(line from a TV commercial)

After some New Software/Old Hardware incompatabilities this past weekend I finally broke down and ordered a New PC for Home. It'll be my first 'Store-bought' Personal PC (other than Laptop). I was surprised at what could be gotten for such a small price. It just doesn't seem worth building them myself anymore.

Bill

Computing power has gotten incredibly cheap in recent years in terms of speed & capacity for your money.

I've just bought two old Heath/Zenith CP/M computers on eBay. For those unfamiliar with these, they are Z80-based, 64KB (yes 64K, not 64 MEG!) RAM and twin 5-1/4" floppy drives. The list price back in 1979 was around the $2500 mark! If you wanted a hard disk, it would set you back another four-figure sum. Just think of how much computing power that same amount would buy today, and then allow for 24 years' worth of inflation!

Paul,

I have to ask ... why?


Bill

LOL!!! . . . Because he can?. . .

One of my clients (who always needed to have cutting edge stuff) gave me a 68M Hard drive that he couldn't bear to throw out because it cost him $4,000 at the time. He couldn't even get $5 for it at his yard sale.

Paul,

It's too bad you weren't around here when the 'Lil' Computer Shop near me closed up. They would've given you a Truckload of antique stuff!

Bill

Paul,
I've got this really old Osbourne(sp?) computer at home here, the screen on it is like looking at an oscilloscope and it only uses BASIC.
Can't get it to do much, I think it's actually older than the first Apple computer or the Beeb.

Bill,
Now that is a line, that could only have come from California.
Surfing-speak, the word "dude", isn't it?.
So how is the new addition to the family performing?.
What system does it run?.

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 04-25-2003).]

Trumpy,

You might be right about the origin of that.

Maybe one of our CA 'Dudes' here can confirm that.

Didn't see your question there.
It comes next week. I feel attached to the one in front of me but it's only a P3-1000. The new one will be a P4-2.5xG

I'm not really looking forward to Windows XP though. I'm used to win 98 and now 2000 Professional (seems good)

Anyone have an opinion on Windows XP Home Edition?

Bill,
Windows XP is a dream to work with compared to '98, it even gives you a wee tour of it's attributes.
It will however take alittle bit to get used to, but I think you'll like it.

Bill, Al,
Yes, because I can! The last time I used a CP/M system must have been around 1987, so I thought it would be fun to "play around" with one of these old systems again. For simple accounts, word-processing and so on, these old systems are still very capable.

Trumpy,
Is your system the Osborne 1 ?

The Osborne portable systems were Z80-based running CP/M as well, so they're not limited to just the BASIC language. There is a huge range of old CP/M software available on the internet now for free.

The very small screen is, on my opinion, the biggest problem with the Osborne series. The Heath H89 et al had a decent size screen.


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 04-25-2003).]

I have several full-height 20MB drives here from old IBM AT systems. If I could sell them for the original purchase price, I'd be rich!

Paul,
Are you married?, because if my fiancee saw anything in the way of stuff that she didn't know what it was, it would end up in the rubbish.
I lost a 2-metre Transciever(hand-held) and a VOX kit I was working on at the time.
Oh well, I don't suppose that will happen again, considering I am married to a different woman!.

Paul,
You are a Gold Mine, mate, I just saw a pic of my Osborne.
Can't really do a lot with it, these days, although it's good for writing PLC Ladders, I just download it straight into my PC at home via a RS232 link that I fitted to it some years ago.
It's just like a lap-top, but it's not, I can write programs into it and take them out later, if it wasn't for that feature, it would have found the scrap-heap a lot sooner than it has!.

Bill, Paul,

Even as exciting as the ever quickening pace of hard- and soft-ware advancement is, especially as I use it in work and at home, I have been struck repeatedly by nostalgia for old systems.

I visited the Boston Computer Museum back in '92. I stumbled across an IBM card punch machine stuck off in the corner of the second floor. The punch was a hands on display with stacks of cards available to play with. Having spent countless hours at these desk like machines as a college engineering student, I immediately sat to it and ran off a few cards. I was bowled over by the sound the machine made. . .!!! It unlocked a flood of memories.

The closing of the driver's door on a '54 Ford four door sedan (first car I ever drove) ranks in the same league.

Speaking of the Dell Dude...

