Talk of XT-AT era computer software & hardware

[CaptainHappy]

Comdex was the big computer show. Key phrase WAS.....
All of the computer vendors used to announce new versions and releases of software at this show.....
Then later on it everyone used to start announcing weeks before the show to get the jump on the others.
Soon Comdex became redundant and then it declared bankrupcy.

The show guide was 300 pages thick, with about an 8point font.
 
I was there when the president of Word Perfect made the statement "What self respecting word processing person would take their hands off the keyboard to use a thing called a mouse".
Word Perfect didn't get onto the Windows band wagon until about 3 years later, and then the product was so far behind the curve it never recovered. The question was answered. 90% of us are not self respecting word processing people.

I used to love Comdex as my company got alot of the invites to many of the exclusive invite parties! Quantum used to be one of the best party throwers!!! Talk about money thrown around!!!

This was a major expense for us, and we just had a small 20ft x 20ft (?) booth! This show used to fill the entire town, and the surrounding areas. It was the largest show in the world I think??

I really used to like Word Perfect! Also their President would not have liked me as I was one of the first to use a program called "MOUSE PERFECT" that added mouse capabilities to Word Perfect! WOW.. I just admitted mega-dorkiness, didn't I???

I liked to think that I was ahead of the curve!  

CH

[StatFreak]

Comdex used to be a blast, especially when the company was picking up the tab for everything. There was always plenty of time to go off and explore all of the booths in between attending seminars, manning our own booth, and discussing business related purchases with some of the other vendors. Many of the vendors had innovative advertising widgets to giveaway (and no doubt this is still the case at these shows), and part of the fun was going around collecting those. As CH mentioned, there were great parties and great food, and there were always cool new consumer gadgets that one could purchase when roaming around on one's own.

I once bought a set of 3D glasses for my computer at Comdex. They used LCDs as shutters to open and close each eye in sync and the software could make anything on the computer screen 3D. I'm not sure how their software was able to determine what should be in the foreground and what should be in the background, but it worked. They were great for gaming, as they would work with any game, although they worked best with first person POV games like Doom.

...
I really used to like Word Perfect! Also their President would not have liked me as I was one of the first to use a program called "MOUSE PERFECT" that added mouse capabilities to Word Perfect! WOW.. I just admitted mega-dorkiness, didn't I???

I liked to think that I was ahead of the curve! 

CH

You were definitely ahead of the curve.    But mega-dorkiness? No. Mega-dorkiness was steadfastly clinging to DOS and refusing to use a mouse! That was me. I set up my computers not to boot into Windows 3.1 and would do almost everything in DOS. I would only run Windows if the program I wanted to run required it, and would then exit back to DOS as soon as I was finished, often doing this in a DOS batch file.

I had literally hundreds of DOS power tools -- little COM programs and TSRs that could do everything. I even had a TSR for removing TSRs! It acted as a 1k wedge in memory that could be uninstalled, and doing so would clear the program in memory above it, and one could use multiple instances of it.

You all know how anal I am. I had a COM program that would alphabetize the files in every directory, and I even alphabetized the order of my directories within directories. I used to use the REAL Norton utility (before the company sold out to the lowest common computer user), NU.EXE (V4.5 and earlier), to probe the FAT table, disc, and directory structure, and learn how discs worked, and then to manipulate them.

To this day, simple DOS commands will still do things that Winduhs can't. Try renaming every file in a folder with 200 files from "DSC_nnnn.jpg" to "DSC1nnnn.jpg" with one quick command in WinDoze. Good luck.   There is also an old program called pcopy as well as Windows xcopy that can do even more.

[Stolistic]

Stat your just a geek! (like me ).  I would write DOS programs in Turbo C similar to the utilities at the time.  Wish I had known there was a market for it.

I used to love COMDEX too.  And then there is this whole thing about "booth babes"...

[jay]

Robocopy !!!

[brichter]

CES? Isn't that the show they run at the same time as the AVN (Adult Video News) Awards? 

[StatFreak]

Robocopy !!!

