Monday night while posting here I heard a big crash. Saw a flash and bzzzztttt, no screen. Awww poopie I guess I finally get that new computer. I hope you guys didn't miss me too much (LOL lots of LOL). I got a new machine on line a few hours ago (sunday). I'm glad to be back.

Mark Shuman

PS: This new machine is like 3 times the old one. Holey cow does it cook. I have a great insurance agent for sure.

Can't you get surge suppresors to save your computer from this kind of thing?

I had the same thing hapen to me back in the 80's while I was using a Commodore 128 (remember those?) I took it in to a local computer store. He showed me the board. It was NOT pretty. I learned to use a surge protector that day.

I have everything or almost everything going into a ups unit.

Commodore 128,i have one in a back room but havn't used it in years.

That happened to me also with a quite new laptop 2 month old, I sent it in and thanks to DELL it is fixed under warranty.

Motheboard, CPU and modem was cooked. I thonk the lightining came from the tel cable so when you use the surge protector there are some with the phone line protector.

Commodore 128D, got me one of them too. Still works, Got a working Atari ST and a Commodore Amiga too. I have surge supressors. Got nailed through phone line. Lots of crispy critters inside. When I went cable modem I forgot to disconnect it. Oh well life goes on. I'm glad to be back though. Not connected to phone now. Guess we all can learn from this one.

Mark Shuman

Wow, C64s and STs! I sure miss some of the games from the Atari 800 and ST days. I should have never sold my stuff.

Another way to get zapped is thru the cable lines. I lost a TV that way.

My son had a Dell that cooked a motherboard, CPU (twice), and ethernet card. No lightning, just stuff burning up.

I lost a Compaq Armada laptop last summer due to a lightning strike. Also came through the phone line, because the laptop was unplugged. I see the make surge protectors that also route your phone line connection through them. Wish I'd know that then. But, the insurance man took care of it!

Hey blwblw

Going of subject a bit check out ebay lol, i brought stack loads of old C64, 128, Amgia's and St's for pennys Relive the old days

NO trip back in time would be complete without a TRS-80 from Radio Shack.

Sorry to hear about it... But a word to the wise... I had a instructor tell me in electronics school "Anything that can travel 10 miles from it point of origin, fast as the speed of light and is 6 times hotter than the sun, nothing man can make will stop it! It will just help detour it sometimes"

I unplug my stuff if it gets bad ...but then again I live in the lightning capital of the US[8D]

Who were you again?

Welcome back! You even LOOK faster!

I had to take a BASIC course on Trash 80s. I remember them too.

Ebay is funny. Sometimes, the 8 bit and 16 bit computers are cheap and sometimes kinda expensive. I'll go looking again.

Everything I own is on either a surge protector or a UPS. Read too many horror stories about "I did have one because I didn't think it would happen to me". Then BAM! $2,0000 computer or home theater went up in smoke. Even sags and spikes can kill onboard components.

Thanks Mike, I even got this new way cool light up mouse. I can even find it in the clutter on the desk now.

Mark Shuman

Would that be a model one?
I had a model I Level one as my first computer.
John

No, it was a model III. I had a friend in Germany who had the TRS-80 I. He wrote programs to copy Atari and Commodore 64 games, defeating copy protection. He did a lot of hacking with it back in the early 1980s. I also met a guy a few years later who was networking CoCo's, if you remember those from Radio Shack. The games sucked big time, but he networked 4 of them. That was an amazing thing in 1985! A buddy did the memory upgrade to my Atari 800XL to 256K of memory around the same year. We did the mod, but couldn't get anything to recognize the 16K memory banks on the 16K chips. I programmed MYDOS for the chips and it worked the first time I gave it a trial run. That was big stuff back then.

Good god am I having serious flash backs here (and drugs ain't involved). I remember plugging in the 16K memory module into a Timex Sinclair 2000 and saying "What will I do with all this memory?"[X(]. I remember 20 MB removable hard drives (can you say Toadfile?). These new machines have all of us spoiled. How many of you remember Guru lights, with the accompanied lock-up? I do [:@].

Mark Shuman

I don't remember Guru lights, but I remember the first hard drive I saw- a Winchester 10 megabye that costs thousands.

Commodore Amigas and some of the older machines had a light on them. When they went on or began to blink the machine had a data collision. And the machine did not know what to do next. So it tured on the Guru light and locked up. These were early attempts at multitasking. The results kinda sucked sometimes. You would be just about done with a project and the !##%^$#@@#%&^*()( ligth would come on and everything you worked on was lost. Kind of annoying, thank god those days are gone.

Mark Shuman

I remember those Winchesters too.

Ok, I remember the Guru messages. The Atari GEM was pretty rock solid. The team went to IBM for 6 months to port it over to the Atari. IBM later dropped the project. This is where meta files originated.

I never had a tape drive, but I had friends who had them in the beginning and they hated them. I used to visit a friend with a C-64 and I remember the waiting for each game to be found and loaded. It was the pits.

Anyone remember Happy Computers and the Happy drives? That was a fantastic system. The ST verson was very good too if you didn't mind writing small scripts for it.

Can't say I remember Happy comuters. I do remember tape drives. Saw a couple, never used one. I remember the old Commodore floppy drives. Used to rattle and clank like an old steam engine. Kind miss them a little.

Mark Shuman