Thread: Poll: you and computers

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In 1988, and coming back to the office after building a garbage burning plant in Maine, the powers above sat me down in front of a Digital dumb terminal and said that I should now start designing turbine modifications and uprates. Two years later they plunked an IBM 286 in front of me a told me to do the same thing, but now we are Intranetted. From there - newer, bigger, faster, (more fragile units) were plunked down for me to work on - then I cashed in my chips and retired.

My first home unit was a real POS that died very quickly. The next was a home built with some help from a friend. Two or three Dell's later, I'm back to a pretty nice homebuilt - finished a couple of months ago. There is another ~165 post thread somewhere(Need a New Computer) here that describes my angst and some help from friends here coping with my new build. And again, would like to thank them for their help.

Originally Posted by PatMonaco

Don't see the survey Bob.

Poll does NOT show up for me either.

What operating system are you using?

My cache is empty (just before launching Internet Explorer).

EDIT: Found the poll on page 2 of this thread.

Actually,though I don't think this is what Bob had in mind, the first computer I had any dealing with was part of an anti mortar radar set I worked on in '62 while in the employ of Uncle Sam. I didn't realize the significance of the binary system then as at 18 I was more interested in chasing skirts.

A donated IBM 360 in high school (1970-74). Don't remember if it had a bona-fide OS with it, but I do remember the boot loader requiring you to set set 16 DIP switches and press a "load" button, then repeat 20-30 more times. Did everything in direct machine language on IBM punch cards. No assemblers or compilers, no word processors to write the code with. Mis-type one keystroke and you get to start the card over (80 characters per card).

My first home PC was built around 1978 or so. Myself and one of the other Jr engineers took a "spare" DEC LSI 11/03 card cage home and built a small chassis for it. Had the power of the shop's DEC mainframe but in a nice small desktop package. Two 8" SS-SD floppy drives that gave around 180kB of storage each. One disc carried an abbreviated version of the RTX OS, along with a BASIC tokenizer and a FORTRAN 4 compiler. The second disk was for your application program and data storage.

Currently have a workstation at the shop using XP-Pro, and a Dell laptop at home with SUSE linux. Tried to run Umbunto on the Dell but gave up after three nights due to video issues.

Cheers, Mark

Bob,

You have to go way back to my first computer. A slab of granite and hammers and chisels.

Actually it was back in the late 50s and early 60s and the things took up two stories and had to be programmed by wiring between terminals. They also had thousands of relays and were very slow.

Ron

Originally Posted by DennyW

Sounds like some of you guys are truly antiques.

I resemble that remark.

Originally Posted by Firechicken

Oh sure, that's just great! Tamper with the data and skew all of the survey results. Destroy the pure scientifically collected results we could have had. Go ahead and add items that weren't selectable by the rest of us....Now we'll never know what the true results would have been.

While you are correct, you and good folks like Ken (NTFDAY) understand, Bill felt it important to overlay what he thought was important, rather than let me get the data I was looking for. But I think I can adjust the data accordingly.

We fed punchcard machines in place where I was in the 70s but I refuse to call them computers relative to PCs which I got my 1st about 1985??--That was before they had hard drives.

I got hooked on computers in 1963 using FORTRAN II when "Graphics" consisted in sending a comand for a 35 mm camera to take a black and white picture of a CRT display and the output (from an IBM 7094) came back to you as a 35 mm film strip. I used FORTRAN and ALGOL-60 till sometime in the 1980s when I bought a Sinclair for home use (with extra 16K of memory!), then a Commodore and then a scratch built XT. They did not get office PCs at my job until the mid-80s and we had a series of research computers such as an HP 7000 and other mid-size computers. Before I retired we used desktop WINDOWS applications along with connections to several UNIX machines. All along I have just been a programmer/user and although I modified my first XT it is only this year that I have tried to build my own system and found I have a lot to learn about the hardware. I am trying to build a small 8-core Beowulf using four PC boxes with duocore CPU, but I see the way the hardware improves/changes rapidly so it will be obsolete in a year but still a good learning experience and maybe my son can use it as a "Lab" while he works on a part time online MS. I am hoping to get this system running while the cold weather holds so I can get back to the roadster when Spring breaks here.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder

My kid had a Comadore 64, if that counts...I was not interested. About 1990, the father in law got the wife interested on these BBs(Bulletin Boards).we got a used 286, windows 3.1.............have had about 10 since....now, the wife has hers and I have my laptop in the living room with my 50 in big screen.............

Of course ,you know I have a video related to this......

Free Movies & Documentaries - The Secret History of Hacking

Free Movies & Documentaries - Narcotics - Don't Copy That Floppy (1992)

Free Movies & Documentaries - Save the Internet!

and a look at what might be around the corner.......
This one is pretty disturbing....
Free Movies & Documentaries - Tempbot (2006)

Originally Posted by mrmustang

Ok, so I added another choice I was a Unix man in a DOS world back in the early 80's

Uhhhhh but now the first two choices are not mutually exclusive and we have poll muckage.

Ok, so I added another choice I was a Unix man in a DOS world back in the early 80's

God I hope not! When I was starting out in the IBM world we were told that Unix and eunuchs were words that were spelled differently, pronounced the same, and were similar in meaning.

I started using computers around 1990.. first computer I ever used was a Commodore
64, remember playing the game called pidgin. We later upgraded into a IBM PS/2 all in one, that had win 3.1, I remember playing Sopwith and The red Barron. I now build them, service them, upgrade them.. I have built 2 computers, and I recently changed to run Ubuntu linux on my main computer.

I was introduced to computers in the mid 80's at work. It was a print shop so we had MACs. So, I've used MACs mostly over the years. Today it's 2 MAC desktops, 1 MAC laptop & 1 PC desktop. And, a couple MACs no longer in service, but they still work, so I have them packed away...........Justin Case. My Wife has a PC & my Son has a PC he built himself. It has multiple screens, & multiple keyboards & some sort of fancy cooling system. Kind of a SiFi lookin' thing.