Bits & Bytes on Retro Computing
It has been quite some time since my last post, though finally feel I’m at the stage of spending some time and attention towards this blog again. I was expecting followers to dwindle with the presumption it was no longer active, though it’s been nice to see this hasn’t been the case. It is unfortunate … Continue reading 2021: Time of Recovery
It goes without saying 2020 has been a challenging time for many globally, even just to get toilet paper. As the year is coming towards an end, it went down like a cancerous spread of bad sectors over a failing hard disk. At a time like this I feel fortunate to retain my job which … Continue reading 2020: The Year That Went Down Like a Disk Full of Bad Sectors
eBay Purchase Price: $19.95 AUD Country of Origin: Australia Condition: Excellent Norton Commander and Norton Navigator have some things in common. Both coincidentally were a motorcycle in the later half of the 20th century, and both were file management software applications acquired by Symantec that are now defunct. Out of the two, it would be … Continue reading eBay Purchase #28 – Norton…
eBay Purchase Price: $15 AUD Country of Origin: Australia Condition: Very Good Ever since Windows dominated the PC landscape, Microsoft Office was and still is the mainstay for productivity applications. Major competitors were Lotus and Corel, though market share had slid to the point where it didn’t really matter who was considered second or third … Continue reading eBay Purchase #27 – Corel…
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, computer terminals such as the IBM 3270 crept up in office environments allowing staff to easily retrieve data from the company’s mainframe. Mainframes tend to come with a hefty price tag and due to significant investment and mission-critical functions, are subject to much less frequent changes. Whilst the computer terminals … Continue reading Setting Up Microsoft…
In 1993 Microsoft released Arcade for Windows 3.1, as part of their Microsoft Home product line. Inspired by Atari, it was a small collection of games that had been played in the heyday of coin-operated arcade machines over a decade prior. The following year, it also was made available on the Macintosh. Dima Pavlovsky had … Continue reading Inspired By Atari: Microsoft Arcade
One weekend I went for a drive up Horsham way, a good two hour drive from home along the main highway between Adelaide and Melbourne. It’s a sizeable regional centre popular for stopovers. Usually when I’m there the only things I might pick up is fuel or a burger from McDonald’s on the way to … Continue reading The PC from The Wimmera
BeOS despite generally long forgotten (if you were aware of it in the first place) had an interesting past. A Frenchman named Jean-Louis Gassée had for most of the 1980s held senior positions with Apple, where at one point had become head of product development for the Macintosh once Steve Jobs left. He was a … Continue reading Install & Configure BeOS R5.1d Using Oracle VirtualBox
In the heyday of Windows 95, there had been a running joke of its security features (or lack thereof). Multi-user account management was nothing more than creating profiles for storing desktop settings and documents. The request to enter a username and password at the Enter Network Password dialog box on startup was often mistakenly seen … Continue reading Classified: Norton Your Eyes Only 4.02
SmartDraw originally dates back to 1994 as a tool primarily for the use of process mapping, organisational charts, maps, and various forms of technical diagrams. The software still exists to this day, although the choice of diagrams has changed greatly and a web-based version is now available. Today we rewind back to Halloween of 1997 … Continue reading Work Smarter Not Harder: SmartDraw 3.20