I was searching across the internet tonight and I happened across something I haven't used in ages. Naturally, I downloaded it.
MS-DOS 6.22!
How many of you remember when the entire OS was on a single 1.44MB floppy disk. That's right young-uns. An OS does NOT need to take up GIGS of space on a hard disk. That's actually mind-blowing when you think about it. But that's not the half of it.
I'd stumbled upon a hidden repository of almost all the great old stuff I used to use back in the day. Almost none of it would be known by these little tykes. Programs like Check-it diagnostics that not only tested the memory, but also the math functions of the CPU and the graphics memory. I think it also had hard disk testing in there too as well as benchmarking. There were all the old word processors from back in the day, right at the edge of when windows was still in version 2,3.0, 3.1, and 3.11. Utilities for data recovery, which wasn't that hard back then if you knew what you were doing.
It started me thinking of why I fell in love with computers. I learned to program in BASIC, on a Commodore VIC-20 and moved gradually up the food-chain to a PC and the PC's many iterations of hardware and processors. I was running DOS all the way up to some ancient early Pentium machines. I had em' all, the 8088, the 8086, the 80186 (they existed), on and on into the Cyrix junk and the IDT Winchips, which were even more of the same. I climbed, building one system at a time, scrounging parts, until I reached the AMD K5, K6, and K6-2's. This went on till I got where I am now. I've built almost everything and fixed more machines than I ever wish to tell.
The thing about it was, I knew the machines, growing up around them, not buying, but building them, makes a person "feel" them work, and sense what's going on inside them. You know every nut and bult. Hell, even the sound of the stepper motors in the old hard disks could tell you what the machine was doing. You learned about IRQ's DMA's, and NMI's. The machines? They all had personalities, every one of them. :) Some were tanks, rock solid, never failing, while others were fickle, always needig attention and upkeep, crashing for reasons you could never really diagnose.
What a wild ride it's been, from the smallest machine with only 5KB of RAM to the mighty machines we have today. Even with all their complexities, they're all still the same basic animal inside. We've just figured out how to get more and more out of them, pushing technology to its breaking points in some cases. Making smaller and more compact transistors that run at incredible clock speeds. Wider data buses now carry information at break-neck speeds. Could you imagine what the original people who worked on the first machines would think of today, if they were skipped ahead the short distance in time it took us to get here?
The youngest of you will never experience the first machines, or writing those first programs in a language that is all but gone now. To learn the nuts and bolts of what is going on in the hardware is a great foundation. Most people now see computers as ubiquitous, not knowing the millions of things happening that enable them to just run the machine and post social content. Way down deep in the machines and memory chips is the burning and surging throng of billions of switches all across the world, making it go.
Wow, how far we've come! Sometime I feel like the old man remembering back to his old model t's while watching a new bunch of kids running souped up funny-cars as fast as they can get them to go. It was the same, and still is the same, as I haven't finished building power yet :).
Anyway, Finding old stuff brings things back. Today it made me smile, thinking back to my room as a kid, filled with boards and parts everywhere you looked. I wouldn't give that up for a million dollars