Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Up until a year or so ago I had two 100MB Zip drives and several cartridges. I also had a 250MB Zip drive and a couple cartridges. But after years and years of thinking they would come in handy at some point, I finally decided the time had passed. They all worked. Well, until I got rid of my last computer that had a parallel I/O port. Sometime after that I finally decieded that I didn't need all these old computers and obsolete computer equipment and parts. Out they went. Boxes and boxes of stuff. Modems, floppy drives, Zip drives, ancient CD drives, ancient 3" floppy disks new and used, lots of godawfully old memory chips, ancient cables, miscellaneous pieces of bent metal with holes in them for various 15 year old chassies. hundreds of backup CDs, 8mm cartridge tapes, 1/4 cartridge tapes, several copies of Win95, Win98, Win2000 installation CDs, licenses, and books. I'd long ago gotten rid of ancient printers even the ones that supposedly still worked. Stone age hard drives with miniscule capacities. A few pieces for Sun SPARC machines and SCSIbus interfaces, and some UNIX software. I even got rid of a couple boxes of miscellaneous cables, including a dozen laptop AC/DC power bricks. Although for some befuddling reason I kept an entire storage box of standard power cables.
Well, back in my day we used one of these. Reprogramming for a new epoch was a real PITA as you had to literally dig up the stones and move them about. And don't get me started on the virgins.
LOL! At least these didn't have to be in the clean room!
This thread is beginning to remind me of the Monty Python "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch : )
"Punched cards? We used to dream of having a luxury like Punched Cards! We used to have to use a Paper Tape puncher!"
"A paper tape puncher? Oh, many were the days we wished we could have a Paper Tape puncher. WE had to get up before the sunrise, cut out strips of of old newspaper, tape them together, and then punch out the holes with a sharp stick!"
"At least YOU had a sharp stick! We had to get up an hour before we went to bed, get whipped by our managers for an six hours, then press our own wood pulp by hand into strips of crude paper, then bite out the holes with our TEETH!"
etc. etc....
And for all you fellow nostalgic rememberers of computers-gone-by......there is a small, but thriving community of people who are recreating these old machines. SIMH is an emulator that emulates a LOT of these old machines. And it can be built/run on multiple machines, including Raspberry Pi's. They've even written interface code so you can wire up those old front panels and even hook up many of the old peripherals (if they're serial, via USB converters; if not, sometimes by writing a simple pin-interface driver.) They're recreating the front panels and switch banks, and more.
Here's a PDP-8i built on a Pi:
And this particular person is also building a PDP-11/70 clone in the same vein:
The base site for the PiDP-8i : http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8
The blog article on their work trying to build the PiDP-11/70: http://obsolescenceguaranteed.blogspot.com/2016/01/starting-to-make-pidp-1170.html
And you tweet that to da yoof of today and they won't belive ya!
The first real computer I worked with was the machine at Florida Institute of Technology in 1967 or 8. An IBM-1130 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130 I took one quarter of FORTRAN and I was hooked. Shortly thereafter getting a job in the computer center it was all downhill from there.
Leading to my work at the Kennedy Space Center, and up through a career of several consulting positions for goverment and industry.
However, the first actual digital computer I worked with was a DigiComp1 plastic toy back in about 1963 or 4 that my parents got me for Christmas one year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I
LOL!!
For those poor deprived souls who are not familiar with the classic "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlIXn0r0AY8
Sticks! Oh, we used to dream of having sticks! We used to have to chip our programs into flat rocks with a piece of flint, all the while having to fend off attacks by cave bears!
Ok, I've got that out of my system, and now back to classic computers....... : )
Wow, I did not know about the old DigiComp until years later....I would surely have asked Santa for one... thanks for posting that link, a toy ahead of it's time!
I carried that DigiComp1 with me for decades afterwards. It sat proudly on top of my racks of computer equipment at the Kennedy Space Center for 5 years, then I remember having it on top of the racks of computer equipment when I worked for the think-tank MITRE in Washington DC. It also popped up in various other places where I was in charge of the computers, though not as a permanent fixture. It just made guest appearances.
I always thought it deserved a wood and glass box around it with gold lettering saying "In case of emergency, break glass".
Unfortunately, it's gone to plastic toy heaven.
Back in my IBM System/360 days (named, BTW, because the design was a complete revolution in computers - prior to the 360, manufacturers did character-based business systems and word-based scientific systems - and the 360 line did both) I discovered that the 360, poster child for the CISC (Complex Instriction Set Computer) - wasn't.
We had our mod 30 die one day because the air compressor in the cpu cabinet failed. In the mod 30 the Read-Only Memory was capacative, with banks of tab-card sized plastic sheets held between circuit boards by air bladders. The sheets had standard tab-card punch holes (low capacitance) for ones and no holes (high capacitance) for zeros (or maybe the other way around - too long ago!). The cards had a mix of 36 bit and 72-bit control words, with each being a row on the card. And things like the Move Character (MVC) instruction was actually a microcode subroutine.
My last mainframe was an IBM 9672-R1, with 512 MB of memory - and the top 26 MB was 'reserved' for the microcode load.
