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I took my first programming class in 1982, the first year after my schools' switch over from punch cards. The following year I harmlessly hacked into the program that our economics professor put out for extra credit multiple choice tests I swear it was to teach her about embedding security stops in her work..

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Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

While we're running down memory lane, I'll add that a friend who worked at IBM way back in the days when it was the "physicists" who worked on the early computers came up to me one day and said "I ran across something I thought you might like to have" and handed me a book. It looked pretty old and didn't have any labeling on the outside. I opened it to find it was an original operations manual for a Univac. Pretty cool to flip through.

I still remember being so happy I could copy my programs I wrote on the C64 to my cassette tape drive. Couldn't afford the floppy drive.

And my first simulator was a racing one...Pit Stop. It was a C64 cartridge. I loved that game, and actually built a set of pedals for it using actual video game pedals and wired them to the custom joysticks we had already built for the Atari 2600 that used real video game joysticks and buttons.


--Donnie

Donnie, did you write part of Apache?

Every now and again, I catch "djb@redhat.com" in a man page.

I'll disagree on Vista however. I've got it now, and I haven't had a moment of trouble out of it. When I first got it, I set it up to not pester me anytime I tried to do anything useful, and turned off the eye candy, and it's been solid as a rock ever since. I don't see what the fuss is about.

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Karl S.
2014 Baby, 2014 House, 2013 Ford Focus ST, 2013 BMW 328i, 1994 Mercedes E320
(Insert passive aggressive signature line here)

x2 to a point. It bombs out the current version of IE now and then, but otherwise it's been solid for me too. I was preinstalled on my new laptop (March '07) and I considered wiping it out and putting on XP, but after giving it a run, it really does integrate media better than XP.

My biggest complaint is how much of a RAM hog it is, but with more than 2GB of RAM, it runs quickly... granted with XP and the same amount of RAM, it would run 5x faster. - AB

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'14 Toyota Sequoia Platinum 4WD
Super Westerfield Bros - '93 Integra - LeChump Du Jour
STX 93 - Scion FR-S

No, I didn't write part of apache. I might have a patch or two in there, but nothing of significance. I've had a few patches in the Linux kernel, and wrote some of the boot up sequence for Linux. And since a large percentage of the web servers run Linux...

As for Vista, it's gotten better (thanks to the updates and people figuring out what to turn on and off), but it's still a mystery to me how it was such a big step on the wrong direction.


--Donnie

Yep, my Dad and I have paid for more than a few sets of tires for the Hollis'!!!

Does he have anything to do with the current generations of FS? Or did he sell it back in the day?

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Todd Breakey
STS 42 - 1992 Sunburst Miata
Dammit!
"You souldn't play leap frog with a porcupine. You might get hurt." - Eliza

IIRC, Andy got out of the business after he finished F-15 Strike Eagle. I played that one back in the day. - AB

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'14 Toyota Sequoia Platinum 4WD
Super Westerfield Bros - '93 Integra - LeChump Du Jour
STX 93 - Scion FR-S

I mentioned Vista to a friend who works for Microsoft, and he put it something like this: "People wanted more security and digital rights stuff. We gave it to them."

There's a lesson there.

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Martyn Wheeler
AXing Kit's '05 Mazda 3, #29 HStock
(when The Gonzo Symphonic allows)

What he really meant was "our big corporate partners wanted ...", though.

End users sure don't want more DRM. Thank you, Apple, for helping.


--Donnie

Actually I believe the bugs would get into the relay contacts and keep them from closing.

When I was at U of I we learned to program in Fortran. We too used the punched cards. You learned early on to either number them and/ or draw a diagonal line across the whole bunch so that if they got mixed it was a bit easier to put back in order.

I recall one of the delightful capabilities of Fortran was it would self correct errors. Of course this self correction led to many, many more errors. Soooo much fun!

Ron

Ron,

Fortran was THE thing for sure. By the time I got out of grad school (NCSU Mech Eng), I was a semi-expert in it along, unfortunately, with IBM 370 JCL. Fortunately, while I was in grad school this thing called a terminal came along and eliminated the need to actually punch cards (now you work with your "deck" on screen, lol) then followed by the IBM PC release and remote connections to TUCC (Triangle University Computing Center -- where the two shared IBM mainframes resided) via a sweet 300 baud auditory modem.

Re punch cards, for anyone there at the time, recall waiting in those long lines at comp center at NCSU in the late 70's just to get the privilege of using a punch machine to create your deck, then submitting said deck to reader (another line during busy times), then standing around the "public printer" to wait for your output (if lucky, 10 minutes, if not perhaps 45min) only to then find the first of many errors to come so you can then go stand in line again and start the process over -- great fun. It was always amazing how crowded that place was at 2am.

NCSU created satellite mini-centers (Dabney, Burlington, etc) to help the load, but those just became jammed at crunch times too.

Everyone should have had to go through this process in order to use a computer. Makes you appreciate modern technology as opposed to just taking it for granted.

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Current stable:
2019 BMW M2 Competition slicktop 6MT
2011 BMW M3 sedan slicktop 6MT
2007 BMW 328i wagon (slushbox for now)
1975 CanAm 125MX2

I agree, no pain no gain!
When I was working at Nuclear Fuel Services in the early 70s the lab had one "calculator" to do the accountability results on the reprocessed nuclear fuel products we were producing, much of which could be used to build a bomb. The calculator was the size of an office typewriter (for those who have never seen one ~ 12" x 18" x 8"H) with a mechanical keyboard and readout sitting on top of a console the size of a 2 drawer file cabinet where all the real calculations took place. You would type in your calculations then sit and wait for the results. It cost 10s of thousands of $$$ and couldn't do any more sophisticated math than a $6.00 "throwaway" pocket calculator available in the checkout aisle of any grocery store today. It was no wonder we had so much MUF (Material Unaccounted For). We "lost" more nuclear material than it would take to have a third world country declared having nuclear capability!

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SPIN or WIN!
there's no glory for going slow.

That certainly happened, but the heat from the tubes attracted these big moths and they'd land on the tubes. Problem is the heat transfer that happened because we're talking big moths would damage the internals of the tube. So this was yet another failure from "bugs."

Mildly funny sidenote...a db person from my Nortel days had a good funny. Unix machines forever have needed a "hostname" and she named her machine "bugs." I asked her why it was named that and she said "because no matter what I'm really doing, when my boss asks 'what are you doing?' I can reply 'working on bugs' and not be lying!"

So my first computer at Red Hat was named "bugs", too. Uber-Linux-geeks may have seen hostnames embedded in packages from Red Hat in the past like "porky" and "sylvester", which is because the "bugs" thing also made me think of bugs bunny and for the the longest time we named ALL the machines at Red Hat after Looney Tunes characters.

Off topic, and nobody probably cares. Man, I am in desperate need of sleep. Win or lose, I never sleep after UNC/Duke games.


--Donnie

Was porky one of the main build machines? That sort of sticks out in my mind somehow. Like anytime I poked around in the kernel sources, I saw a lot of that.

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Karl S.
2014 Baby, 2014 House, 2013 Ford Focus ST, 2013 BMW 328i, 1994 Mercedes E320
(Insert passive aggressive signature line here)

Yep. That's the one most people are likely to see externally.


--Donnie