Building a Better PC

[ljones]

Matt, nice desk, do you have any specs on your computer build?

 

[rtunison]

Sweet Matt !!!!!

 

[dtisdale]

Your computer system and overall look, is really great. I think that we have the same monitor to boot. Is that a 22inch model from Acer?

I also have a dual monitor setup but only in the office and not really at home. It looks really great and I sure bet that works even better with doing your work a lot faster. Now I would want to have dual monitors at home as well.

 

[aschmidt]

Aren't dual monitors awesome... but you should switch over to triple monitors. I run (3) 24" dell monitors at work. Love it.

 

[mgonitzke]

They are 23" Acer monitors. I'd have to make my desk awfully wide for 3 of them

 

[ljones]

I found my antique PC out in the barn has a nVidia graphics card, so I dug out my other monitor and now I have duels

. I can look at the service and operators manual at the same time!

 

[pfitzwater]

Wow Jones, haven't seen a 5.25 floppy drive in almost a century lol

 

[kmcconaughey]

Patrick, here at work we have a bunch of 5.25" floppy drives and many, many boxes of 5.25" floppy discs. We even have a few 8" floppy drives and many boxes of 8" floppy discs. Anyone ever seen a 3.25" floppy disc? How about magnetic tape? We have a bunch of those as well.

Here's some photos.

Magnetic tapes and boxes of 8" floppy discs:

More floppy discs, a mixture of 3.5", 5.25" and 8":

5.25" floppy drive:

How about a Teac "Dual Floppy", has both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives:

Here's a Tandon model TM848-2E, 8" floppy drive:

I bet that few here have seen a 3.25" floppy disc. Here's a photo of two of them with the common 3.5" floppy:

And a detail shot:

We have many of each of the above floppy drives. We also have a bunch of various old tape drives and tapes both reel and cartridge tapes. We used to build special equipment to capture data from various magnetic media for law enforcement use.

 

[dross]

Patrick, did you mean a decade?

 

[aschumacher]

I remember back in the 80's of a couple very basic computers that I worked with loaded from digetal tape cassettes. One unit I worked on loaded off a audio cassette that I carried in my truck! Now thats origional simplicity!
I bet if Gerry Ide shows up that he has some tales from the old days. <font size="-2">(Punch cards!)</font>

 

[kmcconaughey]

Dave, I took Patrick's comment to mean last century.

Allen, we used to have some computer drives that used the "audio" cassette tapes too, but those all went away some time ago. They never worked very well.

 

[dross]

I was in the Navy in the early 80's, a buddy had a "computer" that loaded off a cassett. Then when I got out in 84 my brother shipped one home he built, he was stationed in Japan, it had 16 whatever. He had the chips to double that. The only game it had was flight simulator. You went through DOS to do anything.

 

[kide]

Geez, my ears have been ringing for days, now I know why...
Kraig: No 5081's ? We used cassette drives for firmware loading on the older Unisys disk drive controllers - this was when a controller was the size of an apartment refrigerator and controlled a "string" of disk drives 100 feet long that all looked like double stacked pizza ovens, with drawers that slid out to remove the disk packs that went in holders that looked like large cake carriers. The cassette drives were notoriously finicky and we were fortunate that as long as any drive controller was still running (we typically had 4-6 strings of drives running)you could cross load the firmware from one controller to another. One of my "fondest memories" is standing, with the Unisys Field Engineer and our Unisys sales representative, in the Director's office, explaining why, in a momentary failure of reasoning, I powered the last string off, then dealt with a two hour outage while the FE tried to get ANY cassette to read on ANY of the firmware loaders. (understanding that while this was going on every cop in the state was PO'd because their "holding on the roads" got turned loose)..The backup procedure was to force a load from a card reader using decks of - yes, Kraig - firmware programs punched on ----- 5081's. (5081 was IBM's stock number for the old standard 80 column punch card, it became a reference standard for the industry like "kleenex" or "xerox"..) I still have a stack out in the shop that I used for note paper..

BTW - Anybody here on - gasp - Facebook?

Doing great these days, have put about 2300 miles on Big Blue in a little over a month - without any trips longer than 220 miles. The 129 is doin' fine and I started spinning bolts out of the 149 - I need to see if the PO screwed the Hydro's input shaft up when he put the clamp style U-joint on it. Other than trying to kill Bambi the other night (look at the truck and it looks fine, but needs a lower facia and fender - I'm betting two grand), and making runs to a friend's place in the Saginaw area, life is - uhhh- pretty "normal" these days

.

 

[dtanner]

Gerry Ide

Glad to see you are enjoying Life ,I put on 3500 km on my Nomad so far this season and have an all day trip planned for this Saturday.All we seem to get is rain and I hope the weather improves soon. Rubber down shiny up.

 

[kmcconaughey]

Gerry, I did get to play with the punch cards in tech school back in 1980 but that's my only experience with them. At my first electronics related job we had DEC equipment that used PDP11/23 microprocessors and RLO2 hard disc drives. The RLO2 used removable hard disc aka "Data Cartridge" that were about 15" in diameter and 3" thick with one platter that could hold 10MB of data. I wish I would have kept one of those disc packs. I may have photos of one somewhere... I did find some on ebay:

DEC RLO2

Wow, this one even has the original packaging. I remember that blue plastic covered fitted foam. The shipping box used two of the foam pieces. The box had flaps on the skinny ends. One piece of foam slid in to the bottom then the disc pack then the second foam. I used to make the cardboard shipping boxes into carrying cases by adding a wood handle (short dowel) with packaging tape, for when I or one of the other people I worked with would have to travel with one of the disc packs to a trade show or a service call. I had diagnostic software on my disc pack. To think that I typically carry a USB flash drive in my pocket that uses a Micro SD card that has 16GB of capacity, how things change...

Another DEC RLO2

 

[bmcmeen]

Kraig -

I remember when we found some old RL02 packs in our storage room when I was with Sun Electric (I started "life" on a VAX 11/750). Our DEC engineer and I experimented with how hard of a drop it would take to set off the shockwatch on them...

I think I still have the clock I made out of the platter. I'll dig around...

Of course, nothing beats the sheer size of a UNIVAC 1100 disk drive or drive controller. We had a room full of equipment (7 tape drives, too!), all replaced by a single rack 2200...

 

[kmcconaughey]

Bryan, thanks for the reminder of the shockwatch indicators. It was never a good thing when we got new discs in that had that set off.

 

[kide]

Semi drivers never loved me - I sent more than one piece back after seeing corners crushed and shockwatch ampules busted....

 

[rtunison]

My Toshiba Qosmio laptop that I have been using out in the garage took a dump. Less than 18 mos. old. It lost network and HDMI in one fell swoop. (the SSD harddrive was fine and I swapped it out with no problems) Tech. help is non existent at Toshiba. It is a door stop now. I built myself a rig using (once again) an old Gateway box I found at the dump. Had to do a little grinding to get the motherboard ports out the backside but nothing major.

Got some Cub in the pictures also.......grin

 

[kmcconaughey]

Richard, bummer about the laptop. Good job recycling the old Gateway enclosure. Always good to see Cubs sneak into photos.