I help refurbish computers for a nonprofit and had one donated a while back. From a cursory look on the hard drive, there was no login password, business and home addresses, SSN and credit card numbers, pictures, scans, detailed financial data and more. I could have totally stolen this user's complete identity so easily if I were a dishonest person. Needless to say. the hard drive underwent DBAN. Even computers I've bought from secondhand stores have had personal info on them. I guess most people think the login password is sufficient in most cases to prevent the data from being used even though we all know there are tools to recover or erase the login password.
I remember getting a free copy of OS2 3.0 blue box when I worked at IBM. After a few tries, I got it working pretty good on a 386dx-40. Boot manager was great for setting up a method for booting multiple operating systems. I later moved to Warp connect and then WSEB which I downloaded from who knows where...
There was a few aggravating issues. One was the single input que issue. One program could cause the WPS to not respond even though the system would continue to function. Pressing control+escape a few hundred times might recover the system for you if you were lucky. A program called WATCHCAT was a lifesaver here. Also, if you made any network changes after the initial install, the config utility would not update the configuration files right and you'd get CONFIG.SYS errors. You had to manually edit the networking config files to resolve the issue. I think this was finally fixed in WSEB. Sometimes the WPS would act funny because of ini file corruption. There were 3rd party utilities for this too.
OS/2 ran great on the IBM PS/2 models. Just choose the defaults and wait for install to finish.
I never had a driver issue myself. Just use a soundblaster or crystal audio sound cards and 3com NICs, and you had drivers.
I loved newsreader/2 as it made reading threads so easy. That and browsing web with netscape 2.0
When setup right, it was bulletproof. Lots of settings to tweak and play with. Still miss the WPS.
I've a number of old IBM systems that still run fine, mostly PS/2 models both of the 85xx and 95xx models. With OS/2, they are bulletproof. Unfortunately, I'm finding computers and hardware from the 1990s are failing due to bad caps.
Find a nonprofit org to donate to that will rebuild them and give them away to needy skoolkids. That's what I help out with on a weekly basis. The high-end machines are rebuilt and sold to help with costs of rebuilding the older models. People saying a 2006 era machine is useless obviously don't know what they are talking about. This nonprofit is still giving single-core computers away. They will take anything except CRTs and what cannot or will not be used is disassembled and sold to scrappers so nothing goes to waste. A PC does NOT have to be less than a year old to be useful!
Went to vote after work at an elementary school's replica of a one room skoolhouse. Line was short although the classroom was crowded. Only 3 people out front handing out leaflets of which I do not know what they were about. Signed in, cast my votes on the paper ballot, and then fed it into the machine. I was number 1026. Easy peasy.
I remember all the hype about win95. You could actually buy it on floppies if you didn't have a CD drive or if it was not recognized. I never had too much of a problem installing it, but just about every computer had specific config.sys and autoexec.bat files. I do remember it being rather fragile and could be made to crash pretty easily. I was typically reinstalling win95 about every 6 months as that proved the only way to get consistent good operation from it.
It's always been my favorite arcade game except for Spyhunter which I got so good at I could play for hours and have all 4 weapons and in speedboat mode!
I've always liked the Williams machines. I remember playing High Speed when it first arrived in the local arcade in 1986. The flashing light always got peoples' attention. When it was set up right, it was pretty easy to run the green/yellow/red light and go up the curving ramp. Wish I could find my own to have now.
The Comet, Cyclone and even Taxi! were fun pins to play also. You could tell who was a 'real' pinball player because they'd use body english, nudge the table, and if you used your flippers right, you could some pretty crazy things like catch a ball on the way down so it would not bounce, and if you did it right, you could move the ball from one flipper to the other one without having to send it back up the table.
I think the fact that since they were electromechanical, there can be a lot of work to repair/adjust all the mechanisms. Nothing is more annoying that finding a table with a weak flipper or bumpers, being unlevel, or tilt sensor set way too high. There's some fairly new tables at a Frankies fun park here, but they tilt way too easily, and you cannot nudge the tables hardly at all. Pins were the best game around for two bits.
