As a side note, I don't compress these files. Years ago I did compress them using some kind of "Zip software" but when it came time to uncompress and retrieve them the Zip software failed and my files were lost.
A lot of us users of a certain age go back to a time when buying new storage media required a mortgage, so we looked for ways to save space. I remember thinking my system was hot because I added a second 40 MEG hard drive. MEGABYTE! And saying "What am I going to do with all this space? I'll NEVER fill this drive up!"
Remember partitioning drives because adding a second drive was expensive? What a difference 30 years makes. My smallest desktop now has 3 drives in it. Once has 4. And I would venture a guess that most people here can say the same bedcause this user base overall has a higher geek level than most.
Great example for me is the computer in the bedroom that is connected to my TV in there. It mainly holds movies and concert videos. About a year ago I decided to change D and E to 1T solid state drives. Took about an hour per drive to copy from spinning drive to SSD, and now that system runs like buttah!
Matt, you gotta be in nerd heaven with that new system.
Yeah, since I started building computers in 1983, I’m very pleased. I’ve been though what you describe.
But I didn’t spend a fortune on the new machine, only a small one, since I did not buy a screaming cutting-edge CPU and this has no graphics card at all.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
But I didn’t spend a fortune on the new machine, only a small one, since I did not buy a screaming cutting-edge CPU and this has no graphics card at all.
Perfect example of "horses for courses". Gamers, accountants, musicians, graphic designers... all have different computer needs. My video card was fine when I had 2 monitors. Now with 3, it is underpowered, but man, it is so hard to find a video card with 4 HDMI ports to fit this PCIe slot and (and this is the important part) doesn't cost more than the computer.
What we do is not that intensive, and I continue to laugh at the comments complaining about speed. What is so urgent in your golden years of retirement that you can't wait 45 seconds for something to happen on your computer? MCA and Columbia want your latest release so soon that 45 seconds is an issue? Hilarious.
I have just come to accept that people in general will always look for something to complain about. Like me complaining about my video card...
A lot of us users of a certain age go back to a time when buying new storage media required a mortgage, . . .
Oh yeah, I remember 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disks. And believe it or not as a college freshman I learned FORTRAN on punch cards. And get this . . . I still have the slide rule I used in High School Chemistry class. The teacher had a gigantic 6 foot long Pickett slide rule hanging from the ceiling as a teaching device.
The Gen Z kid says "Slide rule? Is that related to the trombone?"
The one thing I never used but now whish I had is the hand-crank mechanical calculator. I understand that was quite an invention.
https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677 BiaB 2026 Windows For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
Thanks, but it’s the throwback black box. No lights (and no sound!). Nothing to see here….
Yep would want no flashy lights either if going for a new tower, just want it to sit unnoticed in corner, so many PC's now have the flashy display, just puts me off them.
This is the case in my aging 12year old pc, I do like the soundproofing foam inside.
Windows 10 (64bit) M-Audio Fast Track Pro, Band in a Box 2025, Cubase 14, Cakewalk and far too many VST plugins that I probably don't need or will ever use
........................ What we do is not that intensive, and I continue to laugh at the comments complaining about speed. ...............
LOL
I hear you Eddie. I remember waiting 20 minutes for a program to load via tape! Sometimes I would get a failure at the 19 minute mark and had to start over. I do not miss those tape days nor do I complain about waiting a few seconds for a program to load or do a chore. YMMV
Principal: Your child always causes trouble in school. Me: My child causes trouble at home, do I ever call you?
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
Hmmm ... I've just checked my little Raspberry Pi 4B and it's way, Way, more powerful than my first PC and has 26G of storage.
My own first home PC was a 40MHz AMD SX386 with 1MB RAM, 5.25 floppies and a 10M hard drive. I'd already used computers at college and at work for a decade or so, but that was the first time I reckoned I could just about afford something worth having.
Last edited by Gordon Scott; 11/14/2206:48 AM.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful. AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11 BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software. Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts .
My first personal computer was the first by Radio Shack. I am one of the few people you will ever know who SOLD computers to IBM, because this was years before the IBM PC came out.
That Radio Shack computer had 4K RAM (not M, and not T) and a cassette tape (not disk) for storage.
But even that computer was better than my first mainframe experience, where you handed in a deck of punched cards on a Thursday and they told you to come back Tuesday. When you did, a single missing semicolon had aborted the run, so there goes another week. Yes, I have patience, but I learned from those days to make few mistakes and make each try count.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
My first personal computer was the first by Radio Shack. I am one of the few people you will ever know who SOLD computers to IBM, because this was years before the IBM PC came out.
That Radio Shack computer had 4K RAM (not M, and not T) and a cassette tape (not disk) for storage.
But even that computer was better than my first mainframe experience, where you handed in a deck of punched cards on a Thursday and they told you to come back Tuesday. When you did, a single missing semicolon had aborted the run, so there goes another week. Yes, I have patience, but I learned from those days to make few mistakes and make each try count.
Ah, yes the TRS-80 or trash 80 we used to call it. I later had the Tandy TL-1000x, 16 bit processor running on an 8 bit bus! with 20MB hard disk. Then I started building my own when gaming was getting more demanding.
The gamers love the lights and bells and whistles. Not sure why the lighting is so important to so many of them.
