Speakeasy forum: 80 Mbytes of storage for under $12K!

Pony Express handled the shipping ?

Come on Kevin... you are winning a new sweepstakes every day ! I bet you could afford to buy each and every one of us 80 megabytes of storage...



... and still keep your house on the Riviera !

grim, the money keeps pouring in and sometimes, by now, I must have over 10 million and I am filthy rich.
OK, if those shylocks deliver even one dollar to me, I will buy you a Duncan Donut coffee.
You and everyone else have to wait until that $1 is delivered.
(By the way, I never filled out the forms or gave then my social security card number
Just keep them guessing where to send the money!)

Jeese, I haven't checked my email tonight and to see if I have inherited another $Million tonight.
I bet I do!!
Funny part is I never knew I have so many relatives. Even in Hong Cong to win millions. As far as I know, I am Irish/English only. Wonder where my Great Grandfather
Went to in China!?

I Win Yin Yang Mil Dollars with EggFoYong Dollars. Great!! Any fortune cookies to keep my wealth going?? You are about to inherite another Million Dollars!

pudgyOne has first dibbs on my wealth. He is lucky to get a cup of coffee.
Forget the donut. Costs too much. The Cops have driven up the price!!! :)

grim, you will have to wait or fight with pudgyOne. I personally would think twice about that.
pudgeOne is twice your size and me.
I would rather just feed him with donuts and keep him happy! :) HA!!!

-Kevin

Angeline, with all my wealth and more from Hong Kong, I could afford a John Cooper Mini Cooper.
Interesting to note that John Cooper has a sense of humor.

Off Subject:
My friend from Hingham, MA, was the U.S. and Canadian Champion for the Mini-Cooper races in the SCCA and elsewhere (years ago in the 60s & 70s)
He was a nut case, powering into a 90 degree turn and pull on the emergency brake to swing his Minnie Cooper around, pop off the brake at full-throttle and accelerate down the course.
What a driver. He won everything.

Angeline, want to try that racing trick in order to get a good parking spot at a shopping mall parking lot?
Be my guest.
I'll bet you Glenda would. She is nuttier than all of us! :)

-Kevin

-Kevin

...That's 80 MEGS for under 12 THOUSAND DOLLARS???? Uhh...do they kiss you too while they're "doin'" that "other thing to you??? I have EIGHTY THOUSAND MEGS for under a hundred dollars...Wheeew!

They probably couldn't even conceive of a T-Byte drive.

Great memories there.

May I share a story from that time? When I was in the Air Force and stationed in Germany (84-87), we took delivery of "minicomputers" which Zenith promised would quickly automate and speed up certain repetitive tasks - like the computation of travel vouchers. Zenith lied.

Oh, sure, they were faster, as long as GIGO wasn't a factor and if you had someone who could enter data at, say, 60+ wpm. The only problem was that such people were hard to find, and if you did have one, you could count on him or her turning temporarily psychotic and start looking for the nearest .45 caliber pistol after 4 or 5 hours staring at green characters on the black background of what Zenith billed as a "high visibility display."

The machines had a 640K hard drive and one 5.25" floppy drive to store our work. One fine day, my boss came out of a meeting looking irritated holding two boxes of floppies. After telling me that we weren't using the computers enough (true), he said that we were to start using them more (a direct order from God). I said fine, and he announced that he was going to format the floppies and when he was through, that I was to get two people on the machines immediately.

Can you guess what happened next?

About 30 minutes later, I heard my boss' voice: "ARRRRGGGGGHHHH! Paul, get over here, NOW!" I wandered over and asked what was wrong.

"I don't KNOW what the %#@! is wrong! I typed in 'format:,' pressed Enter, and when it finished, everything was blank!"

"Dick, you entered 'format:'?"

"YES!"

"You should have entered 'format c:', Dick. You just formatted the hard drive."

"So now WHAT THE &$#! DO I DO?"

"Get the system disks, and you can reinstall CP/M to the hard drive."

He stomped off and shortly returned with the system disks. Handing them to me, he said, "Here! Handle it; I'm going to lunch."

And that was my first ever experience with reinstalling an operating system - which, BTW, took about 2 hours given the speed (?) of the machine...

