I just Google'd for "Golden Bow Systems" (the disk defragmentation utility shown at around 18:00) and it seems that this tool is still available but now as Windows version and since 2016 free to download and it's still called "Vopt". I just had to try this tool and it threw me back to the 1990's where I regularly defragmented my hard disk with DOS's disk defragmenter. Showing all these blocks move around and gaps being recuded gives a sort of satisfaction. Nostalgic to think that I can run a program they were talking about in the 1980's is still there - albeit in a rewritten Windows version - from the same company invited in this show.
I miss DOS so much. It did what you told it to, no questions asked and when you were done you just turned the computer off. Windows XP was good, I’ll admit, but I haven’t like anything that followed. I remember “disk Doctor” as I used it to cheat on games since I could change the hexadecimal values, lol. DOS was nothing compared to how Windows flings files all over God’s creation on the hard drive. I’ve since switched to a Mac as it works well with my iPad and iPhone. These shows bring back a lot of memories as I used to watch them every weekend on my PBS station.
3:30 where he's talking about DOS 4.0 - he says that partition size is "essentially unlimited". The fact that they thought that 2GB was "essentially unlimited" back then shows how far we have come.
Having said that, I'd have loved 2GB (instead of 200 MB) on my first PC 24 years ago - now my main 8TB data drive would need 4000 partitions of that size...
Yeah, sometimes I think that's why he started fading away from Computer Chronicles around this time. His competitor product was taking off and raking in money while his arguably superior system languished in the backs of magazines. He doesn't show it too much though, a tribute to how much of a pro and a real tech lover he was.
I don't think that's the reason. He made plenty of money, millions, not billions, but he wasn't one consumed with personal wealth. His company did very well in comparison to the flood of tech companies that cropped up during his time.
Goddamn every time I boot up a 286 or a really early 386 now I recall how much patience you needed. It's amazing how much of a difference in lag a 386 SX/16 had to a 386 DX/40. Night and day. Same thing as a 5160 and a 286/16, 20, or 25.
This episode was done way before Symantec and Peter Norton merged their Anti-Virus software packages, for I am used to seeing Norton Anti-Virus software published by Symantec. My first Windows PC had Norton Anti-Virus software installed on it.
Has anyone ever noticed how smiley Gary Kildall always was? It's surprising considering his life off the show and how bad his alcoholism was in his personal life.
@@yellowblanka6058 But he wasn't really destroyed. He was a multi-millionaire doing what he loved most, which foremost was software development in operating systems and programming languages. He left all the business side stuff to his wife.
@@oldtwinsna8347 "Although Kildall preferred to leave the IBM affair in the past and to be known for his work before and afterward, he continually faced comparisons between himself and Bill Gates, as well as fading memories of his contributions. A legend grew around the fateful IBM-DRI meeting, encouraged by Gates and various journalists,[citation needed] suggesting that Kildall had irresponsibly taken the day off for a recreational flight, and he became tired of constantly having to refute that story.[13] In later years, he had occasional private expressions of bitterness at being overshadowed by Microsoft.[6]" "Kildall was annoyed when the University of Washington asked him, as a distinguished graduate, to attend their computer science program anniversary in 1992, but gave the keynote speech to Gates, a dropout from Harvard. In response, he started writing his memoir, Computer Connections.[15] The memoir,[23][24][25] which he distributed only to a few friends, expressed his frustration that people did not seem to value elegance in software,[18] and it said of Gates, "He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry." In an appendix he called DOS "plain and simple theft" because its first 26 system calls worked the same as CP/M's.[26] He accused IBM of contriving the price difference between PC DOS and CP/M-86 in order to marginalize CP/M. The journalist Harold Evans used the memoir as a source for a chapter about Kildall in the 2004 book They Made America, concluding that Microsoft had robbed Kildall of his inventions.[13] IBM veterans from the PC project disputed the book's description of events, and Microsoft described it as "one-sided and inaccurate".[15] In August 2016, Kildall's family made the first part of his memoir available to the public.[24][23][25]" Wherever the truth lies, the turn of events clearly bothered him and contributed to his alcoholism and death.
