How crucial it was to get your master / slave HDD configuration correct if you wanted to be able to pump the data through fast enough for video work.

Also, that drives were a lot smaller than they are today.

Andrew

Looking back on it today sounds pretty racist "Master" and "Slave". So was the computer called the "Plantation"?

I'm only willing to confirm there was nothing kinky on it. :-)

Andrew

I came across some 5 1/2inch floppy disk drives the other day.

I'm old enough to remember news coming through the computer magazines (like a web site but printed on glossy paper) of a development where they had discovered a type of RAM that when you switched off the power it didn't lost the data stored in it. It was amazing.

Andrew

I'm old enough to remember Windows 3.1 having issues with running out of "system resources". On a whim I thought I would see how many instances of Notepad.exe I could launch. I think the answer was about 18.

Why, yes, I was very bored that day.

Andrew

I'm old enough to remember being excited when I got a CD-ROM burner, because one CD-ROM disc could hold more data than my hard drive.

I'm old enough to want to forget about interrupts and base addresses.

I'm old enough to remember running programs with DOS 6.22. The floppy disc with DOS on it went into drive A:\ and the floppy disc with the desired program (e.g. Word Perfect) on it went into drive B:\

That's quite true about those new fangled shiny things having more space than a hard drive. Or floppies for that matter.

I'm old enough to remember that one campus of my university had a computer with a CD-ROM drive in the library, and that you could exit out of Windows to DOS. This enabled me to take a disc with the Corel Draw v2.01 clip art collection and copy to a floppy what I wanted to use. It was a 20 minute drive each way from the other campus, but it's what I had no choice but to do if I wanted to unlock the trove of shiny data goodies.

I can also remember just years prior convincing my father to get a 120MB hard drive instead of only a 80MB drive in the new computer we were getting. Of course, a CD-ROM drive for the family computer didn't even get contemplated.

Andrew

Family computer? You young whippersnappers...

Whippersnappers, indeed. My son started his career in computers as a young teenager back in the early 1980's. The hardware was a Dragon (32?), backed up by a cassette player for the necessary software and a decommissioned TV as the monitor. We didn't have a PC in the house until he got his first job after university. The rest, as they say, is history.

Learned ALGOL in a CS101 course as a freshman at the University of Virginia in 1967, we had to keypunch our programs on IBM cards and submit them to the guys in white coats inside the clean room that housed the massive Burroughs B-5500 Mainframe. Then we would come back later and a printout of the program would be wrapped around the card deck with a rubberband. Most of the time the printout would just say something cryptic like "SYNTAX ERROR, LINE 12". Couple years later the university got a time-sharing system with ASR-33 teletype terminals around the campus connected to the mainframe running BASIC, that's when I really learned how to program.

First personal computer was an Apple ][ with a vast 16KB of memory in 1978. It was one of the first 5000 made. Apple didn't have disk drives yet, you had to use your own cassette recorder for storage and a TV for a monitor. It only had integer BASIC in ROM, that's why I went all-in and got 16K memory so I could load floating point BASIC from tape. The 4K Apple ][ didn't have enough memory for that!

In 1985 I got a 512K "fat Mac" and Apple Hard Disk 20. That was a huge upgrade! Here's my daughter playing with MacPaint in 1987, thats's an old Zenith CRT terminal next to it that I used to connect to a VAX 11/750 running BSD unix at SUNY with my blazing fast 1200 baud USR modem!

Sinclair calculator - probably about 1974, it did plus/minus/divide and multiply - and was around three weeks wages. Then a ZX80 computer, then Vic20 and 64. I was quite a fan of basic - and had Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy which was written in basic and the first text based adventure game - as in:
what can I see
nothing
turn on the light
there is food on the table
eat food

Loved it.

I even liked the Sony, Panasonic and other Japanese MSX computers - then of course Amstrad PCW256/512 with a disk drive! and green screen! Of course I also did all the video formats. I got married in 1980 and got to borrow a Panasonic portable single tube camera - but the person I gave it to didn't;t set it up properly and it of course had a black and white viewfinder and white balance was tricky - so my wife's wedding dress was green. I also recording 16 bit digital audio on a Sony F1 using betamax video cassettes on a portable unit. I loved all this new technology. My stint at a broadcaster introduced me to the MII system instead of Betacam A shame it never took off properly. I've always tried to be in with new products - anyone remember Elcassette - I loved them ¼" tape in a cassette at 3 and 3/4IPS.

Learned ALGOL in a CS101 course as a freshman at the University of Virginia in 1967, we had to keypunch our programs on IBM cards and submit them to the guys in white coats inside the clean room that housed the massive Burroughs B-5500 Mainframe. Then we would come back later and a printout of the program would be wrapped around the card deck with a rubberband. Most of the time the printout would just say something cryptic like "SYNTAX ERROR, LINE 12". !

