Vintage Computers

The_Librarian said:
Who remember ncsnipes? The little shoot-em-up game on novell netware?

Beats today's shoot-em-ups by miles.
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Back in the day I was a techie on the road doing POS systems for a retail store. We used nwlite to network the PC's, main PC with the HDD and the rest booting from stiffy disk, all running MS-DOS then later Caldera DR-DOS with BNC cabling. I got hold of a laptop which I used as backup for any software I needed, basically a clone of the POS system. As the laptop had nwlite installed on it, if I ever got really bored in my hotel room I would boot it up and play ncsnipes. I learnt about the game from the first techie I ever met, who had installed NetWare at my Father's work, my Dad being quite ahead of the curve in his day, remember him using Beltel to do banking.

The company I worked for then bought a chain of retail warehouses, they all had NetWare servers for their POS. One day the system crashed and my boss said go and look at it. Off I went and found the HDD had died, basic machines with no redundancy. Was couriered the install disks and told to rebuild the server. Having never done this I was a little anxious, but somehow managed to install and get the system back up. Was still running when the company went TITSUP.
 
hahahaaa @Stuey74
Thats awesome
I worked for Ankerdata in the mid 90's and we also ran POS systems interfacing back end computers to the cash registers. Fun days. Networking with co axial cables as well.

When the kak hit the fan the software guys would blame the hardware guys and vice versa. We were assembling our own POS hardware here in CT back then, LOL. Aaaah fun times. No wait. It was p0e3. I was on standby 24/7 365 days a year with my Pager.

So glad those techy days are over now
 
Heh. Coax was fun. Played Hunt-the-Terminator on unknown sites which was down, and an ohmmeter will show you either a missing terminator or loose BNC.

I prefer to start at one end, and work my way towards the other end, inspecting BNCs all along the way (and measuring with an ohmmeter as well)....

Fun days.
 
The_Librarian said:
Heh. Coax was fun. Played Hunt-the-Terminator on unknown sites which was down, and an ohmmeter will show you either a missing terminator or loose BNC.

I prefer to start at one end, and work my way towards the other end, inspecting BNCs all along the way (and measuring with an ohmmeter as well)....

Fun days.
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LOL
I saw some 50 ohm terminators last week in my spare room and I thought back to the 90s
 
The_Hobbit said:
POS support is hectic.
I turned down a job with digipoint in George in the 90s because of the POS element. Clients 300km on either side. No thanks.
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Well Done
Cant say I miss it
I was in my 20s but still, the hours are kak.
I would get a pager message at like 11pm on a friday night, phone back and there would be a cash register down at Cantina Tequila in Saldanha. Get in your car and go fix, almost a 2hr journey there by car. LOL. Buggar that nowadays.
 
The_Hobbit said:
Best thing ever when it was popular. Man that thing saved time. Way quicker than stiffies.
Ll3.exe
Then MS brought out INTERLNK and INTERSVR for DOS 6.

For old times sake

WinWorld: Laplink III 3.00a (5.25)

WinWorld is an online museum dedicated to providing free and open access to one of the largest archives of abandonware software and information on the web.
winworldpc.com
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Interlnk and intersvr... Oh, the memories.

FWIW you could also install OS/2 Warp over a serial cable - if the target PC did not had a CDROM.

So you would find a PC with a CDROM (and OS/2 of course), put the Warp 4 cd in there, run a specific program on that PC and leave it.

On the other PC you then boot up from a stiffy, with the correct drivers, and magic happened, it will suck the install files up over the serial port and installation will start.

Of course it was bloody slow, but feasible if you've got a laptop sans CDROM drive.
 
I needed to export data once from an Unix machine, but the DB was too big for a stiffy even compressed.

So I used a parallel cable to "print" the data on the Unix PC, and on a normal DOS PC, I just read the printed data in from the parallel port.

Worked quite a treat. Data could then be massaged into a .CSV format and imported.
 
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