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wow no new posts in days

Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 11:38 pm
by Hearly
heh, it's been slow lately on the boards, is everyone having a nice extended weekend?

Re: wow no new posts in days

Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 3:14 am
by Fawks
NO!  I'm working.  :(

And waiting for 12.  =)

Or maybe 01.  :)

Re: wow no new posts in days

Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 7:19 am
by Journeywoman
*Looks up from study books, shugs and thinks 'I hadn't noticed, to busy studying for exams next week. Extended weekend? What extended weekend? There was no extended weekend in Australia :'( ', goes back to studying.*

Re: wow no new posts in days

Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 2:42 pm
by Hearly
journeywoman wrote:*Looks up from study books, shugs and thinks 'I hadn't noticed, to busy studying for exams next week. Extended weekend? What extended weekend? There was no extended weekend in Australia :'( ', goes back to studying.*

heh, Extended weekend in the US..

Re: wow no new posts in days

Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 3:54 pm
by jnormg
Imagine how it's like for old retired fogies--every day is an extended weekend, with not much else to do but wait for another chapter of something or anything.  I'm going half-crazy from waiting for the next chapter of Subjugation. But I remember what it was like as a student. I worked my way through Engineering school, and believe me, there wouldn't have been time to do any reading even if there had been computers and an internet back in the horse-and-buggy days. (I'm not really that old, but I did graduate from college back in 1961.) Besides, I was too poor to have been able to afford a computer then. :)

Norm Gober

Re: wow no new posts in days

Posted: Mon May 30, 2005 12:55 am
by Spec8472
jnormg wrote:I'm not really that old, but I did graduate from college back in 1961.
You graduated from College then?
My Mother was BORN in 1960. And I'm 24 this year.  :P

Did they have computers back then? ;) hehe.

Re: wow no new posts in days

Posted: Mon May 30, 2005 1:39 am
by jnormg
Most computers in those days were analog, composed of DC operational amplifiers interconnected in such a way as to emulate a physical phenomenon. In my senior year the school purchased a 20-amplifier kit from Heathkit and the students put it together. I had a lot of fun playing around with it.  I still have my old analog computation textbook.

In the late 70's Radio Shack came out with their TRS 80 (trash 80), that was the first widely available 8-bit digitial computer. Then Apple came on the scene. In 1980 I purchased my first digital computer--a 16-bit PDP11-03 as a kit from Heathkit. It had 18 kilobytes of memory and two 8-inch floppy drives. It cost me $5600 and I had to put it together myself. I had to teach myself assembly language because there was not enough memory for the BASIC compiler, the program, and anything left over for data. But I still miss that old PDP11. It was the easiest computer to program I have ever worked with.

Finally, IBM came along and teamed up with Bill Gates and Intel. The rest is history. The Intel 8086 chip (and all its successors) were abominations to program. Eventually, to keep my sanity, I taught myself C and Visual Basic.

In my real career I was an Electronic Systems Engineer and worked pretty much all over the world. But in my retirement I still get a great deal of pleasure from playing around trying to develop some utility application for my own use.

Sorry to ramble but as you can see, I really have enjoyed my experiences with computers.  I think they are here to stay. ;D

Re: wow no new posts in days

Posted: Mon May 30, 2005 11:36 am
by Lochar
Extended weekend.

I have been playing with the wiki a bit though.

Re: wow no new posts in days

Posted: Mon May 30, 2005 11:00 pm
by MISER
Ahh memories of my Commodore 64 and the 128....

Some of the best computer games ever were some of those early original's......... Simple as far as graphic effects and stuff but you had to think and plan and use some strategy...

OK fogey moment over but thanks for the smile's

John