This is very similar to my experience duing high school in the late 70's. I was learning FORTRAN and had to keypunch the whole program on IBM cards and then . . . send them overnight to the local community college where the printout would come back the next day. A 24 hour turnaround for every chance to debug a program. It forced you to really, really, look at every line of code before putting the cards in the tray.

A few years later I wrote a Yahtzee game for the Commodore 64 that was on par with any computer game back in those days, complete with animated dice and everything. I wish I had that kind of spare time now to dabble in apps.

I was always told that the purpose of math classes were to teach you how to THINK -- not that you'd ever use the actual math in the real world. Well, if you want to learn to think logically and learn to problem solve, take a course in coding and learn how to program from scratch. That teaches you how to think. That FORTRAN class was probably the most valuable single course I ever took in high school or college.

The first pc I used at work was an IBM pc with an Intel 8080 processor. It had a monochrome monitor, 64KB of RAM, and a 10MB hard drive. Cost more than $3K USD. I also used an Intel MDS system to write firmware that was burned into eproms. The MDS system used 160KB 8 inch floppies to store programs that took all night to compile. Kids today have no idea how easy they have it. I probably sound like an old man, which I am.

Sorry, but if your first computer had a hard drive and 64K, you're not an "old man" (unless you got a late start). ;-)

anyone remember Elcassette - I loved them ¼" tape in a cassette at 3 and 3/4IPS.

I remember them well. They sounded so much better than the early Philips cassettes. Here in the states they were marketed by RCA and others.

Old enough to remember people getting themselves into an excited lather about "bubble memory" some sort of a revolutionary new tech which was going to come our way. I wonder whatever happened to it.

Learned enough about DOS3.2 to unpick and manually rewrite from a handwritten copy a somehow damaged batch file for Olivetti word processor which used a proprietory software called SWS.

Strangely enough, a screenwriting program of that generation works in Windows 10. It was originally a DOS software but in its version 5, was given its own shell which emulated the look of the Windows GUI but did its own thing. I am still using it and it was one of the few softwares which was millenium bug proof.

Olivetti SWS sent a much newer computer quite insane but sometimes it worked, blisteringly fast with the cursor going off rapidly like a disco strobe. Now Windows and its core guts is such a huge beast, I have no hope of mining into its gizzards to heal it.

Presently there is a conflict going on between a Nvidia graphics driver and Windows 10 that neither company is doing much to correct. Once COVID is put to bed, I guess some progress will be made.

Now does anyone have enough wrinkles and fullness under their chin to remember CTOS, Unisys and Token Ring networking. I never knew how it worked but it did and quite well so long as you learned and remembered all the keyboard shortcuts for WordPerfect 4 I think it was..

Old enough to remember people getting themselves into an excited lather about "bubble memory" some sort of a revolutionary new tech which was going to come our way. I wonder whatever happened to it.

The bubble burst. ;-)

I'm old enough to remember how we used to sweat over the possibility of dropped frames.

Andrew

Seeing as this has become a 'computer throwback' thread I'll chime in.

I remember freshman year of college 1991 I was assigned a computer class my first semester. My Dad worked in programming & an older brother was a computer science major, so I sorta knew a bit about it. I was keeping up, then about halfway thru we were assigned a 'calendar project', where we had to code a working calendar (pure data/BASIC, not like graphics too). Different days in month (28, 30, 31) and leap year. The horror!

I was really struggling, I'd break ground (28 days for February) then run into another obstacle (July/Aug 31). I'd complete it for a year, but it wouldn't flow into year 2. Then around Thanksgiving I got years done but couldn't get leap years. I kinda made friends with a kid in the class who was similar to me, ok at it but not a CS major, and saw him I think the last week of classes. I recall being in a near panic and asking him if/how he got leap years done. To his best, he tried to explain it or help, without fully giving it away, which I got. As much as I understood and respected him not fully telling me what to do, I was near pleading with him for help. I had met with the professor once or twice outside of class already, and was at my wits end. First semester and I'm almost flunking a class.

Anyway I took what he said and don't even remember but must've gone to the lab a few times or over the weekend and made progress. I do recall a point where I thought 'This might make it' after doing a change or two. I know it passed but I think there was something like it fell off after 100 year or a 1000, I just submitted it anyway. The professor noticed but I think I got a C or B & took it with pride. It was old DOS type computing before windows, kindof a stretch to assign a video major into back then for 'Intro to Programming'. Anyway, I look back on that with alot of pride, it really shows something about my sticktoitiveness & commitment.

Congratulations. There is certainly a lot of satisfaction that comes from figuring stuff out and making something that actually works. People that just want to be handed the answer on a silver platter will never understand that sense of accomplishment or build up their troubleshooting skills that can be applied to all kinds of situations in life.

