Hey old timers - here's a site fer ya... old GUI's

[ajawamnet]

http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html

I used a lot of those. Geos was one of the newer ones. Note the AOL install from 1990 at the bottom of this page:
http://toastytech.com/guis/geos122.html

I recall cancelling AOL way back in the early 2000's ... when the person asked what my user name was and I stated wamnet, they said, "... no, there will be numbers after that..."

"Uh... no," I replied, "... that's whole user name." So they look it up. "Wow... you're old... that goes back to 1990"

And here's link that's on that page - the Comdex in 1983 (when I was designing CGA interfaces) where they show Winblows and old Apple II:

I recall seeing that vid at Opus One when we were doing all those installs for various places like Mobay, Westinghouse, Alcoa, and CMU's new ITC center. Designing stuff for getting those old projectors (Novabeam, Inflight/VStar, Electrohome) to do the various resolutions (old Herc, old terminals, and eventually the CGA which was basically NTSC) was fun. Convergence was a nightmare...


Oh - and note the Bell and Howell booth. Wow - back then they were huge. Now they sell cheap lawn lights and clips for attaching your cellphone to your car's AC vents. So sad...

 

[ajawamnet]

Then there's Roger Nichols - Wendell:
http://rogernichols.com/wendel

The first DAW like thing - Note the use of TRW microwave converters and sample hold cards on an old lunchbox PC... all done in Assembly

"Real men code in assembly, lest they get C sick" - what my coders back then told me...

 

[ajawamnet]

And an early touch screen from that Comdex in 1983:

 

[gene_stl]

I liked the GEM interface. Like an early MAC or Apple without Apple. I have always been an Apple Free Zone.

 

[scott wurcer]

Didn't Don Lancaster write all his code in Postscript and use nothing but a printer?

 

[Wombat]

Not so vintage but I use Classic Shell to give me a Win7 GUI on Win10. I even use Live Mail in original GUI. And Media Player.

Luddite bliss.

Lack of support for these may catch up but until then …… .

 

[ajawamnet]

Not so vintage but I use Classic Shell to give me a Win7 GUI on Win10. I even use Live Mail in original GUI. And Media Player.

Luddite bliss.

Lack of support for these may catch up but until then …… .

Yep - Love Classic Shell... the originator retired, but they kept it going thru a github effort
My win 10 bench machine box looks like WinXP - this is the last version the original guy released on win 10 1903

 

[anmpr1]

Back in the day, before the regular Internet of things, I used a BBS (bulletin board system) run by GE: GEnie, or the General Electric Network for Information Exchange. It was a way for the company to utilize their mainframes during off peak hours, charging subscribers a few dollars, and hosting a newsgroup like exchange. All text based. You could use a script program (Aladdin) to dial in, post your replies, and download text messages in whatever newsgroups you subscribed.

I had an IBM 386SX (6MB RAM/IBM PC-DOS 4.0) with a 2400 baud modem. You could actually see texts downloading at that speed. GE charged by the minute, I think, so you didn't want to hang out on line in real time. If I'm not mistaken, this was really before AOL took off, about the time of Prodigy service, which was sort of GUI based--like the old DOS Shell.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

Reminds me of TAN, The Audiophile Network. My first exposure to an audiophile community where I made some long-lasting relationships.

 

[anmpr1]

I started out with a Tandy Color Computer. It hooked up to a TV, and featured a chicklet keyboard. Cassette tape for storage. More a toy than anything.

Then a C-64. The C-64 had a real monitor, but as I recall you could only read about 40 characters of text on a line. It really wasn't WYSIWYG. I think it was more like DOS, as I recall.

Then came the PC. DOS worked OK, but Windows on top of DOS was so unstable. I thought Win 3x was ridiculous, from a user standpoint. I liked the Windows 9x GUI. That was very well thought out.

Because Win crashed all the time, I migrated to OS/2 for a while. OS/2 was really hardware intensive for the day, and not the most easy to configure. Stability was a mixed bag. Win/OS2 sessions worked more in theory than in practice. It was a 'better DOS than DOS', though. That was what IBM advertised, and I found it to be true. But by then, DOS was on the way out.

Once Linux came along, that was that. It rarely crashed, but drivers were sometimes difficult to impossible. Nothing was plug n play back then. Yet Linux was very configurable... such as it was. You never knew if your sound would work--very flaky. You want 3D? Then you'll want to learn Bash. Wi Fi? LOL.

I used Windomaker, based on the NeXTSTEP GUI. Very modern. I also ran Solaris, and BSD versions, but it was mostly just to say I did it. Those all took the same GUIs as Linux--usually Gnome or KDE was what you got.

