Forum Coordinators: RedPhantom
Poser - OFFICIAL F.A.Q (Last Updated: 2025 Feb 07 7:37 am)
I still have my 386 and 486... and rebuilt my DOSbox just last month to keep it going. As Bloodsong says, many old games won't work on the newer machines. DOS is fast and reliable compared to Windows. And some of my favorite software (as well as 10 years worth of art) is on the older machines. I am SO sorry to hear of your loss. Putting down a survivor like that is ahrd to do. Carolly
My dad has a veritable computer museum, he has his older computers doing such tasks as label making and envelope printing, along with the good ole dot matrix printer(s)....he also has Commodore 64, Atari, 286, 486 and some Gateway PII and I think PIII....he is missing the vic20...I still remember the cherry bombs on dbman...sigh ....that particular frustration prompted me to buy him a PC286 and he has been hooked ever since....on pc's I felt my stomach churn when the repair guy called my ATT6000 first ever internal 10mg hard drive "vintage" and it really was hard to see my compaq 286 go to the parts closet....but I really love my 1.5 gh upgrade p4
Good Golly Miss Molly: I just retired my Commodore A-2500 and a 486 running at 33Mhz is about to hit the road now that I have a new Pentium. I loved those machines, but I could see the writing on the wall when I could'nt move beyond the tasks I had managed to master. Sorry to hear about the casualty of progress but I know you'll enjoy your replacement. Chrisf
I've got you all beat. I've still got an original MacIntosh. It has a whopping 128k of ram, no hard drive and 1 400k floppy drive. I also still have an original imagewriter. They still work. I don't really use them anymore, but I can't stand the thought of getting rid of them. They were my firsts...
Well I found a good home for Ol' Paint. I gave it to a friend of mine at work who rebuilds them for kids. He has about several of 'em in his basement in varrious stages of repair. So someone might still get some use out of it. jon
~jon
My Blog - Mad
Utopia Writing in a new era.
Old... okay. I still have my first compubox, an H-8. This predated Apple, Commodore, IBM, Radio Shack, etc. Over 20 years ago I paid $100 for each one of 16k ram (yes, k!). It used an character terminal that could actually do graphics... as long as the graphics consisted of alphanumeric characters. It came with, for the times, really really fast cassette tape drive data storage- floppy disk drives were not yet economically feasible for hobbyists. Eventually I did get a hard disk for it. It was the size of very big microwave oven. This was reasonable considering that it was a humongous 5 megs of storage. Pretty cheap too- about $9,000 in those days. Oh yes- I had to put it together myself. And I don't mean some wimpy job like today, where you plug boards in a box. I mean I had to solder every single resistor, capacitor, chip etc to the boards, including chip sockets. Even the case was in pieces. Without the hard disk I think I spent about $8 or $9,000 on this thing. No graphics, no disk drives, no colour, no sound except for a beep, 16k ram and most stuff had to be programmed in machine language because there wasn't a decent BASIC available for it. So when people complain about the price of today's computers I have to chuckle to myself. Primitive as this box was, it was still good enough to be used by NASA and ran rings around the minicomputers of the day. Today I use an IBM notebook I can tuck under my arm with hires colour, DVD, 20 gigs hard, 192 megs ram and stereo. Added are cd burner, graphic tablet, digital camera, networking, asdl, scanner, printer, etc. Without software I doubt this all cost more than $6,000- equivalent to maybe $2,000 20 years ago. For some things the good old days just weren't that good...
Glad to hear you found a home for your 486 and I think I'll donate my 486 to an individual interested in a basic computer. Wow! with all the tales of machines going further back in time I'm waiting for someone to tell us about replacing their abbacus for an adding machine. Of course the abbacus has better graphics. Chrisf
Hi Nance, Well if anyone has an Altair that preceded the H8 by maybe a year. The H8 was by Heathkit. It was the most elaborate and difficult electronics kit they ever made. It is a testament to their manuals that I was able to build it even though I had never touched a soldering iron in my life and knew squat about electronics. Heathkit went on to design several more computers and eventually spun off into Zentith Data Systems. Zenith later became a premier manufacturer of laptop computers but somehow managed to blow it. You hardly see their stuff anymore and I'm not even sure they are still in the business. Strictly speaking I don't have this machine anymore. I still own it but it is on permanent loan to a local museum. Still works as far as I know.
Although I've played with an abacus my computer actually replaced something almost as antiquated- a slide rule. The advantages of those 2 devices is that they had minimal ram requirements, no data storage problems and never ever ever ran out of power. (unless you didn't eat your breakfast the way mother told you...) The games available for them were not very good though and they didn't run Poser worth a damn.
This thread prompted old memories and I thought people might get a kick out of them. People complain about how long it takes their computers to start up. On that H8 after turning it on I would have to use the keypad to punch in a short program in octal code, not decimal. This was called a bootstrap program and gave the computer just enough smarts so it could actually wake up. Once you got used to it it took about a half an hour. At that point you could either continue to enter your application program byte by byte on the keypad or you could actually load one in from the audio cassette player. Some of those programs were really pretty big, maybe even as big as 5 or 6 k. Of course, one wrong digit and you started all over again. So using tape could save you a day or two of keypad entry. Loading by tape still took a long time and it didn't always load properly the first time. As a result I would avoid turning off the computer if at all possible. Occasionally at work I would hear thunder. Such things would give me minor panic attacks for if I lost power at home all my computing effort would vanish. Eventually a half decent BASIC became available (Micorosoft... who else?) and this led to much easier programming potential. Whenever I successfully wrote a program I would show it to my wife with great pride and satisfaction. She would watch it in silence for a few moments before comment. "How nice. A bouncing ball made out of As and Zs. And it only took 3 weeks to program!" Then she would pat me on the head and quietly depart, muttering something about needing the services of a good psychiatrist. Of course I did serious work too with such things as fractal experiments. I recall a particularly efficient program I wrote that generated simple Mandlebrot fractals. People were quite impressed with its speed. If I started a generation on Monday morning sometimes it would even be finished by the weekend. Still, I must admit that learning about computers this way was a remarkable experience. Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that my wife is still with me. Perhaps the most unsettling thing about it is that old as that machine is, I am even older. In those days you were thought to be rather eccentric if you had a computer at home. In other words, you were nuts. I would talk about where I thought these things were headed thereby confiming peoples' disbelief in my sanity. But 25 years later microcomputers have vastly exceeded even my wildest expectations of yesterday. Our computers aren't perfect but compared to those days they really are cheap, powerful, easy to use and incredibly stable.
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Well today I put the old 486 down. It was kind of sad. I cut my teeth with Poser 2 on that old thing. It was semi-retired anyway. I was going to give it to my daughter as a hand me down, but then things went awry. The sound card quit working in DOS mode, it would not boot without 5 warning messages, then the mouse quit working. So I borrowed a Zip drive from a friend and off loaded all my old manuscripts, the kids old drawings, and the old Poser files. The end came fast, I reformatted the hard drive and pulled the plug. But all good things must come to an end. ;-) No tears from my daughter though. Seems I can get a Duron 800, or there about, without a monitor for around $385, so she's very happy. jon
~jon
My Blog - Mad Utopia Writing in a new era.