Ah! 68000 development systems in a 19" rack. With huge disk pack. I think this took several minutes to get up to speed. They don't make them like they used to. Never had a system with those huge reel to reel tapes though.
Breathing some life into a laptop
- Thread starter aferris2
- Start date
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ColinJ
Puzzle game procrastinator!
- Location
- Todmorden - Yorks/Lancs border
Ha - when I started work it was pre-Windows. MS-DOS booted from a floppy on an 8 MHz machine with 1 MB of RAM! 14" green screen monitors with some poxy resolution like 640 x 480 pixels. It was a few years before we got HDDs.
I remember a colleague drinking an awful lot of coffee one day. Somebody had changed an important header file and it meant that he had to recompile all of his software. He told me that it would take 6 or 7 hours to rebuild!
I remember a colleague drinking an awful lot of coffee one day. Somebody had changed an important header file and it meant that he had to recompile all of his software. He told me that it would take 6 or 7 hours to rebuild!
midlife
Guru
I bought a 10mb hard card for my Amstrad 1512, cost about £250 iirc but wow! No more booting from a floppy lol
My first taste of programming was punched cards. Yes, really! I think we had to remember the bit patterns of the characters you wanted. There certainly wasn't a keyboard. We punched the program, wrapped the cards up with an elastic band, sent it off to run, and received the results a week later. Normally, something like "syntax error" then a couple of pages of garbage. That was fortran.
I was privileged to be allowed to used one of the 3 (I think) 6800 processor systems at Kent uni at the time. I wasn't allowed to use the 6809 one.
ColinJ
Puzzle game procrastinator!
- Location
- Todmorden - Yorks/Lancs border
Been there, punched the cards, waited the week, got the syntax errors!
45 years ago, I wrote an Algol program to add up the integers from 1 to 100. I spent hours entering them onto punched cards which then had to be collected into a bundle held together by an elastic band and delivered to the computer centre at Warwick university. Some time later they ran the program. It took about a month to go through that cycle enough times to sort out all the syntax errors and bugs.
Fortunately, things have moved on since then!
Ming the Merciless
There is no mercy
- Location
- Inside my skull
Space invaders used to be bitmaps pushed into memory directly mapped to the screen. To make the arms go up and down you pushed a different bitmap in and shifted the whole video memory map across.
swee'pea99
Legendary Member
Have to say it absolutely astonishes me just how tough they are. I have ancient MP3 players with 20gb drives in that play for hours at a time, sometimes on the move, which means a little metal disc inside is spinning around more than 5,000 times a minute. 5,000 times a minute! And they have been doing it, on demand, for a decade and more, without ever skipping a beat. No maintenance, no lubrication, no nothing. I find that quite mind-bending. (Apparently they have a surface coating of some rare element that's three atoms thick. I find that pretty mind-bending too.)
ColinJ
Puzzle game procrastinator!
- Location
- Todmorden - Yorks/Lancs border
OTOH... As described above - my niece trashed her laptop drive by throwing the machine onto a sofa while the HDD was still whirring, and I witnessed grown men scream in our office when they lost work due to poor backup regimes and failed HDDs. The worst case was an entire year's worth of work lost!!!
Some drives have anti-shock protection so I assume that your MP3 player has one of them.
It IS pretty mind-boggling that HDDs can do what they do.
rockyroller
Guru
- Location
- 20 miles northwest of Boston, MA
excellent source of computer knowledge. I must tap into that! at the end of lockdown, last August I started laptop shopping. haven't updated my short list but does anyone care to trash either of these?
Dell Latitude E5530 15.6 Inch Business Laptop, Intel Core i5-3210M up to 3.1GHz
Dell Latitude E6530 15.6in Notebook Intel Core I7-3520M up to 3.6G
Dell Latitude E5530 15.6 Inch Business Laptop, Intel Core i5-3210M up to 3.1GHz
Dell Latitude E6530 15.6in Notebook Intel Core I7-3520M up to 3.6G
ColinJ
Puzzle game procrastinator!
