The Nostalgia Thread

Arjun

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Feb 26, 2017
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Remember the good old days?

Let's recollect past memories of things we came across prior to 2010 - it seems after 2010 progress became a very subjective term.


 
When in college one of my profs said there would be a computer on every desk, terabyte memory, and glass cockpits in the planes. I thought he was crazy, and obviously know now I was the not-so-bright one. This was when a big IBM mainframe had 32k words of memory.
 
Am I crazy to have kept my old Pentium III Processor and Pentium II Processor, on display on top of my bulletin board just for show? I feel like the old technology was largely forgivable; the new stuff, not so much - more fragile rather
 
In 1980 I bought an Apple II+ with 48K memory for $1,200. According to the calculator on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is equivalent in 2025 to $5,009.

The NEC 8023 dot matrix printer I bought cost $500 which now would be like $2,087 today.....yikes! :facepalm:
 
Am I crazy to have kept my old Pentium III Processor and Pentium II Processor, on display on top of my bulletin board just for show? I feel like the old technology was largely forgivable; the new stuff, not so much - more fragile rather
The word BULLETIN BOARD got my attention as I did run a BBS dedicated to girly photos back before the internet became popular and when you needed a second DSL phone line dedicated to the Commadore 64.
 
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The word BULLETIN BOARD got my attention as I did run a BBS dedicated to girly photos back before the internet became popular and when you needed a second DSL phone line dedicated to the Commadore 64.
Try to imagine the tech industry growth I witnessed in the Silicon Valley '74 to 04, working on the traffic signals in Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Milpitas, San Jose and Los Gatos. I mean like "everybody that was anybody" was there....Apple, Fairchild, National Semiconductor, Nvidia, Ampex, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Xerox, Seagate, Quantum, Maxtor, Shugart, AMD, Intel, IBM, Lockheed Missles and Space, Western Digital. I know I left quite a few because it's been 50 years. Then there was the software people....Google, eBay, Oracle, Intuit, Adobe and many, many more.

I recall responding to malfunctions, vehicular knockdowns, and routine maintenance visits, etc. to traffic signals and signal and street lighting poles specifically at entrances to the facilities of H-P (Palo Alto), Apple (Cupertino), eBay (Campbell/San Jose), Intel (Santa Clara) and more. In the 29 years of signals and lighting work there I saw many changes.

It was quite an experience and it's indelibly embedded into my memory. I got to witness a little piece of history, one might say. :cool:
 
I know I left quite a few because it's been 50 years.


You left out my favorites... The Santa Cruz Operation! 1980's SCO Xenix on an Intel 386... 5-1/4" floppy madness...

Screenshot 2025-11-01 131302.png Screenshot 2025-11-01 131219.png


Slap some 8 port RS-232 serial port boards in the "PC" and it wasn't so personal anymore...It was amazing how cost effective it was... 16 even 32 DEC (Maynard, Massachusetts and Menlo Park) VT-100 terminals all running off an Intel 386!

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Running the Informix SQL/4GL Rapid Development System (Menlo Park)... So easy to develop business application RAPIDLY!!! More floppy madness...

Screenshot 2025-11-01 133253.png
 
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back in the day, you were cool when you had ..

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( DESQview )
 
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