...."I wonder what this button does.....oops" school. I got really good at reformatting hard drives; it was often easier than trying to figure out what the problem was.

Any thoughts I ever had of getting one went away after two friends lost their data after their Zip drives started going "click...click."

IMO, an unreliable storage medium is no storage medium. I do confess that I'll be watching the progress of solid state hard drives closely, and if they're proven reliable, and when the cost per gigabyte number gets low enough, then I will make the move away from conventional hard drives...

I can remember paying $50 for a 4 MB RAM SIMM. I thought I was hot stuff because I had just upgraded my computer to a speedy 16 MB of RAM!!! And my buddy thought he was cruisin' when he upgraded his hard drive to 540 MB. I remember him strutting around the room going "That's right, HALF A GIG." And I shook my head, wondering why he needed so much space and thinking it was just a status thing for him.

LOL.

My W95 PC included as standard:

MS Office
MS Money
MS Bookshelf

(Bookshelf was nice in that it was used when one wanted to use one of the "books", so didn't sit on the HD taking up a lot of space)

A choice of which then available IPs to install (No pre-installed)

Separate concise, thick printed manuals for everything, including the OS, sound, monitor, keyboard

Included all disks

A special one in an orange sleeve with huge letters- "DO NOT THROW AWAY!" It was for there were big problems, to be inserted when tech support was called.

Outstanding phone tech support


Angeline
Speakeasy Moderator
click here to email
semods4@yahoo.com

"Maybe my mind works differently from other people."

I did a month long internship with an E Learning company this past summer. It was a company designed to provide electronic learning courses to meet the training needs of a state funded "hight tech consortium" of separate companies working in a government operated industrial park. My job was to work on the graphical interface for several new courses that had been requested. When I pointed out that these educational training courses lacked some basic components such as glossaries, definitions, etc... I was told those were not needed because those folk taking the courses were already familiar with all the materials already.

Now this struck me as a classic Catch 22. Here was a company, whose job was to develop training courses to teach self paced classes for beginners as well as advanced learners (and thus, avoid the costs of face to face training and lost productivity hours) but their learning models did not include basic definitions of the technical jargon, peppering the courses. Why? Because the students would already have the knowledge they were studying. While this may have been true for many of the users, I suspect that there were plenty of folk who were directed to these online training courses, who were left questioning the efficacy of the course materials.

I know how my mind works. I do not like "learn as you work" courses simply because as soon as I start a project, I start thinking about all the possible variables, implications, and uses. Thus, if I don't have a fundamental grasp of the basics, it can take me hours to get through a limited amount of material, because I'm constantly questioning why something is being done a certain way. My point is... I think too many manuals for computers take for granted, that their readers already know the "basics". Every manual should assume there are a short list of the most common problems and activities, and should answer those "how to" questions first. There should never be an assumption that the reader is already familiar with the materials. Yes, it may save time, money, and production costs for those developing the resources to copy engineering notes verbatim, but it sure doesn't help out anyone with a question !

My rant for the day is done.

Grim, Nice post.
You work both on a PC and a Mac platform daily.
All Mac OSs come with a manual that I hate to read. Yet, the information is there if you want to read it.

The other alterative is, if you have a problem with a Mac, make an appointment at one of the Apple stores. All hands-on, one-on-one classes to learn their system or questions you have are free.
Same goes for reinstalling their software or problems that you may encounter are available at the
Genius Desk, all for free.
There is on-line help available at no charge also. I like what Apple offers.

-Kevin

gotta love the "laptop"

.,

One of my first college courses was RPG (Report Program Generator), writing the code, using flow charts (and/or/nand/nor, etc.), after writing the code punching the IBM punch cards, running them on the collator (much fun if you put one card in 90 degrees sideways), stacking them, then putting them into the reader on the IBM 360 (circa 1972), and watching the tape drives. Then getting the debug printout from the IBM chain printer, and trying to figure out why it errored out when all I wanted to do was add one plus one.

Then, a few years later, I could do it in DOS. Among a few other things.

Back when computers had a gazillion lights and were as noisy as a 747 cranking up.

The good old days.