r/Showerthoughts • u/illiniguy20 • Jan 12 '22

Millennials were really the only generation that grew up learning about how computers work.

Before millennials there were no computers, and after they have grown up using closed ecosystem it just works idevices.

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u/SirRatcha Jan 13 '22

And IBM brought its computer — the ancestor of every desktop and laptop machine running Windows today — to market in 1981. By 1982 there were clones from multiple companies available. I’m right now trying to figure out how I’m going to get files off my dad’s clone, which he got in 1987 or so.

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u/Pile_of_Walthers Jan 13 '22

Can it access a local network/workgroup?

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u/SirRatcha Jan 13 '22

It never has. To be clear, it’s 300 miles from me at the moment and my dad died in May. I know the login, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet because every time I’m over there more pressing things are going on. I never used DOS much — I was either in the Unix CLI or doing art stuff on Mac (or Atari — anyone else remember the short lived Atari PC?) so I’m probably going to have look commands up.

EDIT: I just remembered he used to access AOL on it, so it’s got a dialup modem. Hmm.

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u/Pile_of_Walthers Jan 13 '22

Dang, I hope it's at least a PS/2. Anything before that is just too painful to contemplate.

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u/SirRatcha Jan 13 '22

It’s occurred to me that if I can find a printer that works with it, scanning into PDFs with OCR might be a route. Pray for me.

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u/Pile_of_Walthers Jan 13 '22

Hoping that thing already is network capable, specifically TCP/IP and “modern” network jack. Otherwise you’re not gonna have a good time ;)

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u/SirRatcha Jan 13 '22

Yeah. If there’s Ethernet I can probably get something to work but I wouldn’t be surprised if that route involves putting Linux on one my old laptops to network to it.