Oldest?

[Gödel]

I'm 75 years old. Is anyone older than that in these forums (fora?).

 

[Handruin]

I'm not sure, I'm currently 49 here.

 

[Mercutio]

I'll be 51 in a couple months. I think dd is ~46? jtr is in his 60s someplace. Tannin's probably... right there with you someplace. He's still posting photos on his personal web site as of a couple weeks ago.

 

[jtr1962]

I think Tannin hit 50 not long after I joined this site, so mid 70s is probably where he is now. I'm 64 on November 30.

 

[Gödel]

OK, I hope Tannin will check in for verification. For old timer's sake.

On another note, I have a PC that's 19.21 years old. Does anyone here have an older one (still running)?

 

[sdbardwick]

I'm probably one of the top five oldest members at 58 years old.
I do maintain a Dell PowerEdge 600SC from about 2001 (P4 2.1GHz, 384MB SDRAM, Windows Server 2003) that serves as a lightly stressed file/database server that has been running 24/7 since about 2004.

 

[Gödel]

Whoa, Mr. Bardwick, pretty impressive; it had or soon will have its quadranscentennial.

 

[Gödel]

Oh, and sorry for the Padres' loss; I like Manny Machado, and miss him from the Orioles .

 

[Mercutio]

OK, I hope Tannin will check in for verification. For old timer's sake.

On another note, I have a PC that's 19.21 years old. Does anyone here have an older one (still running)?

Yes. Several. None in more than occasional use, but I have an old-ass Pentium 4 set up for Windows 98 stuff and I believe every Thinkpad I've ever bought can still be powered on and used.

 

[sedrosken]

OK, I hope Tannin will check in for verification. For old timer's sake.

On another note, I have a PC that's 19.21 years old. Does anyone here have an older one (still running)?

My IBM Blue Lightning dates from about 1994 or thereabouts. I've had one older board (GA-486VM) that was from late 1992 by the date codes.
My Pentium MMX build is recent, but the heart of it is a Biostar 430TX board from the first third of 1997. Of my known-working laptops I have a Toshiba T2130CS with a 486DX4-75 from mid-late 1995, it shipped with Windows 95. Not-confirmed yet is my Thinkpad 760ELD and Gateway2000 Solo 2100, each with a Pentium probably at 100MHz, from sometime in 1996, though I have a Thinkpad 380D from the middle of 1997 that's confirmed working.

I want a Turbo XT at some point but I don't know what I'd do with it aside from stuff an era-inappropriate network card in it that tolerates an 8-bit ISA bus and talk in IRC as a novelty.

I'm 28, by the way. I joined this forum at 15.

 

[Gödel]

Good to hear from you, Fla Man.

I anticipated that you might have some antique computers, but I didn't think you'd have one that's four years older than you.

 

[sedrosken]

I used to optimize my conventional memory by hand for fun. These days I'm lazy and just have a config menu where one option loads EMM386 and just stuffs everything in UMBs leaving me with 620K free conventional... and a conventional-only config with, like, no drivers loaded that sits at 591 I believe.

 

[jtr1962]

I remember doing all that when I got my first PC-a 40 MHz 386. I later installed a math coprocessor. That made a huge difference with some applications. I don't remember the exact numbers but I think I managed to get close to 630K free conventional memory on that machine. I was using QEMM. I maxed out the memory on that machine at 16 MB. That was plenty for Windows 3.1.

EDIT: I just remembered QEMM let you use some of the RAM in your video card to get over 640K. 736K rings a bell now that I'm thinking about it.

 

[Mercutio]

x86SX CPUs were just mildly defective x86 CPUs. The "Co-Processor" was a second CPU socket for installing a fully functional DX processor.
I like to explain this to people when I talk about legacy hardware, because it really sounds made up until you look at pretty much every 386 or 486 motherboard with no CPUs on it.

 

[sedrosken]

So for the 486 that's mostly true; early 486SXes were DXes that failed QA testing on the FPU. They just had that portion lasered off and were sold as lacking an FPU. They'd later develop a FPU-less core to meet demand. The "487" really is just a 486DX with an extra key pin, 169 pin PGA vs 168. Some boards (including my GA-486VM) could do either-or in their main CPU socket and would just need a jumper set.

The 386DX/SX supposedly actually expand to Double-word eXternal and Single-word eXternal, I don't know how true that particular bit is but it sounds right -- the DX has a full 32-bit external and address bus but the SX only has a 16-bit external bus with a 24-bit address bus. This let OEMs reuse cheaper 286 board designs. The math coprocessor was completely separate for each. Fun fact, the original 80287 is just a repackaged 8087, and the 80287"XL" is a repackaged 80387. The 387DX normally uses the same socket as the 286 itself, but some early boards supposedly use a 287 socket.

Yes, QEMM can free up some ranges that would normally be allocated for an MDA/Hercules card and/or CGA I believe. It's not the most compatible thing in the world but JEMM from FreeDOS can do something similar. I find plain EMM386 is the most compatible and anything over 600K free conventional may as well just be for bragging rights -- nothing really needs it.

 

[jtr1962]

I recall only using only the video card RAM for a word processor which could use the extra memory. You're right, it's not the most compatible thing in the world. I had several memory configurations to choose from when booting, depending upon what programs I intended to use.

 

[Gödel]

Speaking of ancient history, has anyone else here used card-punch machines to punch in code (FORTRAN, in my case) into a deck of cards?

​

In college, we had a room full of card-punch machines for us to code our programs.
Then we'd take our card decks into a big room where people could come and line up to read their card-ed program decks into a queue to be run at some point on the mainframe.
There were alphabetized stacks of wall bins where our green-bar fan-fold printouts would be delivered after our programs ran.

 

[Mercutio]

I've kind-of used a punch card system, but I was a VERY little kid when my mom was taking a FORTRAN class in about 1979. Putting the cards in the machine was "helping." Why did my mom have need to take a FORTRAN class? I have no idea, but I definitely remember being stuck in a room full of terminals a couple times a week when I was maybe four years old. I played with Star Wars people the whole time and one day somebody gave me a continuous feed print of Darth Vader that I probably still have in a box someplace, one of the reasons I remember that as well as I do.

 

[Gödel]

Thanks to your mom from all of us. ​

 

[jtr1962]

I've kind-of used a punch card system, but I was a VERY little kid when my mom was taking a FORTRAN class in about 1979. Putting the cards in the machine was "helping." Why did my mom have need to take a FORTRAN class? I have no idea, but I definitely remember being stuck in a room full of terminals a couple times a week when I was maybe four years old. I played with Star Wars people the whole time and one day somebody gave me a continuous feed print of Darth Vader that I probably still have in a box someplace, one of the reasons I remember that as well as I do.

My mother also had a computer course using punch cards when I was in grade school. No idea why as her major was sociology.

I had punch cards in college and high school, but both were already converting to terminals by then. I think only one section of the computer labs in college still used punch cards.

 

[Mercutio]

Maybe it's like college now, when everybody has to take a class in Excel and Powerpoint even though only the only application a college student is definitely going to use is a Word processor?

I've literally never made a slide deck.

 

[Handruin]

I never had any exposure to punch cards in my youth. My parents didn't do anything with them or computers that I know of. My first exposure to anything computer was a commodore 64 and then many years later PCs.