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Obscure retro hardware and operating systems. A look into the past.

UnixWare 7.1.1.
UnixWare 7.1.1.

UnixWare 7.1.1. This is an old UNIX-based operating system, this was released by Xinuos and is a commercial product that is intended for business usage. Support and downloads are available here: http://www.xinuos.com/product-support/selfhelp/downloads.

Old 386 tower PC.
Old 386 tower PC.

Old 386 tower PC case. This is an ancient i386 tower case that would have the turbo button to switch CPU speed. Now we have the ability to change this with a panel app on the Linux desktop, this allows us to downclock a CPU if we do not need all of the speed offered.

Some very old images from the early days of computing: http://www.securitronlinux.com/bejiitaswrath/very-old-computing-advertisements-and-images/. The old Soviet Agat computer is quite distinctive.

I remember when Windows `95 came on floppy disks. That was fun to install. Old computers had 5¼-inch disks, they were actually floppy. Then there were the massive hard disk platters that you saw in Terminator 2. This is what we had to use, they went in a machine the size of a washing machine. How far we have come indeed.

The Xerox Star computer system from 1982 was the first computer with a mouse and a desktop with icons that you clicked on to open documents or applications. Truly ahead of its time. Did we go backwards when IBM released DOS, which was then bought by Microsoft?

IBM Calculator. Just look at those valves.
IBM Calculator. Just look at those valves.

The above picture shows what a calculator looked like in 1956! Truly massive. It would make a very nice space heater…

The Windows '95 desktop. Look at those icons...
The Windows ’95 desktop. Look at those icons…

Watching a Weezer MPEG file with a media player in Windows `95.

They were demonstrating videoconferencing and GUI mouse usage in 1968. On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, which they had been working on since 1962.

A discussion of old Soviet computer technology in the 40s. They invented some very interesting computing technology. The history of Soviet mainframe computing.

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