Taking a trip down 1024 Memory Lane
Mar. 31st, 2010 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogMost of my work goes by the acronym SSDD.1 For the tasks fitting that description, most of my resources are either in my head or on the Memory Alpha knowledge base of this computer, which is the fourth 4 generation of hard drive going back to my joining my last law firm in 1995. Once in a very blue moon, though, I need something old. REALLY old. An obscure collections procedure, or a brief on an arcane bankruptcy issue that I litigated in 1987. In this case, it was a type of lien foreclosure that property owners are only stupid enough to risk about once every 20 years or so, and that put it outside the jurisdiction of my current backup.
That took me to the basement. To the wonderful land of DOS, where I have my first-ever bought-it-myself PC from 1991, still waiting for the call to the BIOSpen to crank up all its knowledge again.
It comes with friends, of course. The original monitor from that puter still stands; its keyboard, as well. Mouse? We didn't need no stinkin' mice in 1991. We were manly, DOSly men!, and our CTRLs and ALTs and BANGs took us everywhere we needed to go.
This baby was so anxious to start up- it had apparently gone through its long (dozen-or-more) winters' nap with the power button depressed- it began clickying through its 1024K memory test before I even got all the peripherals connected. Eventually, though, all of them connected, and it lovingly caressed my wanting eyes and asked me to put a disk in drive A:....
um, because it wasn't, exactly, recognizing the hard disk anymore:(
Now it did say something about the CMOS battery being dead. I am charging that beastie as we speak and we may, MAY yet raise it from the dead on this glorious Easter Week. Yet I was not done, for behind that puter in the cellar queue was a slightly newer one, which I used when we first moved here in 1994. It had quite a bit of my work from that era on it, and I hoped I would find MLFCLCPL.FCG on some subdirectory thereof.
It, too, powered right up. Well, sort of:
OH NOES! Keyboard/mouse error! Yet, after a bit of jiggling, it launched into the bootup just fine:
The device still remembers its name. More than I could probably say if I'd been stuck in a basement for over a decade;)
Now this one I can't cut. It is just too Teh Awesome:
Awww just look at that baby. I felt like Woody Allen in Sleeper, starting up the Volkswagen Bug centuries later.
Moments later, the whole primordial desktop appeared:
(The interference wasn't on the monitor but on the iPhone- that thing probably gives off enough cathode-ray radiation to fry a small third world country.)
After all that, of course, there was no DisplayWrite 3 subdirectory. Those files are probably in the backup box of 47 floppies that had to be restored, one by one, using the same backup proggie and in the same order as they were backed up in the first place.
Maybe I should've just gone to the library and LEXIS'd the stupid form, huh.
Nah.... wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.
----
1 Same shit, different day. Not to be confused with CRS, which stands for something else2, although when Eleanor saw this card from one of my recent client depositions-
-she found it incredibly funny that a court reporter would name its business for Can't Remembering Shit.
2See footnote 3.
3How to keep a lawyer busy all day: see footnote 1.
4Fifth, if you count the first laptop I ever acquired back in '95, which was stolen out of my office a week after it was delivered and before hardly anything had been installed onto it.
That took me to the basement. To the wonderful land of DOS, where I have my first-ever bought-it-myself PC from 1991, still waiting for the call to the BIOSpen to crank up all its knowledge again.
It comes with friends, of course. The original monitor from that puter still stands; its keyboard, as well. Mouse? We didn't need no stinkin' mice in 1991. We were manly, DOSly men!, and our CTRLs and ALTs and BANGs took us everywhere we needed to go.
This baby was so anxious to start up- it had apparently gone through its long (dozen-or-more) winters' nap with the power button depressed- it began clickying through its 1024K memory test before I even got all the peripherals connected. Eventually, though, all of them connected, and it lovingly caressed my wanting eyes and asked me to put a disk in drive A:....
um, because it wasn't, exactly, recognizing the hard disk anymore:(
Now it did say something about the CMOS battery being dead. I am charging that beastie as we speak and we may, MAY yet raise it from the dead on this glorious Easter Week. Yet I was not done, for behind that puter in the cellar queue was a slightly newer one, which I used when we first moved here in 1994. It had quite a bit of my work from that era on it, and I hoped I would find MLFCLCPL.FCG on some subdirectory thereof.
It, too, powered right up. Well, sort of:
OH NOES! Keyboard/mouse error! Yet, after a bit of jiggling, it launched into the bootup just fine:
The device still remembers its name. More than I could probably say if I'd been stuck in a basement for over a decade;)
Now this one I can't cut. It is just too Teh Awesome:
Awww just look at that baby. I felt like Woody Allen in Sleeper, starting up the Volkswagen Bug centuries later.
Moments later, the whole primordial desktop appeared:
(The interference wasn't on the monitor but on the iPhone- that thing probably gives off enough cathode-ray radiation to fry a small third world country.)
After all that, of course, there was no DisplayWrite 3 subdirectory. Those files are probably in the backup box of 47 floppies that had to be restored, one by one, using the same backup proggie and in the same order as they were backed up in the first place.
Maybe I should've just gone to the library and LEXIS'd the stupid form, huh.
Nah.... wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.
----
1 Same shit, different day. Not to be confused with CRS, which stands for something else2, although when Eleanor saw this card from one of my recent client depositions-
-she found it incredibly funny that a court reporter would name its business for Can't Remembering Shit.
2See footnote 3.
3How to keep a lawyer busy all day: see footnote 1.
4Fifth, if you count the first laptop I ever acquired back in '95, which was stolen out of my office a week after it was delivered and before hardly anything had been installed onto it.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-31 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-31 11:36 pm (UTC)At least her father (who also read) is older than me. But not by much:P
no subject
Date: 2010-03-31 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-31 10:56 pm (UTC)I loved Tom Robbins CRAFT club**.
** Can't Remember A F-ing Thing.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 12:32 am (UTC)Back in the good old days, it wasn't like just anybody could log in. You had to be THIS tall to use a computer. You had to have a whole bunch of obscure commands and keystrokes committed to memory and available to your fingertips.
Sigh...
Thanks for the nostalgia!
no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 07:13 am (UTC)(Although I can still remember trying to work with BASIC on an old Commodore 64 tied into a small TV. Remember software coming on cassette tapes? And the screech you heard if you dropped a software tape into an audio deck?)