I graduated HS in '72 and there were no computers in the school office. My brother was a '78 grad and went to college for comp programming - then landed a job with Nationwide Insurance. Y2K worries had him flying all over the country because he knew cobol. Now he heads their disaster recovery team.

Jim Henderson mentioned the 8" floppies with Basic 1.0 - that was the first pc I messed with.

Kids today have no clue how many pages of commands are required for that mouse click...........

 

Speaking of advancement...the call has been made to ditch my archaic P4/2.4GHZ computer tonight....moving on to a P4 3.06GHZ / 800MHZ FSB HT enabled computer...If you want the nitty gritty I'm always more then happy to share but I dont want to disrupt the flow of this content (more then I already have)


Back on track...I donated the left over 486/386's I had this summer to the local highschool computer engineering department. I used to make them into linux box'es but now the old Tbirds and P2's are so cheap (and customers generally give me there old stuff when they upgrade) that I make linux servers out of whatever I have...so no more need for it. I sometimes wonder though...businesses are supposed to make money...mine usaully breaks even, but I guess thats a good thing...since I'm in school and dont have to dedicate alot of time to it. I just do a little hear and there and it pays for all my computers as I go through school. That works right?


So what about careers I never really thought that people on a ford truck site would really be "into" computers, always thought of this as more of a blue collar enviroment. What do you guys do to put the bread on the table?

Chado

 

Those old 386's and 486's make great print servers. Good paper weights too.

 

The new network printers are ruining my fun with those :P When $500 > Printers are coming with 10/100 connections, it takes away the fun of building a few computers to run paralell port printers. For a while though a few USB printers on an old p2 worked as well. In my house I cant get anyone to invest in the higher end stuff with me (I'd rather share a high end laser and a high end ink jet then have middle of the road stuff.) I think the reason why is because they know if they wait long enough I'll get fed up and buy whatever I want and they will get to use it if they ask nicely lol.

Chado

 

***

On a really big sidenote here I just registered for intel's ICC conference on Nov. 12 In Toronto. I know its a long shot but is anyone else going to that event? Or did anyone get to goto the event already?

I may register for the one in december...its for engineers/integrators only so I have to get lots of sleep the night before heh. These guys know to much for there own good.


Chado

 

My first home computer was an Atari 800 with 5-1/4" single-sided, single-density disk drive, and a 300 baud modem (vs 56,000 baud today). It used a TV and projected a 40 character display (vs 80 today). My first work PC had an 8088 CPU and 10MB hard drive using DOS 2.1. We had Epson dot matrix printers.

 

Man- are you guys stirring up memories...

DEC-10
VAX
PDP-11
Pascal/Fortran/Cobol
AppleII
My first IBM PC Junior when my friend had a Commodore 64

I remember the first time I saw a MAC- around 1983 or 1984. Blew me away.

Anybody remember the old text "Star Trek" game that we used to play on the dot matrix terminals.

I too am suprised by how many old computer geeks we got here in FTE world... guess I'm just one of many.

 

I remember all of those but I wasn't a computer geek, I worked on wideband communications and we had computers around and I occasionally worked on them, I started learning more when I got tired of going to fetch a computer geek to check out the computers to see if I had fixed them right.
Any body here remember the Armys portable artillery computer FADAC, I wish I had kept one, it was portable provided there were enough of you to pick it up.

 

Oh yeah, and a computer 'expert' back in 1984 that told me that PC's were a fad and waste of money.

Mainframes and dumb terminals were they "way to go" he said.

snort....

If geek offends- not my intention.