Re: Re: Hi all!
By: hyjinx to Nightfox on Sun Sep 07 2025 09:35 pm
Pentium was 1993, P2 1997, P3 1999, and then it started to change. Th around the time when I started to lose interest in PC hardware.
When you say you lost interest in PC hardware, did you switch to Mac? And around 2006 or so, Apple started using Intel processors for the Mac, so it basically using PC hardware too..
tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
No love for DEC? Their later Alpha boxes looked pretty slick.
A friend of mine couldn't bear to see a DEC Alpha being tossed out at work, so he brought it home. It ran NT 3.51 and IIS for way longer than
it should have - but it would not die.
When computers started to become more about tools rather than objects of fun and tinkering. That's probably when I lost interest in the hardware.
My clicky FOCUS 2001 keyboard - I miss that to this day!
By: hyjinx to Nightfox on Thu Sep 11 2025 09:01 pm
When computers started to become more about tools rather than objects fun and tinkering. That's probably when I lost interest in the hardwa
When was that? I feel like they're often still for fun and tinkering. I like they've been both for fun and tools for a long time.. You can still your own desktop PC if you want to, and these days, there are also DIY pro you can make with a Raspberry Pi board & similar things - There are a lot fun projects you can work on. And there are still good games for computer
Now it's a sea of beige, and a sea of beige operating systems. Even
Linux has ceded ownership largely to a few big corps when it comes down
to it, excluding the kernel, for the most part anyway. But even that has parts coded by IBM, Microsoft, Google and others. Nothing is free any more. No more cathedral and the bazaar.
Hi there. I'm scarface from New Zealand. I'm pretty new to BBS's, mainly just been playing the games (poorly haha). I've also been lurking the message board a bit and thought I should take the time to introduce myself.
Hi there. I'm scarface from New Zealand. I'm pretty new to BBS's, mainly j been playing the games (poorly haha). I've also been lurking the message b
Normal consumer computing (so, I wouldn't consider the RaspberryPI part of that) was fun and interesting. Every other month, you were wondering what new amazing tech was coming along - new graphics like the advances from 4 colours to 16, to 256, to millions, new CPUs which were significant marks better than the ones before. Exciting new operating systems that did things that no others did before it in some way or another. Untold amounts of tinkering, just for tinkerings sake.
Now Windows has been amounted to a big pile of advertising, CPUs are all pretty much meh, all the same, Graphics cards, whilst insane, are all just doing the same thing, just faster, PCs encouraged tinkering and upgrading, different computer types still existed on the market - Acorn Archimedes, Macintosh PPC/64k, Atari ST, Amiga and the 8 bits before them. Linux has been turned into a big lot of boring blah - enterprise kubernetes containerised IoT function deployers.
Same here. My first tech "job" was building and selling computers and LANs. I got bored of that pretty quick, but it was a start. Now when I hear a proud parent brag how their child is so tech-smart because they "built their own computer", it turns out they're just buying gaming PC components from amazon or newegg and assembling them. Sure, they've learned *something* through the process, but they're a long way away from turning that knowledge into a career. When I was building computers, it was still just a lot of assembly work, but you still had to know how to use 'debug.exe' to invoke the expansion ROM firmware of a "Winchester" controller, know how to low-level format a drive, know the differences between MFM and RLL encoding, platters, tracks, cyclinders and clusters and why it might matter for the customer, etc. Chips and cables weren't "keyed" and you had to know where pin-1 was and why it mattered.
Nowadays,
all those details are abstracted away from the system builder. And the software stack is much higher now than back then, so the chances of one person knowing it all is even less likely, even when they do know enough to have a job in the field. I enjoy blowing the minds of youngsters when I'm able to demystify things and explain why things (in tech) are the way they are. But I also feel bad that they may not really retain the knowledge since they didn't "live it" and that could be a big handicap for the generation(s) taking over.
smartphones & other computer technology, it seems a lot of people don't really have much idea about how it works or even a curiosity about it.
