The Nostalgia Thread

[TheCjm1999 11]

If there already is a similar thread to this, feel free to delete this, however I thought it would be interesting if we had a thread where we can reminisce about anything in general. 

I'll start off. 

Remember how popular flip-phones use to be ten years ago? I remember how much I wanted one and I thought they were really cool.

 

[mrsmartman 200]

The era of Ericsson...

[Sabretooth78 808]

I still had a flip phone up until last August and honestly there are some aspects of it I still miss.  I don't rule out going back to one at some point.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The Star Trek original communicator has been superseded.  Time marches on ... Sony has now put the whole business on your wrist.

 

Who remembers the TRS-80, affectionately known as the trash-80?  It was my first home computer.  Tiny memory (384K) huge floppy disks, no hard disk, and ran DOS.  Had an 8080 CPU.  At the time, my job was working with big main frames.  The memory upgrade came in a plastic tube of do-it-yourself memory chips you got to insert on the mother board.

[Compdude787 916]

Oh, flip phones. I remember those things. I remember when the "Razor" was deemed super cool because it was super thin. I also remember how crazy I thought it was when I heard of a phone that had a camera on it.

 

Who remembers the TRS-80, affectionately known as the trash-80?  It was my first home computer.  Tiny memory (384K) huge floppy disks, no hard disk, and ran DOS.  Had an 8080 CPU.  At the time, my job was working with big main frames.  The memory upgrade came in a plastic tube of do-it-yourself memory chips you got to insert on the mother board.

Oh...the trash-80. My grandpa has one and he pulled it out of his basement a couple years back to show my brother and I what computers looked like. He also had some 5 1/4" floppy disks (truly floppy disks!) with DOS programs on them, but he couldn't remember what command to type in to open up a program.

Also, does anyone still remember the first generation iPod Nano? I still have one, but I don't really use it anymore. It doesn't hold a charge, either, but I am going to keep it to show my kids. (if I have kids...) Also, we were recently digging through some stuff that my grandma has and we found a Walkman. My brother brought it to school just for fun.

[AkemiAzula 280]

I used to have a cassette recorder until 2007. This was all i had beside a small tv at the time electronically. Then i got a computer made in the 90s. However before any of that i did have a Tamagotchi at school.

[TheCjm1999 11]

I still have a cassette recorder, however I haven't used it since 2004 There is even a tape still in there from 2004! 

[Sabretooth78 808]

My high school used TRS-80s for the keyboarding classes.  I guess by that time that was about all they were good for.  Those and the good ol' Apple IIe.

 

It's funny how 5.25" floppy disks (or even the larger ones preceding them) still have such an outdated "stigma" to them even though by now even the 3.5" ones are equally obsolete at this point.  Heck, even CDs are almost there.

 

How about ZIP and JAZZ disks?  Remember the 38 seconds back in 1998 when it was cutting edge to have one of those built into a PC?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The bigger floppies were 8", and we used them on some mainframes to hold the boot program.

 

The interesting thing now is that optical storage is going out to be replaced by memory sticks.  We really have come a long way in something like 30 years (one generation).  IBM announced the first PC in 1980, but there were lugables around before that.  I think the ABC machine, which you could get as a kit, was the first really portable machine.

 

One machine I used, the UNIVAC II, was water cooled.  If there was a power fail, the operator had to mop the condensation water off the floor of the chassis cabinet before the restart to prevent short circuits.  There was a huge cold water coil in there.

 

Also, if you had an IBM 704 you had to run around the room opening the cabinets up during a power fail so the tubes wouldn't melt.

 

Then there was the GE machine that had water-cooled boards.  The water was separated from the electronics by a copper oxide membrane.  An operator in the lab (this was an experimental machine) noticed that there was algae growing in the water tank, so he threw in some Javex to kill it.  Naturally, when the sodium hypochlorite hit the copper oxide hot packs there was the usual chemical reaction that reduced the membrane to nice, conducing copper.  The resulting explosion and electrification of the room put an end to the whole project.

 

The early days were a lot of fun in retrospect, but could be a disaster if you were present.

[jmsepe 2,038]

I don't have much to say but transferring music was a pain before. One occasion where in I need to copy a song from my computer to be able to bring it to school for a presentation, it was really a pain. During the time where USB was expensive or non-existent, I only have floppy disks. Sadly, these stuff cannot store in 5MB of files, I decided to buy a CD but as I remember before, I still need to burn these CDs and it takes so much time. I am so happy I'm using external hard drives now. Gone are the days of complicated file transfer life.

[hamsterTK 93]

Fascinating story, moose.

 

Anyways, my nostalgic thing to share is remembering how HDD's used to be so noisy. It was a nice sound effect, you knew your PC was working hard because it was clicking and groaning and making so much noise.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

I remember staying all day playing with my brother Bomberman and other games on Super Nintendo when I was just a small child. Good times.

[TheCjm1999 11]

I grew up playing on the PS1 and PS2 on my analogue TV I used to also have a GameBoy Colour SP (which had an unfortunate ending) and a Leapfrog! 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Anybody remember the holey media?  Paper tape and punched cards?  One of the nastier tricks on a bride and groom was to fill their car with punched card chads.  Not as bad a paper tape chads which were oily.

 

At one time magnetic tapes were made of very thin steel.  If you had an error while writing, you backspaced across the bad block, punched a hole in the tape, forward spaced and punched another hole.  When reading, if you found a hole, you skipped to the next hole.  The UNIVAC I has such tapes.  It took six men and a boy to load a tape drive.

[Compdude787 916]

Fascinating story, moose.

 

Anyways, my nostalgic thing to share is remembering how HDD's used to be so noisy. It was a nice sound effect, you knew your PC was working hard because it was clicking and groaning and making so much noise.

Oh my goodness, yes! I remember that a counselor I used to see when I was younger (at least ten years ago) had a Gateway computer whose hard drive made those noises whenever it was doing something. You didn't need a HDD activity indicator light when you had that thing!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I can well imagine what my disk farm would sound like.  I have three separate HDDs.

[hamsterTK 93]

Anybody remember the holey media?  Paper tape and punched cards?  One of the nastier tricks on a bride and groom was to fill their car with punched card chads.  Not as bad a paper tape chads which were oily.

 

 

Obviously way before my time...

 

However, in college I had to venture into the stacks in the library to find a really really old book. It had a large punch card in the due date card sleeve. I guess that was a thing. Should have kept it, nobody would ever notice or care and it was a neat find.

[Sabretooth78 808]

I don't remember punch cards at libraries but I do remember the cards that had 3 or some odd number of rows of due date stamps.

 

Speaking of libraries, how about some microfiche?  Yeah, that stuff is still around.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

These days to find microfiche you need microbait.  Fiche readers are getting few and far between.

 

Amazing how progress in technology discards the recent for the most recent.  Since 1980, the 8086 processor decor has come a long way.  Processors still bow to that with the x86 technology mostly due to the mountain of software that runs with it.  If current systems these days used their CPUs to the fullest extent possible, things could be a considerable distance away from that old chip.

 

The other piece of 1980s technology that is now going by the board is BIOS.  It is being replaced by UEFI which can handle more hardware types and much bigger disks.