1984.... in high skool and discovering the all the//e models and a few ][+ models. I always made sure to pick the computer with dual floppies in class. Made copying easier. (BRUN DISKMUNCHER 1.1)
Eventually made friends with the guys that had all the cracked games and remember carrying my 2 flip-n-files all day.
I was good at Loderunner ( to kill the sound during class)and remember having about 17 extra players and may have gotten to only about level 75 and 150 that game had. All of us played beyond castle wolfenstein, and I managed to kill Hitler once.
Didn't get my own computer until my Dad bought me a used ][+ for $200 with no disk drive in 1987. Eventually bought a controller card and two aftermarket drives. My ][+ had a encoder board that allowed true lower case, shift key, autorepeat, and a keyboard buffer. A year later, I paid $150 for a AE Viewmaster 80column card and I could run Appleworks now! Hated that I could not run new programs for the enhanced//e though.
Actually, it's like this.
Apple ][
Apple ][+
Apple///
Apple//e
Apple//c et al
You know you had a good day when your Apple crashed into the monitor and you ran 3D0G and you still had DOS 3.3 loaded.
One effect I like was that the computer would select a random pitch of the voices, so one guard might have a highpitched voice and another guard would have such a low voice it was hard to understand.
It was always fun making the man behind the desk put his hands up, and after shooting him, he'd fall forward on the desktop.
For BCW on the Apple//, if you hit a wall edge, you just stopped the screen blinked. Much better than how the original CW did it.
Have not read the entire article, but this new robot does not seem very impressive. I have a HERO1 (complete but needing restoration) which has speech capability, programmability, a grasping arm, sonar, battery charge, remote control and even a keypad and breadboard for extending his capability and all of 32K RAM! No hard drive or Microsquish OS needed.
I live in a neighborhood less than 10 years old and the streetlights are the older type that distribute light in just about every direction. There's a newer section down the street using a newer lightpost style that directs the light downward and it's much better. The area is darker at night which is how it should be instead of it looking like early morning all the time. I just wish out lightposts could be updated to the new style.
Ive driven to the coast to some undeveloped beaches and it's amazing to see the difference compared to a populated area at night. At the coast, the sky is so dark that you can see stars easily and sometimes you can't even see where are you walking because it's so dark. I wish cities would put more efford into preventing light pollution. Why must entire empty parking lots be lit up?
>> #3 will have a long, successful stay at his company, which will reap the rewards of his >>hard work.
You must not live in reality, because those that know a good amount and care about the customer quickly get burned out with a job taking calls because it's all about number of calls taken, not necessarily whether a problem was fixed or not. First time fix? Who cares?
All the call center is concerned about is how long you're logged into the system and that you should be doing two things: Either on a call or waiting in avail for one. It appears to be more important to know HOW to talk to the customer rather than knowing the skills to resolve the problem in the first place.
Eventually most burned out call techs don't care about stats, and take time not taking calls to update their resume and look for jobs online.
I first saw the apple//e in high skool. I never really learned anything in class, but got lots of cracked games and stuff. Even so, it's what got me into the IT world. I didnt get my own computer until I bought a highly modified ][+ with no disk drives for $200 in 1987 and I still have it, although it's always been rather unstable, probably due to overheating issues. I still have dozens of NIBBLE magazine programs to type in! I currently have a pretty large collection of 8bit Apple stuff, and I have every model except for the original Apple ][ and the Woz edition GS (if that counts as a seperate model).
One day I'll have to set up a SCSI drive and archive all my disks I still have. Love playing castle wolfenstein, loderunner, INFOCOM games, Leisure suit larry, et al.
IBM had web explorer which worked great back in 1996 or so. Nice and fast. Now it's useless.