TG,

I saw something about that on TV.
It looks like He blew a good paying gig.

Nope -- Single & no kids, so stuff pretty much stays where I put it. Well, small parts sometimes disappear off edges thanks
to my cat

Now if you have anyone in mind to rectify the single status, just let me know!

Paul,
Sorry I never saw your question above about the Osborn.
Yes it is the Osborn 1, with it's 4MHz clock and 64KB of RAM.
Haven't wound it up for ages.
I also had an Amiga 500 for a few years,
I used it hooked up to a MIDI keyboard and used it as a sequencer when I was playing in a band.
Ahh, the 80's eh?.
Apparently these computers are still used for this very purpose and they will still run with up-to-the minute Synthesizers.

How fun it is to open a box and pull out a completely new machine (or open many boxes and assemble a new machine)! Haven't done this for so long, I forget what that feels like!

My Wife will be getting a new PC at the end of June, as part of her Voc. Rehab Career Course. It will be a "mid-sized" PIV (Pentium 4) based machine with a few nice bells and whistles attached. 17" monitor, run of the mill keyboard and mouse, but no printer.

Package deal from Gateway (the school switched back to Gateway after experiencing some unsolvable headaches with Dell... so I have heard...).

When we set it up, I'll let everyone know the stats of it (speed, DRAM type and size, peripherals, adapters, etc.).

It will most likely have Windows XP, so now I need to learn all the tweaks and guts of XP!

Does XP work well for anyone here? What incompatabilities have you experienced? What makes it a better O/S than any of the 9X series? Is it more or less stable across multiple machine setups? (how many GPFs, IPFs and lockups are experienced after adding new software or hardware).

Does XP get along well with Windows 2000? I may take off into the Windows 2000 Pro / Server angle sometime soon (before the next ice age to be exact! ...).

Gotta go.

Scott

P.S. - Paul,


CP/M - as in the old CP/M Operating System???
The one that refers to the first fixed disk drive as "A:"???
The one that Microsoft was writing apps to run under??? The one that Visicalc ran in???

Have only seen glimpses of the command prompt for CP/M in documentarys (sp???).

I see these machines use the very versatle Zilog Z80 CPU also. What ever became of this Company??? Were they "Integrated" by the larger guys like Intel, Motorolla, American Micro Devices (AMD) or Cyrix?

Feel free to elaborate!

Scott

Scott,

I'm in the process of migrating my machine to XP. I chose to do a clean install on a new hard drive and am using a cd/rw to move files across.

I've been totally impressed with the OS' ability to recognize the hardware. Up to this point I'd boycotted XP because of the activation registration process, but gave in when one to many drivers became un-installable in 98.

Al,

That sounds a bit like that situation I was in with '98. Re-installing it had always straightened out issues in the past, but since IE6 came out it didn't help anymore, and I had to go to 2000 to fix things.


Bill

Hiya Scott,

Haven't heard from you in a while -- Been traveling around sunny California?

Yes, the CP/M operating system which was standard for many small 8080/Z80-based microcomputers in the 1970s. (CP/M stands for Control Program for Microcomputers.)

CP/M was written to run on the Intel 8080 originally. The Z80 was a later CPU which extended the instruction set, but was fully backward compatible with the 8080 -- i.e. all existing 8080 code would run on it just fine.

It would depend upon the configuration, but most CP/M micros had the two floppy drives set as A and B. C and D were often reserved for extra floppies, so it wasn't unusual for the fixed disk to appear as E, even on a system which had only two floppies.

The first version of DOS for the IBM PC was modeled on CP/M in many respects, with appropriate changes for the different CPU and system architecture. In quite a few respects, the DOS utilities weren't as versatile as their CP/M counterparts, e.g. the old CP/M PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program) utility could not only copy files from one disk to another, but could also carry out quite a range of filtering, truncation, etc. Compare it with the equivalent COPY utility in DOS, and the latter is very short on options.

CP/M had "user areas" to segregate files, which was adequate for the small size disks commonly used then. The user area feature never got copied into DOS 1, and it wasn't until DOS 2 that Unix-style directories were added -- But I digress!

Still going strong in micro-controllers and such like, as far as I know.

You might find this link interesting for more on CP/M stuff: http://www.gaby.de/ehome.htm