• Welcome to this forum . We are a worldwide group with a common interest in Birmingham and its history. While here, please follow a few simple rules. We ask that you respect other members, thank those who have helped you and please keep your contributions on-topic with the thread.

    We do hope you enjoy your visit. BHF Admin Team

Computer help

Status
Not open for further replies.
Our office had a main computer with a bunch of terminals. As far as I know it would have cost a lot to put any games on that. In the 80s they started buying in smaller computers. The first ones were a series of Amstrad computers. The first of those stood on a secretary's desk for months while she thought about reading the manual. Then I used it to write something. After that she picked it up pretty quickly. That was just a word processor and didn't come with games. Next one had more programs on it and a proper operating system (Mosaic?) There may have been games on that one. That was the mid 80s. Much before that and all of the screens would have been text only. Text only games tended to be very basic or some sort of role playing game. Are you sure they were playing games on the office computers in the 70s not the 80s?
 
wam said:
Our office had a main computer with a bunch of terminals. As far as I know it would have cost a lot to put any games on that. In the 80s they started buying in smaller computers. The first ones were a series of Amstrad computers. The first of those stood on a secretary's desk for months while she thought about reading the manual. Then I used it to write something. After that she picked it up pretty quickly. That was just a word processor and didn't come with games. Next one had more programs on it and a proper operating system (Mosaic?) There may have been games on that one. That was the mid 80s. Much before that and all of the screens would have been text only. Text only games tended to be very basic or some sort of role playing game. Are you sure they were playing games on the office computers in the 70s not the 80s?
Click to expand...
i remember them dumb terminals.all conectect together with d link cards and cable. i once put a few in for a charity in brum. what a job. feeding coax through the dirty old roof space.:(
 
The first proper personal computers all came out in America in the same year, 1977, and were the Apple ][, Coomodore Pet, and the TRS 80 and were probably starting to appear in the UK in 1979/80. I worked for TABS supporting the first proper accounting package on the Apple ][ personal computer. Games were few and far between and one of the first on the Apple machine was Cat & Mouse, written by one of our own staff and had a continuous background theme of a piece of Bach-like music, again written by the same man, though it was very basic.

I joined them in July 1982 and the first IBM PC, built to operate on 110 volt supply with a step up transformer - forever failing, appeared in late 1982. Early in 1983 I was involved in porting the Apple accounting software onto the IBM PC, first under the CP/M operating system and shortly afterwards the first MS-DOS operating system, we ported it again under MS-DOS and abandoned the CP/M system.

Maximum memory on the Apple ][ was 48K and the disks were 5 & 1/4 " floppies holding a mere 140 K. An external hard disk holding a mere 10 Mb appeared in late 1984. So I think Eric's post #266 could at the earliest have applied to 1979, but was more likely the early 1980s.

Maurice :cool:
 
sospiri said:
The first proper personal computers all came out in America in the same year, 1977, and were the Apple ][, Coomodore Pet, and the TRS 80 and were probably starting to appear in the UK in 1979/80. I worked for TABS supporting the first proper accounting package on the Apple ][ personal computer. Games were few and far between and one of the first on the Apple machine was Cat & Mouse, written by one of our own staff and had a continuous background theme of a piece of Bach-like music, again written by the same man, though it was very basic.

I joined them in July 1982 and the first IBM PC, built to operate on 110 volt supply with a step up transformer - forever failing, appeared in late 1982. Early in 1983 I was involved in porting the Apple accounting software onto the IBM PC, first under the CP/M operating system and shortly afterwards the first MS-DOS operating system, we ported it again under MS-DOS and abandoned the CP/M system.

Maximum memory on the Apple ][ was 48K and the disks were 5 & 1/4 " floppies holding a mere 140 K. An external hard disk holding a mere 10 Mb appeared in late 1984. So I think Eric's post #266 could at the earliest have applied to 1979, but was more likely the early 1980s.

Maurice :cool:
Click to expand...
Our Maurice
i bought a new ibm 8086 xt 640k memory 10mhz hard disk paper white screen.what a job to get into the bios.with out the setup disk, running dos 4 win 3. not much room left on the hard drive for much after installing them....2 floppies 1 360k like a dinner plate and one 720k. software bought was free,from shop you just payed for the disk.... trying to format the hard disk was a nightmare.:mad:
 
I was with my accountant from 1965 until 1988 so any time between those dates.

I first used an Amstrad PC with Sage accounts software myself with a single 5.25" floppy disc all bought at the same time from Dixons in Bristol for about £1300, Sage quickly updated the software and it then needed a hard disk to run.
 
