Have you a hard disk PC? LOL!!

[Jonty]

Sorting some stuff out the other day and came across an old floppy from 1992, free with a magazine, with 50 utilities on it.

The help file stated:

Installing the programs
-----------------------
If you have a hard disk PC, use the install program
(started by typing GO) to copy the programs onto it.
You can then change to the new directory containing
the programs and try them out.


A lot has happened in ten years

[vass0922]

50 utilities on a floppy?
sheesh, now you can't even get A utility on 3 floppies

I remember the DOS days. Started on DOS 3 and still remember some of the commands. It was fun and one could understand the way the OS worked better than XP, which, to me is like a Black Box with everything happening behind the scenes.

I used to have a program called PCTOOLS kinda like a dos norton utilities. My first PC was a 386 with 4MB RAM, windows 3.1 and Office 4.3. Worked well as I recall. Circa 1994.

Yep, lot of water under the bridge in 10 years.

[Brainchild]

FloppyI learned on win95 I'm a newbie compared to you guys

[Ed_S]

I Miss DOS!!

You youngsters may not know, but DOS had advantages that Windows KILLED totally. Most important to me was the fact that all programs kept totally to themselves in their own directory. No DLL's, etc. Want to get rid of one? Just delete the entire directory! No "remove it" apps needed. 100% effective, no "remnaints", no junk.

And efficient!! Whatever program was running had 99% of system resources at it's disposal. Anybody remember getting a 486, and turning OFF the turbo mode, so the system would slow down enough to run games?? Yep! With turbo on, there was NO WAY you could outrun anything!


But on the flip side, you had to configure each app separetely for your hardware. Every game had to be set up for video, every app had to have it's own print driver, etc. Not all bad there though, since a failed install did NOT take anything else with it!

...and a LOT fit on those 1.44mb floppys compared to the 360K SSDD 5¼'s I started with!

[alondra]

Ah Yes, remember the Commadore, an empty box you put everything in w/ floppys. those 360K ones, each time you booted it. we had a little notcher so we could use both sides, and typed out program,s. had hundreds of FREE games.

[griobhta]

Originally posted by shahani

I used to have a program called PCTOOLS kinda like a dos norton utilities. My first PC was a 386 with 4MB RAM, windows 3.1 and Office 4.3. Worked well as I recall. Circa 1994.

that my friend was a luxury machine to run dos on.

My first pc was a tandon PCX20
8088 4.77MHz 640K (shipped with 256 but had 640 by the time i got) hercules mono graphics card cira 1990 might have been earlier but can't quite recall.
MS-Dos 2.11 which in the manual when you looked up DOS it said it rhymed with Boss...???

I had pctool also but the only reason i used it was that it had a good defrag and undelet program but with dos 5 or was it 6 didn't need it anymore

Norton Commander rocked and still use a clone in Linux
Earlier versions of it fitted nicely on a 5 1/4 " 360 floppy

I actually still have the floppy drive and a load of old cover disks from computer magazines

griobhta

[Gomer]

You youngsters may not know, but DOS had advantages that Windows KILLED totally

Ahhhh I am not a youngster anymore!!!!! The rig I cut my teeth on was an 8088 (10Mhz?) I dunno if it was a 10 or 40 Mb HD.
DOS and even 3.1 to some extent were far simpler than these OS'es anymore. At least as far as installs go.

[justy]

LOL, how many remember real pc's ( 8088 or 8086 ) with hard cards?

A 10 meg hard card was like gold. We had the facility to replace the platters, if one was defective. Class A clean room. Cost 10,000 - 15,000 STG at the time megabucks. Within 5 years, it was the company smoking room. Hey it had its own ventalation system.

We were good, no we were brilliant in them days. We fixed everthing, and I mean fixed, no replacements. It just happened that it worked out cheaper to replace than fix. Alot of my buds, GREAT engineers lost there jobs.

Ahhhh.......... the memorys. Good or bad, they were great times.

All the best, Justy.

griobhta- You go back a long way. But match this: When I was in Engineering College in 1972, we had an IBM computer, the 1470. It not only had its room, but an entire BUILDING.

Flashing lights (like a startrek spaceship), 4 people to man it, card punchers where you could punch your FORTRAN programs, give it to one of the four to run, and viola, the next morning you got the dot-matrix printed output on huge continuous sheets.

Then in 1981 when I was doing a Master's, at IIT Chicago, we had the VAX and PRIME 500 mini computers- still filled a room and still had punched cards. We could connect to the PRIME via a modem - you dialed and put the phone hand piece into these rubber caps so it could "connect" - maybe at 1KBPS- I don't remember - but we did lot of computation work from Finite Element Analysis to CAD on it.

Times change. Kids nowadays have it easy.