Site performance is quite poor today

TwistedKestrel

King of GTAM
Site Supporter
I'm not complaining about it, just pointing it out in case there is something to worry about
 
Site today has been dog chit. (from about 10am to 3pm)
IF you guys were doing updates or other tech issues, a heads up would have been nice.
 
Some weird flexing going on in this thread... might as well join in.

In school, we worked on PDP-11s running a variant of Unix. I was a few years too late and missed the hole (pun intended) punch-card era but my teacher had a big box of them sitting on his desk.

Got my first computer around 1982. It was an Apple ][ clone. A couple of years later, I had it hooked up to a 300 baud modem and was running a BBS, trying to remember the name of the SW... GBBS, I think? Acoustic coupler FTW. I could whistle the proper frequency to connect to another 300 baud modem.

By ~1988, I was running Opus BBS on a 386 PC connected to FidoNET, getting batch mail and messages from inter-BBS forums overnight. F-n state of the art at the time. Started working at IBM in 1990, and they had *all* the toys there, I had unlimited access to luggables and then later on Thinkpads. All running OS/2 ugh. Started messing around with multi-user telnet BBSes, hooking up Opus to the Internet. This was the direct precursor to the Internet forums of the late 90s (of which we are all talking on right now).

I had ran the gamut of 1200, 2400, 9600, 57.6K baud modems, from Hayes to US Robotics, acoustic couplers to PCMCIA. You name it, I had it in the back of a drawer somewheres.
 
I started
Some weird flexing going on in this thread... might as well join in.

In school, we worked on PDP-11s running a variant of Unix. I was a few years too late and missed the hole (pun intended) punch-card era but my teacher had a big box of them sitting on his desk.

Got my first computer around 1982. It was an Apple ][ clone. A couple of years later, I had it hooked up to a 300 baud modem and was running a BBS, trying to remember the name of the SW... GBBS, I think? Acoustic coupler FTW. I could whistle the proper frequency to connect to another 300 baud modem.

By ~1988, I was running Opus BBS on a 386 PC connected to FidoNET, getting batch mail and messages from inter-BBS forums overnight. F-n state of the art at the time. Started working at IBM in 1990, and they had *all* the toys there, I had unlimited access to luggables and then later on Thinkpads. All running OS/2 ugh. Started messing around with multi-user telnet BBSes, hooking up Opus to the Internet. This was the direct precursor to the Internet forums of the late 90s (of which we are all talking on right now).

I had ran the gamut of 1200, 2400, 9600, 57.6K baud modems, from Hayes to US Robotics, acoustic couplers to PCMCIA. You name it, I had it in the back of a drawer somewheres.
I started on a PDP 11 running RSTS. PIP was my friend, was glad it got adopted by CP/M.

I worked in small tech lab that developed Z80 based stuff, I remember getting our first 5mb hard disk (Corvus). It was the size of a beer fridge, got delivered in a special air ride transport. 10 of us shared that disk over an Arcnet. A big upgrade over 64k floppies.

We made 212a modems for Bell, and did a lot of homologation work for Hayes, we always had the fastest modems ( beta nickname for their first 19.2 was porn-modem).

Having one of these on your desk (beside your ashtray) was cool.

1780106704111.jpeg
 
Paid $900 for a 2nd Floppy Disk Drive on my 1981 IBM PC.
Also $400 for a 64Mb plugin memory card made by a Markham company called 'ATI'.
 
Yup, expensive. I remember my parents buying an original IBM PC with 2 floppies, the ATI memory board, CGA colour monitor, and Epson FX80 printer and the bill being just under $10,000! Which was 1/3 the price of my dad's brand new Mercedes 450 SL he bought a few years earlier.
 
Also $400 for a 64Mb plugin memory card made by a Markham company called 'ATI'.

ATI!

They made graphics cards as well. I started off with a green-screen CRT monitor and quickly bought the very newest CGA card: 640x200 and 16 colours! Luxury!

Later on, I climbed the upgrade ladder of ATI adapters, CGA->EGA->VGA->SVGA etc. They were a very big name in the industry.

ATI was later bought by AMD, which took its flagship Radeon line and continued developing it into the very popular current GPU lineup, rivalled only by NVIDIA and their competing GeForce products.

How did I turn into the Cliff Clavin of this board?!?!

EOcaculX4AI5QIx.jpg
 
You used to be able to buy engineering samples of ATI video cards at Above All Electronics Surplus on Bloor St. Some of them even worked
 
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