However all that was, once MS got Windows to the point where it wouldn't crash for no good reason (Win 3 and 9x), I went back. Most things usually work out of the box. The one thing I don't like about Win Tin Tin is that it has become a commercial, occasionally 'reminding me' of all the 'cool stuff' I can buy from MS. And I had an old PC that refused to work after an update. But it was old. Really old, so what did I expect? Might have been from the Vista era.

 

[gene_stl]

I can still remember the first time I successfully multitasked which was in the early 90s on OS/2 which I loved. The fact that Bill Gates bailed on it in favor of Win 3.x made me hate him because the latter was crap.

 

[ajawamnet]

Back in the day, before the regular Internet of things, I used a BBS (bulletin board system) run by GE: GEnie, or the General Electric Network for Information Exchange. It was a way for the company to utilize their mainframes during off peak hours, charging subscribers a few dollars, and hosting a newsgroup like exchange. All text based. You could use a script program (Aladdin) to dial in, post your replies, and download text messages in whatever newsgroups you subscribed.

I had an IBM 386SX (6MB RAM/IBM PC-DOS 4.0) with a 2400 baud modem. You could actually see texts downloading at that speed. GE charged by the minute, I think, so you didn't want to hang out on line in real time. If I'm not mistaken, this was really before AOL took off, about the time of Prodigy service, which was sort of GUI based--like the old DOS Shell.

The coder that worked for me on one of the first wireless Internet of Things patents - Larry Wimble, he started in 1995 - see this page:
http://www.ajawamnet.com/amnet/index.html
was an amazing coder... ran an 8 line BBS on a Commodore back in mid-late 1980's...

When he started with us we were using 6811 and PIC uC's... then these new Atmel things came out but he hated Winblows (what they had for a Dev environment ). So he wrote one of the first GCC assemblers during a few lunch hours back in 1996. I believe there may still be some of his code lurking in the Arduino thing that's all man-bun, Java-jockey cool...

I still have a drawer of Rockwell 224ATF modem chips we used.... to this day most of the dial up telemetry (the little that's left) still 2400 since the negot time is really fast... why waste time buzzing and bipping thru all the silly when you're only sending a few dozen bytes of data for a credit card swiper?

Still available:
https://www.westfloridacomponents.com/T604APF11/RC224ATF+R6641-14+Modem+Device+IC+Rockwell.html

Back in 1982, when I was doing all those video interface boards for various computers we had a ton of cradles sitting around. I recall a Plexis having one that we used to get data from various telemetry sites.

Until about 5-7 years ago there was a bank in the Shopper's grocery store that had an ATM that was running OS/2. I was watching the guy repair it and when it booted I was amazed.

I believe most of the POS self serves in Shoppers and at Home Depot were running (might still be) WinXP.

I recall being at the local Home Depot here in Manasshole with my son a few years back and seeing it at the Tellytubby background with a DOS window open. I went over and thought, "Gee be cool to have a mouse to scroll thru it and see where it crashed..." Then I remembered it was a touch screen... as I scrooled thru I noticed that it was balking at the check for the credit card swiper (USB driver didn't like something). As I went down I noticed mismatched this and that and realized that it was hacked. Freaked the MILF standing behind me; almost dropped her cans of paint. I used cash and left. About two days later my kids were up early for school and mentioned that the DC NBC affiliate just ran a story on Home Depot being hacked...

 

[ajawamnet]

Here's some fun - BBS via Syncterm

http://syncterm.bbsdev.net/
https://www.pcmag.com/feature/358037/7-modern-bbses-worth-calling-today

Pretty cool...

 

[pkane]

I started out with a Tandy Color Computer. It hooked up to a TV, and featured a chicklet keyboard. Cassette tape for storage. More a toy than anything.

Then a C-64. The C-64 had a real monitor, but as I recall you could only read about 40 characters of text on a line. It really wasn't WYSIWYG. I think it was more like DOS, as I recall.

Stop it! I actually wrote video games for Tandy Color Computer and C-64 (and Atari 800). Atari was a much better gaming computer than the other two.

Radio Shack even sold my color computer games. All the glorious 2 bits of color that I turned into 4 with some color aliasing, all on a 8KB cartridge

 

[ajawamnet]

Just fired up my old lab box that sits under my bench. Running Win2K. The event viewer in Device Mangler goes back to 2002. Still runs great. And the HD is a 20Gbyte.... All in all of the two dozen machines in my lab I have 3 that still run Win2K. Fire up anything on them and they just scream compared to the man-bun, java-jockey bloatware crap of today.

