Vintage Computers

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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At one stage my area was a everything on the left of a line from East London to Upington, then the whole of Namibia as well. Did a little over 1.5 million KM's in 8 years. Sometimes miss being on the road, but mostly not.
 
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.
Click to expand...
I worked for what was technically a POS software development company for 12 years. On standby permanently considering around R10-20mil went through our systems daily.
Printers are still a swear word to me, thermal printers were the bane of my existence.
 
always wonder what computers and IT will look like in 10-20 years from now,
look how far they have come in the short time they been around,

maybe in the future win 10 will be considered an antique.
 
The_Hobbit said:
And flipping expensive bricks sometimes... those Zebra printers were the only ones I got much joy from. *spits*
Those and Oki dot-matrix for multi-part wider format stationery.
So glad I haven't had to open one of those in over 16 years.
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Man some of those printers... especially Zebra label printers.
I spent a ton of time using the EPL/ZPL language to write instructions for formatting.
The flipside was that once they were working they generally carried on working.
 
Staying off topic (sorry), but I think the printers were the worst calls to attend too. If they weren't full of cockroaches, dirt and coins, they were switched off. Really annoying to drive 8 hours to switch on a printer. We used Epson LX-300 for end of day, Citizen dot matrix slip printers then Star thermal slip printers. The things that came out of some of those PC's are best forgotten.
 
Stuey74 said:
Staying off topic (sorry), but I think the printers were the worst calls to attend too. If they weren't full of cockroaches, dirt and coins, they were switched off. Really annoying to drive 8 hours to switch on a printer. We used Epson LX-300 for end of day, Citizen dot matrix slip printers then Star thermal slip printers. The things that came out of some of those PC's are best forgotten.
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LOL
Agree
Always cockroaches or paperclips in the dot matrix printers
We used Oki Microline or something, furking hell those things printed fast, bloody fast !!!!
 
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As for till printers I still have one in my spare room somewhere from the mid 90's

Also have a keyboard to program the old TEC cash registers as the tills only had an alpha keyboard so it was a mission to use the ASCII c ode to type out your groceries etc into the till. Lemme go find it and take a photo, also from 1995
 
The LX-300 was the go to printer, not bad and affordable. But I did repair a few of those in the 90s
Whereas the more expensive Oki Microline series was double the price they just never broke down. I had to once change out the head on one of the printers due to a horizontal pin jammed up, was a 9 pin guy if I remember correctly. There were OKI printers with more needles but they were beyond expensive and I hardly ever saw one
 
The_Hobbit said:
I'm going to need help on the next step with the Osborne Executive.
So far everything checks out and I'm going to connect up this weekend but I will need some software including a boot floppy.

I'm not sure what file system it uses, never mind how to create a new boot floppy eish.

Anyone know if a more "modern" double sided double density 1.2Mb floppy would work? This is a single sided single density drive with something like 160k capacity IIRC.
I'll do some homework...
@jannievanzyl
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CP/M-80 operating system. Before my time. Maybe you can download from the internet?

SSDD floppies from that era were 100KB according to Wikipedia.
 
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