If you have the MS Resource kit.

[Op-Bell]

Mega-dorkiness was steadfastly clinging to DOS and refusing to use a mouse! That was me. I set up my computers not to boot into Windows 3.1 and would do almost everything in DOS. I would only run Windows if the program I wanted to run required it, and would then exit back to DOS as soon as I was finished, often doing this in a DOS batch file.

Are you perhaps an unknown brother of mine, Stat? I too did without Windows when possible. My computer booted into XTree Gold and I hardly ever left the shell. But I'm only a kilo-dork, because I had a mouse driver loaded in DOS. I had to keep my hard disks partitioned into 500MB chunks just for XTree, otherwise it ran out of memory    I hated Windows because it wouldn't run my graphic-intensive games properly - Windows ME wouldn't run them at all and effectively put an end to my DOS programming career. I reluctantly installed W98 in 2000, when I needed USB, though I still had it boot to the prompt.

Before I had XTree I used to write everything in WordStar. Even now, 25 years later, I've never seen a non-document editor that has the features WordStar offered. You could even copy and paste columns, an incredibly useful trick on the few occasions you needed it. The self-destruction of MicroPro, the WordStar company, is covered in depth in Merrill Chapman's In Search Of Stupidity, conveniently available on Google Books. Everyone in hi-tech management needs to read this book, along with Fred Brook's Mythical Man-Month, which has evaded Google Books' scanners but (Google tells me) is available as a torrent.

[Op-Bell]

A few years ago Comdex used to bring Las Vegas to a standstill for a week, yet in a couple of years it disappeared without trace. The resorts weren't sorry to see it go - even with the hotels sold out, it was their worst revenue week of the year. Gaming revenue fell to a pittance, as every hotel room in the city was occupied by people who didn't gamble. CES is a lot more fun, IMHO, but the most fun of all is an adult entertainment exhibition that runs at about the same time, that I occasionally get tickets for through a friend of mine. The good thing about the AE show is that it's heavily staffed by content providers (nudge, nudge). Booth babes? You ain't seen nothin'.

[brichter]

A few years ago Comdex used to bring Las Vegas to a standstill for a week, yet in a couple of years it disappeared without trace. The resorts weren't sorry to see it go - even with the hotels sold out, it was their worst revenue week of the year. Gaming revenue fell to a pittance, as every hotel room in the city was occupied by people who didn't gamble. CES is a lot more fun, IMHO, but the most fun of all is an adult entertainment exhibition that runs at about the same time, that I occasionally get tickets for through a friend of mine. The good thing about the AE show is that it's heavily staffed by content providers (nudge, nudge). Booth babes? You ain't seen nothin'.

The venerable Op-Bell knows of that which I spake! And I will second the

[Op-Bell]

The venerable Op-Bell knows of that which I spake!

Oh, yeah. Those people don't just party, they debauch. One time I picked up an open bar pass and, um, I don't seem to remember much else, except ending up at the Hard Rock at a David Lee Roth concert with my friend and two east european porn actresses. I think they wanted to give it a go, but I was too "tired and emotional".

David Lee Roth was hopeless, incidentally.    Talk about people who need to retire...

[brichter]

David Lee Roth was hopeless, incidentally.    Talk about people who need to retire...

That's a pretty astute observation, as the last time I saw him he was singing in a park at the San Jose Grand Prix, for a BLUEGRASS band!

[StatFreak]

A few years ago Comdex used to bring Las Vegas to a standstill for a week, yet in a couple of years it disappeared without trace. The resorts weren't sorry to see it go - even with the hotels sold out, it was their worst revenue week of the year. Gaming revenue fell to a pittance, as every hotel room in the city was occupied by people who didn't gamble. CES is a lot more fun, IMHO, but the most fun of all is an adult entertainment exhibition that runs at about the same time, that I occasionally get tickets for through a friend of mine. The good thing about the AE show is that it's heavily staffed by content providers (nudge, nudge). Booth babes? You ain't seen nothin'.