 

[anmpr1]

Just fired up my old lab box that sits under my bench. Running Win2K. The event viewer in Device Mangler goes back to 2002. Still runs great. And the HD is a 20Gbyte.... All in all of the two dozen machines in my lab I have 3 that still run Win2K. Fire up anything on them and they just scream compared to the man-bun, java-jockey bloatware crap of today.

My first PC had a 40 MB HD. 386SX 16MHz and 2MB RAM. DOS 4. It was slow then, and would be slower now. But it ran DOS based programs acceptably. And Commander Keen. Doom was too much for it. DOS 5 was helpful for its memory management features, so that added value. I beefed up RAM to 6MB in order to run Win 3x (5 floppy disks as I remember) and Lotus 123. But I needed a larger HD for all of that. I think I got a 120MB drive.

In the beginning hardware was very expensive. Windows programs were the beginning of bloat. But even then you could actually customize your PC for programs using Autoexec and Config files. They made sense. Once the Registry happened, no one could figure anything out, and MS started to hide things from users. Even official Windows support got to the point where the solution was to "reload Windows".

Other than graphics and sound (the latter which can still be flaky), the biggest improvement in PC Land is the SSD. I would never own another PC without a solid state drive. I hope I never have to own another PC. I do miss buying the monthly Computer Shopper magazine. You could spend hours with it. Like a Sears catalog, both in size and scope.

 

[ajawamnet]

I recall buying a 10MB hard drive in the mid 1980's that cost $3,000 back then. Lasted 5 months before physical defect caused it to fail.

 

[anmpr1]

I recall buying a 10MB hard drive in the mid 1980's that cost $3,000 back then. Lasted 5 months before physical defect caused it to fail.

Hopefully it had a 6 month warranty!

 

[ajawamnet]

As to registry crap - check this out


I have a Win 7 box that has some drives on it that are mapped on an XP box. (yea I have to use XP since I have about 300 CAD/EDA/RF programs I use that only run on XP or DOS - and yea I tried XP mode and emulators - NoGo)...

So I have quite a few Win 10 boxes.

I noticed that every time I do something intense over the network between the Win 10 boxes and the Win 7 machine that the XP box loses the mappings. Tried all kindsa stuff, already had SMB1 on, got rid of a bunch of stoopid on the Win 10 boxes as well as various HKLM .... Lanman reg key BS. Turned of Browser service on the win7 and win 10 boxes I have... did tons of stuff - nothing worked.

What was weird was that even rebooting the XP box still wouldn't remap the drives - I figured out is was when I rebooted the WIN 7 box that housed the drives that things went back to "norman" (as they say in Rugrats).

So one morning I again lose the XP mappings. I recalled on another time when my PC that runs my CNC did an ESTOP in the middle of a job (ran 1,000's of jobs over the years - never an issue) that I went to Device Mangler and looked in the Event viewer - system. At the time the ESTOP occurred I noticed an entry that the CD-ROM drive had been removed from the syste. Now this machine sits well up on the wall, away from the CNC machine. But lo-and-behold, I open it up and there's all this fine aluminum dust on near the SATA connectors. Damn...

So when this XP box lost the connections, I went to the Win 7 box and went to the System thing in Event and there's this 2017 error that occured right when the XP box losts it's way.
"The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations."

Huh... so I schmoogle that.

Guess what? I come across this article
https://social.technet.microsoft.co...ol-because-the-server?forum=w7itpronetworking

Which eventually leads to this old ref (now on wayback)
https://social.technet.microsoft.co...ol-because-the-server?forum=w7itpronetworking

Which leads to a link to a 1999 text file written by none other than Mark Russinovich of Systernals fame:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170723175917/http://www.decuslib.com/decus/vmslt99a/nt/tips.txt
At the bottom -

"
Tuning NT Workstation and NT Server have vastly different performance
Workstation characteristics due to the internal tuning that the NT operating
.....

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory
Management\LargeSystemCache

and

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size

This table (which was derived from sessions with NTRegmon) presents
the settings you should select on a Workstation to achieve the same
effect you would get using the dialog box were your system a
Server.

Tuning Target LargeSystemCache Size

Minimize Memory Used 0 1

Balance 0 2

File Sharing 1 3

Network Applications 0 3



A setting that has existed since 1999 that no one really knows about, for actual real users that do real work ... Mrs. Melman would never come across this as neither would all the man-bun, Java-jockeys of today that really don't push hardware like we used to. They're too busy with their social disease/media, Clown Computing crap.

I mean really - look at the local Best Buy. Used to be you could buy stuff to do ACTUAL WORK. Now it's play,play, play oh - a washer/dryer - play. play play - oh and vacuum cleaner - play, play, cellphones to play, play, play....

Geez....

 

[Kal Rubinson]

These were my first home PCs.