Get off my LAWN! "Grumpy Old Farts"

[ahc]

Man, the equipment you all are referring to I remember but it makes me feel so dang old!
I regret that my old friend advised me in 1985 and even as late as 1995 to invest in Apple and Microsoft. I had some modest surplus money I could have invested, who knows-- I could have been a millionaire by now. I'm not asking but I wouldn't be surprised if some of you GOF's are actually millionaires from investments when you were younger. You all are obviously much smarter than me.

In my final years working in IT, I'm a pc tech and webmaster. Thankfully, most of my work has become very automated. All our Dell computers are 'tool less maintenance' and most of my installations involve entering licensing information in programs already installed on the PC's. I gave at my own low level 30 years of support and I'm glad it's so easy today compared to 30 years ago. I don't miss having to program a network card's IRQ so it doesn't knock out the sound card. I'm so fortunate that everything JUST WORKS out of the box. I have about two years to go and I'd like it to be pretty smooth sailing.

A lot of the government part of my IT career included 24/7 support. That made it tough to play on a part time basis and I hated it after being a full time player prior to my getting a "real" job and being a "suit". And yeah, I wish I had invested in Apple and MS a lot earlier than I did. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

 

[beans-on-toast]

....webmaster....

After retiring maybe you can become a hibachi grill master.

 

[alaskaleftybass]

In 1998-1999 I worked as a project manager for a county in Oregon and their financials were on a Unisys Mainframe (is that correct?) system. We had a Unisys trained programmer on staff and it was so complex and green screen keyboard commands and everyone hated it. I was glad all I had to do was set up a local shortcut for logging into the mainframe. Then in 1999 I returned to Sitka and worked for the City. We had an IBM mainframe and the IS director was a programmer in IBM and every three months IBM techs would come by and inspect and maintain the equipment. In 2010 we switched to Tyler New World Financials and that is so cool because it's a web browser interface. If there are problems with it our IT director has to contact Tyler tech support. All I do now is supply the link in the browser and make sure they have the right default printer.

 

[alaskaleftybass]

After retiring maybe you can become a hibachi grill master.

 

[ahc]

Now I'm HANGRY!!!

 

[beans-on-toast]

A lot of the government part of my IT career included 24/7 support. That made it tough to play on a part time basis and I hated it after being a full time player prior to my getting a "real" job and being a "suit". And yeah, I wish I had invested in Apple and MS a lot earlier than I did. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

If You Invested $100 in Apple's IPO, This Is How Much Money You'd Have Now | The Motley Fool

 

[alaskaleftybass]

If You Invested $100 in Apple's IPO, This Is How Much Money You'd Have Now | The Motley Fool

I'm not even going to look. I'll be crying all night!

 

[Bobhmcs]

Got zero pain here, so no need for meds. Wish they still made APCs though. Way more effective than ibuprofen. Cant drink alcohol anyhow... Developed a sensitivity 10 years ago. Swallow one beer, I act and feel like a stroke victim.

It was found that Phynacetin (the P in APC) was hard on the liver so APC in any form such as Anacin was pulled from the Market. In their infinite wisdom they replaced it with Acetomenaphine aka Tylenol. Tylenol is even harder on the liver than any pain killer out there. In fact when individuals overdose on pain medication such as Vicodin the concern is much less with the opioid reaction than the Acetaminophen liver damage. So there is your Pharmaceutical class for today Boys and Girls.
;[)
Bob

 

[GwenOnBass]

That I've time on board on steam-powered computers of lore doth not make me a computer whizz. Every major newspaper in the world ran modified Digital PDP-11s on the news side. Other departments like classified, accounting, circulation, and advertising might (usually did) run other systems. In the beginning there was Kermit ...

Life in the ink lane lead (<-pun) from typographical ninja to a much wider role .... And by "peak career" the computer side of things appeared too dreary for me to pursue. The "Big Guys" never truly understood the publishing industry, IMO. Finding any random anybody to come in to lead a big computer project is an easy thing. Finding a project lead who actual newspapermen listen to is another thing entirely. And tech companies, while used to managing weirdos, found newspaper people too weird for even their standards

From my desk today, what I see is a single tree on the hillside is flame-red. There is still more green than yellow. I'm going to say peak autumn is about three weeks distant.

These are better concerns to me than concerns about putting the next edition on the street

 

[Deleted member 268085]

I remember those mainframe days. When your cards got mangled by a reader, you had to know how to disassemble it and clear the pathway. The 360 had large consoles.