BTW, imagine if you had to do that with IBM punch cards and you could only press "run" once every 24 hours to debug. You'd still be working on it! :-)

This is more my vintage:

https://youtu.be/PZVaK2TKgFA - how things have changed!

Also, I believe that I was one of the first in the UK to use a computer for editing digital audio recordings for subsequent release on CD. The system was based on an ATARI computer and went by the name of Sound Maestro, manufactured by Audio Design and Recording, a well respected audio company here in the UK. This would have been around 1985/6.

Sorry, but if your first computer had a hard drive and 64K, you're not an "old man" (unless you got a late start). ;-)

Right. We didn't even know what a hard drive was. Some people incorrectly called the 3.5 floppies hard disks. Wow a HDD was a nice thing to have.
64K? a dream when 16K was all you had. :)

What ever happened to bubble memory?

These things were big deals to me when they became available: HDD, VGA, Sound cards, CDROM. Heck, even 16 color EGA was impressive when it came out

I can remember when the family computer only had a couple of floppy drives in it, and it would make some satisfying noises with your floppy as a file was written to the disc.

Then we had a family friend's computer for a time (can't remember why) and I saved something. All that happened was a small light on the front panel of the computer blinked - that was it. Apparently this computer had something called a "hard drive" and the file was already saved in that very split second. Heady times!

Andrew

First computer I owned was a used Radio Shack TRS-80. Affectionately known as a "Crash 80".

I remember:

Shooting with JVC cameras recording to a VHS deck hanging off my shoulder.

Thinking S-VHS was Super Pro. 400 lines holy crap!

Shooting for the first time with a 40 lb Beta cam on my shoulder.

Discovering DVINFO.net (then the XL1 Watch Dog) because I was building my own computers to edit digital video. All of the guys here were fighting our way through the same problems and this was the place for answers.

Paying $3,500.00 for cameras I would get a $100,000.00 ROI with.

When firewire was king. Everything had it. It worked and it worked in both directions

Shunning the DSLR innovation for many years. I was a camera snob."if it didn't have an XLR input I wouldn't shoot with it".

Hand carrying magnetic tape and film through security at airports, even though they claimed it would not be damaged.

And more recently; I paid over $3,000.00 for my HP Zbook that does everything I need for portable editing. It has never shown me the "blue screen of death" for those of you that remember that.

Kind Regards,

Steve

I’m old enough to remember when lighting desks did NOT have computers in them, and last night’s Drifters show did not have the blue screen of death 1 hour before showtime!

As a young electrician and lighting designer, I saw that all first-hand. Began lighting community theatre shows in the church basement in 1961, built my own dimmer rack from four huge discarded resistance dimmers, it weighed a ton! Then through the years, lots of variac transformers and resistance dimmers. Learned how to use my hands, arms, legs, feet and even chin to move a bunch of dimmers at the same time!

In college during the late 60's I was house electrician for the theatre where all the Broadway tours came, that was a great experience for a kid, learned all about "piano boards" from the road-worn IATSE guys. Our stage had the latest technology though, a Century (I believe this was before they merged with Strand) Edkotron solid state SCR board with a massive 36-channel 2 scene setup. What a disaster - good, modular idea but terrible quality control. The control handles were cheap plastic and the gears all stripped out. It became almost unusable in a short period of time.

As a senior in 1971, I saw a demonstration of one of the first computer boards - the Q-file. Was it Kliegl or Century? Can't remember. First "real" job was technical supervisor for a new performing arts center at Ocean County College in 1972 with a new Century "C-Card" 36-channel board. It was like a two-scene preset board, but the the handles were on big plastic "cards" that you preset for each cue and swapped out. Good idea, but very awkward and lots of reliability problems, the factory reps were visiting often to fix problems. Then, one of the students spilled a cup of coffee on the desk that got inside and really messed things up - that was an expensive fix.

Lots of others along the way, but the first big computer board I used as a designer was 1979 at the Civic Center in Syracuse, NY where I was working for the Syracuse Opera. Very impressive, 100 channels with 350 dimmers located in a bunch of separate rooms throughout the complex. There was a huge matrix on the wall with 35,000 pins (100x350) that were used to physically patch the dimmers into the channels. Powered by a PDP-11 Minicomputer, it was also setup for use as a 2-scene preset board with physical dimmer handles.

Cool as it was, kind of a designer's nightmare. No tech table display, you had to give the electrician levels one channel at a time on the headset. And the physical dimmer handles weren't motorized, so editing cues was really tedious. The whole thing was not very reliable, especially that pin matrix, very hard to make changes without accidentally affecting something else.

On tour we started using the little Kliegl Performer boards and that was a real breath of fresh air - although they were also pretty buggy, memory battery would go bad and "forget" the cues and the tape backup was not very reliable. Started using Strand Light Pallete boards at Philadelphia Opera in 1993, and mostly used those (with some ETC) until I retired in 2011.

