Hoseasons 2016

[Oddfellow]

I get what Strow is saying and for catching up, I think this is right. But for learning something new from scratch, i find them invaluable, if only because flipping between screens is messy with so many windows open and. as Alan says, the difficulty of reading on screen as opposed to paper. E-ink readers made this so much easier, but still I find a book better to work with. 

And, yes, the Hoseason's Brochure is far nicer to handle as a printed thing rather that their rather klunky web site.

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, FreedomBoatingHols said:

I get what Strow is saying and for catching up, I think this is right. But for learning something new from scratch, i find them invaluable, if only because flipping between screens is messy with so many windows open and. as Alan says, the difficulty of reading on screen as opposed to paper. E-ink readers made this so much easier, but still I find a book better to work with.......

It works really well with multiple desktops over two or three monitors though, something that Windows has supported for many years now.

You simply run the programming application on the main screen and the browser on a side screen, and you can still even cut and paste code between them.....

I now use a pair of full HD led 27" monitors, giving me an effective desktop of 3840x1080, and they only cost £90 each....

[Oddfellow]

I have never really worked with multiple monitors on one machine. Did it occasionally in the past but ran out of desk space with all the machines I has running!

[JennyMorgan]

Son in law's set up is one very large monitor on which he might have, for example, four 'screens' open at any one time, looks good to me. Me, just a simple lap-top, I can see the need at professional and attraction at geek level of multiple screens but for bog-standard catalogue browsing I go with Andy on this one. 

[Guest]

People are so lucky these days, with large 1080p flat screen pin sharp monitors and TVs.

I spent so many years with this kit, 12" monochrome cathode ray tube monitors, PCs with only 8" floppies and no hard drives, and all those bl**dy books.........

The RM 380Z cost around £2000, way back in the 80's, and you could go and make a cup of tea while it compiled anything......

[vanessan]

I am a paper person although use computer technology when called for and I do enjoy browsing online anything I need to research. But, I like to browse through catalogues/brochures and it seems a lot of us do. One thing that really irks me is the lack of paper manuals these days. I bought a new camera recently, it came with the briefest of paper instructions and I have to refer to an online manual if I want to know any more. This is annoying as I don't think I will ever get to grips with it unless I print the manual in its entirety - hundreds of pages. Or I guess I could probably purchase one from the company at an exorbitant price!

When hiring boats, the brochures I used became dogeared in a very short space of time as they were so well thumbed. I still have some going back to 1982!

 

[ranworthbreeze]

1 hour ago, Strowager said:

People are so lucky these days, with large 1080p flat screen pin sharp monitors and TVs.

I spent so many years with this kit, 12" monochrome cathode ray tube monitors, PCs with only 8" floppies and no hard drives, and all those bl**dy books.........

The RM 380Z cost around £2000, way back in the 80's, and you could go and make a cup of tea while it compiled anything......

Hi Strowager,

I have seen 8 inch disks in the dim & distance past but I never used them it was bad enough with the 5 1/4 disks an dual drive units, programming in those days was an art, keeping the files small enough for the disk size. 

Cost of drives, ram etc was a small fortune.

Regards

Alan

[ZimbiIV]

I have still got some 8" discs and floppy discs, should I contact the Antiques Roadshow?

paul

[BroadScot]

Oh eck, I feel a MS Dos moment coming on!  The number of back ups one did with floppies at the Golf Club, brings back nightmares! 

 

Iain.

[FairTmiddlin]

Iain

Remember when I worked in car hire company. They started up a car leasing side Four Salesmen all new computers.

OS came in a box not installed, Windows 95, 26 x 3 1/4 floppies + 22 x 3 1/4   for the leasing program+ 17 for the credit check. Took all day on a     Sunday to install all of it and that was walking the disks around all four computers.

Thank god Cd's came in

 

Nigel

[BroadScot]

11 minutes ago, FairTmiddlin said:

Iain

Remember when I worked in car hire company. They started up a car leasing side Four Salesmen all new computers.

