Don't ya just luv microsloth

railsquid · December 15, 2016, 09:02:01 AM

Quote from: Zogbert Splod on December 15, 2016, 03:30:46 AM(640 x 480 and (I think???) a total of 12 colours, if you went for the Hercules option)

CGA was 640x200 in two colours and 320x200 in a selection of 4 colours from a total of 16. 480 lines didn't come in until VGA (via the 640x320 16-colour splendour of EGA). Hercules was a high-res text-orientated monochrome card with something like 720×360 pixels. Dunno why I have the space in my mind dedicated to remembering such trivia, but there you go. I reckon I'd do quite well in a "resolution and colour pallette of early 80s computers" quiz...

Damn, those were the days when you needed to care about these things, I can barely remember what the specs of my current desktop are (and I "built" it myself).

Snowwolflair · December 15, 2016, 09:31:01 AM

IBM just did not know what they had, but Microsoft did and leveraged it as much as they could. What IBM did design properly was the concept of a properly designed hierarchical interrupt structure that is fundamental to all PCs. They took the Intel 8086 chip and used it properly.

At least IBM gave up quickly ~5 years on trying to stop the clone manufacturers who completely outstripped IBM technically. For instance the first commercial version we made was using the then new 80186 processor the new 16k DRAM and skipped a lot of the BIOS with a state machine. It however had Tektronix emulation graphics which amounted to what became VGA offered later as a standard, and we sold it not as a desktop but as an industrial controller.

PC's became office rather than engineering machines with the release of Lotus 123 and Lotus Notes, soon followed by Wordcraft, Wordperfect and Word, etc. The rest is history, but the PC is an engineers machine at its roots not a user friendly Apple type, although these days it tries hard.

Most of us who cut our teeth on microprocessors learnt 6502, SCMP, 8080 or Z80 code in bare board machines like the Nascom.

Happy days

Malc · December 15, 2016, 11:52:10 AM

You are bringing back some memories there. I built an eprom programmer using a SCMP chip in the 80s. I too learned 6502 and Z80 machine code. Wrote a disassembled for both chips to help me learn programming tips. Wrote a DOS for 6502 motherboard PC I built. Try not to take the lids off these days.

Dorsetmike · December 15, 2016, 01:01:47 PM

I found the Z80 and the 8080/8085 machine code easy to write a disassembler for, could never get on with 6502, I was using a colour Genie at the time and at work teaching 8080/8085 based equipment, first PC was an Amstrad 1512 to which I added 128K RAM and a 3.5" floppy, later I added a 32M Hard drive - on a card, I ran Wordstar for Word processor, I found Wordperfect to be somewhat user unfriendly. Instead of Lotus I used the freebie As-Easy-as (1 2 3). I upgraded to an Amstrad 1640 with a hard drive - WOW! After that I built a couple of 286 and 386 machines at the time there were quite a few small shops selling cases, PSUs, mother boards etc. Didn't get into Word until the mid 90's working for Siemens.

I'm now running a Zoostorm (from Ebuyer) Quad core AMD chip, 2TB drive 16Gb Ram, Win7 pro 64 bit. Still got a dual core Pentium Gateway which plays music all day. Panasonic Toughbook for outdoor use, picked it up cheap on fleabay with only Ms-DOS, it had originally had Win7 Pro, so I just used a relevant CD and used the original key from when it was new to register it.

themadhippy · December 15, 2016, 01:52:38 PM

wonder if this will run doze 10 any better than my current midrange intel skylake
http://www.electronixandmore.com/projects/relaycomputertwo/index.html

Snowwolflair · December 15, 2016, 02:10:59 PM

Yes.. Um... My new smartphone is going to be made of wood (not)

railsquid · December 15, 2016, 02:39:22 PM

Quote from: Snowwolflair on December 15, 2016, 02:10:59 PM
Yes.. Um... My new smartphone is going to be made of wood (not)

Ian_S · December 15, 2016, 08:58:30 PM

Receipt for the 1st PC I ever bought...... 1992

Got ridiculed at work for buying this..... 105Mb HDD - "Yer'll never need all that!"
£200 for 7Mb of additional RAM....

And my 2nd PC 6 years later

davidinyork · December 21, 2016, 09:17:29 PM

Quote from: Dorsetmike on December 14, 2016, 01:57:22 PM
Needless to say it's a Win 10 problem, a recent update would you believe.

I've not had any major problems with Windows 10 updates for a while. Office / Exchange problems are more frequent - several times in the past few years they've managed to release an update which means that Outlook and Exchange won't talk to each other - and as any of you with experience of managing email servers will know, that really is rather a problem!

The problem I have at the moment is with roaming profiles (the mechanism whereby users' settings and documents carry across to whichever computer they log onto on a network). These have always been temperamental, but by the time of Windows 7 they generally worked pretty well. Not so Windows 10 - regularly losing default browser settings and printer drivers, and there are different versions of the profiles with each release of W10 (which are about six-monthly). It's all rather a mess, and so unnecessary given that it had previously become very reliable.

I manage currently around 150 computers, all with W10, and on current experience it's fine on stand-alone and workgroup computers, but stick it on a domain and the problems come thick and fast! It's been getting worse rather than better with each major update!