Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 26, 2021

Don’t give in!

16 megabytes RAM? 35 megabytes of hard disk space? Aw, how cute.

Anyone remember those days? I do.

Certainly not a brain larger than a planet.

16 megs of RAM. How adorable. (Yes, I remember those days).

The printer! – do you remember when printers used paper with holes along each edge

Weird days then. I was a programmer for the department’s main server computer applications. The powers that be determined all “professionals” should have a PC. I was the last to get one because “you already have the biggest computer in the department.” I said that not only is it not on my desk (it comprised three cabinets in a separate air conditioned room), it doesn’t run Windows programs, doesn’t have access to the office network printers, and by the way, I am probably the only one (other than two hobbyists) that knows anything about them.

In 1993, I was running a PC based on a 486DX33, 16MB RAM and a 210MB HDD…I still have it….

At least one of the benefits was the introduction to plug & play. How effective might the system’s demands have been were it not for this capability, after all?

Unfortunately the latest version has passed being a joke to an insult to business. Why would I need ability to access xbox at work?

Plus forcing everyone to upgrade every 18 months, not patch, is budget busting. It cost money to make a new default image and deploy it.

Remember when this seemed like a lot? Ah, those were the days.

I remember his strips in the Hades when he was spoofing Apple for being memory hungry. Glad to see equal time here.

Now, see, unlike the giant talking ambulatory cigarette, THIS is believable. ;-)

Wasn’t there a time when, during a new product demonstration, Bill Gates activated the computer and got the blue screen of death?

“Quarter” is what they would be asking for, not what they would be giving.

35 megs hard disk space…sigh. I remember when this was first published. I was in grad school still writing my thesis on my first computer. The DOS word processing program and all storage lived on 5” floppy discs. Oh the swapping and the swapping….and the accidental overwriting when you put a disk in the wrong slot…

This is so awesome, I so remember these days…lol

Box specs? Those were always “Minimum Requirements” until Microsoft realized they’d better be more honest and add, “Recommended” numbers as well. “Minimum” meant it would load but not be able to do much more.

Our first home computer was a Packard Bell, must have been 30 years ago. My wife bought it and thought it was fantastic, the kids thought it was fantastic, I thought it was a waste of money and what would I ever do with it. Now it’s the first thing I turn on in the morning, even before the coffee!

Buncha old fart geeks complaining about how hard y’all had it back in the day. Not only am I intimately familiar with many of the issues described I had to walk ten miles uphill to get to school and then work and had to stop at the family farm on the way and milk the goats. They beat the heck out of slide rules and typewriters then and they’ve gotten much better. Go back to yelling at the neighborhood kids, it’s a lot more fun.

Then: The first Tomb Raider game needed 1 MB of free space for the install files; the rest of the game ran off the CD.

Now: The 2-generations-old CPU in my desktop has 16 MB of L3 cache. The raw images produced by my 10 year old DSLR are ~25 MB. The raw images produced by my 2 year old cell phone camera are ~80 MB. My home server has 32 GB of RAM; one of these days I’ll toss in 32 GB more, because old server ECC memory is dirt cheap. One of the movie files in my media folder is 25 GB. I have two 2 TB HDDs lying around unused, because “I’ll get around to” installing them one of these days.

People kept walking away with the key to the men’s room in their pocket, and so as at a gas station I needed to attach something big to it. I used my old Win95 upgrade CD— always good for a laugh.

My first computer had Windows 3.1 and I UPGRADED to 6mb RAM. When I tried to put Windows 95 on it, it stopped dead.

I remember building my first PC and being so proud that I put in a 100 Mhz CPU. Well, 99 but you know what I mean. Building the PC from Motherboard and empty box to a functioning PC was like a Jedi building his own light saber. It was a right of passage in the IT field. How things have changed.

I missed some comments from the last couple of days so probably somebody already said (sorry)…

I was surprised they’re excited about consumer level software…

If this is part of Bernie’s business network, wouldn’t they be installing latest Win.NT …maybe 3.5?

Or would Mike really have a stand-alone PC going from Windows 3.11 to 95?

Maybe Trudeau uses Win95 so readers at home would understand.

 

I started with Commodore 128 cos I didn’t know better…

Then given an old IBM “compatible” 8088 .