OS came in a box not installed, Windows 95, 26 x 3 1/4 floppies + 22 x 3 1/4   for the leasing program+ 17 for the credit check. Took all day on a     Sunday to install all of it and that was walking the disks around all four computers.

Thank god Cd's came in

 

Nigel

Hi Nigel,

With 500 members who had to have their Handicaps up to date because of the CONGU system, in the early days it was a FULL TIME job! lol

We moved from the big floppies to the plastic ones and a NEW PC unit, all briefly before Windows 93 appeared on the scene! Happy days!....Not!

I am very happy with Windows 10, it loads quickly on my lappy compared to the old days of weird and wonderful noises on the old tower before it completely loaded up!

Iain. 

[LondonRascal]

I am new to computing, in relative terms having been brought up on an Commodore 64, then Atari 520st, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200 and then jumped in with a PC bought from Tempo (anyone remember them) which cost me well over £1,500 - but feeling very proud as was, along with a DECT cordless phone the first purchased I ever made with money eared from a proper job.

I found out about the Internet in Weymouth one summer on holiday, when for about £1.50 you could 'surf' the web on a computer in some touristy experience.  I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and it all seemed really slow but none the less I knew my PC back home had a modem and before long I was signed up to AOL (version 3).  Back then you had to pay per month charge for AOL to simply be there and available, then on top of that a per hour charge again to AOL and then call costs to dial up to AOL paid to BT through your phone bill!

What really shook this all up was Freeserve by Dixons (later to become Wannadoo) with no actual rolling monthly cost but you paid for the calls and Freeserve took a small slice.  AOL then changed their ways to an 0800 dial up number, remove the per hour charges and you paid a flat fee per month but...got AOL exclusive content.

Well you can imagine how cool it was when we got AOL broadband at 512Kps - soon to increase to a blistering 1Mbs service.  AOL was, for many their first way into the world of the Web, so hate it (as I grew to) without it I'd never have been such an early adopter of the Web.

Since then I have used many ISPs but today find myself content with BT Broadband, which at least where I live is stable and gives just under 80Mbs download and 18Mbs upload speeds.

I have two 27" monitors myself, cheapest I could find made by Hanns G - three years old and nothing wrong with them but my - how nice it is having that extra screen even if for something simple like web browser open on one screen and Spoitfy on other - not to mention it looks nice

 

[Hylander]

 

OS came in a box not installed,   Come to think of it , what is MS Dos?

 

 

What the dickens is OS, please?  ,

[NorfolkNog]

6 minutes ago, Hylander said:

Opera

OS came in a box not installed,   Come to think of it , what is MS Dos?

 

 

What the dickens is OS, please?  ,dic

Operating system?

You are too young to remember MS Dos Monica :-)

[LondonRascal]

I've still got the Amiga 1200, in full working order with 'Workbench' (that was the OS not something you had to put the computer on) 

[BroadScot]

30 minutes ago, Hylander said:

 

OS came in a box not installed,   Come to think of it , what is MS Dos?

 

 

What the dickens is OS, please?  ,

Hi Monica,

MS Dos is Microsoft Disc Operating System

OS....Open Source or Operating System

That is what I know them as, someone else may think differently.

Iain

[Guest]

1 hour ago, BroadScot said:

......MS Dos is Microsoft Disc Operating System
OS....Open Source or Operating System
That is what I know them as, someone else may think differently.

me...

"Operating System" and "Open Source" have very different meanings, even though they share the same acronym.

"Operating System" is the primary software that runs on any machine, like Windows, Linux, Android, and Apple.

"Open Source" means any software where the source code is accessible, so can be freely altered or modified.

Linux is open source, but Windows, MsDos, and Apple are definitely not, and never would be.

[BroadScot]

Thanks Strowie, I am sure Monica will now know the full picture on abbreviations. I try to keep Computer lingo as simple as possible.

Iain.

[Guest]

My spectrum setup soon grew lots of ribbon cable expansions, a modified ex-teleprinter keyboard, modems, printer ports etc.