The students who worked in our college computer center were often there late at night and sometimes overnight running batched student jobs and school business and class scheduling programs. We'd sit around playing cards or games or helping other students just outside the actual computer room (doorway but no door) and listen to the sounds that the diskdrive, card reader and printer made and could pretty much tell when the system entered various phases of FORTRAN compilation, Assembler phase & execution phase of student programs. The long running programs also had their various phases and the sounds from the computer became announcements of when we'd need to get back into the computer room to push another button. A quick glance at the lights panel above the input console also spoke volumes to the experienced, of the type of activity taking place or about to take place. Damn, young brains are so quick to grab onto patterns.
Except when it comes to behaving rationally in social situations. 
...
LOL! Glad to see some folks remember the classics!
"Still have a computer in the shop I built with the old, and rare, AMD K6-III cpu"
Aha, you and me both, Greymom!. I have one I built on the FIC VA503+ with an AMD K6-III 450 Mhz. That's one of two socket 7 systems I have kept, the other being based upon the venerable Asus P55T2P4 that went through a number of processor upgrades from Intel through AMD, finally ending up with a K6-2 400 Mhz. Love those old boxes.
Glad to hear someone else still remembers! I need to pull that one out of the storage rack. Have not looked at it in years. : )
Back when personal computers were getting started I used to go to exhibitions and buy whatever issues of Byte, Dr Dobbs etc they had. Then I'd read about all those American computers you couldn't buy over here, and even if you could I could never have afforded one. When I did get started I was always trying to do it on the cheap. My TRS-80 only had cassettes and I bought an Atari 400 with the unoffical upgrade to 48k. I eventually got an Amiga 500 but my attempt to turn a CD32 into an Amiga computer with AGA graphiics using addons never worked. I use PCs now but I do have Amiga Forever installed on one.
I started off working with Ferranti mini-computers, then moved on to Z80 CP/M systems. I sometimes miss the purity of programming in assembler with a simple OS you can either use or ignore and do your own thing.
The software on the Ferrantis ended up depending on a real bodge that I still shudder to think of. The software was built round a custom multi-tasking kernal and every so often it just locked up. We never managed to work out why but we did discover that two processes were locked waiting on a flag so neither of them could reset it. So we left the front panel switches on the computers set for that address and the clear value. The instructions to the users was, if the system stops working go the the computer and press those buttons. This reset the flag and let the system carry on.
I went on to other systems but never worked on mainframes,. I became one of the few people in our computer department who didn't know Cobol but I did pick up a few other languages and systems. C is my favourite programming language and Unix my favourite OS.
Now I'm retired I tend to collect free compilers and interpreters but hardly ever use them. I have done a bit of python programming on a Raspberry Pi but I keep getting distracted by other things.
It wasn't a hidden feature, but you had to find the correct string of dialog boxes to navigate to find the one that had a "disable modem speaker" checkbox. You could come at it through Device Mangler, the taskbar icon, or your connection/networking dialog, but only one had the checkbox.
What's US Robotics up to these days? Back when I bought hardware modems (PCI slots), I had a more favorable experiene with USR than the others that were available in my area.
Apparently its still around and still making modems, DrNewcenstein, although a mere shadow of its former self, understandably.
I've had my hand at desiging and implementing several custom built multi-tasking computer OSs for research and industry. One has to think in many dimensions to forsee problems with waiting on flags. The apropriate use of "atomic" operations to make changes of state without the possibility of being interrupted, yet keeping the process short enough to avoid disasterous delay for other programs was difficult.
Sometimes while driving home on the Washington DC beltway my car was an unguided missle while my brain was going over 5 dimensions of possibiities of a problem at work. 
This was during the period of DOS, Window95, 98, 2000, and XP. I had a peek at those operating system and threw up my hands in disgust at the unbelievably bad multi-tasking implementations. They simply were not reliable enough for the type of work we were doing. I was not at all surprised at the frequent occurences of BSOD and system hangs that those commercial systems had. Win7 was the first Microsoft OS that I have found to be trustworthy enough for even my paultry home diddleings. Yeah, things still go belly up now and then but I think most of the grossly ignorant design issues have been taken care of. But that doesn't prevent some fresh new recruit at Microsoft from reinventing them. 
Could I be an OS designer again today? No way! My ancient brain has been throttled down and I don't think I could drink as much coffee and smoke as many cigarettes as required to think in 5 dimensions anymore.
BTW, I don't know if anyone here has seen the thread in the forums or heard about Microsoft's roadmap for Windows? Apparently they have decided that most users don't really need a full blown computer or operating system and will be happy using the cloud for storage and hosting their applications. Hmmm, I remember very well, what, 30 or more years ago when this new-fangled computer technology was being rolled out to corporate and government offices everywhere. Everybody had a "dumb terminal" (basically a keyboard and networked monitor) connected to a server somewhere that provided all the storage and ran all the applications. I also remember when, slowly but surely the situation progressed towards everyone having a PC on their desk with both dedicated storage and native applications, and the servers basically were domain controllers that managed the LAN and provided access to the WAN and the internet. Much better. I'm really not personally interested in going back to those particular "good old days" of centralized computing. Been there, done that, didn't like it. So does that make me one of those oldtimers who has difficulty embracing change and progress, or an oldtimer that isn't interested in rolling back the hands of time?
