Usually, I only listen to a podcast once. That changed when The 1352 Report came out. For those podcasts, I listen at least twice, sometimes three times. There is so much going on, some quick comments, and a relaxed attitude, that I want to make sure that I have heard everything that each of the participants have to say.
The latest episode was probably one of the best, as Bruce Elgort, Carl Tyler, Jess Stratton, and Sean Burgess took a trip down memory (no pun intended) lane. It's sad when you hear a reference to QEMM-386 and it reminds you of the amount of time it took to maximize available memory on a workstation. Kids, this was before a product called "Windows" made its debut and you had to tweak memory to get your software to perform well.
Incidentally, and I have no idea where it came from, but when they were struggling to remember the manufacturer of QEMM-386, I found myself shouting "QUARTERDECK" at the iPod. Damn, I haven't had to utter that word in many years.
Even if you don't remember CompuServe, 5-1/4" floppies, or payphones (Sean - I see one every day, at the gas station up the street from me. It sits there, lonely, unused, and unloved) you may want to know about modem files on your Domino server and Notes clients, Sametime 3D, and other current IBM/Lotus offerings. And the format, one akin to a discussion among friends over beers, is extremely enjoyable.
Take a listen. It's worth your time.
Link: The 1352 Report: Episode 10: From pop-tops to config.sys to your big floppy disk
Technorati tag: podcast 1352Report
Comment posted by Vitor Pereira03/20/2009 04:24:05 AM
Homepage: http://www.vitor-pereira.com
Funny, I had the same happening to me with the reference to QEMM-386.
That sure brought back a lot of distant memories, lots of time spent tweaking this and that.
Comment posted by Carl Tyler03/20/2009 08:04:28 AM
Homepage: http://www.iminstant.com
Hey we got it eventually and we didn't even Google for the answer, remember when you couldn't Google for the answers?
Comment posted by Keith Brooks03/20/2009 12:55:10 PM
Homepage: http://www.vanessabrooks.com
I had until about 2 years ago the Quarterdeck Blimp from the 1st PC Expo in NY. Loved it too.
QEMM was a great product, until MS added the equivalent(although not as detailed) into Dos 5 or was it 6, I don't remember anymore.
I just now I had calls from clients for a year or 2 after since they could never understand how I got over 600K all the time in accessible RAM on their laptops.
Comment posted by Gregg Eldred03/20/2009 03:38:06 PM
Homepage: http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf
@Carl-and you didn't even touch IRQ's. Couldn't Google, is right - we had tools like Archie, Veronica, and finger. FTP was character-based (which, even now, is how I FTP stuff). Yeah, I am old (in computer years).
Comment posted by Philip Storry03/23/2009 09:01:05 AM
Homepage: http://www.not-so-rapid.com
This used to make me feel old. Which is impressive, given I'm in my early 30's.
Yeah, I grew up with 5 1/4" floppies. Which predated stuff like optimising my upper memory blocks. 5 1/4" floppies were getting old when I started - the 3.5" 720Kb floppy was becoming ubiquitous, to be followed by the 1.44Mb version.
Plug and play hardware? I remember IRQ conflicts, DMA conflicts, and hardware that had banks of jumper switches on it.
AJAX on your web pages for a faster, smoother interface? My faster, smoother interfaces were done by dropping into in-line assembler for the core loops.
My first networking was with IPX/SPX. Probably NetWare 3.x, but I do recall working with a 2.x environment too.
USB Keys? I transferred megabytes of files from computer to computer using Laplink Pro and a cable.
And if you didn't have the cable, don't worry - I have some wire here, a schematic, and I can make you one.
Internet? Try FidoNet. Try bulletin boards. Try people recompressing files with compressors like ARJ - not because it was cool or it was the latest thing, but because it saved you kilobytes per archive. And that made for a shorter, cheaper phone call when you downloaded it.
And all this used to make me feel old.
But I stopped caring about that a while back, when I tried buying a new graphics card and realised that it only _looked_ confusing.
Yes, there were 2,653,872 options. But most of them were just variants of the same basic chipset. And I've already forgotten more about video cards (MDA, CGA, EGA, MCGA, VGA, SVGA, XGA, Hercules, VESA etc.) than the kids of today will ever learn.
Sure, they know which nVidia card has 512Mb of graphics RAM versus 768Mb.
But that's mayfly knowledge. Here today, gone tomorrow. Everything I know about graphics may be out of date and useless, but it was useful for a lot longer than I'd have suspected.
One lesson from all these memories?
Don't sweat the little details. Anything that changes more than once a year is probably irrelevant.
And don't mistake age for experience.
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