The venerable Op-Bell knows of that which I spake! And I will second the

Save some for me, would you?   I'll have to check out the AE show sometime.

[StatFreak]

The venerable Op-Bell knows of that which I spake!

Oh, yeah. Those people don't just party, they debauch. One time I picked up an open bar pass and, um, I don't seem to remember much else, except ending up at the Hard Rock at a David Lee Roth concert with my friend and two east european porn actresses. I think they wanted to give it a go, but I was too "tired and emotional".

David Lee Roth was hopeless, incidentally.    Talk about people who need to retire...

That's a pretty astute observation, as the last time I saw him he was singing in a park at the San Jose Grand Prix, for a BLUEGRASS band!

Sounds like the story of Spinal Tap.  It's a shame; he was good back in the day.

[StatFreak]

Mega-dorkiness was steadfastly clinging to DOS and refusing to use a mouse! That was me. I set up my computers not to boot into Windows 3.1 and would do almost everything in DOS. I would only run Windows if the program I wanted to run required it, and would then exit back to DOS as soon as I was finished, often doing this in a DOS batch file.

Are you perhaps an unknown brother of mine, Stat? I too did without Windows when possible. My computer booted into XTree Gold and I hardly ever left the shell. But I'm only a kilo-dork, because I had a mouse driver loaded in DOS. I had to keep my hard disks partitioned into 500MB chunks just for XTree, otherwise it ran out of memory    I hated Windows because it wouldn't run my graphic-intensive games properly - Windows ME wouldn't run them at all and effectively put an end to my DOS programming career. I reluctantly installed W98 in 2000, when I needed USB, though I still had it boot to the prompt.

Before I had XTree I used to write everything in WordStar. Even now, 25 years later, I've never seen a non-document editor that has the features WordStar offered. You could even copy and paste columns, an incredibly useful trick on the few occasions you needed it. The self-destruction of MicroPro, the WordStar company, is covered in depth in Merrill Chapman's In Search Of Stupidity, conveniently available on Google Books. Everyone in hi-tech management needs to read this book, along with Fred Brook's Mythical Man-Month, which has evaded Google Books' scanners but (Google tells me) is available as a torrent.

Funny that you should mention WordStar. I still have a copy on my hard drive, as well as many documents. I'm not sure if I could get it to run in an XP environment as I haven't tried to run it in years. I preferred it to WordPerfect.

[rickhunter]

Geez, I didn't even like shells, everything was command prompt or die.  Wordstar was it, I still have 360K floppies with it.  Then I put it on the hard drive (my HUGE 20MB drive Seagate ST225).

C>ws

Those were the days when everything was su much simpler.

I used to write TSR programs in assembly language to handle some of the expansion hardware on my PC.  Remember the Turbo acceleartors?  I had a board made by Quadram called the Quadsprint, that basically had an 8 Mhz (yes, you heard that right) 8086 processor that replaced the 4.77 mhz 8088 processor. It was very clever as you had to remove the 8088 from the mainboard and plug this jumper cable into the socket that led to the Quadsprint.  The big deal of the quadsprint is that you needed a program to switch from 8Mhz down to 4.77 Mhz as certain programs wouldn't work right with the faster processor.  One of my TSR's (Terminate but Stay Resident) programs would control the speed by means of hot keys. I used Ctrl-Alt-Plus and Ctrl-Alt-Minus to control the speed.  I also had a Quadram board that had a frame buffer that I controlled by my hotkey program, it would allow me to display the frame buffer as a background in the dos environment.  It was able to display 640x200 with 16 colors (how's that for technology).  So I had dos with a background screen.  The frame buffer was in graphics mode while still remaining in Text mode for the command prompt.  It thought that was very cool.  UUUUBBBBBERRR GEEK.