It seems a bit counter-intuitive.
SyncTerm is great. NetRunner is probably the only other one that comes close, but SyncTerm is mostly what people these days use.
[snip] When I was building
computers, it was still just a lot of assembly work, but you still had
to know how to use 'debug.exe' to invoke the expansion ROM firmware of a "Winchester" controller, know how to low-level format a drive, know the differences between MFM and RLL encoding, platters, tracks, cyclinders
and clusters and why it might matter for the customer, etc. Chips and cables weren't "keyed" and you had to know where pin-1 was and why it mattered.
Nowadays, all those details are abstracted away from the
system builder.
And the software stack is much higher now than back
then, so the chances of one person knowing it all is even less likely, even when they do know enough to have a job in the field. I enjoy
blowing the minds of youngsters when I'm able to demystify things and explain why things (in tech) are the way they are. But I also feel bad that they may not really retain the knowledge since they didn't "live
it" and that could be a big handicap for the generation(s) taking over.
Interesting.. Good to know. And are you using a purchased Windows 11 serial too? It would be interesting to know if an activated Windows 11 will work on an older PC. If so, I'd consider doing that with my 2014 Lenovo laptop.
TPM is just a security feature that uses cryptography to protect against malware. So I suspect Windows could run fine without it and without the additional security checks.
tenser wrote to Digital Man <=-
Much of this is good; consider PCI interrupt routing. Instead of
four level-triggered interrupt lines that require magic to discover
how they map to a physical line on a 8259A or IOAPIC, and because
they are separate signals from memory may outpace DMA, MSI/MSI-X
over the memory fabric is both much simpler and more rational. I consider LBA similarly a strict improvement over CHS, and even
NVMe is much saner than SATA+AHCI. Memory-mapped IO accesses for
PCIe config space beat the pants off of the legacy port-based ECAM
stuff.
When computers started to become more about tools rather than objects of fun and tinkering. That's probably when I lost interest in the hardware.
scarface wrote to All <=-
I'm probably a bit younger than the average age, but is nice to see
there are even younger folks getting engaged with this sort of
technology. I worry sometimes about the direction of the software industry. I'm not so sure it is always going forward haha.
I'm probably a bit younger than the average age, but is nice to see
there are even younger folks getting engaged with this sort of
technology. I worry sometimes about the direction of the software industry. I'm not so sure it is always going forward haha.
Hi there. I'm scarface from New Zealand. I'm pretty new to BBS's, mainly just been playing the games (poorly haha). I've also been lurking the message board a bit and thought I should take the time to introduce myself.
I'm a child of the late 80's, brought up with a mix of DOS, Debian, and various window's starting from 3.11. I've gotten to know a lot more about computers ever since, but always know there is heaps more out there to learn.
I'm probably a bit younger than the average age, but is nice to see there are even younger folks getting engaged with this sort of technology. I worry sometimes about the direction of the software industry. I'm not so sure it is always going forward haha.
Haha, I too believe that I will try out MacOS any year. Some of my school friends had macs growing up, but just seemed foreign to me. I had some
Hi there. I'm scarface from New Zealand. I'm pretty new to BBS's, mainly j
I'm a child of the late 80's, brought up with a mix of DOS, Debian, and va window's starting from 3.11. I've gotten to know a lot more about computer ever since, but always know there is heaps more out there to learn.
In recent years, I mainly use linux, but dabble in other OS's in VM's. I'v also made a decent effort at my own OS for the x86, purely for the learnin opportunity of learning x86 assembly.
Anyhow, that's me. Using SyncTERM from ubuntu. Happy for recommendations o other clients to enjoy this though!
From what I remember, it wasn't common practice for CPUs until Intel start their Core i3/i5/i7 line (in 2009, I think?) and they started making new versions every year. I remember with the 286, 386, etc., it was maybe 3-4 years between new generations of a CPU, and in the meantime, you'd mainly see faster versions (higher megahertz) and different variants sometimes, s as SX and DX, etc..
