How old are the computers in your office?

The computers are about a year old. Parts of the software system is at least 7 years old.
It's a Windows 2000 system.. however to put the paper out we have to log into the News Maker network. Newsmaker uses Word 6.0. But the computers, as part of the regular operating system, have Office 2003. Both versions can't be opened at once. So if you make the mistake of trying to open a document from a source for a story you're doing, you can't be logged into the editorial system or else you'll crash your computer.

 

But it looks newer than this one:

 

I found one of these at the back of a desk drawer. Using deductive reasoning, I figured it was for sending stories, but I had never seen anything like it.

We got new Dells and new editing software last year. Before that, it was 10-year-old computers and Lotus Notes.

 

Hell, we have a regular stringer who still uses a TRS-80 to write up his stories. He's reliable and (fairly) clean, so we don't mind too much.

 

Nobody in our office knows how to use them (most of us are under 35). Care to elaborate for the sake of my education?

 

LOL Ours aren't quite that old.

Although recently I did get stuck with the task of cleaning out a storage area. Some of the stuff I threw out was so old it needed to be in a museum. Old computers are so heavy I thought I'd kill my back moving them around.

While all but one of our computers are from this century, the postage machine (a clunker I've dubbed The Beast) was bought in 1989. I really hate that thing and despise Pitney Bowes for ever creating it.

 

He's a warlock.

 

IIRC, I fixed this problem 3-4 years ago by installing Microsoft's Word Viewer and associating DOC files with it. Then Word documents open with the Viewer program instead of Word 2003, and there's no version conflict to crash NME. It does add an extra step for people who really want to edit in Word 2003, though; I think you have to hit Control-E to send the document along to Word. It's been a while since I worked on it, so YMMV.

 

Terrific little machines. I wrote the sending program for these for our paper at the time (early 1980s); it was about 200 bytes IIRC. Also, legend has it that the version of BASIC on these machines is the last coding Bill Gates directly worked on. ... How do they work? Pop in four AA batteries and turn it on. Instant-on, and all its files showed up in the opening menu. Has a built-in modem, so it's easy to communicate with 'em.

More info: http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-10.htm

 

You could play Oregon Trail on that.

 

Tell me somebody remembers these. Started my career on one of these. I was playing hang man waiting on games to start and thought I was the shit.

Good times. Good times.

 

Says Univac on the side.