I recall those days when backups required the use of 5 1/4 inch floppy diskettes, double-sided; double-density, that could hold 1.2 MB of files. Backing up 10 MB of files was time consuming.
That mention of MS-DOS 4.0 reminded me of DR-DOS that Gary released, and it was far better and more popular than MS DOS up till Microsoft released 6.2...
@@lucius1976 You say that as if it was a bad thing? At some point the computer world had to move on from all flavors of DOS, and step into The Future™.
I remember the nightmare of storage problems back in the 90s. Constantly having to free space on the HD and also backing up and archiving. Want to work on a new project? Spend an hour freeing up space. Oh, wait don't worry? Just use an Iomega drive. This way all data will be corrupt and lost and no longer the need to backup.
$1800 for a tape drive. My god. I have 2 40TB+ arrays at home for about the same. It really is amazing how far we have come and how quickly we got here.
@@awalrus9253 I can speak from my own experiences that high-def video files takes up a considerable amount of space; on average nearly 4 GB per hour at 1080i resolution.
what time did this show come on. I think it was the morning. It worked in the morning cause how much our brains feel like broken computers first thing in the day.
Christopher Bloom not at all. The facinating thing about watching old shows like this is realizing how much time we wasted as kids messing with all this stuff. Facinating how all the functions of all these 3rd party utilities are basically simple things that should have been in the OS to begin with. There's a funny circular logic to the whole PC enthusiast market. These guys are spending more and more time and money on computers to spend more and more time and money troubleshooting and tweaking the system, rather than actually using the computer for anything outside that kind of circular logic. It's like the old question people used to ask, what do I need a computer for? The average geek would answer without the slightest sense of irony, "to learn about computers", and not see the entirely circular logic of the situation. I'm thrilled that today computers and operating systems are actually powerful enough to do actual tasks (like video editing) outside that circle of logic! 😁
Fun times for all... mind you, by the time I had my own personal PC, we were up to DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, but I think everyone was much happier when DOS 5 came out. And yes, kids, much like versions of Windows, DOS versions were also hit-or-miss, 3.3 and 5.0 were great, 4.0 not so much.
Back in '92 while at college a group of 10 people that all bought the same Everex QIC60 60/120MB tape drive. We were swapping tapes at school in stead of floppies... could fit up to 100 megs on a tape, and since everybody used the same tape software, we could exchange software a lot easier. Don't copy that floppy? How about swapping tapes? ;)
Hopefully the prices had gone down since 1989. Didn't they say that the tape drive was $1800 and each tape was around $40? At that price I might as well just buy the software. 😅
9:30 He says the backup process slows down when you enable compression. I wonder if that was true. Compression does take more CPU time, but floppy drives were very slow, with write speeds of about 10 kB/s. And with compression there's a lot less data to write to that slow drive.
data corruption was the major issue as i recall and still can be, when using compressed volumes. often in the end, not worth it aside from very specialized situations.
It HAD to be true. Why would someone advertise a negative about their product unless it were true? They were trying to get out in front of it so customers would know in advance.
@@oldtwinsna8347 One could buy an Apple Mac Plus in 1989 for $1249 and that included a monitor, even if tiny. An ST/E or Amiga with monitor was even less. A PC was not.
@@10p6 Mac Plus was a 7Mhz machine equivalent to a turbo XT with floppies and greenscreen. You could get one of those for even less in 1989, especially if you picked up a phonebook sized computer shopper magazine that had all the PC bargains in it. Up the ante to a real computer, a 386 with VGA color, and you'd be priced far, far, less than a Mac II.
You think the backup software companies use their previous versions to backup their work as they make new versions... and the first developers were like "FUCKING YOLO BOYS!"
