A government job I reported to in 1993 they were using Wang it wasn't until around 1998 that they updated to Windows. I saw news reports recently that some of the U.S. nuclear capability is still relying on systems with 8 inch floppies. I immediately remembered my administrative job in the U.S. Marine Corps around 1988. During the schooling we had about 20 minutes on what they called the old "green machine" because they told us that when we got to the field we would have the same system the classes were being conducted on (286 based). I arrived in Okinawa, Japan at my first duty station after school and there in the corner was a green machine with 8 inch floppies. About six months later we got the 286 based system (by then it was already obsolete) Completely "tempest certified" with all covers in place it could process classified material (my work section never dealt with classified) however with the covers in place on the printer it would jam after the first two or three pages. It had two 5 1/2 drives 360K and 1.2MB?. Removable hard drive (turn the key pull the HD) The monitor screen was covered with a fine mesh.

Craft stores selling sewing machines that have floppy drives. You can transfer patterns to them that way. They are sort of like a mini CNC machine, they can sew a pattern for you. Those are still driving floppy sales

I bet those Wangs were more reliable than Windows.

Thanks for your post, the reliability, stability and security of older PCs for simple vital tasks is evident from this post.

First Christmas after I started the job I was speaking to a relative who was amazed that anyone was still using Wangs.

Yes, the security against hacking etc., Just read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_2200

In 1993 there was no windows, and there were quite a few Wang shops. For an organization to change to a different system is far from trivial, and can easily take years to accomplish, so 1998 seems a rather speedy changeover.

Wang systems would be quite immune to any hacking, they probably didn't use today's network standards. In their time frame, there were many other network protocols in use, and there wasn't any public internet.

My old DEC PDP-8/E was completely hack-proof, it didn't have any network connection other than Kermit over a serial port.

EDIT: To me, 'windows' began with Windows 95. Windows 3.x to me is a windowing interface running on DOS. So in 1993 there was a windows of sorts. Sometime around then, I had a Toshiba 1960cs laptop running WFW3.1 and Trumpet Winsock to get TCP/IP and a dial-up local ISP. Somewhere I still have the setup floppy the ISP sent me with Pegasus Mail and a beta Mosaic web browser

Around 1993 I was running Windows 3.1 on my 20Mhz 286 with 2M of ram on the board. Summer of 1993 we had a C programming class using Turbo C (2.0 IIRC). The school bookstore sold Borland C++4.0 for $129 student discount (retail price was over $400). I had to upgrade my 286 to a 386 with 4M just to install it.

I had a store bought computer desk with my VGA monitor on it, then a plywood desk I built that had my electronic parts and tool and an IBM PC, then a plywood corner section connection the two that held my Citizen color dot matrix printer then under that was my home made tower case with the 286/386 board on one side and an Amiga 500 board on the other and the A64 adapter going to my Commodore MPS1200 printer and two 1541 drives then my Commodore SX64 on top of a single drawer filing cabinet to the other side of the desk.

I was, since no one else in the office wanted the job, the SSA (systems security administrator) which was a fancy word for the person who solved minor problems and replaced paper on the printers. Though I did assign local access to new employees (access to the HQ system went through the government subcontractor)

Once a week I went into the computer room, pulled a chair up to the zero work station and logged in with user name IPL password IPL to perform the weekly initial program load. Basically replacing the disk pack that had been in use the previous week with the disk pack from the week before.

When they upgraded the license the people at the "hotline" (government subcontractor) did not allow me to insert the new "key" kind of like a weird looking usb stick.

They did allow me to replace a board in the huge telecommunications box once. That board, which handled one line, was as large as the mother board in the XT clone I had at the time.

Old Computer and power consumption video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9-UurN1q2w

This is quite informative and good as we have had the comment here once every few months about the power consumption of older computers.

MS Word source code is available now in a limited manner: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm...a-source-code/

just be careful using anything in Microsoft formats they are not future proof. I've found times when newer versions of MS products can't open older documents. Granted having the source you could write a converter but its simpler to just keep your docs in ODT format which already has convertors written and support in multiple programs.

Nice list of vintage OSes:
https://archive.org/download/Vintage...ystems_Archive

Happy 2017 in advance all

I'm surprised some are in there, I see a few which still have copyrights.

Check this also:
http://www.freebyte.com/free_computers/#introduction

Lots more to discover above.

Note: I am just sharing related links. Certainly, no time to test most of these software, OSes. Still struggling to try the few I have and learn.