Eddie, the graphics cards prices have come down significantly now since the mining for digital currency has cooled. Now that Nvidia has released their RTX-40 series you can get some pretty powerful cards in their earlier editions for a pretty good price, even less than the price of the computer!!! LOL!!
My wife asked if I had seen the dog bowl. I told her I didn't even know he could.
I had a Texas Instruments TI 99-4/A. It was a horrible base computer but if you bought the "Breadbox" expansion unit it got better. You could add 32K more RAM and whatever other cards it used. Programs came on ROM cartridges that slid into it, and the fatal flaw was that after a while that card receptor slot became worn and the carts were not able to seat tightly. As anything with friction/tension based connections will.
That expansion box was something else. It connected with a big flat cable about 4 inches wide terminating into a 3/4" thick connector. It ran some proprietary version of BASIC, with a cart for Extended BASIC. It was truly awful.
I had the idea that if I bought a disc controller card and decided that if I could get the terminating resistors right I would have the only TI around with hard drives. It took me 4 cards, at $139 each, before I got it right but I finally got it to work, and I ended up with 2 720k DSDD 5 1/2" drives in it. I was the envy of the local TI user group. until another guy named Jim managed to code a BBS, which I got a copy of and ran. Pretty slick stuff for 1989!!
But even that computer was better than my first mainframe experience, where you handed in a deck of punched cards on a Thursday and they told you to come back Tuesday. When you did, a single missing semicolon had aborted the run, so there goes another week.
At college we used to send paper tape to the main campus in another town to load and run, so had a similar delay. My first batch of programs all came back because I'd set all variables to something and apparently the compiler wanted zero to be either +0 or -0. Just plain old zero was verboten. Sigh. Valuable lesson, though.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful. AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11 BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software. Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts .
I'd used computers at work during the 80's so that was my first contact with computers. I got my first PC in about 1997. I built my first computer in 1998.
My son was 7 and he asked me if he could help build it. I said "of course" and I explained each and every part and what it did. I put in each part and started the screws for him. He tightened them down as best could and I cinched them down.
By the time he was 10 he was building his own computers, installing the OS, downloading and installing updated drivers, etc.
He hasn't came out of his bedroom since! ................
I've been gladly taking his hand me downs for the last 10 years or so on PC's because he builds high end gaming systems with far more power than I need. He just builds for himself and his friends.
Fortunately I was able to pull him away from the PC long enough to get him 6 yrs of piano lessons and 5-6 years of guitar lessons. He was my backup guitarist for a couple of years on the flatpicking contest circuit when he was in his early teens.
This thread really takes me back. Back in "the day" we had a VAX/UNIX system here at Case Western Reserve University known as the Cleveland Free Net. They used to have 40 minute time limits so the connection would drop after 40 minutes and you had to dial back in. There was a chat system and you'd be right in the middle of a chat and your time would end and you had to dial back in again. However, if you created a group and was the moderator of that group you got a different level of logon and you had unlimited time. I created the Synthesizer and MIDI User Group (SMUG) and got the elevated logon.
With that Unix based system, you could use Telnet and I used to Telnet into computers at colleges all over the world. From there you can use commands like grep and who and look through databases for users. I did that once and queried my last name and got hundreds of hits. I saved those email addresses to a text file, wrote a letter introducing myself and sent it to every one of those people. Oddly I was not related to even one of those people as my last name is an extremely common Slovenian name. I did make contact with a guy at a college in then Yugoslavia who was raised in Ljubljana where my ancestors came from. He told me that the name is so common I'd have to know the 2 block area where my relatives lived.
I miss stuff like that from older days. I DON'T miss that paper tape you mentioned, or COBOL and FORTRAN card programming, or tape drives in general. At one of the jobs I worked, if you worked 3rd shift your first job at 11pm was loading backup tapes. There were 3 different recording systems, they all ran different form factor tapes, and they didn't all run every day, so there was this system of sleeved pages noted Sun thru Sat on a hanging bander with exact language of what got backed up that day and what didn't. Crazy. Now that kind of stuff is thankfully all automated and scheduled.
With maturity of hardware came a certain simplicity, and Matt went back to basics with undated hardware.
And now you make me want to do the same, as I like the concept of dedicated computers.
With maturity of hardware came a certain simplicity, and Matt went back to basics with undated hardware.
One of my favourite simplicities (though setting it up is a bit of a faff) is my BackupPC server. It sits in a brick built outbuilding beyond a real firewall from the house and in the early hours of every morning it backs up my fileserver to a plenty large enough hard drive. No tapes or other removable media to remember, organise, store, restore, keep safe, etc. Just a simple web access to the various backups over many months and a checkbox and confirm to restore.
Luxury
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful. AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11 BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software. Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts .
This is my first computer. For the Gen Z's this is not a musical instrument, is not connected to the internet, doesn't use batteries and doesn't even need electricity. Don't laugh, this brilliant device invented around 1620 and known in the US as a "slipstick" put men on the moon and brought them back alive.
For scale, the round object is called a dime; US currency, that could be used to buy 10 pieces of Bazooka Joe bubble gum. It could also be used in a pay phone . . . what's a pay phone? That's another discussion
https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677 BiaB 2026 Windows For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
Same here ... which shows how reliable they are. As a sailor, I also recognise that they don't mind salt water.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful. AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11 BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software. Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts .
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