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EDIT 8/2/10 Let's see if newer folk have anything to add.
I'm curious about when you folks embraced computers. Please mark the appropriate catagory as applies to you AFTER reading all the choices because more than one may apply but I'd like to see the one most applicable to your situation.
Don't see the survey Bob.
Need one more catagory Bob. I didn't get mine at home till 2003 and didn't use one at work till 2004.
Don
Pat, looks like others can see it so you may need to clean your cache or reboot/log off-on.
Pops, that's outside the window I am looking at right now, but so you and anyone else can be part of it go ahead and just put a response in text as you've done above. Thanks.
Maybe one of his pole dancin aquaitences borrowed it........:HMMM: :eek:
I have seen some pics he has posted ,those ladies look suspect to me......
:HMMM: :confused: I'm not sure....how do I know if I'm using a computer......?:confused: :LOL:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Firechicken
You lived down wind of the Asarco plant too long didn't you!?:LOL:
I worked for Zenith for 18 1/2 years (I know, a glutton for punishment) and had I the foresight I would have gotten in to them in the early '80's when Zenith first began producing monitors. :CRY: :(
i hate computers :LOL:
Ok, so I added another choice ;) I was a Unix man in a DOS world back in the early 80's :D
I was lucky ..I guess, I had a commador vic 20 in 80 ,81 when they first came out ....I was age 11 approx.Then at 14 I was able to attend a summer college course on basic os....not sure of the laguage name anymore,but still remember the basics.
Then ,I drifted away from them untill around 97 ,now I am back into them ,not only using them , but able to build them now also.
It has reduced my television time to almost 0 now ...a good thing...and has given me the ability to research or look up anything in the world I want,most network stations broadcast all content on the internet ,plus the news ,weather etc can all be obtained by me when I need it.
Most radio stations broadcast on the internet,I would say my primary use is the internet or being online ,whichever terminology you prefer.
I use mine as a tool ,entertainment a learning aid etc,but I must admit ,its the closest thing I have seen to time travel or time loss....:LOL: .... you can loose 3 to 5 hours in a few minutes on a computer......:CRY:
Prior to 1980 (your first choice) I was dealing with IBM 360's (actually as early as 1965) No such thing as a PC back then. We had IBM 407 Accounting Machines and IBM 360-20'2, 30's and a 40. Used punch cards and actually had fun.
Move forward a couple of years, I worked on a Commodore and a Sinclair, then graduated to a Radio Shack TRS80 (Trash 80). Then it was an Osborne (CP/M machine). Got my first IBM PC in 82 at work, and followed it up with a Compaq portable for home. Have had 5 store bought (2 desktops and 3 laptops) and 5 home built PC compatibles desktops since. Currently own one desktop and two laptops, last one acquired in 2006.
I don't think I will ever not have a PC of some flavor again. Too much fun.
Of course this association with computers is solely responsible for my mental state today.:whacked: :LOL:
:LOL: Yaa we try'd ta sue 'em cuz uv all thu problums, but the liar said we din't have enuf led in our blud 'er sum'n lyk thet ta bee apart uv it. I offerd ta increese hiz blud/led mixture but, he din't tayk me upon ma offer tho...Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Parmenter
Seriously though, my first computer at home was in '96 and my first one at work was in '96 as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mrmustang
:eek: 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. I can see that you were a rebel back then and time hasn't changed you....sheesh! :LOL: :3dSMILE:
Unix huh? :cool: I spent some time with Linux a while back. Wish I had more time to learn it. Just not high enough on my list of priorities though I guess.
I had a Commodore 64 with a dot-matrix printer back in the late 80's that I used as a word processor. Since I never really did anything else with it, I don't count it. Later, in the early 90's, I had an old IBM at school that I used only as a word processor again. Finally, in 1996, the school offered a week-long computer basics course for teachers and I took it. Before that week was over I had bought my first "real" computer and went online. Been surfing the 'net ever since.:D
I have a love-hate relationship with these things. When it's working good, I love it;) ; when it doesn't do what I expect, it can put me into a screaming rage in a matter of seconds.:mad: I have threatened to stick my 12-gauge in the CD slot and blow it to Hell; I have threatened to throw it through the window behind it; I have threatened to pummel it with my 10-pound sledge hammer; I have threatened to plug it into some 220 power and watch it burn!:eek: The stupid thing just ignores me when I get like that which makes me even more irate.:rolleyes: Actually I think this thing has a mind of its own and it likes to go visit the computer tech guy at the local Staples store. I take to him, pick it up a couple of days later, and the dumb thing is happy again for another year or so...:whacked: :LOL: :LOL:
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.:D
Poll does NOT show up for me either.:(Quote:
Originally Posted by PatMonaco
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. :3dSMILE:
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
:HMMM:
Bob,
You have to go way back to my first computer. A slab of granite and hammers and chisels. :LOL:
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 :o
I resemble that remark. :LOL: :LOL: :LOL:Quote:
Originally Posted by DennyW
Quote:
Originally Posted by Firechicken
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.