@10:00 ffs, that 125mb tape backup cost in the 80's close to what I would have to pay for a tape-based backup system for my 15TB drive array.... Aren't these things supposed to get cheaper as the decades go by?
psh an 80mb HD in 1989 was probably about $600. today I can get a 5tb drive for about $90. Peter Norton sold Norton to Symantec the following year, in 1990. lol 144mb is large in 1989, Windows 10 takes 32gb lol alone.
Why? It’s not like they didn’t know how much tech progressed over time. This show was on the air for more than 10 years. They experienced progress firsthand.
@@BlownMacTruck Back then they could not imagine anyone EVER needing more than 4GB of ram or even a few hundred gigs of storage space. Yes, they understood technology would improve, but it was one of those things that "you'll NEVER need".
@@jeremywj Uh, no. This aired in 89. There were already plenty of 64 bit processors around specifically to get around the issue of 4GBs of addressable space. Also if you think Gary Kildall, one of the most innovative people in the industry, thought the ram or storage limits of the day were "fine", you don't know anything about the people involved.
It was a 386-dx33, not a 286. Huge difference. the 386dx processor could access 32-bit memory, making it smoking fast even compared against a 386sx processor, not to mention absolutely fried the 286 machines. The speed difference was so huge and apparent in DOS programs one had zero buyer's remorse.
Stewart and Gary! What an amazing combination! Love and respect!
When I see PC'S of this period, it reminds my why I loved my Amiga so much.
a virus can kill your operating system oh shit boy!
get Guardian now before it's to late!
The Amiga was the ultimate game machine. I loved my Amiga 500 😀
@@ChadQuick270W For me the ultimate was the DOS PC.
@@MR-vj8dn I liked DOS. I’ve never liked Windows.
I just Google'd for "Golden Bow Systems" (the disk defragmentation utility shown at around 18:00) and it seems that this tool is still available but now as Windows version and since 2016 free to download and it's still called "Vopt". I just had to try this tool and it threw me back to the 1990's where I regularly defragmented my hard disk with DOS's disk defragmenter. Showing all these blocks move around and gaps being recuded gives a sort of satisfaction. Nostalgic to think that I can run a program they were talking about in the 1980's is still there - albeit in a rewritten Windows version - from the same company invited in this show.
23:56 "That means there's no bastard boot record" aha!
Well, that tells you what they thought of it in their labs, doesn't it?
freudian slip!
@@timothystevenhoward Indeed!
Really wish they’d officially gone with BBR.
I miss DOS so much. It did what you told it to, no questions asked and when you were done you just turned the computer off. Windows XP was good, I’ll admit, but I haven’t like anything that followed. I remember “disk Doctor” as I used it to cheat on games since I could change the hexadecimal values, lol. DOS was nothing compared to how Windows flings files all over God’s creation on the hard drive. I’ve since switched to a Mac as it works well with my iPad and iPhone. These shows bring back a lot of memories as I used to watch them every weekend on my PBS station.
1989 is when I graduated high school. My goodness it’s been a long time.
23:55 - My Bastard Boot Record vanished once too.
3:30 where he's talking about DOS 4.0 - he says that partition size is "essentially unlimited".
The fact that they thought that 2GB was "essentially unlimited" back then shows how far we have come.
Having said that, I'd have loved 2GB (instead of 200 MB) on my first PC 24 years ago - now my main 8TB data drive would need 4000 partitions of that size...
@@CanuckGod Bloody hell!
I was wondering what "essentially unlimited " meant, haha.
from 40 megs to 2gb is a hell of a lot today or then. So imagine what they were thinking... crazy
There's another video where they reference something like support for up to 64MB of ram being essentially unlimited.
That must’ve been tough for Gary to talk about MS DOS
Yeah, sometimes I think that's why he started fading away from Computer Chronicles around this time. His competitor product was taking off and raking in money while his arguably superior system languished in the backs of magazines. He doesn't show it too much though, a tribute to how much of a pro and a real tech lover he was.
