[Freddy]

It's slightly scary how much time has gone by since these things were cutting edge - but my geeky fascination with old technology was well refreshed by this article.  Ahh the good old days hey ?

http://technologizer.com/2009/03/26/whatever-happened-to/

I know there's a few of you out there who will be into this too heheh..

[Maviarab]

Heh interesting.

[Art]

Yes...quite a bit of nostalgia there!

I had an OLD RS Dot Matrix printer that had a print head go bad. I tore it apart, found some very fine copper wire from a tiny motor and performed a rewind job, frequently stopping to compare the resistance of the new one to one of the old ones. When they were close, I closed it up, plugged it in and happily continued printing for many years to come. Ah...What a geek! That was even before the word Geek was invented!!

Heck, we loaded programs into 4k of ram from a cassette tape drive and the monitor was mono! My 300 baud dial-up modem is still functional and lives in a box in the basement somewhere, covered with dust!!

Scary indeed!

[Freddy]

  I've found in various jobs I have had that they still use dot-matrix printers a lot - like they say they are perfect for multi-part forms.  Not much use in the home these days where we want colour prints and things.

I was amazed they still make Z80 processors though.  And the number of big companies that have gone down is an eye-opener, I had a look at the sites labelled as CompuServe now and they are in a sorry state.  I wonder why they even bother, they don't really look like the kind of place you would consider spending money any more.

So glad we don't have to wait five minutes to load a program these days.  On my old Spectrum, I had a word processor which took about 7 minutes to load from tape - imagine doing that now - and we still want it to be faster !