The subsequent BBC was a much better base machine though, and had the luxury of disc drives instead of those damn audio cassettes and microdrives. 

 

[Guest]

46 minutes ago, Jonzo said:

Beebs were great, one of the first machines I programmed on. They were really versatile and as you say, those disk drives were a big thing back in those days.

Microdrives were utterly useless, such a poor implementation of a fairly good idea. 

I see there's a CP/M guide there too, Strowy!

Yes, great machines, so much more versatile than Clive's rubbery Spectrums.

I managed a great deal with that, even adding an 8086 coprocessor so that I could run DrDos before I could eventually afford an IBM PC (much later).

Yes, the CPM manual was well thumbed back in those days, people often struggle with drag and drop now,  but "pip" was far more obtuse.....

 

[Siddy]

I started at school on the Research Machine Strow has in his pic. then got the Vic and built that up with voice, light pens.

Moved onto C64 looking back just gaming, then got the A500 business pack with IBM emu which I added all sorts to it, from tv tuner and teletext unit which was great compared to tv text. RGB gen video box. Help run the Commodore club.

Now help required here, moved my house into storage and I've lost a 2nd Amiga but found a box of speccy games with a 'Sam Coupe' pc which looks like a cross of a Amiga/BBc pc. How I ended up with I don't know. Someone must have give me it.

Ebay listing one at £500 ( still for sale can't understand it) so if you know anything about the SAM let me know.

 

Robin have you seen the 6 months free Deezer music care of 'Three' I just signed up today using Mifi sim. Can send the link if anyone requires it.

 

[Oddfellow]

If you wish to sell the SAM Coupe,  Siddy, i'll give you a few quid for it. 

Way back in the day, computing was very much my business. I studied computing science and worked on a number of national computing magazines and occasionally produced material for some of the national newspapers too. 

Just about the only home computer I never owned were the Amstrad CPCs (despite writing for a CPC magazine on occasion  and even being on Deputy Editor of one for a short time). 

Today, I have a Commodore Pet sat beside me with dual 5 1/4 disk drive unit that's bigger than a small suitcase (fully working), but little used as you might guess from the dust on it. This was a good looking bit of equipment (erroneously attributed to Porsche by many, but it did win a design award). It runs at a whopping 1Mhz with 4K of ram.

In storage, I have a small collection of machines from Atari 8-bit micros, C64, Spectrums, Apple Macs (not the kind that youngsters will recognise) and some more obscure equipment too including the Tatung Einstein. 

 

[BroadScot]

1 hour ago, FreedomBoatingHols said:

If you wish to sell the SAM Coupe,  Siddy, i'll give you a few quid for it. 

Way back in the day, computing was very much my business. I studied computing science and worked on a number of national computing magazines and occasionally produced material for some of the national newspapers too. 

Just about the only home computer I never owned were the Amstrad CPCs (despite writing for a CPC magazine on occasion  and even being on Deputy Editor of one for a short time). 

Today, I have a Commodore Pet sat beside me with dual 5 1/4 disk drive unit that's bigger than a small suitcase (fully working), but little used as you might guess from the dust on it. This was a good looking bit of equipment (erroneously attributed to Porsche by many, but it did win a design award). It runs at a whopping 1Mhz with 4K of ram.

In storage, I have a small collection of machines from Atari 8-bit micros, C64, Spectrums, Apple Macs (not the kind that youngsters will recognise) and some more obscure equipment too including the Tatung Einstein. 

 

Going that far back Andy, you will soon be picking up your Pension! 

Iain.

[ZimbiIV]

Not a bit of topic, new Hoseasons catalogue to old computers!

I am not admitting any age issues but I do miss my old abacus.

paul

[BroadScot]

19 minutes ago, ZimbiIV said:

Not a bit of topic, new Hoseasons catalogue to old computers!

I am not admitting any age issues but I do miss my old abacus.

paul

I miss the slate board! Hoseasons would have struggled with one or many of them! 

Iain.