Yea, that single input queue problem was frustrating. I used a program called watchcat which could sometimes break loose from the hung app. I was reading an IBM redbook, and it made mention of a config.sys line that would address this problem.
Even with the latest fixpaks, it still makes mention of floppies! I dont know why they never updated the update process. Thankfully there are utilities written that makes it easier. Definately have to read the readme files though.
You have to remember, token ring was all IBM so they were not going to ack anything else. Just about every PS/2 made had a TR card in it.
I use/used it for about 10 years now. I dont use it for my primary duties though, mostly just playing around on it and enjoying the WPS.
I just recently setup an old Netfinity server running WSEB (v4.5) with RAID, Mozilla, Staroffice, VPC, Java, Netfinity apps, a newsreader and some other goodies. Sytem is rock solid and stable and pretty snappy on dual PII 450s no less.
OS/2 will never be opensourced because there's too much M$ and IBM code mixed in together.
For machines that just have to run attended for years doing something, OS/2 is a perfect match.
The only thing that sucks now is that any updates (fixpaks,drivers,USB) for the operating system require a paid subscription which I cannot afford. I wish they allowed access for hobbiests.
How far back are we talking about? In the PC world, I played Wolfenstien 3D spear of destiny (IIRC) Actually finished that one!
Doom II , made more hi-larious by adding the Simpsons overlay to it.
Stunt Island. Was cool to fly various planes around the city and stuff. Never really got as far into this game as one could have.
Simcopter. Lots of people disparage this game for the poor graphics it had. If you could get past that, it was fun and had its funny moments too. I still play it occasionally and have version 1.0 which has some sort of easter egg in it.
Around 1984 when I was in hi skool, I discovered the Apple 2e. There was also a few ][+ models too. By making friends with some computer nerds, I acquired disks of cracked games and whatever else was being traded around. I remember carrying that plastic flip n file disk box around!
I used the computers at skool, and played with a neighbor's 800XL with disk drives. I typed in programs from COMPUTE!
I did not get my own computer util around 1987. There was an apple ][+ in the paper for $150 so I managed to get the money and bought it. Unfortunately, it did not have a disk drive so I didnt do much with it until I bought a controller card and Mitac disk drive from JAMECO. This computer had an aftermarket encoder board which allowed lower case characters, autorepeat and macros too. Around 1988 I paid $150 for the AE viewmaster 80 card which allowed me to run Appleworks on my plus! I also remember getting a Zoom 300bps modem and actually making a connection to a local BBS. I was proud to be one of the few that owned a computer. The only problem I had was that I could not run programs that required an enhanced//e and required 128k and mousetext. It would also crash sometimes or lose the DOS connection. Running with the lid off seemed to help. I still have the computer safely stashed away. I replaced the RAM chips, but was still unstable. Over the years, I have acquired multiple Apple// series computers. The only one I dont have yet is an original ][ without autostart ROM
I don't think the//c+ was a bad idea at all. The power supply was built in, it used the 3.5 drive and could run at a speed faster than the//GS. It took me quite a while to locate a//c+ for my collection and are probably one of the more difficult apple// models to find.
I've got a 660av along with the matching applevision monitor, and I like it. The caddy type CD drive is not a big deal to me since it uses the same caddy that others did. Nice and compact design.
I love playing it. Like most said, any still out in arcades never play right. They're either unlevel, or flippers are weak or stuck which makes playing them truly suck. I remember working in an arcade in 1986 and remember when HIGH SPEED was brought in. I loved that game and would enjoy having my own to play. I remember all the sounds, and running the red light and if you were good, you could run up the ramp again as you looped around and make a quick getaway. I loved Williams games. CYCLONE was fun too. I think there was another similar to it, but cannot remember its name.
