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Ask Slashdot: Old Technology Coexisting With New?
New submitter thereitis writes "Looking over my home computing setup, I see equipment ranging from 20 years old to several months old. What sorts of old and new equipment have you seen coexisting, and in what type of environment?" I regularly use keyboards from the mid 1980s, sometimes with stacked adapters to go from ATX to PS/2, and PS/2 to USB, and I'm sure that's not too unusual.
Here's all the components I can think of using in the 80's, and what their function or lack thereof would be today:
3.5" floppy - still used for some driver diskettes
5.25" floppy ?? have not used one of these since 1995
Keyboards - usable with adapters
Mouse - same as above
LPT Printers - DB-25 still shows up on many new motherboards
Serial DB9 - I can still make these by hand! Definitely useful for many console RS232 equipment ports
IDE Hard Drives - useable if you really had to, but why?
IDE CDROM - same as above
10Base-t Ethernet - 10 MB back in the day, but still compatible (although they might be only half-duplex)
Cat3 Cable - good for phones, digital or analog, or 10base-t
Cat5 Cable - Good for home PC or connecting internet-facing equipment
Modems (v21/v22) - Doomsday is sure to come, always have a tinfoil hat, and dialup number at the ready
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
but college girls' equipment stays the same age.
It's AT to PS/2.. ATX standard used PS/2... Just needed to state that..
I have a few old devices I keep by my modern equipment for perspective. You know, a sundial, a vcr, and an iphone 4.
I can get a new keyboard at Big Lots for $8, so no need to keep them for decades. I do use older top-of-the-line enterprise equipment, though. Raid cards that were $750 new can be found for $35, old IP KVMs that were $1200 new are actually BETTER than current models because don't require proprietary software. The other day I used a serial cable to transfer files from an Win98 laptop that didn't have USB mass storage drivers.
Well my 26 year old IBM Model M keyboards I use everyday beg to differ.
Today's telephone networks are a random mix of old and new technology. The modern phone backbone is fiberoptic digital, but when wired to your house, it's made to emulate good old Bell. You can plug in an 80 year old phone rotary phone, and when someone calls you, it'll ring, and you can answer it! You can have one of these ancient devices right next to your DSL modem on opposite ends of that filter the phone/internet company gives you. In some area, pulse dialing will still work! And touch-tone phones is also an old technology. When you call on your cellphone, the numbers you dial don't get sent as tones. But in a call, when you call up one of those annoying phone robots, your cell phone will send tones, emulating the old signaling technology of the 70's or 80's or whenever the tones were invented. Plus, add in VOIP and the IP phones I use at work, and it becomes apparent that the modern telephone network is a continuum of technological anachronisms.
Well my 26 year old IBM Model M keyboards I use everyday beg to differ.
Plus it can quickly be converted into a rather effective cudgel, all the better for bludgeoning AC's with no appreciation of history.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I have an Apple II+ that I program on at least once a week. It's a fun exercise to see what I can get the old machine to do. I don't have any disk drives, so I use the cassette interface. But I don't have a cassette deck either, so I use my brand new laptop as the storage by plugging the Apple into its audio ports. So I have 33 year old tech not just co-existing, but working in tandem with, brand new equipment.
Working, an old C64 (original, still working with modifications made circa 1988) with Amiga monitor, 2 1541 hooked up. (similar setup on my TV)
There's a 160 Mhz 486 (5x86 all ISA & VLB, no PCI) with an Ensoniq Soundscape Elite soundcard running under DOS 6.22/Win 3.11 .
Right next to it a 800Mhz PIII with 98SE. Powermac G4 400Mhz with OS9 / Leopard. (those are using a CRT)
There's a 2Ghz G5 iMac hooked up to my home theater (iTunes), my Media Center (XP MCE) and the *newest* machine, a Core2 duo (Win 7 x64 about to go back to x86).
What's saddening is the older stuff works as it is, but I had to recap the iMac, the Media Center, my AV receiver (2003) needed a new relay and caps on the Core2 are starting to bulge (that one is probably 2006)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I've had a lot of old hardware running alongside newer stuff, hobby, nothing serious, but I always tried to get rid of relics. It's not their age, performance, looks or anything like that; the power usage was simply too high, reducing the power costs actually made it easier to buy more new hardware.
And call me sentimental, but I stil have an 486, a p266 and other things, all perfectly functional, in the back of the closet, things I have a hard time parting with.
