Does anyone else get emotional about their main PC?

[Breelander]

Yes, but do you have a Sirius 9000, MS DOS v3.1?

Oh, don't get me started on my 'museum' pieces (still working last time I checked). I have these...

The IBM PC-AT Model 2 (512 KB RAM, one floppy disk unit, one hard disk and a color screen).
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/com ... c=185&st=1

IBM PC Portable - Model 5155. This computer was the portable version of the PC XT.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/com ... c=446&st=1

[XFool]

Interesting to bear in mind that, when Bill Gates came to the UK, he gave an interview in which he explained that (contrary to the usual history) MS was keen on finding a partner in the computer hardware field. He said their candidate machine at the time was the Victor Sirius (US designation) - "an interesting machine" - but the company were not, for whatever reason, interested. The rest is history...

So we might have all been running Windows on updated Sirius machines!

[mc2fool]

BTW, in regards to not being 'offline', how many separate broadband connections do you have? (I actually do have a backup, in the sense that my neighbour and I have each others' wifi credentials and have used them when one of our lines has broken.)

How useful is that? If you're with the same provider, or if your providers share infrastructure at some point (very likely), you might find your downtime correlated!

It's proved to be very useful, several times!

I'm with TalkTalk via copper wire, my immediate neighbour has BT FTTC. There was just one time, some ten or so years when the local exchange went down in toto which, obviously, affected us both -- and on that occasion we used our other neighbour's cable connected wifi.

[ReformedCharacter]

Oh, don't get me started on my 'museum' pieces (still working last time I checked). I have these...

The IBM PC-AT Model 2 (512 KB RAM, one floppy disk unit, one hard disk and a color screen).
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/com ... c=185&st=1

IBM PC Portable - Model 5155. This computer was the portable version of the PC XT.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/com ... c=446&st=1

Wow. I wondered what they cost and then looked down at the Technical Information. I see Euros 3811 for the portable and 'unknown' for PC-AT. Apparently 3811 Euros converts to £2107 at the 1984 exchange rate. Quite an expensive piece of kit. I'd guess that the PC-AT was probably a little over £1000. Good to hear that they're still working. You presumably have working 5''1/4 floppies for the portable. Haven't seen any of them for a while!

RC

[Julian]

Wow. I wondered what they cost and then looked down at the Technical Information. I see Euros 3811 for the portable and 'unknown' for PC-AT. Apparently 3811 Euros converts to £2107 at the 1984 exchange rate. Quite an expensive piece of kit. I'd guess that the PC-AT was probably a little over £1000.

Funny that my thread has prompted all this discussion of old computers and you RC explicitly talking about costs because a couple of weeks ago I started thinking about all this specifically re my then about-to-be-built new PC and wondering how far back in time I would have to go until I reached the point where my VHS-cassette-sized new PC(*) would have been the equivalent of a million Pound computer just looking at RAM and mass storage prices and then how far back again before it was a billion Pound computer and finally how far back I would have to go before its cost would have exceeded the entire GDP of a small nation (at which point said small nation probably wouldn't have had the electrical power generation capacity to power it anyway) and if that final national-comparison point could be reached then just how small a nation would it have been.

I haven't got round to trying to work it out yet, and probably never will, but it might yield some quite sobering results.

- Julian

(*) Different shapes but probably similar total volumes.

[Itsallaguess]

I'm not quite sure what all the emotions were - guilt? sadness? loss? - but whatever the mixture of emotions was I was quite surprised at how strong they were!

Does anyone else have similar experiences when swapping to a new PC?

With the advent of free virtualization solutions, where, for instance, a Macrium-Reflect back-up image can be turned into a virtual hard-drive and loaded straight into Oracle VirtualBox, hasn't the day now been reached where we never really need to say goodbye?

My new Windows 10 Pro box (ASRock Deskini with 32GB RAM) will happily power up my old XP set-up in a much faster time in VirtualBox than it ever took to boot when I turned the tin box on, and it's the same XP machine at that point as far as I'm concerned.

So the hardware might fall to bits, but with the free desktop virtualization options available, I think we've got it better than we've ever had in terms of keeping those old PC memories alive and kicking...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[UncleEbenezer]

Interesting to bear in mind that, when Bill Gates came to the UK, he gave an interview in which he explained that (contrary to the usual history) MS was keen on finding a partner in the computer hardware field. He said their candidate machine at the time was the Victor Sirius (US designation) - "an interesting machine" - but the company were not, for whatever reason, interested. The rest is history...

So we might have all been running Windows on updated Sirius machines!

What point in MS's history was that about?