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a15...h98/comp03.gif
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......:LOL: :rolleyes:
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.......:LOL:
This one is pretty disturbing....
Free Movies & Documentaries - Tempbot (2006)
Uhhhhh but now the first two choices are not mutually exclusive and we have poll muckage. :LOL:Quote:
Originally Posted by mrmustang
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.:eek: :LOL: :LOL: :LOL:Quote:
Ok, so I added another choice I was a Unix man in a DOS world back in the early 80's
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. :LOL: :LOL: 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.
I worked on the computer staff at Bradley University in 1962 when I was a sophomore. Our main computer was an IBM 1620 with a whole 16K (that's K, not M) of memory. It was the size of a small car. I learned Fortran - punched cards in and out. No tape, no disk. I also learned and taught Basic as a grad student.
In the 60's and 70's, I did quite a bit of application work on Burroughs B5500 and B6700 mainframes. We had moved up to teletype input and line printer output.
In 1982, the company I worked for equipped most of us with the first IBM PCs - with a mind-boggling 64K on board. Our main applications were Basic and VisiCalc.
The PC sitting on my desk now is more powerful than the Burroughs B6700 mainframe that did all our corporate systems and accounting back in the day.
Commodore Vic-20 was my first.
5 kb of RAM and a cassette drive for sequential data storage - Oooooh Too Cool - :LOL:
Once I wrote and executed my fist 'Hello World' code, I was hooked.
Commodore VIC-20 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hard to imagine isn't it Jack. My first job after the USAF (1970) was as a production expediter at Teledyne. We were making guidance computers for the Atlas Centaur missles. We hand wired a memory board (thin gauge copper wire through ferrite rings, if I remember correctly, on a board about 1' sq), also a mere 16k! The enclosure was a clamshell affair milled from solid billet aluminum.Quote:
Originally Posted by Henry Rifle
Anyway, very interesting and revealing responses. Thanks folks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Parmenter
Bob, yeah that's Torodial Core Memory. I made a subtle joke about it in a computing thread on the board a while back. I had begun to think that nobody knew what it was.
Anyway, we had the same thing in our Delco Carousel IVE Inertial Navigation Systems. They were manufactured beginning in the late 70's we had a whopping 32K in them. Technology came a long way though in a short time and shrunk the size necessary as our "board" was (as I recall) a type of fabric that was folded over and over and eventually came out to about the size of two 9 volt batteries stacked together on their sides.
Amazing how much things change in such a short time....
The first computer that I got was in 1985. I have been working on them pretty much since.
Spent 15 years working on IBM Midrange systems (AS/400). Then moved on to software support (PC). Then on to PC repair. Now I do pretty much anything at work that involves a computer. I support approx 5000 computers at work. And 6 at home.
Not many dull moments with 3 teenage kids trying to mess everything up all of the time! :rolleyes:
First exposure to these infernal machines was in the Navy in the early sixties; that's all it was, though, exposure - I never touched one, then. The company I spent my working life with started using them in local offices in about 1965, for accounting, meter reading data, and inventory control and planning. Our first home unit was in the mid to late seventies, IIRC, and the names of Atari, Commodore, and Radio Shack keep passing through my memory. Since then, we've had Apples, Macs, and Dells; have one Dell running, at this time, and two others in reserve, plus two Macs on the shelf. I sure wish I could figure out just how to really put these things to work, but when faced with a recalcitrant unit, I tend to revert to caveman, and reach for a hammer - not such a good thing. :3dSMILE:
Bttt if you haven't already, please vote above.
I just Reread my old post.. it's interesting because a couple months ago, I bought a Commodore 64 off Ebay to relearn the old Basic computer language, and ended up downloading or buying the old games I used to play on it as a kid..
Hey Bob, betcha remember these!Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Parmenter
The last one is a close-up of a core plane. The distance between the rings is roughly 1 mm (0.04 in). The green horizontal wires are X; the Y wires are dull brown and vertical, toward the back. The sense wires are diagonal, colored orange, and the inhibit wires are vertical twisted pairs
Yes Larry, I do. And I remember ours were all hand threaded while looking through a magnifier! Those gals had a lot more patience than I could have mustered.