You Might Be An Old Fogey If...

[sanctus]

If you remember phone numbers by heart. I actually consciously forced myself to memorize the one from my wife...I used to know all the numbers of my friends, but then 10 years ago I got a mobile phone (I know late and I still miss the times without one).

[DrKrettin]

If you don't actually have a mobile phone. Life is becoming increasingly annoying because on so many occasions one has to fill in contact details and a mobile phone number is often mandatory. When this happens, I just give a random number which looks plausible. I try to explain that where I live, there is no mobile phone coverage so the land line is the only option. Obviously I am the only person in the universe in this situation.

[OceanBreeze]

If when you but a new computer, the fact of having a dvd-reader built-in or not is a relevant factor

 

A DVD reader? How about a parallel printer port, an RJ11 two-wire modem jack and a floppy drive?

 (of course, I never used any of those, just heard about them)

[OceanBreeze]

If you remember phone numbers by heart. I actually consciously forced myself to memorize the one from my wife...I used to know all the numbers of my friends, but then 10 years ago I got a mobile phone (I know late and I still miss the times without one).

 

You are really old when you remember the phone numbers by the abbreviation for the exchange.

 

Like TYrone 4 8996

[OceanBreeze]

If you don't actually have a mobile phone. Life is becoming increasingly annoying because on so many occasions one has to fill in contact details and a mobile phone number is often mandatory. When this happens, I just give a random number which looks plausible. I try to explain that where I live, there is no mobile phone coverage so the land line is the only option. Obviously I am the only person in the universe in this situation.

 

I have one but I only use it to store music (burned from CDs) to play in my car.

[Sammy]

A DVD reader? How about a parallel printer port, an RJ11 two-wire modem jack and a floppy drive?

 (of course, I never used any of those, just heard about them)

 

Oh dear, I definitely remember the RJ11 two wire modem! AND I still have tonnes of floppy drives!

[Turtle]

You might be an old fogey if you remember tube (valve for you Brits) testing kiosks in markets. :lightbulb

[OceanBreeze]

Oh dear, I definitely remember the RJ11 two wire modem! AND I still have tonnes of floppy drives!

 

 

If they were still in use, you would need tons of them!

 

A floppy disk can hold 1.44MB. Well according to calculations:

 

 Windows 10 would take 2778 Floppy Disks

 

 Windows 8 would take around 1,713 Floppy Disks. Some say the figure is 2,373.

 

 Windows 7 would take around 1750 Floppy disks.

 

 

[CraigD]

... when you read this

A floppy disk can hold 1.44MB.

you immediately know it's referring to a two-sided high-density 3.5" diskette, remember using 360KB single-side ones, and being impressed that they held a lot more than 5.25" ones, which held a bit less than 100KB on single-sided drives, and only think of the 5.25" ones as really “floppy”, ‘cause the actually are.

 

Windows 10 would take 2778 Floppy Disks

But back in the day when OS/APIs came on diskettes, nobody could’a conceived of an OS so bloated it would take thousands of ‘em. The first GUI OS I had, Windows 3.1, came on these 6 diskettes:

I may be even fogey-ier noting that, for most practical purposed, my early 1990s Win 3.1 machine was actually a bit faster than my present, company-supplied Win 7 one, because it’s OS not only didn’t use much disk storage, but also not much memory or CPU.

[DrKrettin]

... when you read this

you immediately know it's referring to a two-sided high-density 3.5" diskette, remember using 360MB single-side ones, and being impressed that they held a lot more than 5.25" ones, which held a bit less than 100MB on single-sided drives, and only think of the 5.25" ones as really “floppy”, ‘cause the actually are.

 

... when you realize that the storage capacities stated above cannot be right, and there is an error factor of 1000. 

[OceanBreeze]

... when you realize that the storage capacities stated above cannot be right, and there is an error factor of 1000. 

 

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I think maybe he meant 0.3 MB

[CraigD]

... when you realize that the storage capacities stated above cannot be right, and there is an error factor of 1000.

Oops! . Err, replace “MB” with “KB” throughout.

 

My mistake is especially scary when you consider that, professionally, I’m 1 of 2 of the sysadmins for life-or-death, mission-critical system for a multi-billion dollar healthcare organization, with about 20TB of storage. Hopefully I’ve not made any recent unnoticed factor of 1024 mistakes there recently!

 

It appears that time and Moore’s law has rendered me unable to even conceive of the kilo-byte as a unit, and that I may be not only an old fogey, but a senile old fogey. :(

[fahrquad]

You young whippersnappers!!!  I remember my dad taking us on a tour of the Metropolitan Life computer center on Long Island back in the early 70's.  They were still using punch cards and one Honeywell mainframe computer took up the space of a football field.  Keypunch operators were still around back then.  They were converting to IBM computers with tape drives that were half the size. 

 

I currently have a Toshiba 1TB solid state external drive under my laptop computer that I store everything on.  In 4 years I have only used 74 GB of the available 931 GB (1TB minus the pre-loaded software).  It really saved my bacon when the motherboard on my old computer got fried (Diet Coke and some additions spilled on the keyboard).  I was able to retrieve what was on the internal hard-drive with an Orico adapter so now I have a spare external drive (currently $9.99 from Amazon, although I think I paid more than that when I bought it).

 

http://us.toshiba.com/storage/external/portable/canvio-basics

http://www.orico.cc/goods.php?id=4815

[fahrquad]

Also it keeps the internal hard-drive uncluttered for faster performance.  I am only using 40.5 GB of 419 GB on the C drive.

[fahrquad]

The IBM mainframe back then was probably the System/370.  No clue what the Honeywell system was.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/370

[fahrquad]

I think the most likely model was the Honeywell 1800.  Can't find any good photo's

Edited December 31, 2016 by fahrquad

[DrKrettin]

You are an old fogey if you can remember the first portable computers and that they used to have their makers' name on the lid so that it was the right way up for the user when the lid was closed. Very soon on, they started putting the labels the other way up, so everybody else can read it with the lid open. As though anybody cares....