Computer skills that have become 'lost arts'?
 

Things that you used to have to know to use a home or office PC but which people starting today probably don't know.

I will throw disk formatting in as my first offering. My college years are filled with memories of having to format my disks before saving my papers to them.

What are other lost arts of computing?

how about the old "ATDT" type commands to run modems to call up bbs's or other dialup sites way back when

Ahh memories :) Technology go up very fast

Um, the lost art of patience. I remember when I was in highschool, putting a copy of Windows NT 4.0 on 80 3.5" 1.44mb floppy disks - for archival purposes. What do you think are the chances of one of those 80 floppies having an error? :)

How about downloading a file off the Usenet using UUencode/UUdecode to look at a single pussy picture. I spent up to an hour downloading a single photo on my 14.4 modem.

Oh, and how about dialing into a BBS that doesn't have any sort of a PPP interface, and needing to run Trumpet Winsock with the most cryptic and complex custom script just to be able to have what most of us take for granted... an internet connection.

I remember running Netscape 1.0 for the first time on my Pentium 90, and nearly pissing my pants with excitement that I was able to experience this thing called the World Wide Web.

Then I have a vivid memory of surfing someone's site for pussy pics (do you notice a theme?) and seeing someone say "adult content has not, and will not ever exist on the Web... because it is too easily accessible to everyone" I nearly fell into a depression as a result of that. If I had only known what was to come...

And high and low density floppy disks, remember ?


High density disks was a huge step :1orglaugh 1.2Mb of fucking storage :thumbsup


And how about a hack ? Remember ?

Transforming a low density into a high density disk, doubling the storage capacity.

Using a drill to do an extra hole on a low density, then format it and surprise surprise, you got a new High Density Floppy Disk !!

That's oldschool, which means I'm getting old :1orglaugh

I don't remember ever knowing it was possible to turn a 720k 3.5" floppy into a 1.44mb floppy... there was never any differences in the two besides the hole?

That's odd.

formatting, making partition all via system floppy disk and fdisk tool :). Windows installation

I just know that I did it a lot of times and always with sucess. That was an huge hack back on old days.
It was a 2 in 1 hack, :

1 - You just felt good to know you did it.

2 - Was a money thing, buying low density cheap disks and turn them into high density.

That is a flash back..I used to be very into BBS fun.

Using debug to low level format hard drives.

I remember programming in BASIC using line numbers. :1orglaugh



.

Damn... the words "Trumpet Winsok" brings back a lot of painful memories.......... how I used to struggle with that shit. :1orglaugh

Now there is a name I haven't heard in years.

Not to mention DOS.

LMFAO :1orglaugh :thumbsup

having all my OS (DOS) and programs (wordstar, lotus) in one floppy disk :thumbsup

Rending a hi-res 800x600 3d image on a 4HMz machine.

I did this amazing car in 3d with refecting balls next to it. I pressed "render" and went away for the weekend. When I came back the message on the screen said "No light source found - Click to cancel". It didn't even start.
When I did click it, 1% was done in 5 hours. I canceled the process which took it 20 minutes to stop.

Oh the good old days.

I remember it taking me all night to download netscape only to have the connection drop 2 percent from the end.

Manually jerking with IRQs to resolve conflicts. That was always a hoot especially if you had a lot of devices.

i remember the 3.5 disk .... i guess i have 30 pieces of them

now... flash drive rocks , but still old schools is like an art

Oh hell, I still have tons of 5.25" disks.

Runtime error 61 - Disk full :1orglaugh

how about spelling? not a computer art, but you certainly needed it back in the day. Not anymore thanks to Word :P

paying for slow ass internet by the hour

or using a puncher to turn your single side 5 1/4" floppy into a double side floppy for your Commodore 1541 drive :winkwink:


10 print "Hello World!"
20 goto 10


that and patching Windows 95 for 32 bit programs


this i really hated, it once took me 2 weeks to make a scanner work


I would also like to add:

Trying to write a nice looking text with a program that does not support WYSIWYG and made your text look like HTML sourcecode. and then dealing with the frustration that it took 10 minutes to print one page on a 9 pin printer that sounded like fingernails on a blackboard at the volume of a starting 747. and at the end it still looked shitty :Oh crap

Sounds like you need to do some house cleaning! :1orglaugh

parking my hard drive before turning off my old 286. lol

Editing autoexec.bat

Load "name" ,8,1

floppy disk... shit i found some the other day i shit load probably with hot girls but you know what I dont have a floppy reader anymore.. lol

Making webpages using a text editor! :1orglaugh

shit

CPM

Z80 assembly language

fortran

os/vs

vax 11/750 with Ultrix

IBM system 36

thinking. that's a lost art

Designing ansi graphics for BBSes.

Telix for DOS (then later came Procomm for Windows).

My first copy of Nutscrape Navigator came on four 3.5 floppies (which took an hour to install on a PC-XT with 640k ram and a whopping 20mB harddrive.

Anyone remember the 'Turbo' button on the front of the PCs?

I still remember payin' $300 for an HP Colorado Travan tape drive back in the early 90s (which I later sold at a garage sale for $20 bucks, hehe).

My first USRobotics 14.4 modem card was longer than the motherboard itself.

I certainly do remember that and also that on a multi-node BBS you could often see what other people were downloading or had recently downloaded. That is fine unless you know the other people on the BBS in real life. There are times when I didn't want to know the kid sitting next to me in math class had downloaded horse porn the night before.

Mobo jumpers and dipswitches for the most part.

Yup ! I remember programming in basic too :)

What was that email type system in the BBS's. FIDO or something right?

copy *.* a:

Back Orifice, AOHell, Phreaking etc...

I still have real life friends that I originally met on Fidonet.

"logging on" to the internet

Fight-o-net (Fidonet) is still around, although it's pretty small compared to its hey day. Many nodes use TCP/IP to transfer mail packets now.

I remember reading about a project in BYTE in the early-mid 80s where you could make a camera from memory chips that had a metal lid rather than being encapsulated in a monolithic plastic case. With a clear lid the dynamic RAM matrix became light sensitive and could be read out as grey levels. The whole thing was fiddly and required a LOT of circuitry for interfacing.

Now you just buy a $10 webcam and plug it into your USB port...

Same here.

And if memory serves, we used BlueWave as a mail packet reader.

basic, pascal command line programs.
.com extension executables!

optimizing autoexec.bat and config.sys to free up some RAM to run "newer" games.

feeling that 128 mb is A FREAKING LOT of diskspace!

considering it a big jump in capacity to change from 5.25" disks to 3 1/4"

the good old times :1orglaugh

I remember using my apple macintosh where you had one floppy with the system and the other with the application you wanted to use. That was in the early 80's I think

batch files in general

damn they were usefull
I actually used a batch file to process folders of content for my first adult sites!

we bought a double speed CD Burner for the music studio i was working at that time (early 90ties). it had the size of a 19" 2 HE server and cost 5000 german marks at that time which is nowadays about $3500 USD

anybody remamber zip drives from the 90's? I think the first ones cost around $200 and held 100mb