I don't think that's the reason. He made plenty of money, millions, not billions, but he wasn't one consumed with personal wealth. His company did very well in comparison to the flood of tech companies that cropped up during his time.
I adore that monitor. Looks like a toaster oven.
Goddamn every time I boot up a 286 or a really early 386 now I recall how much patience you needed.
It's amazing how much of a difference in lag a 386 SX/16 had to a 386 DX/40. Night and day. Same thing as a 5160 and a 286/16, 20, or 25.
Norton dude had awesome presentation
This episode was done way before Symantec and Peter Norton merged their Anti-Virus software packages, for I am used to seeing Norton Anti-Virus software published by Symantec. My first Windows PC had Norton Anti-Virus software installed on it.
Has anyone ever noticed how smiley Gary Kildall always was? It's surprising considering his life off the show and how bad his alcoholism was in his personal life.
Happy drunk
Reportedly a really nice guy who was ultimately destroyed by the cutthroat nature of Silicon Valley.
@@yellowblanka6058 falling down the stairs drunk at a biker bar now coined "the Kill-killdall method"
@@yellowblanka6058 But he wasn't really destroyed. He was a multi-millionaire doing what he loved most, which foremost was software development in operating systems and programming languages. He left all the business side stuff to his wife.
@@oldtwinsna8347 "Although Kildall preferred to leave the IBM affair in the past and to be known for his work before and afterward, he continually faced comparisons between himself and Bill Gates, as well as fading memories of his contributions. A legend grew around the fateful IBM-DRI meeting, encouraged by Gates and various journalists,[citation needed] suggesting that Kildall had irresponsibly taken the day off for a recreational flight, and he became tired of constantly having to refute that story.[13] In later years, he had occasional private expressions of bitterness at being overshadowed by Microsoft.[6]"
"Kildall was annoyed when the University of Washington asked him, as a distinguished graduate, to attend their computer science program anniversary in 1992, but gave the keynote speech to Gates, a dropout from Harvard. In response, he started writing his memoir, Computer Connections.[15] The memoir,[23][24][25] which he distributed only to a few friends, expressed his frustration that people did not seem to value elegance in software,[18] and it said of Gates, "He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry." In an appendix he called DOS "plain and simple theft" because its first 26 system calls worked the same as CP/M's.[26] He accused IBM of contriving the price difference between PC DOS and CP/M-86 in order to marginalize CP/M. The journalist Harold Evans used the memoir as a source for a chapter about Kildall in the 2004 book They Made America, concluding that Microsoft had robbed Kildall of his inventions.[13] IBM veterans from the PC project disputed the book's description of events, and Microsoft described it as "one-sided and inaccurate".[15] In August 2016, Kildall's family made the first part of his memoir available to the public.[24][23][25]"
Wherever the truth lies, the turn of events clearly bothered him and contributed to his alcoholism and death.
16:05 that guy has some good eyesight to see that small screen from there and do all that techie stuff hardly anyone could do now!
I recall those days when backups required the use of 5 1/4 inch floppy diskettes, double-sided; double-density, that could hold 1.2 MB of files. Backing up 10 MB of files was time consuming.
It's hard to believe 40 MB was ever considered a lot.
to this very day i will always trust a man with a mustache and tie
NDD saved my ass a few times.
That mention of MS-DOS 4.0 reminded me of DR-DOS that Gary released, and it was far better and more popular than MS DOS up till Microsoft released 6.2...
The real end of it was Windows 95 when Microsoft integrated DOS into Windows. Before you always could install WIndows on top of DR-DOS
@@lucius1976 You say that as if it was a bad thing? At some point the computer world had to move on from all flavors of DOS, and step into The Future™.
I remember the nightmare of storage problems back in the 90s.
Constantly having to free space on the HD and also backing up and archiving.
Want to work on a new project? Spend an hour freeing up space.
Oh, wait don't worry? Just use an Iomega drive.
This way all data will be corrupt and lost and no longer the need to backup.
Memories of Zip drive click-of-death flooding back into my memory... the horror.
