The geek shall inherit the earth!

[LUKE at US COACH]

Hi Folks:

You guys really know how to confuse  us Senior Citizens!!!!

Happy & SAFE!!! Busin this weekend and always>

LUKE at US COACH
"OLD" Newbie

[Stan]

I don't know how old you geeks are but I was building process controll with Texas Instruments 74xx with two gates in a 14 pin DIP. When 1k chips came out, I retired because I couldn't work with such big numbers. I eventually got talked into buying a Comodore 64 with casette tape storage so I could learn how to program in BASIC.

[RTS/Daytona]

And while we are on a frivolous topic, its Gumpy, not Grumpy or Grumy.  I find him to be quite civil, and not the least bit of a curmudgeon.  The name misspelling probably bothers me more than it does him.

sorry H3Jim and Gumpy

Like many engineers - I'm very dyslexic - (we make the best engineers - [Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell, Michael Faraday, etc]) 

I didn't even see my Gumpy spelling mistakes.

Pete RTS Daytona

[brojcol]

Well, I'm ADHD and I can never finish a

[Connel]

Guys,

A couple of Shiner's makes all this garbledegook go down much easier!!

Have a great weekend.

Connel

[Clarke Echols]

My wife thinks I show all the symptoms of ADHD.

I learned to program on a 16-bit HP 2116 mnicomputer using assembly language.  Then I learned
a littel Fortran, then HPL (a language used on HP desktop computer that my cousin called "BASIC
with cheap mnemonics") followed by BASIC, Unix shell programming, a bit of C, and then HTML.

The fourth program I ever wrote was 156 pages of assembler code (60 lines per page) that was
a "system executive" (now called an operating system) [I wrote the whole thing, including a
relocating loader] and it supervised the test stations for testing NMOS chips back when Motorola
was learning how to build them too.  That was in 1973.

Then some years later I went to marketing to write computer manuals and design online help
for the next 20 years.  There we had "standards".  "K" and "k" aren't the same:

          1 kohm = 1000 ohms

          1 Kbyte = 1024 bytes which in binary is 2^10 as previously mentioned.

At least that's how we managed it.

Only computer geeks even care, so if you care, you might be a geek.  (Sorry about the
take-off from Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a redneck if..." routines.)

Clarke

[Hartley]

There once was a day that I could "Toot my own horn "
after nearly 30 years with computers, I am lucky of I can "Poot my own horn"

I used to build some pretty wierd stuff with those old 74XX chips. And I thought I was a genius...

My microscope vision for seeing that fine stuff left me about 10 years ago.. Can't see sh$$ anymore
without help. So I work on "BUS" it has parts big enough to see......

Dave....

[Stan]

DrDave-Reloader: You were a genius building with 74xx. You had to see the whole problem and design a solution. You didn't have the luxury of an entire engineering department with gigabytes of program to do it. I once redesigned someone else's design made with discrete germanium transistors.  I guess being in at the beginning of the silicon revolution does make us old as dirt.


Good luck with your eyes.  I lost depth perception anoput five years ago and had to sell my bus and I'm down to driving a class B. Without depth perception, it is impossuble to get a joint, solder and soldering iron in the same location.

[DrivingMissLazy]

You guys are a bunch of babes in the woods! LOL

My first computer work was with analog ball and disc devices. And lots of vacuum tube devices. Talk about being old as dirt.
Richard

DrDave-Reloader: You were a genius building with 74xx. You had to see the whole problem and design a solution. You didn't have the luxury of an entire engineering department with gigabytes of program to do it. I once redesigned someone else's design made with discrete germanium transistors.  I guess being in at the beginning of the silicon revolution does make us old as dirt.


Good luck with your eyes.  I lost depth perception anoput five years ago and had to sell my bus and I'm down to driving a class B. Without depth perception, it is impossuble to get a joint, solder and soldering iron in the same location.

[Dallas]

Richard,
The way you tell all of us young guys, your so old that your first computer had a wooden frame with a bunch of beads on it and you sold the idea to the chinese!

Sorry, I was just kiddin', but still I couldn't resist!!!!

You guys are a bunch of babes in the woods! LOL

My first computer work was with analog ball and disc devices. And lots of vacuum tube devices. Talk about being old as dirt.
Richard

DrDave-Reloader: You were a genius building with 74xx. You had to see the whole problem and design a solution. You didn't have the luxury of an entire engineering department with gigabytes of program to do it. I once redesigned someone else's design made with discrete germanium transistors.  I guess being in at the beginning of the silicon revolution does make us old as dirt.


Good luck with your eyes.  I lost depth perception anoput five years ago and had to sell my bus and I'm down to driving a class B. Without depth perception, it is impossuble to get a joint, solder and soldering iron in the same location.

[DrivingMissLazy]

Yea, Dallas, and the beads were square!
Richard

Richard,
The way you tell all of us young guys, your so old that your first computer had a wooden frame with a bunch of beads on it and you sold the idea to the chinese!

