Man-Machine 80s and early 90s Home Computer Discussion

Indian Summer said:
I completely disagree with this :) I want the desktop version of Linux to be slick and user-friendly, and to have the potential to become as popular as Windows and MacOS. If I want a challenge, there will always be the terminal, new server software to configure, and programming tasks to solve.
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Funny enough I think part of what I had in my head was in fact server administration, scripting and coding tasks. As far as the desktop goes, I really miss the days of e15 and to perhaps a lesser degree e16. Nothing felt better to use than those older versions of Enlightenment, it was really something special. Essentially FVWM reworked to utilize PNG's, and a pretty absolute scripting method that really opened up the possibilities of what the desktop could be even if largely hard coded and requiring some hacking to customize. Gnome, KDE, etc are so dull in comparison to what an X desktop once could be.
 
beanstew said:
I had Acorn computers. First an Acorn Electron, then a BBC Master and finally an Acorn Archimedes A3000 before moving to x86 systems running DOS, then Windows and Linux.
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Another Acorn fanboy here :) starting on a BBC Model B and ending on a Risc PC, with various models in-between. I still have them all, but now use a Raspberry Pi Model B to run Acorn's RISC OS, my favourite operating system to-date.
 
Richard Molyneux said:
Hmm, I'm not sure why the URLs were removed... anyone know please?
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Rule number 4:

Announcement - The VeggieViews rules & regulations | Vegetarian and Vegan Forums @ Veggie Views

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beancounter said:
  1. Don't use your account mainly for promotion of web sites, web pages, products, companies, or organizations. (Note that new members can't post URLs. Such URLs will be automatically hidden by the software.)
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Cheers @beancounter, I'm guessing I fall into the new member category; despite having been signed up since at least September 2014 (based on the oldest email I could find from Veggie Views).

I can never understand restrictions on new users, as though they are somehow different from existing users, and need to be marginalised (chances are a new user is keen to engage, and putting such measures in place will only likely dampen any enthusiasm).
 
Richard Molyneux said:
Cheers @beancounter, I'm guessing I fall into the new member category; despite having been signed up since at least September 2014 (based on the oldest email I could find from Veggie Views).

I can never understand restrictions on new users, as though they are somehow different from existing users, and need to be marginalised (chances are a new user is keen to engage, and putting such measures in place will only likely dampen any enthusiasm).
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It's not about the real new users, it is about the spam posts; I see them here all the time, with a bunch of random phrases and a link or two. So they set it up to block posting links until the third post or whatever to stop this. Sometimes the spammers still get around it by posting in multiple threads.

Anyway, glad you're posting. :)
 
Cheers @ledboots, it sounds like 'spambots', which can usually be circumvented during the signing up stage. It's a shame to penalise the majority, due to a minority of spammers/spambots.

Karl's kindly approved me now, and I've enquired as to what measures are taken to avoid spam; I moderate on veg site Volentia, and it's not really been a problem there since we started approving new members.
 
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Joe said:
I'm bumping this thread just to let you know that Tech Republic has posted 22 photos from a conference of computers from the 1970s and 1980s.

Photos: Apple II clones, an ENIAC emulator, and more from Vintage Computer Festival East XI - TechRepublic
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This got me thinking. It would be cool if technology-related companies today would exhibit vintage computers in their lobbies, conference rooms, break / lunch rooms and such, and loaded them up with games and modern hacks that allowed them to surf the web, or do other semi-useful tasks. I think that could appeal to the tech-savvy people these companies want to attract and/or keep around.
 
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Haha, this reminds me, when I was in school, maybe in 1986, a friend was offering me a historic computer / word processor that his father's office was supposedly selling for 150 $ ... some IBM monster with magnetic core memory, an 8" floppy disk reader and a typewheel printer.

I was mainly interested in that for the typewheel printer (which I was hoping I might somehow be able to connect to my Commodore 64) as I was tired of finishing my typing assignments (my school had a business focus with accounting, typing, and shorthand being quite popular on the curriculum) on my old manual typewriter and wanted an electric one with correction possibility, but could not really afford one, and all the printers that I could use on my Commodore 64 were really expensive, at that time, too. So that word processor was already quite ancient at that time, and offered at a really good price, but unfortunately, when they tried it out, they found it was not working any more, so I could not buy it.