Couldn’t install Windows 1.0 cos it required 90% of my hard drive. Green monochrome monitor. WordPerfect with a keyboard overlay.

The Commodore was more useful but I wanted a “real” computer.

 

This strip is 1995… friends had 486’s… Mike probably does too..

But I bought a used 386 with a 20M hard drive… ran Doublespace to squeeze in 30 Mb of programs and data. Had to delete 2Mb programs for space.

XTreeGold DOS shell instead of Windows… still miss some stuff on it. It taught me about disk structure instead of masking it like Windows.

It blew up and I was lent another that year with a HUGE 40 Mb hard drive.

 

Had to give it back and bought a secondhand 486 in 1996 or 1997 w/ Windows 3.1. … everybody had Pentium75’s. Got my first modem but had no ISP.

I saw new 1 Gb hard drives but they cost over $250.

Saved up, and had a PC built in 1999 with an AMDK6 chip, Windows 98 and FOUR MB RAM. Ooooh…. and by then could get a 40 Gb HD.

Later swapped out for Win 2000. Much better till Win7 came along.

 

In those days I knew the speed, type, and brand of processors, RAM chips, hard drives, etc.

Used that PC till 2006… I think it’s still in my shed with the DIN keyboards and corded ball mice. LOL.

 

Now on a 2013 laptop upgraded by Microsoft from Win 8 to 10…

Do I know what’s inside? Vaguely. 8Mb RAM, 250GB HD but who knows or cares what specs any more?

Anybody remember Novell?

At today’s prices that machine should have cost about $8. ;-)

First computer was an Apple II+ with 48K ram and a 5-1/2" floppy drive. DOS had to reload from the floppy for each app. I added a 16K memory card, 80 column mono video card and lower case chip. It was amazing what creative programmers could do within those limitations.

I’m surprised someone still hasn’t come up with a computer that asks you a few questions while you are in the store, then prints out a justification for its purchase for your boss or spouse or bossy spouse.

The next time Bill Gates announces another scheme to save the world, someone should remind him of Windows.

Computer evolution exists in a different kind of time from other reality.I just bought a 16 GIGAbyte flash drive for $4.

I bought my first computer in 1988. It was on sale at the local furniture store. Good thing I knew some DOS.

just wait a couple years until Everquest comes out… whoa.. upgrade city!

My first personal computer was a Processor Technology Sol — a woodie (yup, had actual wooden side panels). It came originally with 32K of RAM, and after I upgraded to 48K I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever need more. I eventually donated it to the Computer Museum (along with the 5 mimeographed, stapled CP/M manuals that explained its inner workings), hoping that maybe I’d qualify for the prize they were giving for the best donation, but then I learned that Steve Wozniak had given them his own personal Apple 1.

Eeeek! Never forget to park the drive before moving the machine. Don’t ask me how I know that.

Those were the days. :-D

This really sounds like The 4 Yorkshiremen! I programmed machines with cables! Like a phone operator’s.

so-called progress

I remember about ’81 or ’82 stopping at a computer store — I think it was called “Future Vision” — looking for a magazine for my Radio Shack Computer. There was a guy at the counter trying to convince the proprietor to stock some “high resolution 80 character” video cards he had built for the Radio Shack computers.

“Why would anyone need 80 characters per line?”, I wondered…

I started out in the Division Data Center for the 25th Infantry Division. We used IBM punch cards, 80 column, which is one byte per column. Our biggest data ‘file’ was the property book for the division. It was 10 trays of the cards, at close to 3000 cards per tray, which could store about 2.4Mbytes. The cards, metal trays, and filing cabined would be close to a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could stuff about 25 tons of them into a tractor trailer, and have a portable Giga-Byte! My current camera has a thumbnail-sized 512 gig micro-SD card. That would equal enough tractor trailers stuffed with filing cabinets and cards to fill the parking lots of a dozen Walmarts ! There has been some Mega-Gains over the years, and it is a great thing, otherwise, my camera would have a real storage problem with 512 tractor trailers.

My first desktop tower in 1991 had 4Mb RAM, a 5.25 floppy, an 80Mb hard drive, Windows 3.0 and DOS, and a 13" monitor, and cost $2400.