Going through the pictures I took with my Sony point and shoot Cybershot camera, I ran across this picture. Those were the good old days! Heavy cathode ray tube monitors, heavy and noisy computers (they still can get that way today), wired keyboards were the way back then as wireless keyboards were usually expensive and cranky, plus they weren’t really plug-n-play like most are today. Wireless mice chewed through batteries in most cases. You could hear your hard drives clunking away and floppies weren’t any quieter. On a good note, I wished CDROM and DVD drives were still common in computers!
The scanner you see beside the HP computer on the desk was slow and noisy. You had to install drivers to make it work….and install them in order……. You had to hold your mouth just right and think clean thoughts every time you scanned something. This one had a slide scanning adapter that was pretty decent, though. However you had to work with TIFF files as this particular slide scanner didn’t output any other format.
Here’s a converted slide slightly smaller than actual size from the HP scanner. This was my house when I lived in Germany
The image quality really can be better as the following image looking from my upstairs bedroom window shows. Of course the picture above was taken on a cloudy snowy day and the one below on a clear evening.
Here’s a better day looking out my bedroom window.
The softness is simply a result of a manual focus SLR camera. To be exact, it was a lower middle line Yashica using the 50mm lens that came with it.
Back to the topic: Scanning these and the other slides I took around Europe took at least a minute scanning per slide in addition to setting the slide up. The adapter allowed placing more than one slide in the adapter at a time, but did not save any time as each slide still took the same amount of time. The slide adapter can be seen sitting on top of the gray HP computer on the desk. It was smallish, but did a good job for the day.
In the featured image at the top of the post, the best monitor was the one in front. It had a clearer picture than the slightly larger and more expensive monitor beside the desk. That monitor was attached to my Linux computer behind the monitor (the black item on the floor under the desk is the subwoofer for the Cambridge Audio speakers). It was a Sony VAIO. The fans inside required Windows, however, to detect temperatures and for speed control. Technology back then didn’t make it as uniform as today. That thing roared!!!!!!!! I forget what the processors were in these two computers. I started out using OpenSUSE on the Sony before switching to Ubuntu a few years later.
Later I bought a quad core – big times back then – HP that served for many years. That computer ran Windows Vista. It finally became long in the tooth where even Puppy Linux didn’t feel responsive. I kicked Windows off when an anti-virus program trashed the registry. Really, I believe it had some hardware issues in its later days. The drives were fine, but something else ailed it. It was the last desktop I’ve owned as the rest of the computers I bought are laptops.
My laptop assortment consists of two Lenovos and two HP laptops. Really, one HP is relegated to the workshop as it is really showing its age. To be honest, I don’t really desire a desktop any more! A laptop can simply be shifted around on the desk.
I miss the days of Bejeweled and certain jigsaw puzzle games. Now, the earliest days saw me downloading “Sub Commander” from a BBS with a state of the art 1200 baud modem! Desktops then really took up a desktop, too!
Going back further, while living in Germany, the VIC-20 came out. I bought one and later bought the 1541 floppy drive as the tape drive was really slow and inconvenient. That, the Commodore 64 and COCO III were my favorites of all times of the old days. I bought a Coleco ADAM after returning from Germany. That very day I saw on the news that Coleco had officially abandoned everything except their Cabbage Patch Doll line! I still loved playing with it. The printer and word processing software were actually quite impressive. I salvaged what parts were good when it finally bit the dust (cassette drives went south, one after the other and no parts were available to repair them). Somewhere I still have the three Z80 processors it contained.
There were other computers of various styles I had at different times. Some handheld, others were various desktop and laptop variations.
Hopefully my wandering down memory lane wasn’t painfully boring.
