ScuzzBlog: Diaries October 2019
Entry 11th October 2019: Post 01: RM PC-5200 Professional or just Rosie.
RM PC-5200 Professional or just Rosie.
One interesting aspect of being part of the early computer era and
in particular when working in an office environment was the fact
that cus so few actually knew how to use things, that if you showed
and aptitude toward the computers you very quickly became the office
nerd. Being mad on computers I kinda took on the role of tech guy
for the office and for close on twenty years managed and maintained
the office computers.
For my troubles I was also given first dibs on all redundant stock
and became responsible for cleaning software of old machines before
they were taken from the office. This meant that my home became a
general junk store for old kit. We had a number of offices and
quite often I would return to my car after a meeting at one of our
other offices and find the car full of old kit.
At one time drive storage was so expensive it was easy for me to
take one of these old computers, network it and use the drive space
for backing up. Many also had ZIP drives and the like that I could
use with the Amiga. Nowadays I have like twenty tin boxes stationed
around the sanctuary and can access them all via the home network.
The only problem is that the local electric supply to the village
has a brown out when I switch them all on.
I do check them regularly, though these days they really are not
used for anything other than ZIP drives and maybe some file transfer.
As with all my computers generally I give them girls names. It's
far easier remembering a machine by a girls name than say RM machine.
Also it makes them a little more user friendly given that on the
whole they are dull as soup.
And so to Rose Marie who for some reason decided not to work. And
when I say not work I mean not work. So I dragged this very tall
tin box which is a RM PC-5200 Professional from around 1997 to the
bench and lay the poor girl on her back and guess what... she booted
first time. Talk about annoying.
Gave me the chance to take some very very boring images of the inside
of one of these beasts. You will note, absolutely nothing of any
interest, except maybe a very small spider resident in the one corner.
The capacity of the hard drives are so small as to be useless. She
does have a 250ZIP drive which is a bit of a rarity, mostly cus I
have all of five 250ZIPs. The hard drive does have a sprinkling of
Amiga games, though I doubt I know what is there.
This machine is a Pentium 200, I guess , though not really sure.
She is slower than a slow thing with a very good reason for being
slow. I do try to keep them working and change the batteries every
now and then. I have quite a few RM machines. The office started
with RM then moved to Evesham and finally with HP. I have to say
the best machines I have used are the Evesham and the HP.
And so Rose Marie is back at her station and working just fine.
As for her name, well it normally is the first thing that comes
to mind. I give all the computers a unique IP address and so they
all have a sticker on the case with the name, IP Address and maybe
some comment on how crap the thing is. And as for the other girls
well these are... deep breath, Kimberly, Rina, Olivia [ Fern ],
Kasumi, Toni, Risa, Ashley, Lara, Regina, Coral, Stephanie, Cintia,
Candice, Clara, Sam, Avril, Rose Marie and the IBM PS/1. I do have
more PC style tin boxes but they are not networked.
And before I forget I have a Windows 10 DeLL machine yet to be named.
I have to wait till MS pull the plug on my Win7 machine for that
to happen. I do have a MacG4 but she is hardly a lady.
RM PC-5200 Professional or just Rosie.
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