Remember when you switched from Win3.1 to NT3.5

[George Smiley]

And you've spent the day building your first server, there is no Internet for help and you are presented with this screen:



How long until you actually tried to follow that instruction?

[TonyRPH]

It was the first thing you had to do to login to the box?

I don't get your point?

[The_Jackal]

Personally, I just did what it said.
No reason not to.
Was just happy to be dealing with a big boy OS.

[Pieman68]

I remember starting out selling PCs in '95

P133 with 8Mb RAM, 1Gb HDD and a 14" CRT monitor was £2k

Soundcard and CD-Rom drive was extra

Windows 95 came on 14 x 3.5" floppy disks. We also offered 3.11 and OS2 Warp as options

I'm feeling old now

[h0b0]

First PC was a 386 SX40 with a 40mb HDD (double spaced)
Windows 3.1
Wolfenstein

I still use the dos commands learnt on that pc in my job today.

[motco]

Mine was an 8086 processor, no GUI, DoS only and 20Mb hard drive and a low density 3.5" disc drive. Amstrad PPC 'laptop'

I've still got it!

[TonyRPH]

h0b0 said:

First PC was a 386 SX40 with a 40mb HDD (double spaced)

<snip>

They should have called it 1 1/4 space because I rarely got more than 25 - 30% extra when I used it! (I know - it was the type of files I was storing..)

I remember Stack (Stacker?) compression as well, which did pretty much the same.

It worked well on documents, text files and bitmaps though.

[rxe]

I remember having to reboot a production NT server because the keyboard driver fell over. Even in about 1997 we were looking at it wondering why we couldn’t just open up a terminal. I come out in hives every time I see Windows in a data centre ever since.

[George Smiley]

TonyRPH said:

It was the first thing you had to do to login to the box?

I don't get your point?

I was in my very first job and I was asked to check one of the servers, the manager had recently built 3.5 and I had never seen it before and it asked to press ctrl+alt+del to log on. As my only previous experience was Win 3 and DOS, pressing that combination would automatically restart the machine so it was a bit of nerves doing it the first time

[TonyRPH]

George Smiley said:

I was in my very first job and I was asked to check one of the servers, the manager had recently built 3.5 and I had never seen it before and it asked to press ctrl+alt+del to log on. As my only previous experience was Win 3 and DOS, pressing that combination would automatically restart the machine so it was a bit of nerves doing it the first time

Oh of course.....

It's been that long since I worked with DOS.....

I managed to reboot a key Linux box once because of this. We had a shortage of ports on our switcher, and the monitor was plugged into a Windows box, and the keyboard into a Linux box.....

After that, the ctrl+alt+del reboot sequence was removed from inittab lol!

[nikaiyo2]

TonyRPH said:

Oh of course.....

It's been that long since I worked with DOS.....

I managed to reboot a key Linux box once because of this. We had a shortage of ports on our switcher, and the monitor was plugged into a Windows box, and the keyboard into a Linux box.....

After that, the ctrl+alt+del reboot sequence was removed from inittab lol!

Our 2 big glass cutting lines still have DOS machines!

It always makes for a challenge when there is any kind of an issue. Trying to refresh long forgotten tit bits of info with youtube videos. It is made even harder as the keyboard layout on one is Italian so getting the symbols is guess work

[Magnum 475]

rxe said:

I remember having to reboot a production NT server because the keyboard driver fell over. Even in about 1997 we were looking at it wondering why we couldn’t just open up a terminal. I come out in hives every time I see Windows in a data centre ever since.

Same here. Windows is an OK desktop OS, but IMHO has no place as a data centre OS. Thankfully more and more datacentre environments are running on UNIX again now. RHEL is so stable by comparison it amazes me that anyone considers MS for anything where there's a viable alternative.

[George Smiley]

Anyone working in IT who knows the dos commands has a huge troubleshooting advantage

[TonyRPH]

Magnum 475 said:

Same here. Windows is an OK desktop OS, but IMHO has no place as a data centre OS. Thankfully more and more datacentre environments are running on UNIX again now. RHEL is so stable by comparison it amazes me that anyone considers MS for anything where there's a viable alternative.

My more recent experiences with Windows as a server o/s is that it's actually quite stable. The reboots after updates remain a minor annoyance.

I seem to recall that a few years back (10 years or so) , one of the bigger issues was not such much the o/s as IIS and it's 'application pools' of which some would repeatedly fall over during the course of the day.

But overall, I would say it's a viable competitor to Linux (depending on what you want to use it for).

[sicarumba]

h0b0 said:

First PC was a 386 SX40 with a 40mb HDD (double spaced)
Windows 3.1
Wolfenstein

I still use the dos commands learnt on that pc in my job today.

I remember having a PC with enough RAM to play X-Wing, but not enough hard drive space to install it. I found Double Space and thought it was the answer to all my prayers, sure enough it gave me enough hard drive space to install X-Wing ... but it used up too much RAM so I couldn't launch it.

[fourstardan]

Pieman68 said:

I remember starting out selling PCs in '95

P133 with 8Mb RAM, 1Gb HDD and a 14" CRT monitor was £2k

Soundcard and CD-Rom drive was extra

Windows 95 came on 14 x 3.5" floppy disks. We also offered 3.11 and OS2 Warp as options

I'm feeling old now

I remember the Rolling Stones advert, I was 10 at the time and ordered a demo pack....never opened it and probably threw it out somewhere.

Good old days.

[fourstardan]

Azure is a rather large global set of data centres running quite a bit now days lol

[h0b0]

sicarumba said:

h0b0 said:

First PC was a 386 SX40 with a 40mb HDD (double spaced)
Windows 3.1
Wolfenstein

I still use the dos commands learnt on that pc in my job today.

I remember having a PC with enough RAM to play X-Wing, but not enough hard drive space to install it. I found Double Space and thought it was the answer to all my prayers, sure enough it gave me enough hard drive space to install X-Wing ... but it used up too much RAM so I couldn't launch it.

My first PC came with 1mb of RAM because it was £30/mb. I had to upgrade to 4 to do anything straight away.

The computer before that was a Toshiba MSX in 1985 with 64kb of RAM



(Mine was spotless though) Games loaded up from tape. One was both sides and took 14 minutes. It seemed like I was living in the future and was a very lucky 5 year old. That computer may explain how I ended up in technology though.

[judas]

My first computer was one of these



First PC was a 286/12 with 1MB RAM, 40 MB hard drive and a 14" VGA monitor, running Windows 3.0. HDD died a month after I bought it; had to boot from a floppy until I could afford another one, but it was only a measly 20MB. Had the best keyboard ever though

[thetapeworm]

fourstardan said:

Azure is a rather large global set of data centres running quite a bit now days lol

Pfft, it doesn't even have a "turbo" button.