I got a new handheld programmer--questions for bob boyce

[yurtle]

I finally tore my last two apart, but kept the platters for evil experiments. 5MB IBMs.

[nickdalzell1]

I have seen videos of folks attaching propellers to the motors and making goofy drones out of 'em. Or model hovercraft.

Sad part is a lot of those drives still work today for those into old systems. Hardly ever see a modern hard disk live past warranty these days

More nostalgia:






^^Oregon Trail was perhaps 2nd grade's most popular title. If you were not at the front of the line then, all the disks were gone by the time you got to the tray

[yurtle]

Good motors. Threw out all but 4 motors and controllers. Still have every platter I've ever owned. Those are for launching with 15 kJ of EMP.

[nickdalzell1]

Ever seen those few on YouTube where they rig up floppy drives or dot-matrix printer heads to play music?

[yurtle]

No. I never felt as nostalgic about printers. Tossed the "ball" typewriter printers when the 9 pin dot matrix's came out, then tossed those for 24. Had to change balls to change fonts or pitch. I couldn't afford a laser until 1993. HP LaserJet 4P. Only 4 pages per minute, but they were beautiful for a home printer. And unlike inkjets, they didn't bleed if you got caught in the rain or spilled coffee on them.

I never had a daisy-wheel printer, nor ever recall using them.

[nickdalzell1]

I have never seen printers using a ball (known as a selectric) only typewriters.

Dot matrix printers have finally become extinct in these parts, they were still selling them at Office Depot until 2 or 3 years ago. I wish fax machines would join them. Who even relies on fax these days when email is ubiquitous?

I couldn't afford the Laser printers back when they were standard in high school (LaserJet III) they were selling for well over $900 for black and white, almost twice that for color. Inkjets were not even affordable for myself until I had long since moved out of my parent's home.

I once had a color dot matrix printer, a Star NX-1020 Rainbow, took all day to print a color anything. It would print a line, take a few minutes to swap color by adjusting the ribbon (ribbon had like 6 colors in one cart) then print another line, adjust again, repeat.

[yurtle]

I must be wrong about the ball printer. Back then, we always had to have a typewriter, to fill out forms, since you could advance manually from one line to the next. I did a Google search, but couldn't find one.

[nickdalzell1]

I have only seen dot-matrix printers as well as thermal printers. Never even saw a daisy wheel either except on a typewriter.

In the 70s there were mainframes connected to a "Teletype" which was a large printer with keyboard that basically acted as the monitor for such ancient systems. Imagine the paper waste.

There were some great error messages then, as most were hand-written by programmers and utilized. things such as "Values of B will give rise to DOM" or "Beam me up Scotty, there's no life out here" and the infamous UNIX error 'lp0 on fire' were all over newsgroups back in the day. One of my favorites is "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tuna fish"

[yurtle]

I used to prefered the teletype terminals at college when I was programing, as I could take the thing with me, without waiting for up to half an hour for the guys to tear off each print job and throw them in a bin.

My favorite error was Post Mortum Dump. Helpful info, if you knew what it meant. When I took classes, you were given a problem, and you'd write a program. You could do as many test runs as you liked, but once you were happy, you had to do a grade run, where the prof. entered tricky numbers you may not have thought about, so if it wasn't perfect, you'd flunk that program. No do overs. There was always multiple ways to get the right answer, but the easier you got to the end, the fewer chances you had to blow it.

[nickdalzell1]

TRS-80:

Bughlt: sckmud "Shut her down Scotty, she's sucking mud again!"

No, never figured out what that one meant. Just love the Trek reference


Various UNIX errors:

FATAL SYSTEM ERROR #NNNN CAUSE: We should never get here!

Attention KMart Shoppers! Blue Light Special on our SYSTEM UTILITIES DEPARTMENT. We will now be taking requests for utilities you think should be here. Thank you for shopping KMart

COMPILER THWARTED

$>man overboard
BUGS: No life raft

Bad external file system: Boy is your system messed up

And so on....

Kinda wish modern systems had funny creative errors these days, but instead they dumb down and just say "Sorry, can't connect to this network" without giving a cause.