My best friend is a dead man...!

[palmettomoon]

My dad (82) complains, "Dem damned 'pooters done ruint dis country!" LOL.

I remind him that I've had a great career(s) due to the personal computer and my use of them enabled me to take care of him at 56 rather than having to report to a job everyday

 

[basstracker89]

My dad (82) complains, "Dem damned 'pooters done ruint dis country!" LOL.

I remind him that I've had a great career(s) due to the personal computer and my use of them enabled me to take care of him at 56 rather than having to report to a job everyday

Bless you for taking care of him. My wife and I have learned to love working from home

 

[JimmyJet]

In late 1983, while waiting on our first child to be born, I went to Target and bought a Commodore 64 and a cassette drive. Shortly after that I invested in a floppy disc drive and a Commodore color monitor and then a dot matrix printer. My first program was Zork I, and I played that for hours (text adventure game). Followed by Zork 2 and Zork 3 right after the birth of my daughter. I bought a disc notcher so I could write to both sides of the 5 1/4 floppy disc which cost about $1.25 each. Later on I got a 300 baud modem. Dial the phone, if a computer answered unplug the handset and plug the cord into the back of the modem and start hitting the enter key. Sometime you got lucky and the BBS would answer up and you were "online".

Other computers came later with big hard drives and faster modems but there is still a warm spot in my heart for that old C-64.

The Tandy computer a friend loaned me had an adventure game with it called "Desert Sands of Egypt" that my (then) nearly 5 year old son wanted to play…. I told him he needed to be able to "read" to play it…. so sat down and taught him phonetics and away he went! So, I guess there could be considered SOME value in computers besides something to waste your time….


There's nothing better than getting paid to look out the window....


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Bagman]

Oh, the memories...

 

[CardsFan]

First "real" Job was after graduating U of Louisville working for a company doing a tank simulation for ARI. There was no internet, no HTML, no graphical User Interfaces at that time.

A Sargent (who turned out to be a good friend) showed me something DARPA was doing. We could dial in to a DARPA "site" using a modem that presented a menu of documents that you could view, all in text format. Everything was in text format.

You could use the arrow keys up and down to select a document to download and display the text of that document.

Coolest thing ever at the time, other than the low res simulation we were building at the time.

 

[Klif]

I was stationed at NSA from 1976 - 1981 and during that time I got exposure to a lot of computers, including some massive main frames. You programmed them with punch cards you put into a deck of punch cards and then fed into a vacuum reader that sucked them up and ran them through the reader and out the other side.

Biggest thing I saw was about 3 basements deep and it was a Cray Super Computer. You had to don a clean suit, hair net and shoe covers and go through an air lock. It was cold as could be inside and noisy too. You had specific times you could do your work on it and it required the same stack of punch cards. Stuff printed out on page printers, huge impact printers that printed a full page of 11x14 tractor fed paper at about 1 second per page. Talk about noisy. I was impressed to say the least.

Worked in A Group and we were developing a system where 5 mainframes all talked together and worked together. My job was to cause them to crash and I got to be really pretty good at it. Give a computer enough messed up data fast enough and it went to its knees. That was a long way from my Air Force specialty of High Frequency Radio and High Speed Morse Code. Hey it was a living and enabled me to work a regular 40 hour a week job at a coin shop along with my full time Air Force job. We actually we able to buy food in Maryland at the time.

 

[basstracker89]

Yep, I remember the cards. large computers, cold temps, curcuit boards and so on. I figured if I said reel to reel that would all be conveyed. Brings back memories. Remember binary numbers programming

 

[wildbill1973z28]

My friend who may or may not end up in a early grave due to his most recent prank.
He sent me this youtube clip and the email was titled:
If you can recall doing this.
Congratulations, you are an old fart..!

Got him back though.
In my reply, I politely (maybe not so) that he was only a year younger than me.
Still, he didn't have to be so mean and remind me that I'm getting older.
Maybe I'll get his kids a drum set and trumpet for the tot's birthdays.

it was like yesterday! i was being booked into Earl LEE fine jail!

 

[NewLeaf]

Floppy disk.....reel to reel

If I remember right? it took about 5mins for them to warm up. I remember the teacher learning to turn them on before we got to class haha.

 

[hdgapeach]

Wow! Brings back memories. Took my first computer class at Tri County Tech in Pendleton, SC. Arnie Lillyhammer was the instructor. He came to TCT straight from the Navy, where he was a part of the early computer age for the USN. Learned on the IBM. Had to boot up with two 5-1/4 floppy discs. The only stuff we worked with was MS DOS, Word Perfect, Lotus 123 and Data Base. We thought we were going to be something special back then. That stuff doesn't even rate paperweight status today.