Remember how long it took the IBM PC to boot up while doing it's post (counting and testing memory, etc).  I made a utility that would add memory to the registers so that I could configure my motherboard to 64K of ram and then this "quickboot" utility would add the RAM and then pass on the loading of dos to the hard drive.  I did it in the boot sector of a floppy disk,  and I was never able to put it in the boot sector of the hard drive as I would have had to modify IO.SYS, so my custom IO.sys would add ram and then pass on over to the IO.sys in the hard drive.  It was the lazy way out, but the machine booted up from power up to c prompt in about  10 seconds!!!

I still have my original IBM PC somewhere up in the attic.

Remember BBS systems, fido-net, etc.  300 baud modems!!!!

[StatFreak]

Okay, I just ran WordStar successfully in a DOS window. CHECK THIS OUT!! 

[rickhunter]

WOW that's 4.0.  I only have 3.3!!! 

[StatFreak]

But wait! There's more. Here is XTPro (not gold). Unfortunately, it gives me an out of memory error. Gee, I guess that it can't handle a 500GB HDD!  

Available Bytes: ###########    


PS: I'll have to get an old scrap drive and see what it does to NTFS.

[Stolistic]

I used to run VisiCalc off of floppies.  Another program that required you to learn a bunch of keyboard combinations.

[StatFreak]

Funny, I still prefer keyboard combinations to my mouse.  

For example, type the emoticons on the keyboard (without the added space) ": 5 -  : 71 - : 79 -  "   then, <ctrl><shft> {<right arrow> (x3)},  <ctrl> C,  {<ctrl> V (x3)} , and voila!:             

or goto the beginning of the second line in this post and type,  <shft> {<down arrow> (x2)}, <ctrl> C,  {<down arrow> (x3)}, <ctrl> V, and:

For example, type the emoticons on the keyboard (without the added space) ": 5 -  : 71 - : 79 -  "   then, <ctrl><shft> {<right arrow> (x3)},  <ctrl> C,  {<ctrl> V (x3)} , and voila!:             

[stayouttadabunker]

And to think I  thought Comdex was a Comdial telephone show...  
Boy, was I way off!...

[jdkmunch]

I have that stuff still running on an IBM XT 8088.    It has a 10Mb hard drive with a nice green screen.   Every once and a while I boot it up to run PC USA - I like to see what it predicted the population to be in 1992.

I need a new keyboard though.  Sadly I dropped the original and a few keys don't work. 

[StatFreak]

Now that's cool.  It's like having an antique slot.

I never had an 8088 with a hard drive. I used my mom's IBM PC-Jr (POS) with a single floppy and a CGA monitor, then got my own XT clone with two floppies and a monochrome amber monitor. My first hard drive was on an AT.

Prior to those I had a Morrow VIC-20, which could run a complete version of WordStar with quite a large document in addition to the operating system in only 64k of RAM, and before that I got to play around various versions of the TRaSh-80. There was an IMSAI 8080 that we used in computer club in high school, and before that, my friend's S-100 bus computer, which was a much better design than the PC, IMO. Another friend of mine built an ELF which he augmented with a hexadecimal keypad that allowed more robust programs to be entered. Then there were times that I got to use teletype terminals that had time sharing on university computers. I did get to play around with some punch cards, but they were really before my time.

[brichter]

I have that stuff still running on an IBM XT 8088.    It has a 10Mb hard drive with a nice green screen.   Every once and a while I boot it up to run PC USA - I like to see what it predicted the population to be in 1992.

I need a new keyboard though.  Sadly I dropped the original and a few keys don't work. 

That should be a standard keyboard with huge 5 pin DIN connector, right?

[StatFreak]

Hey guys. consider this.

Those early XT computers typically had 64k-128k of RAM (before we all got the BIG 640k). The first HDDs for them were around 10MB.

Today, the average PC HDD is around 250-500GB, or 25,000 to 50,000 times as large (roughly, and disregarding the powers of 2). If RAM had kept up with offline storage using that metric, today's PCs would conservatively have between 1 and 5 Gigabytes of RAM. But if we used the AT baseline of 640k of RAM and 10MB of HDD storage, today's home computers would need to have around 32GB of RAM to have kept up with HDD space.


<EDIT> Oops, I worded this incorrectly.