Yeah, I've watched the industry oscillate through centralized vs distributed computing a several times. Each has its advantages and I suspect the pendulum will continue to swing for various aspects of computing needs in the coming years. In the end I suspect that part of the oscillation is driven by marketing and bottom line economics.
...two disadvantages of centralised computing are system load as well as connectivity speed/response. When Daz has a big sale event, their servers get pummeled and response at the user's end begins to go south. This was the same case back in the mainframe era, the more people on the the system, the slower response became. If a big administrative job was run it would often have a serious response impact at the individual terminal end (hence why large jobs and batches were often run overnight when few if any people would be on the system).
On a standalone system this is not a concern. Save for downloading updates, my primary work system remains offline and all software I use is resident on it with no need for a Net connection. This is part of the reason I am not interested in subscription software or cloud. the other part, being online reduced available system resources (It is not unusual to see FF taking up 2 even 3 GB of available memory when involved in passing heavy amounts of data back and forth).
Not to mention the fact that 'cloud' computing turns your PC into a brick if your Internet connection goes down, or if you take it to some place where there is no connection. Both have been known to happen, even in this enlightened, connected age.
A couple of years ago I was all set to pull the trigger on a $4,000+ laser cutter/engraver (mislabeled a 'laser printer' by the promoter/manufacturer)...until I found out that it depended on the 'cloud,' for no reason other than marketing and control considerations. So if I take it to Pavement Narrows, BC, it's a brick? If you go bankrupt, it's a brick? No thanks.
No Cloud no subscription if I can't run it without the internet I don't need or want it
I cringe every time I see "cloud" as a storage option. "Cloud" is marketing-speak for our disk drives, on our servers that you have {no/marginal/minimal} control over unless you pay a {nominal/minimal/noticeable/large} fee on a {weekly/monthly/annual} basis. And even if you pay the fee, there is no guarantee your data will be there tomorrow - they could go bankrupt, one of the other customers could store something that attracts law enforcement interest with the resulting confiscation of the servers, or someone could mis-configure something and the whole world would have access to your data.
And regardless of EULA agreements, anything you put on the "cloud" could always be available for scanning in search of a marketing tie-in.
And, unless it is in the contract and you are paying for it, plan on making your own backups as they probably aren't.
Clouds look light and fluffy but can turn dark and ruin your day.
Memory card 4K x 16 but only magnet tori for 14 bit. One of several cards from a Varian 620f computer (around 1970). The CPU was a 19 inch drawer full of wire wrapped cards with a plethora of logic gates - ECL for speed, not TTL. The 14 bit computer was organised octal, 16 toggle switches grouped in 3 to enter the binary code plus a toggle to load the switch positions into memory, a toggle to run the just loaded bootstrap (we were instructed to always hit it twice). 30 commands sufficed to start a tape that loaded the application.
I'm not a computer but rather an RF guy, worked on air traffic control radars first and then for 40 years in satellite telecom. I had to move on, though. Less and less hardware trouble shooting and making modifications. Things went digital, full of highly integrated chips, analogue and digital, nothing to repair anymore. If equipment failed, just replace it. Rather boring. Then networks came replacing G703, another challenge to come to grasp with. Set up and troubleshoot the equipment of customers abroad (and aboard vessels) remotely.
I started with a Sinclair ZX80 then ZX81. Being a hardware guy, I constructed several 8 bit computers based on the Z80 and also wrote the operating systems (assembler). Then a got an Osborne Executive with CP/M+, MS-DOS and UCSD-Pascal. I played with Fortran (mostly to cheat in a game I was stuck with that was programmed in Fortran), Pascal, Lisp, Forth, but not seriously - but I had a subscription of DDJ (Dr. Dobbs). I mostly work with PowerBASIC because it has a good assembler interface, is nearer at the machine and less abstract. Though there's a bit of scripting in Javascript, PHP and REBOL, too. I had ported a figFORTH79 from CP/M to DOS at the time. Schematics, pictures and program code of much I made (and is now obsolete) I have on my website (Personal, should be named vanity). To understand the basics of networking and router configuration, I built myself a home network. The mistakes I made had no consequences and back at work what I learned came in quite handy because if you configure a customer network remotly and make a mistake, the connection goes down and you're lost - which means to send a contractor to the site (or ship) of the contractor to fix the mess you did.
Wow, the old Varians bring back memories. Had a couple of those on lab controllers and analyzers, plus one in the computer room for general users. If you did matrix operations, it actually transposed values. Had to convice our IT people that this was the case.
I still have my old Sinclair Z80 in a box somewhere!
The Ferranti minicomputers I worked on used core memory. It got to the point where I could be in the computer room not looking at the live system or anything connected to it, but I could tell when it crashed from a subtle change in the sound it made. It was a faint high piched noise and it went closer to a pure tone when it crashed. I always assumed this was due to the magnetic cores vibrating as they were accessed but I don't know if this was true.