Still do the same on Android devices
“You can’t tell that there is much going on inside”
I can tell it won’t be going on anymore
$1800 for a tape drive. My god. I have 2 40TB+ arrays at home for about the same. It really is amazing how far we have come and how quickly we got here.
@A walrus My Plex server is around 40TB and growing and my other NAS is home drives, music, books, iscsi storage for vm hosts. I could go on.
@@awalrus9253 I can speak from my own experiences that high-def video files takes up a considerable amount of space; on average nearly 4 GB per hour at 1080i resolution.
3:45 - ‘now it’s essentially unlimited’
Actually it is limited to 2 gigabytes 😅
brings memory...back in 1989 I used Xtree Gold :D good times
what time did this show come on. I think it was the morning. It worked in the morning cause how much our brains feel like broken computers first thing in the day.
I recall in the 1990s that this show would broadcast on San Jose's Channel 54 on Friday nights.
Does anyone miss being able to watch the disk defragmentor defrag a disk while using a newer Windows PC?
Christopher Bloom not at all. The facinating thing about watching old shows like this is realizing how much time we wasted as kids messing with all this stuff. Facinating how all the functions of all these 3rd party utilities are basically simple things that should have been in the OS to begin with. There's a funny circular logic to the whole PC enthusiast market. These guys are spending more and more time and money on computers to spend more and more time and money troubleshooting and tweaking the system, rather than actually using the computer for anything outside that kind of circular logic. It's like the old question people used to ask, what do I need a computer for? The average geek would answer without the slightest sense of irony, "to learn about computers", and not see the entirely circular logic of the situation. I'm thrilled that today computers and operating systems are actually powerful enough to do actual tasks (like video editing) outside that circle of logic! 😁
Yes, I do 😀
Ahhhhhh MS dos 4.0.... the trauma returns
Fun times for all... mind you, by the time I had my own personal PC, we were up to DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, but I think everyone was much happier when DOS 5 came out. And yes, kids, much like versions of Windows, DOS versions were also hit-or-miss, 3.3 and 5.0 were great, 4.0 not so much.
At 9:52 $1,800.00 for tape backup of 125 megabytes. That's $3,264.00 in todays dollars.
.....or $150,000 in 2023 dollars 😮😂😮
40 mb on it!! It's like another world :-)
Back in '92 while at college a group of 10 people that all bought the same Everex QIC60 60/120MB tape drive. We were swapping tapes at school in stead of floppies... could fit up to 100 megs on a tape, and since everybody used the same tape software, we could exchange software a lot easier.
Don't copy that floppy? How about swapping tapes? ;)
Hopefully the prices had gone down since 1989. Didn't they say that the tape drive was $1800 and each tape was around $40?
At that price I might as well just buy the software. 😅
3:47 essentially unlimited = 2 gigs (yes really). Kinda amusing no-one could imagine an hdd larger than that back then.
"That means there's no bastard master boot record"
27:50 - How to fight legislation banned unsolicited faxes: demonstrate how annoying said faxes are. Genius move by the opponents. :)
9:30 He says the backup process slows down when you enable compression. I wonder if that was true. Compression does take more CPU time, but floppy drives were very slow, with write speeds of about 10 kB/s. And with compression there's a lot less data to write to that slow drive.
Same question came to my mind. Even today compression + writing may be faster than writing original data (depends on compression ratio).
data corruption was the major issue as i recall and still can be, when using compressed volumes. often in the end, not worth it aside from very specialized situations.
It HAD to be true. Why would someone advertise a negative about their product unless it were true? They were trying to get out in front of it so customers would know in advance.
Jeez. This is a family program.
Watching shows like this, shows how amazing Apple, Atari and Commodore systems were back in the day compared to PCs; and how much cheaper.
Hmm in 1989 a decked out Mac II system cost over 10k (not even inflation adjusted price) so wouldn't say they were cheaper by any stretch.