Digital Man wrote to Nightfox <=-And don't forget -
3. Swapping out the UART chips on the MB (or expansion serial card) to use the high-speed 16550 UARTs, to properly use 19200/33600,56K modem speeds.
4. On my first PC (a Kaypro PC), I upgraded the 8088 CPU to a VIC-20
and it was a noticeable speed increase.
6. Massive, complicated batch files to run a mailer and BBS package for FidoNet. For me it was FrontDoor (and later Intermail) and PCBoard. LOTS of errorlevels and branches for mail/callers/doors/maintenance. I still have my masterpiece batch file that made it all work together.
Ahhhhh - the good old days!! :-)
hyjinx wrote to Nightfox <=-
Now Windows has been amounted to a big pile of advertising, CPUs are
all pretty much meh, all the same, Graphics cards, whilst insane, are
all just doing the same thing, just faster, PCs encouraged tinkering
and upgrading, different computer types still existed on the market - Acorn Archimedes, Macintosh PPC/64k, Atari ST, Amiga and the 8 bits
before them. Linux has been turned into a big lot of boring blah - enterprise kubernetes containerised IoT function deployers.
I'm probably a bit younger than the average age, but is nice to see there are even younger folks getting engaged with this sort of technology. I worry sometimes about the direction of the software industry. I'm not so sure it is always going forward haha.
Welcome to bbsing! I suspect that most of us worry about the direction
of
the software, and general tech, industry, too. ;)
I hadn't really even _heard_ of amiga growing up eh. a few friends had apples which seemed rudimentary as I had already explored DOS and linux quite a bit. In hindsight, I likely just haven't given it the chance to explore it at the time, but I can still do today!
My high school had a couple of mac's we used in music class. the big colourful CRT unit all in one things. iMac's? Basically only used one piece of software on it, so I just .. acquired .. a windows copy. Majority of my software on my windows machine in that day would have been open source, soon to make the switch to full time linux.
Personally, I think its a disaster nowadays. Nobody knows how to debug anything. They put out the most inefficient code that is so full of errors and bugs that it would make you wince. Most folks don't even understand what the code even does just "ChatGPT told me to use this".
If you ask someone to help/assist with something outside their domain, they look at you like you are an alien. They simply don't understand
how to take skillset "A" and translate that into at least a beginning knowledge for "B".
play Fortnight or Minecraft they are "IT" experts.
What kind of Apple? I think the Apple 2 was a bit rudimentary compared
to a DOS PC, though the Macintosh was a bit more advanced than the
typical DOS PC when the Mac came out.
5200). My high school also had a computer lab with some DOS PCs in it.
hear a proud parent brag how their child is so tech-smart because they "built their own computer", it turns out they're just buying gaming PC components from amazon or newegg and assembling them. Sure, they've learned *something* through the process, but they're a long way away
from turning that knowledge into a career. When I was building
I feel like it's a little weird that Intel and Apple have been doing that
lately (new CPU each year). With the yearly new CPU models, it seems
Capitalism my friend. Sadly it is the only way people think, and not so much about societal value or impact of these practices.
Digital Man wrote to Nightfox <=-
It seems to me that's the case these days. When I was growing up, computers still seemed like a relatively new thing, and it seemed that there were more people (like myself) who were curious about how they work. I like to build my own desktop computers, and I feel like I grew up in a time where a good number of people did that, and know how to fix things that go wrong. These days, even though a lot of people use smartphones & other computer technology, it seems a lot of people don't really have much idea about how it works or even a curiosity about it. It seems a bit counter-intuitive.