The start of MS's rise was Gate's coup in getting on board with hardware partner IBM. Building on the customers' trust in the IBM name, MS then put itself at the centre of an "IBM clone" ecosystem, nurturing newcomers like Compaq and Dell, and numerous others long-forgotten. It was the collective strength of that ecosystem that gave MS market victory over a range of much-superior systems that were around in the 1980s.[1] To have taken one hardware partner after IBM would surely have risked jeopardising that ecosystem and consigning MS to the dustbin of history.

Then came the '90s, the era of Win95, of supreme arrogance, of "embrace and extend", and of first ignoring then sabotaging the Internet. Can't see how hardware would've fitted there.

That leaves recent times, as they've become a more normal bigco. And now they do produce hardware: they sell "surface" tablets, and they bought Nokia. But surely that's not what you were talking about? Was there a time when he envisaged MS directly competing with IBM and Oracle as a full service in the Enterprise, perhaps when Oracle acquired a top-end hardware capability by buying Sun?

[1] A lesson from history that informed my most-successful-ever investment, when I twenty-bagged with ARM. Back in 2008 when I first started a portfolio, I could see ARM was at the centre of an even greater ecosystem and was sure to prosper. And they even had a much-superior product!

[MikeyWorld]

Reminded me of a Canadian film:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Alt_Delete_(film)

Not necessarily a good film, just unforgettable.

[XFool]

Interesting to bear in mind that, when Bill Gates came to the UK, he gave an interview in which he explained that (contrary to the usual history) MS was keen on finding a partner in the computer hardware field. He said their candidate machine at the time was the Victor Sirius (US designation) - "an interesting machine" - but the company were not, for whatever reason, interested. The rest is history...

So we might have all been running Windows on updated Sirius machines!

What point in MS's history was that about?

Obviously very early on. Before any relationship with IBM. I can't give a date off the top of my head.

(The interview, in the UK, was decades later when he and MS were of course very much in the public eye.)

[stewamax]

Does anyone remember the IBM 2321 Data Cell - an ingenious piece of kit that first appeared in the mid 1960s.
It consisted of strips of magnetic tape on a drum. The drum rotated until the desired strip was located and the mechanism moved the strip to a read/write head and returned it.
Wonderful to watch - and spectacular when they went wrong.

[dionaeamuscipula]

Guilty as charged M'lud. Apart from my original 1980's vintage Amstrad I don't think I've ever thrown a computer out. The PC I am using now sits upon its predecessor which died a death a couple of years ago. There's an HP server behind the TV, an old Dell in the front room, an Aspire One somewhere I'm not sure quite where, a black and white screened AST portable in a corner because that really is a museum piece. There's a box full of old HDDs somewhere and another which has some 10-T ethernet cabling in it because you never know....

A PS2 in the play room, a playstation portable upstairs somewhere and a Psion 5 probably in the same box.

I was an IBM dealer in the late 80's/early 90's and I'm pretty sure that an AT was a lot more than £1,000. But of course almost nobody ever paid list. I came out of that business not long after I went into PC World and bought a copy of Word off the shelf for less than I could buy it through distribution. I sold it on for list (ahem) which must have been £400.

Work is worse. I have every PC we have ever owned, plus those from two sites that are now closed either under my desk (laptops) or in a storeroom. Plus all the cables, fifty obsolete OEM Office licences.......

DM

[Redmires]

because you never know....

DM

That's how I always end the sentence when my wife accuses my of hoarding computer bits/books/wire/bits of old string

[servodude]

...and in vindication of the "you never know"

I have just won some Brownie points by repaired our old DV Handycam
- and using our old Sony Vaio (12yrs old? running vista) to rip the video off
- it's the only computer we have with a Firewire/iLink port (something I never thought to spec on anything since)

happy days
- sd

[ReformedCharacter]

Somewhere I have my grandfathers old Amstrad PCW 8512. 3inch format drives, quite unusual even then. It was his main work machine and I like to think part of him lives on when I power it up. It even had an Apache helicopter flight sim, albeit slow and very much limited by the green-screen.

You're making me feel old and nostalgic now. I had a PCW 8256 which I thought was brilliant. IIRC there was an Amstrad advertisement at the time which showed people throwing typewriters into a skip. Apart from Locoscript (which was excellent for it's time) it came with Logo on which I wrote my first program. IIRC it was a Pontoon game but - as I soon realised - the 'random' numbers it produced although 'random' were always the same

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(pro ... g_language)

It also included SuperCalc which was a pretty decent spreadsheet. Neither SuperCalc nor Locoscript made much progress on the PC which was a pity.

RC

[BobGe]

I'd guess that the PC-AT was probably a little over £1000.

FWIW, the best part of £4-5000, with monitor and a few cards, subject to spec. The keyboard alone was £300 odd.