Wow... I have a TRaSh 80 in my basement, and a IIe, IIC, a Commodore and a PONG. Betcha don't have VISICALC on floppy disks still. And yes, I mean the 5 1/2 floppies. I still have some of the 10" Trash 80 floppies, too. 512kb rocks!! Is it true that old computer folks never die, they are just stored in the basement?

Now if this worthless museum stuff could just round me up a contract....

Frank, been there done that, your house took a power hit. I am a hardware guy, no reason all of those things could fail at once, except for the only thing common to them all, Electricity.
You may want to invest in some really good surge suppressors or UPSs for your critical systems.
Seems expensive, until you have a day like today. Hope you get everything back up.
Years ago when I was on the Kitty Hawk, eating in the Chiefs mess, I would see the lights dim and I could name off the pieces of equipment that would be down. I was almost always right. The avionics benches that went down cost us a lot of your money to get back up.
Look on the bright side.

have a set of 8 inch floppies from an IMSAI from roughly the same 1979/80 years. I dont have visicalc but i do have Lotus Symphony on 5 1/4 inch. I used to use the 8 inch floppies in a class to make a point about permanancy, the point being that its best not to think of whatever technology you are working with as "THE best", its just the best for right now, give any computing technology you have in the house about 28 months and it will be a boat anchor by that time. I think the 8 Inch floppies contain the CPM OS, which I was once a big fan of, back when there was two DOS'es, MS-DOS and DR-DOS. ahhh, those were the days... hard sector floppies vis soft sector. Now I have 1 gb on my keychain USB drive.

If you ask kids today what an 80 column card is they look at you like youre a bit odd. Say the phrase "do not fold, spindle or mutlilate" and they have no idea what you are talking about but it was just a blink of the eye in time when we were debating whether or not a "color" monitor was really worth the extra cost. Kids today dont know the thrill of copying 15 pages of small text Basic code out of a monthly magazine like Byte or Kilobaud just to make a star trek game, just to find a line was misprinted on the 5th page and you have to debug it to get it to work. You have to really like this stuff to do that sort of thing. you know whats scary? its remembering what you paid for them!

(Contracts?, try www.dice.com. highly used, highly recommended,but you probably already knew that. )

I dont think it was a power strike, with the exception of the hard drive which is more likely due to unknowingly going beyond the MTBF, everything else has been some from of simultaneous USB drop. The Tivo uses a USB interface for its network connection ( a serious error - in my opinion ) and the device simply disappeared from the units knowledge. I unplugged the usb interface and powered the device off, powered it back up and plugged it back in, and all was better. The printer was the same thing, plug the USB back into the printer server via its USB interface and it was fine. Why? I dont know! Its my week for weird hardware stuff I guess. While I was repairing "Big Media" the HDTV antenna feel off the counter right on to the motherboard chassis of the box. It was the perfect end to a perfect week.

Not much I hate more than getting home from work and having to troubleshoot my own gear.

When I got out of the service in '96, I went back to college for a year to finish some stuff. While there I was having a conversation with a 3rd year computer science major. Turns out he'd never heard of EBCDIC or even seen Assembler. Kids!

"Dont start with the Microsoft vs. Linux vs. Apple thing, just dont go there. Ok?"

Heh. Reminds me of a quote from work (I'm in a computing support call center):

"Don't even, don't even, don't even pull out your little penguin puppet and make your Linux sounds at me or I will eat your liver with faava beans..."

Talk about a reaction... 's not every day someone threatens to eat one of your internal organs. But hey! Mac v Linux v Windows **is** a religious debate, after all. :)

Pop Quiz, what do the following have in common?

026,029,0129,402,602,1401,360,370,SeriesI,Sys32,Sys34,AS400,rs6000

MR

> a truly joyous trip made up of hours and hours of hardware problems. I - being a "software guy" and not a "hardware guy" find this effort especially tedious.

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Can't be done, it's a hardware problem.

:-)

> Now if this worthless museum stuff could just round me up a contract....

I'll give you a contract to sell your useless museum stuff to me for US$10, Stephanie...

:o)

I still have two tackleboxes full of pirated A][ games and other softare. I cut my teeth on IBM 360/370s, but I sharpened them programming a][s to the bare metal. I've still got a file cabinet of Apple C.O.R.E. notes, tips, and tricks.

I meant to point you to this some while back when you talked about liking gadgets.

Tom's Hardware is a good source for reliable reviews of stuff. Very technical, but competent and I have it on good authority that, unlike many sites, they don't hedge for an advertiser's happiness. If it's garbage, it's garbage, and the advertiser can pull his ad money if he wants.

OK, the link is:

> >http://www.denguru.com/2005/06/28/digital_video_recorders/