Old, dirty fryer oil makes everything darker, but the food will never get crispy and causes a lot of smoke. New oil makes everything nice and golden brown and crispy, never greasy. You can definately tell a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I help refurbish computers for a nonprofit and had one donated a while back. From a cursory look on the hard drive, there was no login password, business and home addresses, SSN and credit card numbers, pictures, scans, detailed financial data and more. I could have totally stolen this user's complete identity so easily if I were a dishonest person. Needless to say. the hard drive underwent DBAN. Even computers I've bought from secondhand stores have had personal info on them. I guess most people think the login password is sufficient in most cases to prevent the data from being used even though we all know there are tools to recover or erase the login password.
I remember getting a free copy of OS2 3.0 blue box when I worked at IBM. After a few tries, I got it working pretty good on a 386dx-40. Boot manager was great for setting up a method for booting multiple operating systems. I later moved to Warp connect and then WSEB which I downloaded from who knows where... There was a few aggravating issues. One was the single input que issue. One program could cause the WPS to not respond even though the system would continue to function. Pressing control+escape a few hundred times might recover the system for you if you were lucky. A program called WATCHCAT was a lifesaver here. Also, if you made any network changes after the initial install, the config utility would not update the configuration files right and you'd get CONFIG.SYS errors. You had to manually edit the networking config files to resolve the issue. I think this was finally fixed in WSEB. Sometimes the WPS would act funny because of ini file corruption. There were 3rd party utilities for this too. OS/2 ran great on the IBM PS/2 models. Just choose the defaults and wait for install to finish. I never had a driver issue myself. Just use a soundblaster or crystal audio sound cards and 3com NICs, and you had drivers. I loved newsreader/2 as it made reading threads so easy. That and browsing web with netscape 2.0 When setup right, it was bulletproof. Lots of settings to tweak and play with. Still miss the WPS.
I've a number of old IBM systems that still run fine, mostly PS/2 models both of the 85xx and 95xx models. With OS/2, they are bulletproof. Unfortunately, I'm finding computers and hardware from the 1990s are failing due to bad caps.
it just really sucks. FUCK BETA
those that forget history will oft repeat it. beta sucks, too
Find a nonprofit org to donate to that will rebuild them and give them away to needy skoolkids. That's what I help out with on a weekly basis. The high-end machines are rebuilt and sold to help with costs of rebuilding the older models. People saying a 2006 era machine is useless obviously don't know what they are talking about. This nonprofit is still giving single-core computers away. They will take anything except CRTs and what cannot or will not be used is disassembled and sold to scrappers so nothing goes to waste. A PC does NOT have to be less than a year old to be useful!
Went to vote after work at an elementary school's replica of a one room skoolhouse. Line was short although the classroom was crowded. Only 3 people out front handing out leaflets of which I do not know what they were about. Signed in, cast my votes on the paper ballot, and then fed it into the machine. I was number 1026. Easy peasy.
I remember all the hype about win95. You could actually buy it on floppies if you didn't have a CD drive or if it was not recognized. I never had too much of a problem installing it, but just about every computer had specific config.sys and autoexec.bat files. I do remember it being rather fragile and could be made to crash pretty easily. I was typically reinstalling win95 about every 6 months as that proved the only way to get consistent good operation from it.
It's always been my favorite arcade game except for Spyhunter which I got so good at I could play for hours and have all 4 weapons and in speedboat mode! I've always liked the Williams machines. I remember playing High Speed when it first arrived in the local arcade in 1986. The flashing light always got peoples' attention. When it was set up right, it was pretty easy to run the green/yellow/red light and go up the curving ramp. Wish I could find my own to have now. The Comet, Cyclone and even Taxi! were fun pins to play also. You could tell who was a 'real' pinball player because they'd use body english, nudge the table, and if you used your flippers right, you could some pretty crazy things like catch a ball on the way down so it would not bounce, and if you did it right, you could move the ball from one flipper to the other one without having to send it back up the table. I think the fact that since they were electromechanical, there can be a lot of work to repair/adjust all the mechanisms. Nothing is more annoying that finding a table with a weak flipper or bumpers, being unlevel, or tilt sensor set way too high. There's some fairly new tables at a Frankies fun park here, but they tilt way too easily, and you cannot nudge the tables hardly at all. Pins were the best game around for two bits.