It was a fun ride, but honestly, I don't miss it much. :-) BTW, we always called them "boards" in the US, not "desks". I suppose that's a holdout from the days when the old dimmers were actually mounted on a piece of wood?

Actually we did use boards, but when the small electronic ones came out it moved to desks.

The Q-File was the Thorn. It sold a few here in the UK, but we did bring in some Berkey Colortran controls - the one I remember (and hating) being the channel track. This is when lighting operation split between the US and the UK. The American preference (when memory was expensive and often less than ideal) was to store changes to cues, but the Brits preferred to save EVERY channel in each cue. Our system was memory hungry, so our maximum channel count was often less than idea, while the Americans only stored channels that had changed between cues. This of course mean, we could instantly go to say, cue 37, but the US people would have to go back to the last cue where every channel was recorded, then go forward. Now of course, you get the choice.

Great memories! I was a grad student at Carnegie-Mellon and we had one of the infamous George Izenour Thyratron dimming systems, had to turn it on well in advance for the tubes to warm up. Cues were keypunched on large IBM-type cards and placed into readers. Quite a ridiculous system by 1971 when I arrived there but Izenour was a good friend of William Nelson, who ran the lighting design program.

Evidently there was a twin system at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, but when I started working there in 1976 it was gone. The story was, the master electrician came in drunk one night and when it started acting up during rehearsal, he kicked the dimmer rack repeatedly and totally destroyed it!

This is very similar to my experience duing high school in the late 70's. I was learning FORTRAN and had to keypunch the whole program on IBM cards and then . . . send them overnight to the local community college where the printout would come back the next day. A 24 hour turnaround for every chance to debug a program. It forced you to really, really, look at every line of code before putting the cards in the tray.

A few years later I wrote a Yahtzee game for the Commodore 64 that was on par with any computer game back in those days, complete with animated dice and everything. I wish I had that kind of spare time now to dabble in apps.

I was always told that the purpose of math classes were to teach you how to THINK -- not that you'd ever use the actual math in the real world. Well, if you want to learn to think logically and learn to problem solve, take a course in coding and learn how to program from scratch. That teaches you how to think. That FORTRAN class was probably the most valuable single course I ever took in high school or college.

At university in Ontario 1973/74 there was a flavor of FORTRAN called WATFIV (pronounced WAT five, created by Waterloo University). We would type our code on the punch cards in one class room full of those punch machines, then carry the stack down the hallway to wait our turn outside the room with the computer. An attendant would take the stack from you and you waited for your printouts at the next door down the hall. The demand was non-stop so it would run through the night. We often first went to the pub until closing, hoping the line would be shorter after midnight (not usually). Oh hell, we would go to the pub anyway, who am I kidding?

One time a student came down the hall at a brisk pace holding his stack of cards and collided with another student coming out a doorway, sending the cards flying around the hall. You know how long it takes to punch a 3 inch stack. There was some crying going on from that, poor guy.

learned all about "piano boards" from the road-worn IATSE guys.

I was one of those IATSE guys, although not too worn (I was just in my 20s). I remember the "piano boards" and ran a lot of them. They hung on for a while because in the '70s some (or all?) of the theatres in NYC had DC backstage, not AC (a holdover from the Con Edison days) so only resistance dimmers would work. IIRC we took piano boards to the USSR in '74 with Joffrey Ballet. I was doing sound on that tour. It was a real nightmare. The Russian stagehands didn't speak English, and we were allocated ONE translator (who didn't know stage terminology) for setup and strike.

Very cool Greg! Trying to remember whether Joffrey toured to the University of Virginia while I was the house electrician up until 1971, I think they might have. I remember the Alvin Ailey tour, I hung out and partied with them which was very cool for a college kid. Alvin said the first thing he would do in a new town was go to all the record stores and buy stuff, looking for new ideas. We sat around his hotel room while he went through a big stack of new records, if he didn't like one he would just chuck it across the room, haha.

Around 1990 we had a small group from the Bolshoi Theatre come to SUNY Oswego where I was the TD. That was really interesting, I speak a litte Russian. Went out one night and drank vodka, I couldn't keep up with them, don't think I've even been that drunk in my whole life. It's a miracle I survived the 15 mile drive home through a snowstorm!

I recently watched Robert X. Cringely's 1996 "The Triumph of the Nerds" on DocuRama, somehow I must have missed it along the way. Made me think of this thread. Some really terrific computer nostalgia there, especially cool to see a 1996 Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (who was currently "in exile" from Apple at that time).

And to relate this all to video, just found this ESRGAN AI upscaled version on YouTube. Compare it to some of the other VHS versions, it's quite impressive. Didn't know things had come this far with upscaling.

Triumph of the Nerds: The full documentary (1996) - YouTube