Sometimes, I miss those days. Life was simpler ...... also, I could fix my own car
P.S. Maybe the most comforting thing about Hubitat (outside of it being a great automation platform), is that I can relate age & experience-wise to a whole bunch of the fantastic folk on this community board.
Yikes! Too many memories with this hardware. Before putting in 450's, we had some 1000e servers that caused a bit of grief. One of my best memories was an OS bug that would leave a process stuck in the process stack while it was awaiting an interrupt. Processes "chosen" for this purgatory were at random. Most of the time it took out a database process, but other times the server would become unreachable. Hop on the console and everything was magically better. (Keyboard or mouse interrupts caused the process to leave its purgatory.) Prior to an OS patch, our after-hours fix involved taping a pager to the mouse. I actually had to use it once...got the 2AM phone call, hopped online, messaged the pager, and 5 seconds later the server reappeared. I was in tears that the low-tech fix worked. We even put a barrier around the mouse so the pager wouldn't vibrate the thing off of the desk. Good times.
I worked in the mathematics dept at a major university in the 1990s. We had an old Apollo, a whole lab of NeXT machines (including a Cube) that people wouldn't give up unless you killed them first, some Sparc 20s, and a whole lot of Linux machines.
The NeXT machines were awesome... For those that don't know, NeXT was the basis for OSX when Jobs went back to Apple.
True. Albeit different architecture - 680x0 vs PowerPC. The first time I saw a NeXT Cube (Case Western Reserve campus bookstore - back then in Thwing Center), I would have given my left hand for $10K (or $9.9K - that was the list price in the bookstore). Monochrome monitor, without the printer. The color monitors came with the NeXT Slabs (pizza boxes). And memory says the printers were about $4K - they were also 400 dpi vs 300 dpi that Apple/HP had at the time.
+1 for working on a NeXT -- loved the Megapixel display, much better than the VT100s connected to our Vax 11/750s & 11/780 (or being forced to work on the Teletype if all the video terminals were in use).
I recently got a Sanyo MBC-675 portable computer that was dad's college laptop for college, it even came with a dot matrix printer. I'm determined to find a use for it in an ad we make this year. These old machines sure are fun to take a look back at.
Neato! For first year Physics (the Optics section) our "team project" was to write a BASIC program to do some refractive index calculations. We used the desktop version of that portable Sanyo. I think it was called the 575 or 775.
Similarly, my first was a 386, although I had a Commodore 64 before that, and some other thing with a monochrome green screen, maybe a PET. (I was very young)
But the greatest day for me was acquiring a Gravis Ultrasound. One of the first 16bit 44khz soundcards on the market. Many hours of Epic Pinball were played, many hours of music was sequenced in trackers, and many viewings of Future Crew's Unreal.
You can almost tell someone's age by the computers they used.
I had a Commodore PET for a while, but I never used it much.
From there I had an 8088 that I bought used, and paid hundreds of dollars for.
My first build was a 386 though.
I still have all of these in the basement. Don't know why, other than I am a tech hoarder.
I just sold my 2003 325 Ci with over 200k miles (I bought it with 8k) a few months ago. The coupe was difficult with 1 car seat in back but we just had kid #2. Practicality took over so I am no proud driver of a Camry.
Some TRS-80 Model 1 ("Trash 80s") work in school.. and Vic-20 (6502 / 4K) at home for fun.. Yay basic and assembly programming.. block moves and graphic string packing (Z80) / Redefining char set bitmaps for the win (6502) and also stealing cassette buffer space for more memory..