How the world has advanced in someways, here am I sat at home with my telephone from the office and my laptop and two Ethernet cables and I have my complete office to hand, a little bit slower than normal, but accounts, records, emails at my fingertips, I also of course get the telephone calls to the office, so I can deal direct with customers.....in the words of the sainted Louis A -'What a wonderful world:

bob
 
Yes, big changes and I retired in 2001, though everything has now got faster, bigger disks only used for backups, main disks replaced with SSD (solid state device), which is just memory, main memory measured in Gigabytes rather than Kilobytes, and the Apple ][ clock speed of 14 Mb is now around 3 Gb on most modern PCs. Bigger numbers mean bigger word width in the processor. Hence the move from 8 bits in the Apple ][ to 64 bits in most modern PCs.

Current technology is now limited by heat and printed circuit board track width - the narrower the track gets, for a given current, more heat is generated. This applies not only to the PCBs but also the tracks inside the integrated circuits. To get around this problem, you now effectively have more than one processor and maybe up to eight, although all in one CPU chip.

I've tried to explain this in as close to layman's language as I can, and in reality it is a lot more complex than this. And I haven't even touched the move from clunky monitors to the flat screen ones of today or the higher internet speeds! Just enjoy what you have :)

Maurice :cool:
 
sospiri said:
Yes, big changes and I retired in 2001, though everything has now got faster, bigger disks only used for backups, main disks replaced with SSD (solid state device), which is just memory, main memory measured in Gigabytes rather than Kilobytes, and the Apple ][ clock speed of 14 Mb is now around 3 Gb on most modern PCs. Bigger numbers mean bigger word width in the processor. Hence the move from 8 bits in the Apple ][ to 64 bits in most modern PCs.

Current technology is now limited by heat and printed circuit board track width - the narrower the track gets, for a given current, more heat is generated. This applies not only to the PCBs but also the tracks inside the integrated circuits. To get around this problem, you now effectively have more than one processor and maybe up to eight, although all in one CPU chip.

I've tried to explain this in as close to layman's language as I can, and in reality it is a lot more complex than this. And I haven't even touched the move from clunky monitors to the flat screen ones of today or the higher internet speeds! Just enjoy what you have :)

Maurice :cool:
Click to expand...
1607001144258.png Thanks our Maurice:grinning:
 
And IPhone 12...”The "five nanometre process" involved refers to the fact that the chip's transistors have been shrunk down - the tiny on-off switches are now only about 25 atoms wide - allowing billions more to be packed in.”
 
Pedro,

The problem with this high speed technology as I explained above is heat, and iPhones have neither the space nor the battery capacity for fans, so under some circumstances they will run quite warm. When I left Marconi in 1988, they had got track width down to 4.5 nM, but then the difficulty is lack of current carrying capacity without generating heat, or even worse, fusing. Which is why a lot of research is generated towards biological computing, but I don't pretend to understand any of that:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing#Engineering_biocomputers

Maurice :cool:
 
pjmburns said:
It was on the news earlier. Massive worldwide outage of youtube, google and gmail.
Click to expand...
ta janice i could not get anything google working.i thought it was my pc so i changed it disconected all the cables ,and used my spare,nothing. so i used ducks that worked but my emails are still not right, i cant log on
 
mmuk,

The Google search engine was not affected, just You Tube, GMail, and a couple of chat-type programs, and they weren't down for all that long, certainly back online by mid-afternoon UK time.

Maurice :cool:
 
sospiri said:
mmuk,

The Google search engine was not affected, just You Tube, GMail, and a couple of chat-type programs, and they weren't down for all that long, certainly back online by mid-afternoon UK time.

Maurice :cool:
Click to expand...
what a game.our maurice. i tryd to log on a few times. but no joy. when it resumed i tryd and was told.i have tryd too many times and have to prove my id.as my gmail is locked. so i longed on with a google android, after a while and faffing it worked. grrrrr
 
Pete,

I didn't notice it had gone down until I spotted the news item about it. Then I went onto the Keyboard Forum, mainly American musicians and a few Europeans, and they were telling me when it went down and came up again, but I had to do a time conversion. :)

Maurice :cool:
 
sospiri said:
Pete,

I didn't notice it had gone down until I spotted the news item about it. Then I went onto the Keyboard Forum, mainly American musicians and a few Europeans, and they were telling me when it went down and came up again, but I had to do a time conversion. :)

Maurice :cool:
Click to expand...
its a good job i have a back up android or i would never have got on gmail. they would not let me use a pc even though they have my phone number as proof.
 
Pete,

There are rumours going around that it may have been hacked, but so far no confirmation one way or the other, but there rarely is. GMail is only a back-up for me, which I've never had to use.

Maurice :cool:
 
sospiri said:
Pete,

There are rumours going around that it may have been hacked, but so far no confirmation one way or the other, but there rarely is. GMail is only a back-up for me, which I've never had to use.

Maurice :cool:
Click to expand...
i thought that our MAURICE.
i delete emails after reading them or print them,i dont trust leaving then on my pc.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top