1984.... in high skool and discovering the all the //e models and a few ][+ models. I always made sure to pick the computer with dual floppies in class. Made copying easier. (BRUN DISKMUNCHER 1.1)
Eventually made friends with the guys that had all the cracked games and remember carrying my 2 flip-n-files all day.
I was good at Loderunner ( to kill the sound during class)and remember having about 17 extra players and may have gotten to only about level 75 and 150 that game had. All of us played beyond castle wolfenstein, and I managed to kill Hitler once.
Didn't get my own computer until my Dad bought me a used ][+ for $200 with no disk drive in 1987. Eventually bought a controller card and two aftermarket drives. My ][+ had a encoder board that allowed true lower case, shift key, autorepeat, and a keyboard buffer. A year later, I paid $150 for a AE Viewmaster 80column card and I could run Appleworks now! Hated that I could not run new programs for the enhanced //e though.
Actually, it's like this. Apple ][ Apple ][+ Apple ///
Apple //e
Apple //c et al
You know you had a good day when your Apple crashed into the monitor and you ran 3D0G and you still had DOS 3.3 loaded.
One effect I like was that the computer would select a random pitch of the voices, so one guard might have a highpitched voice and another guard would have such a low voice it was hard to understand.
//, if you hit a wall edge, you just stopped the screen blinked. Much better than how the original CW did it.
It was always fun making the man behind the desk put his hands up, and after shooting him, he'd fall forward on the desktop.
For BCW on the Apple
Have not read the entire article, but this new robot does not seem very impressive. I have a HERO1 (complete but needing restoration) which has speech capability, programmability, a grasping arm, sonar, battery charge, remote control and even a keypad and breadboard for extending his capability and all of 32K RAM! No hard drive or Microsquish OS needed.
I live in a neighborhood less than 10 years old and the streetlights are the older type that distribute light in just about every direction. There's a newer section down the street using a newer lightpost style that directs the light downward and it's much better. The area is darker at night which is how it should be instead of it looking like early morning all the time. I just wish out lightposts could be updated to the new style. Ive driven to the coast to some undeveloped beaches and it's amazing to see the difference compared to a populated area at night. At the coast, the sky is so dark that you can see stars easily and sometimes you can't even see where are you walking because it's so dark. I wish cities would put more efford into preventing light pollution. Why must entire empty parking lots be lit up?
uh...depending upon the breaks.
>> #3 will have a long, successful stay at his company, which will reap the rewards of his >>hard work. You must not live in reality, because those that know a good amount and care about the customer quickly get burned out with a job taking calls because it's all about number of calls taken, not necessarily whether a problem was fixed or not. First time fix? Who cares? All the call center is concerned about is how long you're logged into the system and that you should be doing two things: Either on a call or waiting in avail for one. It appears to be more important to know HOW to talk to the customer rather than knowing the skills to resolve the problem in the first place. Eventually most burned out call techs don't care about stats, and take time not taking calls to update their resume and look for jobs online.
I first saw the apple //e in high skool. I never really learned anything in class, but got lots of cracked games and stuff. Even so, it's what got me into the IT world. I didnt get my own computer until I bought a highly modified ][+ with no disk drives for $200 in 1987 and I still have it, although it's always been rather unstable, probably due to overheating issues. I still have dozens of NIBBLE magazine programs to type in! I currently have a pretty large collection of 8bit Apple stuff, and I have every model except for the original Apple ][ and the Woz edition GS (if that counts as a seperate model).
One day I'll have to set up a SCSI drive and archive all my disks I still have. Love playing castle wolfenstein, loderunner, INFOCOM games, Leisure suit larry, et al.
