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About Trenton Technology

Trenton is a designer and manufacturer of industrial rackmount computer systems, single board computers and backplanes for critical embedded computing applications such as telephony,medical imaging, gaming, military installations,instrumentation, and process control which require performance, precision and reliability.

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You know you are an engineering geek when...

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  We were chatting here at Trenton, reliving the glory days of the past when single board computers were "born", and we started remembering technology that has since moved into the boneyard of your attics. Like some seasoned engineers, you hold on to those treasures "just in case" they come back.

You know you are a seasoned engineer when:

1. You used keyboards that were connected to punchcards.

2.  You recall when computers didn't come with any hard drive at all.

3. You remember paying more for a 1MB memory module than a brand new computer today.

4.  You recall using an EISA bus.

5.  You still have a Commodore 64 computer and still use it.

6. You remember when floppy disks were as big as a salad plate.

7. You have fond memories of OS/2 Warp.

8.  You designed products with CPUs with "thousands of transistors not billions of transistors".

9. You dissected your Texas Instrument's Speak and Spell toy for the components.

10. You recall PONG as the coolest video game that would ever be  invented.

 What are your fond memories of technology gone by? I am sure my Blackberry and iPhone will find their way to an attic, but no time soon.

Comments

Didn't you build an Intel 8008 on a wire-wrap board, and connect it to a 9" b&w tv? Mine boasted a 1K EPROM monitor, written by yours truly...
Posted @ Friday, September 18, 2009 6:46 AM by Keith Odell
And who can forget the memorable day when a non-proprietary bus (S-100) first debuted? Freedom from being tied to any 1 vendor!
Posted @ Friday, September 18, 2009 6:48 AM by Keith Odell
Not so long ago (it seems) I doubled the cost of my new PC order by doubling the memory requested. Now, I have many times that in my pocket. A free promotional gift....
Posted @ Friday, September 18, 2009 2:05 PM by Michael Carrington
When the mass storage was upgraded from an audio cassette system, to a "microdrive": a wierd mini-8track endless tape offspring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Microdrive. Random access, instead of rewind and play (8-). It's still in an attic in Scotland somewhere I think, packed up when I moved to US over 20 years ago.
Posted @ Friday, September 18, 2009 9:50 PM by Stewart Christie
CP/M 86 was the hobbyist's OS of the day. I had to write the driver for my 8" floppy by hand-assembling it each day on a legal pad until it worked and I could finally boot off the floppy, not just the PROM monitor, and save the driver source at last! 
 
80286 came along and just had too many new instructions that we didn't need. Ditto for 68020.
Posted @ Wednesday, September 23, 2009 8:44 PM by Frank Hoeflich
Toggling in the bootstrap loader on the front panel of your IMSAI 8080 so that you could then load your program from paper tape or audio cassette player. 
 
7 and 9-track 1/2 inch tape drives. And trying to interface to a drive to your home computer so you could transfer data to and from the main frames.
Posted @ Saturday, September 26, 2009 7:27 PM by Mark S. Harris
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