- Location
- Todmorden - Yorks/Lancs border
They both look a bit chunky to carry around. Not a problem if you won't be lugging them about on foot or by bike.
I like my laptops to be small and light so I bought a smaller one with a 12" screen and weighing only 1.2 kg (2.6 lbs). A lot more expensive though...
rockyroller
Guru
- Location
- 20 miles northwest of Boston, MA
basically for home use. it only moves from the kitchen table to the living room couch, I'm currently nursing along my Son's 10? yr old unit that we got him for high school. we got him a new one for college which he graduated from 3? yrs ago anything newer than that will likely be better & lighter
Not me (honest!). At the end of each project we had to archive the source-code just in case... The computers just had two 8" floppy drives (this is long before the days of hard disks). One disk for the OS (drive 0), the other for the project code (drive 1). To make the copy, you put the project disk into drive 0, blank disk into drive 1, and copy drive 0 to drive 1. Simple, except...and I witnessed grown men scream in our office when they lost work due to poor backup regimes and failed HDDs. The worst case was an entire year's worth of work lost!!!
...we had about 10 projects which archived perfect copies of the OS.
ColinJ
Puzzle game procrastinator!
- Location
- Todmorden - Yorks/Lancs border
Oops!
I always worried slightly about backups at work. We eventually had a network drive to backup our projects to and were told that I.T. were doing backups of the network drive. The thing is, how can you be sure that a backup has been done properly and looked after, until the time comes when you desperately need it!
Which reminds me... It is time for me to spread my backups around a bit. I have a couple of flash drives which I use. Flash drives are not totally reliable long-term, but the chances of my SSD and 2 flash drives all failing at the same time are tiny, except for the fact that they are all stored in the same room! A fire, flood or burglary could be a big problem. I think I'll encrypt my files and archive copies online...
We had IT guys who insisted that everything was backed up every day. It was always strange that when anything went wrong, they could only restore to the beginning of last week.
I have scheduled backups to a drive on the home network and important files onto my own domain via FTP. About £30 per year and they handle backups of everything on the server too. It's mainly office documents which are all password protected and they go into a folder that you can't see on the net.
...and I have restored files from all of my archive locations.
RoubaixCube
~Tribanese~
- Location
- London, UK
- Depends. Does the laptop still serve its purpose? If yes how badly do you want to spend money?
- Replacing with an SSD will help tonnes. a Samsung, Crucial or Sandisk SSD will serve your needs. Keep an eye out on amazon deals. my friend recently bought a 1TB for something like £80. Laptops like yours normally have something called an 'Msata ' or 'Mpcie' slot for a more compact versions of SSD. Might be worth putting one of these in instead and save your hard drive bay for a hard drive for extra storage if you need it.
- Depends. I would rather a fresh install though because its just cleaner. When you install an OS over another OS then a lot of apps can get broken due to incompatibility or lost because windows 10 doesnt know how to hook everything up correctly in the registry. You dont NEED to but it is the preferred way of doing it to minimise possible headaches in the long run.
- Not at all. You should still have the W7 key on a sticker on the bottom of your laptop. >follow this guide here to find out your windows key< then copy and paste it into notepad and store it on a USB stick for safe keeping. but since youre already on windows 10. that key should be registered to your microsoft account so should your hard drive ever die or something happens to your windows installation and it gets corrupted, windows should always be activated once you sign in with your microsoft account.
If you have a blank 8GB usb key, you can use >Microsoft Media Creation Tool< to make that drive a windows 10 installation drive that you plug in and boot from to install windows.
according to intel, That CPU supports up to 32GB ram so you can put that in if you want. Ive seen HP, Dell, Lenovo and Alienware laptops rocking 32GBs of ram so there is no reason why you cant do the same. It might help you with your CAD work.
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