I was working at Intel when those things came out. There was a group who sat around looking at speed paths and fixing them, and when they had enough to make it useful they did a new tapeout for a faster processor. So overclocking probably wouldn’t hurt anything.
After one 4 MHz bump we got an award with a chip built in. Rumor was that these were good parts, since no one wanted the slower version.
I didn’t work on x86 machines, I worked on the Itanic.
I’ve got some DecTape floating around, with among other things the Star Trek program from Ahl’s Book of Basic Games rewritten in Pascal.
And we had a tiny punch that we called a “chicken plucker”, to add holes in the tape. Also splices. Yeah, for a while there was no way to actually edit a tape.
I bought a used Macintosh 512KE that consumed half my savings, so I had almost no money left to buy software. After a couple months, I discovered the interrupt switch down on the side, which let me get into the machine. For my own amusement, I played around with the interrupt display for several months to the extent that I was able to construct a crude little program, literally in 68K machine code, which allowed me to continue to play around with machine code and resource files. I got to the point where I was able to use it to make a small floating analog clock accessory. But mostly it was just entertainment.
Ooh, Matron.
Who remembers when kids had paper routes?
I do. I had one. Long Island Press, every afternoon and Sunday mornings.
I once read about how someone was able to figure out how to browse the web on a Commodore 64, complete with instructions for how other nostalgic Commodore 64 users could get online. Although this was back when I was in college, which itself was about 20 years ago now, so this was back when web sites were primarily text based, with a few .gif image files here and there.
When I was in high school, back in the early/mid seventies, we had a lesson in computing! They put us all in a minivan and drove us two miles to the local technical college where they had the only computer in a conurbation of - oooh - forty thousand people? The size of a room (you were looking at a wall, basically), no monitor (there was a keyboard and teletyper-thing so you could see what you were typing). I got to write a basic program that converted fahrenheit to centigrade, and they gave me a copy on punched tape.
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I had one too. Afternoons, except Sunday mornings. Got up at 4:30am every Sunday to deliver. Had a lot of money for a 12-yr-old, also. I did it well, and was really proud of it.
Yep. I remember learning to typeset on an old Compugraphic system. It was called photo-typesetting and the columns of type came out developed on something like photographic paper.
ETA: that’s where I learned about “discretionary hyphenation”. Fun.
We had a lidded box sitting on the front porch, right next to the door. I seem to recall it being wood clad in tin, about 20"x12"x15" more or less.
There was a sliding panel in the wall by the door to our apartment in Manhattan.
That apartment building also had one of those elevators with a manually operated door-- double doors-- the first one opened with a lever I couldn’t operate because I was too little when we first lived there-- that is, not strong enough. The inside doors just pulled open.
A couple of times, when it got stuck between floors, we just opened the doors, and jumped down.
A few times in the '60s, we rode in the elevator at the back of the downtown Meier & Frank department store. Unlike the ones at the front of the store, this one had no buttons. There was a person who had a hand on the knob on the disk on the wall, and we would tell them what floor we wanted. I seem to recall that they had a small round seat (that may have been hinged to fold up against the wall), but when we were in the elevator the operator was always standing.
When I was a kid, back in the 50s, all elevators had operators. I don’t remember any self-service elevators.
Oh, yeah-- in lower rent apartment buildings, the elevators were a lot like the ones that were run by an operator, but self-service.
Was he the one who phoned the helpline to ask where the ‘Any’ key was?
And was he one of the pioneers in realizing the full potential of the cupholder?
I still have one, from an IBM system 38 or maybe early AS400.
I also did a lot of Twinax cable runs and some Token Ring of course.
My Zip disks and 2 zip drives got recycled years ago.
Well, I have an old HD platter from one of those multi-platter drives that were the size of a washing machine and stored tens of megabytes.