MB HDD and an SVGA screen, and it was ready loaded with DOS 6.0, Windows 3.1, and Lotus Smartsuite.  It was pretty high-end for personal computers at the time, no wonder perhaps with DRAM going at about £100 a MB.  The PC cost £1291 inc. VAT and software an extra £235, giving a grand total of £1526, which is equivalent to £3977 today.  Obviously I was feeling flush back then!  I liked tweaking DOS as, done correctly, it could bring about performance improvements.  Done incorrectly, on the other hand, it, er, didn't.........   For some strange reason I still have both DOS and Windows 3.1 on floppy disks.

Edited August 31, 2023 by Torper

[Pacific231G]

Though I did a two day Fortran course at University my  first professional encounter with a computer was soon after graduating in 1973, working at one of the University of London colleges for six months before starting with World Service. Our research group had a load of data on punch cards which muggins- the research assistant- landed the job of re-sorting. It was a choice between about three very tedious days sorting the data cards manually or writing a program to do the job for me. The college had a "terminal room" for the IBM main frame at UCL where, along with card punching machines, there was a Texas Industries  scientific calculator chained to the desk like a medieval bible. My program was only about 15 lines and I would hand it in on top of the data deck and a few hours later get a printout with the latest crop of syntax errors.  I eventually got the program to run and, though it took four days, I eventually got a nice new deck of sorted data- far more interesting than hand sorting the cards. 

 

I bought a secondhand Sinclair Spectrum in about 1984, but it wasn't until 1986 that I started using computers for scriptwriting, when I worked on the BBC's MicroLive programme.  I started, not surprisingly, with a BBC Micro but then got hold of the Toshiba 1000 laptop PC I'd used in a film demonstrating international e-mail (Telecomm gold and its Dutch equivalent if anyone remembers that far back). I actually still have the Tosh though I've not tried running it recently. They were very popular with journalists and I used it as a word processor for several years. It had no hard drive and just one 3.5 inch disk drive so you loaded a copy of WordPerfect from a working floppy with enough space on it to also save the work onto (though I generally backed up onto a second disk) .      

Edited August 31, 2023 by Pacific231G

[zarniwhoop]

I started out with a Jupiter Ace and the dreaded cassettes for storage. Work (S.E. Electricity Board) was offering purchase deals (pay back over several months, if I remember correctly), because the chairman was keen to see what people could do with them - but at that time I couldn't afford it. Got the Ace (Z80, FORTH, the joys of typing in programs from magazines and building your own language, plus occasionally building add-ons (static RAM, keyboard). Then I got a Triumph Adler Alphatronic (Z80 running CP/M). Started to really get interested with free/shareable software.

 

Meanwhile, at work I was responsible for doing weekly maintenance (backups) on a mini for the industry's pension scheme with the disk (maybe 14", maybe more) mounted on top of a cabinet. When using the system for data input and doing calculations I got used to the dread words 'Cobol compilation error' - I'm sure it wasn't actually compiling anything, but maybe swapping in different chunks of code. Got lucky when work decided to see if they could find any suitable internal candidates for trainee programmers - cut-off age was 30, I was a few months short of that.

 

Then I got my own compilation errors, although they always had long messages with a code beginning 'I' that you could look up in the library for the more obscure ones, followed by abend codes when running. The joys of application programming with MVS and its later versions, JES2 with JCL, and later VSAM to work with a payroll software package.

[Kickstart]

I started on a 48k Spectrum in 1983, then an Amstrad CPC6128 in 1985. Landed up working as a programmer, initially in PL/1 (so yes plenty of JCL, and avoiding coding by doing processing using sort). Used to many languages through work, but these days mostly SQL with some PHP.

 

All the best

 

Katy

[Reorte]

We had a BBC B when I was young, so I started out playing around on that, including learning a bit of programming. I was probably around six or seven when we got it, which I think makes me just about qualified to be the first generation to really grow up with computers. I stuck with Acorn for quite a long time (still think RISC OS is the nicest desktop interface I've used), although these days it's all PCs (lumped with Windows at work, and at home because I mostly use it for gaming), and most of my programming now is in Matlab.

[pH]

6 hours ago, Kickstart said:

Landed up working as a programmer, initially in PL/1 (so yes plenty of JCL, and avoiding coding by doing processing using sort).

Ah, JCL! I always thought of it as an inanimate computer operator - if it could find any reason not to run a job step, it would take it!
 

Apologies to any operators on here. The best were brilliant, but so many just seemed to be determined to be awkward. (They probably had similar views on programmers!)

[Michael Hodgson]

1 hour ago, pH said:

Ah, JCL! I always thought of it as an inanimate computer operator - if it could find any reason not to run a job step, it would take it!
 

Apologies to any operators on here. The best were brilliant, but so many just seemed to be determined to be awkward. (They probably had similar views on programmers!)

Yes we had a lot of conditional JCL to keep the most important systems running even if something fell over. 

 

I got on very well with most of our operators.  Possibly helped by bending the company's "no alcohol on the premises" rule (we weren't supposed to know that they had wine in the Directors' dining room) and bringing in a few cans when I was called in late on Xmas Eve to fix the factory's manufacturing forecasting system.  This 8-hour suite of programs was classed as business critical and it was scheduled to be run twice daily, and I was first on the call out list.  Never mind that the factory had closed down for a fortnight over the festive season, and output would be identical to the previous run as nobody had been there to input any new data since the previous run or to do anyting with the output until they all sobered up and got back to work (not necessarily in that order).

[New Haven Neil]

I have shown this before elsewhere on the forum......our school had a Ferranti Pegasus that had been donated from a local business.

 

We were only allowed to make simple programs on 5 hole tape, and not to actually touch it!  It was dismantled after my first year at the school, one of the guys in the photo, far right, was a pal although a few years older than me - he is a railway enthusiast!  The lady was the technician and was fearsome!