All this is a big eye opener. Seems there are still folk around that had fun with their computers same way as I did. I think I've got an old 486 in the loft. All this discussion has given me the idea to get it down and have a fiddle. Wish I'd kept my 386 though.

And I seem to remember that Prince Philip's Prestel Account got hacked.

And there a way to get almost an extra 64KB above the 1 MB limit by addressing segment FFFFh. This gave a total address space of 1 MB + 64 KB - 16 B. Called HMA = High Memory Area.

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

In reply to a post by kasg:

I nearly choked on that ............

Same as I do when people think that Apple invented the GUI and mouse!

These were the fun days.......Memories

Yep can remember going to a demo (in Uxbridge I think) circa 1978/9 of a Xerox dedicated Word Processor. Had a monochrome screen which you could physically turn to display either a landscape or portrait view and it had a WIMP environment. You could only rent kit from Xerox in those days but most WP's from the likes of AES & Wordplex cost around £15K! Oh You could only do text on daisy wheel printers (lasers based on the Canon LBP8 engine were yet to arrive).
All noisy as hell (until you put 'em in a box to kill sound).

In reply to a post by brush:

Yep can remember going to a demo (in Uxbridge I think) circa 1978/9 of a Xerox dedicated Word Processor. Had a monochrome screen which you could physically turn to display either a landscape or portrait view and it had a WIMP environment. You could only rent kit from Xerox in those days but most WP's from the likes of AES & Wordplex cost around £15K!

The Xerox 860 - worked on that in Dallas for a couple of years. I didn't think it was introduced here in the UK until circa 1981

In reply to a post by brush:

Oh You could only do text on daisy wheel printers (lasers based on the Canon LBP8 engine were yet to arrive).

We, Xerox, had laser desktop printers back in the late 70's, for internal use, but the main revenue stream, for desktop devices, was the Diablo Daisy Wheel printer. Have a read here under History if you are interested

Just realised it's 50 years ago today I started work with English Electric Leo Computers as a junior assistant programmer, salary £520 pa. Though based in Hartree House, Bayswater, I spent my first week on an induction course in Kidsgrove in Staffordshire, a place where I was to spend a lot of time over the years.

In 1967/68 I was writing comms. software including some special stuff for an Australian Bank. Because the hardware was being developed in Kidsgrove and the software in Hartree, we had to dial up to the hardware in Kidsgrove. At the time the Kidsgrove premises had a operator connected switchboard. Quite frequently, after getting through to the hardware box's extension and doing tests, we'd get disconnected. The operators would occasionally listen in and hearing only buzzes and crackles and no talking, would think the call had ended and disconnect us .

Those were the days

Me too. Add one to the list of those who started - at home, anyway - with CompuServe in 1994: http://www.perifrith.org.uk/st585/st585v5.htm

However my first use of email was not via CompuServe but hosted on a VAX 11/750 minicomputer at a client site. This was at the beginning of the 1980s. It was brilliant to be able to leave a message for an engineer to read once he arrived for his shift at 10pm. I dialled in using a 1200 baud modem to connect directly to the VAX. (1200 sounds immensely slow by today's standards, but it was a great advance over the previous 300 baud acoustic coupler.)

JPL

My first use of email was around 1980 I think using EXAC - EXecutive ACtion - that ran on ICL VME mainframes.

Seemed a quite amazing capability.

In reply to a post by JPL:

.........but it was a great advance over the previous 300 baud acoustic coupler.

In the main due to the GPO's stringent connection requirements and approvals process.........only slightly simpler than Germany's Bundespost!

Edited by deleted (Mon 01-Sep-14 13:23:40)

I seem to remember that email didn't come to my part of ICL until the mid-80's with OfficePower dedicated terminals that provided most of what would now be MS Office functionality. It was the devil's own job to send an email onto the real Internet; it was really for sending internal emails. Before OfficePower we sent each other paper memos.

So, on our desks we had an OfficePower terminal mainly for Word processing & email, and a locally-only networked PC/DRS for doing our programming.