Sorry, I was just kiddin', but still I couldn't resist!!!!

You guys are a bunch of babes in the woods! LOL

My first computer work was with analog ball and disc devices. And lots of vacuum tube devices. Talk about being old as dirt.
Richard

DrDave-Reloader: You were a genius building with 74xx. You had to see the whole problem and design a solution. You didn't have the luxury of an entire engineering department with gigabytes of program to do it. I once redesigned someone else's design made with discrete germanium transistors.  I guess being in at the beginning of the silicon revolution does make us old as dirt.


Good luck with your eyes.  I lost depth perception anoput five years ago and had to sell my bus and I'm down to driving a class B. Without depth perception, it is impossuble to get a joint, solder and soldering iron in the same location.

[Hartley]

DrDave-Reloader: You were a genius building with 74xx. You had to see the whole problem and design a solution. You didn't have the luxury of an entire engineering department with gigabytes of program to do it. I once redesigned someone else's design made with discrete germanium transistors.  I guess being in at the beginning of the silicon revolution does make us old as dirt.


Good luck with your eyes.  I lost depth perception anoput five years ago and had to sell my bus and I'm down to driving a class B. Without depth perception, it is impossuble to get a joint, solder and soldering iron in the same location.

1979 & 1980's history.
I did have a computer in my design department at the time, It was a Bell & Howell Grey Apple II with dual disk drives
and a green screen monitor. A year before that I was working in a design lab using an ICE machine (8051 emulator) and building
LED computer displays for excercise machine prototypes, I also ran all the support on our DEC PDP-11/04 main frame and built
a 600 meter fiber optic multiplexor system to run 4 terminals in another building from scratch/components using TDM on a 9600
baud terminal port.

I left there and went to be avionics installer/tech. King Air-Nav & Autopilot systems and Collins Digital AirNav systems.

I have owned my own DEC PDP-11/04 (real digital) , Microdata Reality System ( RTL ) and a few other power hogs.
just for fun but couldn't afford the electric to run them.

I now have a couple of TerraByte servers at the office with 5 W2000 Pro Servers and 31 XP machines
on a Gigabit-Copper network that I built and I almost forgot 5 MAC G-series machines. A Man Roland 500
printing press, Direct Digital to Printing Plate system. And a Fully Digital Color Printing Press.

And I am only a part-time janitor if you were to see my miniscule paycheck... 10 Years There so far...

I was a GEEK before anyone had invented the word, Like from 6 years old, ( back in the 50's !!)

[uncle ned]

but  do you remember a model 15 telytype    and the keyboard that you could slow down because the women would over run the high speed circuit.  "300 baud"

uncle ned
a realy old geek
"huggy bear"

but never learn to type of spell

[gumpy]

Well, I don't go back quite that far, but here's some names of machines I worked on that you probably won't find today...

Wang
Radio Shack TRS-80, complete with cassette storage. We upgraded from 4K to 8K memory. They sent us a funky chip with holes in it that had connections in the holes, and using a 16d nail, you had to punch out certain connections and plug the chip into a certain place inside the box, and that effectively doubled the memory! It was all magic to us at the time. I programmed a crude version of Space Invaders on it in BASIC!
Apple II Plus and Apple IIE (finally, color and graphics!!)
CDC Cyber (even had a card punch and reader, though that was going "out of style" in favor of the remote time share terminals)
DEC PDP-8, PDP-11, VAX & MicroVAX (VMS is still the best OS ever written!!!)
Commodore Amiga 2000 w/ 40 meg hard drive!!


I just happen to have an Apple IIe and Commodore 64 (128??) in the basement that I'll be getting rid of soon, if anyone really wants to relive the good old days. Oh yeah, there's an Amiga down there, too. I had always hoped my son would get interested in these old machines and want to learn a bit about where the technology started, but they couldn't compete with Gameboy 

[Jeremy]

Back in the very early days of 'home computers' (before that term was even invented), you couldn't buy a computer off-the-shelf, but you could send off for a mail-order kit of parts that you assembled yourself. My Dad had one of the first 'Nascom 2's, which was a very advanced design at the time, but failed to take off. The 'popular' one at the time was the Sinclair Z80, which in fact later became available ready-built. I quite recently heard an interview with a guy from Sinclair who's job it was to fix non-working computers that had been sent back after having been incorrectly built by the customer. Apparently it was quite common to find that components stuck down to the circuit boards with balsa cement rather than solder.

By the time I went to school my family had an Amstrad CPC464, and my best friend had a Commodore Vic20. We would spend hours typing in games in basic from magazines, then spend hours more debugging the programs, then eventually play them for a few minutes before switching off the machines and losing all our work.

By the time I went to university I was very unusual indeed as I had a computer of my own - one of the first IBM 8088 PC clones, which had two floppy drives but no hard disk. Excellent machine it was too!

The Amstrad is still in the family, by the way, and still works perfectly. It's probably quite collectable now.

Jeremy

The Amstrad is