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Steve |
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But goof ball programmers like myself sometimes like to think of things in base 2, base 8 and base 16. You know there are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't. :JEKYLHYDE |
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Steve |
Steve,
After we got real words and could keep them on something besides rocks, the language got all fouled up. :rolleyes: Boy does your remark about trying to explain Hex, Binary, and Decimal bring back some frustrating memories. Then try throwing Octal in with it. I finally found a calculator that would convert between the different ones and showed that to a guy and he still told me that no computer could make words out of just 0s and 1s. I watched a show on TV last night about the beginning of the computer age and boy did some of that stuff bring back memories. The old black monitors and no graphics or words, just code that you had to interpret. And then they showed the first portable computer and what a laugh. I think it weighed about 25 pounds and looked like a medium sized suitcase. Darn for the good old days of rocks and chisels. :D Ron **) |
I had one of those...a Compaq 'luggable'. The keyboard used to clip onto the bottom of the 'suitcase' and was connected by a spiral wire. screen was about 7 inches diagonally...I lugged it all over the US!!!
And there are 3 kinds of people, those that can count and those that can't! |
I was a professor of engineering for some years. Always amazed the students with the numbers I knew. Those first laptops were like a 30 pound rock. The keyboard was the protection for the CRT and floppy drive(s).
Those were the days, working 3 hours a day and that was every other day. No wonder I quit and went to work for some that would pay me. :D :D |
:)
Hey Glyn, Do you still have that portable luggage carrier? I wish I had saved some of the first computers and things that I had. But like with cars, I couldn't wait to get the newest. All I have is two of the old aluminum cards with rows of magnetic dots on them that we had to write the program onto. They also served as the memory banks in the big computers and were called program stores. Just to update a medium sized office back then took all day and half the night. Now it is all done by the computers themselves and in about 20 minutes for a full upgrade of program and service packs. Ron :) |
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That's awesome that some of you had possessed these early computers. The earliest one we had was a Coleco ADAM, basically a clumsy word processor. We traded it back to Montgomery Ward for a Commodore 64. Wards honored that no appreciable promised software was ever created for the Coleco. The 64 became our first business computer when my son (mostly) and I typed in an Apple Basic "spreadsheet" program that allowed it to calculate payroll. Both Apple and Commodore used the same Z80 processor chip, programmed by MicroSoft. Wish I'd bought their stock back then. Had about a dozen employees at the time. It was a worthy mad scramble saver since I paid every Friday afternoon for the preceding 7 days. Selected the individual and entered the timecard and voila. Miller time for me an hour sooner. The 64 also allowed me to send a statement out clearly showing a balance of invoices paid/unpaid and the resulting total due. That beat, by far, the handwritten reminder note that I had been sending out with the latest invoices. Awesome being one of the overused catch-phrases of our present world. :rolleyes: ... |
Ron...wish I'd kept all the stuff I had! I started in the computer industry in 1970, but wrote Fortran programs from 1968 onwards on a GIANT CDC machine we had at university! I worked on the old mainframes with punched cards, chad (!), paper tape, 8K replaceable hard drives etc. Ah, giants walked the Earth in those days...LOL
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Glyn, I remember when we had the big rolls of punched tape that had to be ran through a reader. A real pain the the A**. I stared in computers in the 50s when the first one was nothing but some relays that you had to wire certain ways to get them to do whatever you wanted them too. The paper tape and punch cards were big advances back then. Our switching computers then got the IBM Trouble card punchers that punched holes in a long heavy paper card and you had to sit down and decipher just what it was saying as the holes were related to binary. Isn't it amazing that now a pocket phone or calculator has more power than the computers they had on the moon landers. One thing I don't miss is the horrible racket those thousands of relays would make when things got busy. Ron :) |
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My favorite acronyms that peope use, but don't know what they mean:
SNAFU JAFO SWAG FUBAR FUPA FNG Well, this story has grown tiresome, I'm going to go listen to my favorite 80's band, Haulin' Oats. |
:p
Miles, You forgot: GIGO FRED Ron :) |
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JAFO Just Another F***ing Observer SWAG Scientific Wild A$$ Guess FUBAR F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition FUPA Fat Upper P*ssy Area FNG F***ing New Guy I had to look up JAFO, and I forgot using SWAG before. Most of them I used in the Navy. Ron, GIGO (seen it JIJO before but the same) Garbage/Junk In Garbage/Junk Out. FRED F***ing Ridiculous Electronic Device (I deal with these on a regular basis) |
Joe,
SNAFU is term quite common in the military: SNAFU = Situation Normal All Fu*ed Up Ron :) |
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Kaypro was the first "luggable". It ran CP/M
Dang it was heavy. Ron, you probably know all about this baby. :D :D :D :D :D |
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Tru, It was heavy but not like Granito. It was made of Granite and by the time you got the block of Granite, hammers, and chisels into the pack, it was portable only by my pet dinosaur. Ron :LOL: |
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