The first microcomputers that I used in the 70's ran CP/M. Some of the hardware was on S100 cards plugged into a bus. Floppies were 8". The ones that I used were rack based. Altair and IMSAI were two popular products. You could key in an address and data from the front panel to get the computer to boot, like the DEC PDP computers. In the 80's I designed computers, Basic Input Output Systems (BIOS) that were loaded onto EPROMS to access the hardware, disk drivers cards, and video displays. We focused on video and imaging research. This was all before Microsoft and the IBM PC. For many years those machines were considered toys, not able to do anything useful other than to play with. Computer games started, there was pong and chess.

It was an exciting time. New hardware revolutionized the industry. Big companies would take years of incremental research advancements and shrink it onto a single board or chip. Before there was autofocus cameras that we take for granted, people worked for years coming up with algorithms, trying all sorts of approaches. At one point, I worked on constructing 3D images from narrow focus 2D slices. Not as easy as you'd think. Very common in medical imaging today. It took a lot of work to get there. For the most part, advancements in hardware and processing speed drove the advancements. It made things that worked only in the lab practical for others to use. Now things like that can run on a laptop instead of a multi-million dollar machine.
View attachment 4005961

My first personal computer was a Z80 S100 buss machine. Built it from scratch. Each memory card was 8K x 8. Lots of voltage regulators and heat sinks. I had 2 8" DSDD drives that I had to write the drivers for using ASM that was part of CP/M. I also had a 3K BASIC ROM in it. Didn't get into Forth until later. Can't remember the brand of terminal I used. Think it was an ADM from the late '70s.

 

[SoulReflection]

My first computer was a "portable". Small screen, weighed a ton:

Then on to the IBM PC XT, a couple of Mac's and what about this workhorse:

This was used to "program" parking machines in the field (mid to late '80's). If you let the battery die, you had to start all over again.

 

[the slug]

I got a stainless steel chain mail glove after too many boneheaded maneuvers with wrenches.
they work great for prostate exams as well



View attachment 4004823

 

[SoulReflection]

Ya, but, how are they for playing bass?

 

[the slug]

^Only for metal

 

[GwenOnBass]

My first computer was a "portable". Small screen, weighed a ton:

View attachment 4006712

Then on to the IBM PC XT, a couple of Mac's and what about this workhorse:

View attachment 4006711

This was used to "program" parking machines in the field (mid to late '80's). If you let the battery die, you had to start all over again.

Ah, the Compugraphic MDT. Truly futuristic. Compugraphic MDT 350 – Time-Line Computer Archive

 

[Jeff Scott]

My first computer was a "portable". Small screen, weighed a ton:

View attachment 4006712

That's the first one I used, too. It was my brothers and he loaned it to me for awhile in 1987 (he probably still has it, among his collection of antique radios and TVs).

 

[GwenOnBass]

Went down a personally provoked memory hole (presumably in search of something) with the Compugraphic flashback.

Cold type.

and me with no methadone.

 

[alaskaleftybass]

One of my life regrets is that I didn't hop into the IT field much sooner than I did. Also I'm sorry I didn't take the travel training I was offered. I might have gotten much further along. I was obsessed to own in a computer ever since I saw Harrison Ford use one with voice com in Bladerunner. But I couldn't afford the computers back then. I never connected the dots to maybe even lease or buy a Radio Shack on time. My son had a Commodore 64 and got pretty good at it.

As they said, hindsight is 20/20!

 

[biguglyman]

As they said, hindsight is 20/20!

Funny you mentioned early computer adoption. My dad used to work for a rather small branch of NASA based at the Dudley Observatory on the campus of the State University at Albany, NY. He used to take me to work with him occasionally to get me out of my mother's air. (I was "a handful" as they used to say.) One day he took me into this hot, noisy room full of big grey cabinets. After he and a couple other guys fed reels of perforated paper into a cabinet next to what looked like a big typewriter, said typewriter "came to life" and typed "K-6 and 7-8". Dad pointed to the K-6 on the left and said: "Those are your cards, you have a king and a 6." He then explained the basic rules of blackjack to me and I spent many happy hours being taught how to play blackjack by what must have been one of the earlier Minivac computers.

 

[ahc]

The Osbourne 1 was the first "portable" computer I ever played with. It belonged to a lady friend's father. I didn't know CP/M so not much happened. With the computer, that is.