I have the worlds only 80386DX connected to the internet. I have an IBM Model 80 with an Ethernet card and a 9Gb Full height SCSI hard drive running OS/2 Warp 4 Fixpack 5 and Mozilla Firefox version 3. It works for most sites that don't require Flash.
Nathan
And don't fool yourself into thinking 20 fucking year old shit is "working" cuz it ain't working !!
Neither are you, outside of fast food.
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I used to have one of those. Loved that thing.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Stable technology (and the desk! :-) ) - Using the hand tools my dad gave me, some of them were his grandfather's (e.g. the chisels), to build the desk I work on with my laptop. Can't see me passing down any of my electronic equipment to grandkids for them to use day-to-day. Nice to be using tools that have worked for generations.
I'm not seeing any downsides here.
Mine is of the very oldest vintage too. The local recycle place put out a BOX of them a few years ago. I snapped up the whole box for like $10. Still got 3 of these beasties and they're the best peripheral ever made if you ask me. Takes a bit of a stack of adapters to get to USB with the thing, but I got there...
And for you who haven't experienced the Zen of it all the lack of the 'windows' key and such crud is a blessing ;) I can do 120 WPM with this baby.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
My parents got a color TV in 1976. They kept that thing for 29 years. It worked with one of the early Pong games. It worked with an Atari 2600. It worked with an Atari 800. Later it was connected to cable TV (with remote control that was connected by wire to a box on top of the TV). It worked with VCRs and DVD players. Near the end of its life it was using satellite TV. That old thing went through a lot. Halfway through its life the channel changers on it were largely forgotten. That was a good television.
:P
When I bought my first VCR I bought the same brand assuming that they made good stuff. I had to replace it within a couple months and ended up buying a Japanese brand
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I still have my BASIC and assembler programming books for my TRS-80 Coco. For that matter, I still have a TRS-80 CoCo somewhere. I should dig it out and see if it still works. You never forget your first. :-)
A project of mine (https://github.com/dandroid88/webmote) attempts to serve as a bridge for some less connected, older technologies to be controlled by newer things like my smartphone. For instance, my home entertainment system, a hodge podge of new and old responds to IR (each with their own remote). My project allows one to control any of these devices from any device with internet connectivity and a browser so that I can turn off Glee (my fiance's fav) from the bathroom, lol. Its a plugin architecture that also supports some X10 so that I can turn lights on and off etc. On the newer end, it supports newer things like XBMC control and a few other soon to be uploaded additions. If you are looking to bridge the new and the old and have a rasbpi or server you can run it on I welcome you to try it out. It requires some simple arduino construction but that shouldn't be too difficult.
When the zombie apocalypse comes, a Model M will be second only to a shotgun as a means of self-defense.
Second to a shotgun?? Haven't you learned anything from zombie flicks?
:)
Type M's don't run out of ammo
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
... ergo all my old computer equipment has LONG since been tossed.
I've purged closets and garages full of ancient computer junk continuously since I've been married. Now I just have two work laptops, a work LCD at home, and two desktop computers of my own.
I have a lens made for a 1930s Leica which, using an adapter they started making in the 50s (when the current bayonet mount was introduced), will work happily with any of their later rangefinder cameras, including the latest 2012 digital model (if I could afford it). As a bit of a long shot, I emailed the company a few years ago with a technical query about this lens, and got a prompt response with a request for the serial number so they could check their records! The standard flash/accessory shoe used today is also the same size as the one Leica was using as early as the 1920s, as is the 35mm cassette (so you can stick modern film in that antique Leica).
35mm itself (packaged differently) is basically a 19th century movie film standard, and we're also in the third century of several other common tech standards - the D cell battery goes back to 1898, the 1/4 inch audio jack is a 19th century phone switchboard plug, and the Edison screw lightbulb dates from the same era. Any others?
Those things are awesome. We had one at a company I used to do contracting for. The only interaction anyone on their IT staff ever had with it was double-tapping scroll lock. I found out the IP address and used it without getting up from my desk and they all thought I was some kind of wizard.
I worry about the state of some people's IT staff.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
You don't have an ATX keyboard. ATX is a standard for motherboards. They're an XT keyboard, or an AT keyboard, but they're not an ATX keyboard.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Last year, my employer spent half a million euros on a new X-ray source for protein crystallography. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that there was a 3.5" floppy drive in the middle of it, holding some critical piece of code that needed updating. The service engineer's laptop didn't have a floppy drive; fortunately, we have some ancient kit elsewhere that does... ...but man, it makes you feel old when you have to show your sysadmin how to format a floppy. Kids these days...