@@oldtwinsna8347 One could buy an Apple Mac Plus in 1989 for $1249 and that included a monitor, even if tiny. An ST/E or Amiga with monitor was even less. A PC was not.
@@10p6 Mac Plus was a 7Mhz machine equivalent to a turbo XT with floppies and greenscreen. You could get one of those for even less in 1989, especially if you picked up a phonebook sized computer shopper magazine that had all the PC bargains in it. Up the ante to a real computer, a 386 with VGA color, and you'd be priced far, far, less than a Mac II.
@@oldtwinsna8347 OK ignore apple (note Apple gave massive discounts to businesses and Schools) and compare the cost of a PC to an ST/E or Amiga.
Large 90mb hard drive . Those were the days.
You think the backup software companies use their previous versions to backup their work as they make new versions... and the first developers were like "FUCKING YOLO BOYS!"
One box of discs will get you by!!!!. What if the box of discs is a 3pack. Will that be enough to backup 20megs.
哇，Vopt的历史居然这么早。
@10:00 ffs, that 125mb tape backup cost in the 80's close to what I would have to pay for a tape-based backup system for my 15TB drive array.... Aren't these things supposed to get cheaper as the decades go by?
Wow, people talking about 32mb HDD, and now one single doc can up to 50mb, lol
Virtually unlimited? Let's throw a 3TB drive at FIRst 4 and see what happens.
Manage those 25 megabytes!
there's our data aaaaaaand it's gone
😂
Fortunately I have no 40mb hard disk
finding info on a 40mb hard drive? sounds like a daunting task. NO THANKS lol
today were lucky with a search command
Forty.... MEGGGGGGAAAAAAbytes.
1:46 - 1:50 Seizure warning
@26:23 lol, complete fail of a prediction. I never even heard of a 2" floppy.
thats what she said.
Little blue pills needed.
who would need 40mb disk space? This is too much.
“A hard disk with 40 MB of information or more” I had to replay that part to be sure he said Mega and not Giga
psh an 80mb HD in 1989 was probably about $600. today I can get a 5tb drive for about $90. Peter Norton sold Norton to Symantec the following year, in 1990. lol 144mb is large in 1989, Windows 10 takes 32gb lol alone.
That's nothing to boast about, as Windows 10 is a bloated mess that doesn't benefit casual users... or anyone for that matter.
Bastard boot record, haha!
Around $10 grand for a Compaq ? WTF you smoking dude
If I ever get a time machine I will go back to the studio this was recorded in while it was being recorded and bring with me a 1TB micro sd card.
Why? It’s not like they didn’t know how much tech progressed over time. This show was on the air for more than 10 years. They experienced progress firsthand.
They wouldn't be able to use it because they wouldn't be able to read anything made after the mid 90s at the very latest.
@@BlownMacTruck Back then they could not imagine anyone EVER needing more than 4GB of ram or even a few hundred gigs of storage space. Yes, they understood technology would improve, but it was one of those things that "you'll NEVER need".
@@jeremywj Uh, no. This aired in 89. There were already plenty of 64 bit processors around specifically to get around the issue of 4GBs of addressable space. Also if you think Gary Kildall, one of the most innovative people in the industry, thought the ram or storage limits of the day were "fine", you don't know anything about the people involved.
back up 100mb in half hour, now you can copy thst much to a thumb drive in half a second! lol
Hahaha,back faxing firing will be illigal by actibor.
Buy holy crap $10.000 for a 286 at 33mhz? Whooaah that's alot of money.
It was a 386-dx33, not a 286. Huge difference. the 386dx processor could access 32-bit memory, making it smoking fast even compared against a 386sx processor, not to mention absolutely fried the 286 machines. The speed difference was so huge and apparent in DOS programs one had zero buyer's remorse.
Those are the days when Norton was actually good. Now they're just a bloated piece of shit company.
So many jews
Huh?
Shalom!
Damn this show was a real snooze fest until 1992-93
Seriously…
@@uriituw I've been binging the mid to late 90's episodes and I can't get enough lol