Same here. My first tech "job" was building and selling computers and LANs. I got bored of that pretty quick, but it was a start. Now when I hear a proud parent brag how their child is so tech-smart because they "built their own computer", it turns out they're just buying gaming PC components from amazon or newegg and assembling them. Sure, they've learned *something* through the process, but they're a long way away
from turning that knowledge into a career. When I was building
computers, it was still just a lot of assembly work, but you still had
to know how to use 'debug.exe' to invoke the expansion ROM firmware of
a "Winchester" controller, know how to low-level format a drive, know
the differences between MFM and RLL encoding, platters, tracks,
cyclinders and clusters and why it might matter for the customer, etc. Chips and cables weren't "keyed" and you had to know where pin-1 was
and why it mattered. Nowadays, all those details are abstracted away
from the system builder. And the software stack is much higher now than back then, so the chances of one person knowing it all is even less likely, even when they do know enough to have a job in the field. I
enjoy blowing the minds of youngsters when I'm able to demystify things and explain why things (in tech) are the way they are. But I also feel
bad that they may not really retain the knowledge since they didn't
"live it" and that could be a big handicap for the generation(s) taking over.
Hi there. I'm scarface from New Zealand. I'm pretty new to BBS's, mai
Hi from Wellington :)
Very cool that you got into assembly. I always found x86 a massive PITA
to be honest, just couldn't get the hang of doing everything in reverse. Coding in x86 real mode as well... urghh. How did you find it? What
tools did you use, and what books/resources did you use (i.e. did it
make learning it any easier?)
Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: Hi all!
By: Gamgee to Digital Man on Sun Aug 31 2025 10:00 pm
2. Juggling the order (and command line switches) for device drivers in autoexec.bat and config.sys for maximum free memory (via "loadhigh", "devicehigh", EMM, EMS, etc. (This assumes we're going all the way back to MSDOS days). ;-)
One of my favorite featues added in MS-DOS 6 was the ability to have multiple boot configurations. You could modify your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT with different sections which would have different
settings & drivers loaded (or not loaded) when you boot up. This way,
if any of your software required a different system configuration in
order to run, you could easily reboot and choose the other
configuration from a menu that MS-DOS would show you (it also had a default configuration which would automatically be selected, if I
recall).
Except in Intel's case it - capitalism - isn't working. They are selling a percentage of their business to the federal government - another form of bailout - to keep from going under.
In 2000, I ran a company off of a Sun Enterprise 250 - Purple, gray,
big vents, a big door with a key... we replaced it with a bunch of
white boxes running Linux. :(
hyjinx wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
Now it's a sea of beige, and a sea of beige operating systems.
tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
My clicky FOCUS 2001 keyboard - I miss that to this day!
Hey! I had one of those; loved that thing!
Why not upstream all of that? A great question, with a few different answers. One is that some of it couldn't; some stuff had been done
in collaboration with a vendor, under NDA, and Google was legally
barred from sending that code upstream. Some was because, even
though there was no significant intellectual property concerns, code
might be so Google-specific that it didn't make sense to send upstream; much of that is historical baggage, but getting rid of it takes time.
But probably the biggest reason was that it wasn't economically viable
for a lot of stuff. Google might make a change that was a win, but
for a specific, constrained use-case. It may be cool to upstream, but when it's sent someone looks at it and says, "yeah, this is neat, but
it only works for n=1; you should generalize it for any n." Except
that doing that generalization might be 10x the work of the current
patch: the engineer can't justify the investment because it provides
no additional value to Google, so it's easier to just float the patch.
Of course, over time, that decision is more expensive than doing the
work and getting the thing upstreamed, but we're talking about a 5-10
year timeline here.
This is a really interesting insight. I bet more people would like to
know the inner workings of contribution in the corporate fed open source world. If you'd ever consider wrapping this convo into dialogue that
you'd be willing to share to a wider audience, I'd love to interview you for the YouTube channel. Let me know if you're interested.
Heh, I don't know if you really want to interview me; I'm pretty
boring. But I'd be happy to chat with you some time if you'd like
to explore further.
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