I ended up buying a thermal-transfer printer for my Commodore 64, which was not a really good idea, as the printing tapes (or the special thermal paper that you could use alternatively) turned out to be really expensive. Also, the teachers did not accept typing agreements that did not have the correct German umlaut characters, so I had to stick with my manual typewriter for those...
 
Andy_T said:
I ended up buying a thermal-transfer printer for my Commodore 64, which was not a really good idea, as the printing tapes (or the special thermal paper that you could use alternatively) turned out to be really expensive. Also, the teachers did not accept typing agreements that did not have the correct German umlaut characters, so I had to stick with my manual typewriter for those...
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Emphasis added.

This reminds me of my high school French class. The teacher used to give homework assignments typed on mimeograph paper, double spaced. He had a French typewriter. I used to type my homework, because the space between lines was too small for me to write in. I used my English typewriter, then just went back over it and wrote in the accents and other special characters with a pen. The teacher was favorably impressed that he was getting typed homework handed in, but he had grave (pun intended) doubts about my typing it on an English typewriter and then drawing in the accents with a pen.
 
Oh my, I can not even begin to fathom what an effort typing with French accents is!

The old manual typewriters (at least in Germany) actually had 2 keys for typing the accents that would not advance the carriage with typing it, so you first type your accent, the carriage does not move to the next space, then you type the letter that should have the accent added to it. For the "circonflexe" (like in "Arrêt") you have to first type both accents (they are a little offset and fit together).

When I am now typing french words for my kids' French lessons on the PC (have an excel spreadsheet that can generate vocabulary testing lists to fill out in random order), I basically do have some example words with all those accents in them, and copy and paste the accented letter from them... not a very good approach, but somehow working. Definitely a bit too cumbersome for writing a letter...

Also, like in all other things in life, the French are very different to the rest of the world also as far as the layout of the typewriter keys is concerned - but in a major way.

The German keyboard has some small differences to the English one (e.g. the "y" and "z" are exchanged, all other letters are the same), but the French keyboard deviates from the standard for about 80 % of the keys. I remember that I had a French video game on my C64 that needed some keyboard input. I first had to somehow find out where all the keys are located and make a map on a piece of paper that I would then refer to when playing the game...
 
Andy_T said:
Oh my, I can not even begin to fathom what an effort typing with French accents is!
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Windows has a utility called Character Map that can be used to insert "special" characters into text, e.g., accented French characters. There is a freeware variant that I use called Extended Character Map. The main difference is that ECM allows you to increase the size of the characters in the preview windows so you can actually see what you are selecting. Most Windows word processors have "symbols" that can be inserted for this purpose (foreign language characters). And Windows itself (at least in some past versions) had foreign language keyboards within the program, that could be used on-screen if desired.
 
Two other things I thought of.

Extended Character Map gives you the keystroke equivalent once you select a character.
For example, it tells you that é is the equivalent of Alt+0233
I would have to check whether Character Map does the same thing. It probably does.
This is freeware, but it came out in 1998. But I believe it can still be downloaded from various websites.

The other thing is that I have an old Smith Corona Personal Word Processor, purchased new around 1991.
This is sort of a cross between a primitive computer and an electric typewriter. It prints through a type wheel (yes, wheel, not ball). This wheel has the most common foreign language characters. To type them, you press a function key first to put it into a different mode (or whatever it is called). Then you just type é with the key that this character is marked on. Such markings are in the upper right hand corner of the typewriter keys, smaller and in a different color from the regular key letters. In other words, é is treated a if it were a separate letter from e or è or ê or ë . You do not type an e and then type an accent mark on top of it. The word processor function can be used to save the file to a floppy disk (720 K) in Word Perfect format.

Unfortunately, Smith Corona went out of the typewriter business. But a similar machine is currently manufactured (I believe) by Brother. It ain't cheap. And believe it or not, the Brother machine also uses a 720K floppy disk to store the documents on.
 
Sometimes I miss my Atari 800... 5-inch floppy drive and all. I never got a printer for it. I did have a BASIC language cartridge, as well as an assembly-language compiler and manual, but never did that much with them. It was all about the games- which, admittedly, were quite good.
 
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