I have plenty of these install disks laying around my house and I can't find a need for them; however, they offer me some sort of sentimental value, some sort of mawkish weirdness that newer operating systems don't do. Does anyone else experience this strange nostalgia? It's quite depressing.

-A

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"Foolishness is indeed the sister of wickedness."

hedy ma'am, you have the superb style of teaching and crossing the threshold of the heart of any person. But why you dive deep, from TFD, for so many days?

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Me Gathering Pebbles at The Seashore.-Aj

I still have my ancient Timex-Sinclair 2000, with its 2K bytes of memory and its ROM-resident BASIC interpreter.

Entirely useless now, of course, but that was the most flexible, most capable BASIC I ever used. It was so good that I used it to create my own Assembler, which I then used to build my own I/O routines which could read and write (tape cassette only, of course) considerably faster than the original version.

Pleasant memories, indeed!

My first computer was Mikro Mikko 1 (Nokia)

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In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

That is the computer.

The huge box on the right is just the monitor - a Cathode Ray Tube television with electronic valves (what the Americans call 'tubes').

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Wyrd bið ful aræd - bull!

MikroMikko 1 M6

Processor: Intel 8085, 2 MHz
64 kB RAM, 4 kB ROM

Display: 80×24 character text mode, the 25th row was used as a status row. Graphics resolutions 160×75 and 800×375 pixels, refresh rate 50 Hz

Two 640 kB 5.25" floppy drives (other models might only have one drive)
Optional 5 MB hard disk (stock in model M7)

Connectors: two RS-232s, display, printer, keyboard

Software: Nokia CP/M 2.2 operating system, Microsoft Basic, editor, assembler and debugger

Cost: 30,000 FIM in 1984

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In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Don't knock it till you've tried it.

One thing that I miss is being so involved with the control of the machine. It always did exactly what I told it to do, no more, no less, and I really had to be clear about what it was I wanted to do. CP/M, and especially DR-DOS, facilitated clarity of thought, although BASIC often enabled sloppy execution in the form of "spaghetti code".

I have absolutely zero nostalgia for Win 95, even though it sucked somewhat less hard than Win 3.0.

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"Make it go away, Mrs Whatsit," he whispered. "Make it go away. It's evil."

One of the first early super computers has to be Konrad Zuse's series of machines. Created in 1930s and 40s, they were one of the very first computers to be programmable as well as capable of multifunction.

Here is the Z1 computer. In the foreground is the manual crank for driving the clock frequency by hand! -

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In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

W95 OSR2.1 was a great OS. I used it for over a decade. The install routine was fairly easy to subvert so you could get it to install as an upgrade without it prompting for a key. You could also install it without IE or any of the other crap that left if weak and hobbling around on crutches.

For micro/desktop computers of XT class there was CP/M, DR-DOS, OS/2, and of course the underlying basis for Windows, MS-DOS.

Amiga, Commodore, and Xerox each had their own version of DOS.

Later there was NeXT and BeOS, both ported to several different CPU families.

By the late 1990s FreeBSD had also been ported to both Intel and PowerPC based micro computers.

At the workstation level there were AEGIS, Domain/OS, HP/UX, and a number of UNIX derivatives such as Solaris that pre-date Linux by several decades.

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"Make it go away, Mrs Whatsit," he whispered. "Make it go away. It's evil."

Fortunately, the cultures of academics and researchers — and no small amount of peer pressure — have strongly encouraged adequate documentation of non-trivial code, often in-line with the code itself.

Unfortunately, engineers and managers, for good reasons, are not so likely to conserve documentation for microprocessors and their particular machine languages when the chips are likely to be outdated within a year or two anyway. It is enough to know that something works or doesn't, so hold on to the former and lose the latter as excess baggage.

JPL falls firmly in the former case. I'm quite confident that they recorded and archived every step and miss-step along the way, including the debugging tools and development libraries.

NASA not so much. Typical of the non-archival mindset was around the time of the thirtieth anniversary of the first moon landing, when it was discovered that several containers of videotape and film had been incorrectly labeled, so the actual recordings of the first landing were erased or discarded instead of the training and simulations. This led to a great deal of embarrassment, not to mention all sorts of wacky conspiracy theories that still won't die.

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"Make it go away, Mrs Whatsit," he whispered. "Make it go away. It's evil."

It's got bells on't.

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"Make it go away, Mrs Whatsit," he whispered. "Make it go away. It's evil."