IBM had web explorer which worked great back in 1996 or so. Nice and fast. Now it's useless. Yea, that single input queue problem was frustrating. I used a program called watchcat which could sometimes break loose from the hung app. I was reading an IBM redbook, and it made mention of a config.sys line that would address this problem. Even with the latest fixpaks, it still makes mention of floppies! I dont know why they never updated the update process. Thankfully there are utilities written that makes it easier. Definately have to read the readme files though. You have to remember, token ring was all IBM so they were not going to ack anything else. Just about every PS/2 made had a TR card in it.
I use/used it for about 10 years now. I dont use it for my primary duties though, mostly just playing around on it and enjoying the WPS. I just recently setup an old Netfinity server running WSEB (v4.5) with RAID, Mozilla, Staroffice, VPC, Java, Netfinity apps, a newsreader and some other goodies. Sytem is rock solid and stable and pretty snappy on dual PII 450s no less. OS/2 will never be opensourced because there's too much M$ and IBM code mixed in together. For machines that just have to run attended for years doing something, OS/2 is a perfect match. The only thing that sucks now is that any updates (fixpaks,drivers,USB) for the operating system require a paid subscription which I cannot afford. I wish they allowed access for hobbiests.
How far back are we talking about? In the PC world, I played Wolfenstien 3D spear of destiny (IIRC) Actually finished that one! Doom II , made more hi-larious by adding the Simpsons overlay to it. Stunt Island. Was cool to fly various planes around the city and stuff. Never really got as far into this game as one could have. Simcopter. Lots of people disparage this game for the poor graphics it had. If you could get past that, it was fun and had its funny moments too. I still play it occasionally and have version 1.0 which has some sort of easter egg in it.
Around 1984 when I was in hi skool, I discovered the Apple 2e. There was also a few ][+ models too. By making friends with some computer nerds, I acquired disks of cracked games and whatever else was being traded around. I remember carrying that plastic flip n file disk box around! I used the computers at skool, and played with a neighbor's 800XL with disk drives. I typed in programs from COMPUTE! I did not get my own computer util around 1987. There was an apple ][+ in the paper for $150 so I managed to get the money and bought it. Unfortunately, it did not have a disk drive so I didnt do much with it until I bought a controller card and Mitac disk drive from JAMECO. This computer had an aftermarket encoder board which allowed lower case characters, autorepeat and macros too. Around 1988 I paid $150 for the AE viewmaster 80 card which allowed me to run Appleworks on my plus! I also remember getting a Zoom 300bps modem and actually making a connection to a local BBS. I was proud to be one of the few that owned a computer. The only problem I had was that I could not run programs that required an enhanced //e and required 128k and mousetext. It would also crash sometimes or lose the DOS connection. Running with the lid off seemed to help. I still have the computer safely stashed away. I replaced the RAM chips, but was still unstable. Over the years, I have acquired multiple Apple // series computers. The only one I dont have yet is an original ][ without autostart ROM
I don't think the //c+ was a bad idea at all. The power supply was built in, it used the 3.5 drive and could run at a speed faster than the //GS. It took me quite a while to locate a //c+ for my collection and are probably one of the more difficult apple // models to find.
I've got a 660av along with the matching applevision monitor, and I like it. The caddy type CD drive is not a big deal to me since it uses the same caddy that others did. Nice and compact design.
I love playing it. Like most said, any still out in arcades never play right. They're either unlevel, or flippers are weak or stuck which makes playing them truly suck. I remember working in an arcade in 1986 and remember when HIGH SPEED was brought in. I loved that game and would enjoy having my own to play. I remember all the sounds, and running the red light and if you were good, you could run up the ramp again as you looped around and make a quick getaway. I loved Williams games. CYCLONE was fun too. I think there was another similar to it, but cannot remember its name.
Old, dirty fryer oil makes everything darker, but the food will never get crispy and causes a lot of smoke. New oil makes everything nice and golden brown and crispy, never greasy. You can definately tell a difference.