craigb

"South of 5 grand?"  That cheap?  😏

For lack of one little "g" at the end of your image link... 🙂

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet!"

    ~ Moses

I like being delusional.  I mean, have you really taken a good look at what's actually happening out in the so-called "real" world lately???  *Bleh!*

This is fun!

After a couple of college classes at SDSU while still in high school, I enrolled for a bunch of classes at a community college, made the football team, but only got two calculus classes and dropped off the team.  I was supposed to go to Annapolis and fly F-14's, but I grew too tall so, next I went to a private, IT-based college where I took four years in two (Coleman College).  I had classes in Assembler, Fortran, PL/I, COBOL, BASIC, RPG and C.  Since I had already been programming in a few of those, I had time to set the high score on the Miss PacMan machine during breaks.

Half-way through, we all had internships with "real" companies so we could learn not to wear white socks with suits and they could use us for copying and data entry.  I got to go to a Defense Contractor (CSC) and, during the initial orientation meeting, the Senior Contracts Administrator was disappointed that we weren't there to code something for her (because we hadn't had classes in that language yet).  However, I already knew it and jumped at the chance to do something new.  Within a couple of days I had figured out who the "REAL" programmers were, secretly hacked into their accounts to learn all their coding techniques and created the basics of the program that maintained all modifications to the project contract for over five years.  At the end of the week-long internship, several guys there lobbied for me to get a contract to finish my work.  Next thing I know, I've got a lucrative consulting job as a teenager which turned into being the tech-lead for the CMQA department where I got to build everything and even work on the guidance system of the Tomahawk Missile System.  I also got favorably noticed by DEC by pointing out some major vulnerabilities in their system ('cause I'd used them!  LOL!).  I was there for five years until the main project was cancelled.  For most of the time we were right across the street from Miramar Naval Airbase where I had a base pass (ironic to think I could have been flying out of there!).  I found out during a Change In Command ceremony that my cousin had been the base commander there!  I met with several Admirals there (Cold War paranoia mostly), but never ran into my cousin.  Small world!

Ah...  Mammaries! 😋

I'll save the story of how Biff became the name of the mail app on Unix for a later time.  LOL!

Noice!

This is what I had a terminal logged into when UNIX v1 came out.  It was so long ago that we had to use lowercase "L's" for 1's!  😆

We had to use an acoustic coupler where, if you whistled into the phone just right (4,800 Hz I believe), you could connect at 300 BAUD, otherwise you were stuck with 110 BAUD...

9 minutes ago, Gswitz said:

How old are you guys??

I started young.  Did you ever hear about those teenage hackers recruited by Defense Contractors?  That was me.  $34/hour back during the Cold War days!  I wish I knew just how awesome that was back then like I do now...

Yep!  Xerox is where the mouse came from and I was the only person I knew who had their companion invention which was not adopted:

The idea was to have one hand on the mouse and one hand on the keyboard.  You played chords to make all the different keys and numbers.  Once you get used to it, everyone ends up typing about 40 wpm regardless of whether you were a 10 wpm or 80 wpm typer to begin with.

Here's part of the cheat sheet.

Kids these days... 😜

I meant go further back!  (BTW - I started on mainframes before UNIX was "official" in 1970.)

Gary (Kildall) borrowed heavily on UNIX's shells, pipes and command formats when he made Computer Program/Monitor (which became CP/M, then DOS, etc.).  Most of the exact same syntax is still there today when you bring up the command prompt.  At least we never had to use VI on Windows!  (Though you could get a version of it if you really wanted to.)

Side note:  I helped port Advent to the HP-2000 in '76 and I should still have the source printed out in storage! A hollow voice says "Plugh!" 😀

A Flock of Seagulls have always been my guilty pleasure band.  

I had a nasty arm break in 1984 only a week after playing in my best gig to that date (opening for Blue Oyster Cult).  It took months just to get my arm to straighten out and even more for the nerve to grow from the upper arm all the way down to my fingers.  But, they DO grow back!  Just slowly.  Fortunately for you, it doesn't have to go too far so, with some physical therapy, you'll be moving your hand and fingers normally in the not-so-distant future. 🙂

5 hours ago, abacab said:

Linux and Mac evolved from UNIX.

Windows 3.x through the 9x versions evolved from an IBM mainframe operating system called DOS, later developed by IBM and Microsoft into MS-DOS and PC-DOS for x86 systems.

Microsoft had used a UNIX based system called Xenix, but that was licensed from AT&T, and later acquired by SCO UNIX. It was never actually part of the DOS evolution for MS though.

Windows NT, 2000. XP, and so on were developed from the NT rewrites of the OS/2 operating system that Microsoft had co-developed with IBM. So Windows today is an "NT" based OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1

UNIX History Diagram

 

Keep going.  (And you probably shouldn't use wikipedia as a reference source!  LOL!)

I'm shocked this thread hasn't been locked!  All those Hertz, but where's the love???

😀

They all evolved from Unix.

4 minutes ago, InstrEd said:

Where are the seagulls.....

Just a tip...  Don't look up!

1 hour ago, bayoubill said:

I pack guitars in bass cases to protect them from theft

🤣

38 minutes ago, paulo said:

I use Bitflipperworks.  Does the same job.

I thought Dave was retired... 😀

(That's Dave a.k.a., "Bitflipper" for those of you are a bit slower on the uptake.)

Um, so what are Linux and Windows both based on again? 🙄

I used Linux servers to run game servers in the late 90's (Quake, Half-Life and Counter Strike).  I had the second-most popular servers on the West Coast at one time (and was rated in the top-25 for Quake 1 players on a database of over 340,000 players - thank you low ping! 😛).  Other than that, I've been pretty much strictly DOS/Windows for decades.

That said, .NET Core is now becoming stronger where the code you create can run on Windows, Apple or Linux so I'm guessing more stuff will be coming out soon.

50 minutes ago, Grem said:

 

You serious? What kind of stand is it on?

Yep!  Here's the back in both horizontal and vertical mode (you'll see that I kept the stand on for stability which flips to the side and I rest the bottom edge on a wrist rest in vertical mode).

Hi-res back horizontal

Hi-res back vertical

I should have taken a picture of the front (maybe tomorrow?).  Heck, an entire Emperor penguin will fit on the screen in life size!  (And most of Kenny's dream girl Meredith - LOL!)

Just now, Grem said:

 

 I am partial to Jennifer Love Hewitt. : )

Who is only 14" taller!

2 minutes ago, Grem said:

 

Now that's a dang good question!! Why use Reason at all?

Because I have a 40" 4k monitor that's set up to rotate into portrait mode?

(I will try Reason for just that, well, reason!😀)

I wonder if Meredith owns a pizza parlor with beer...

What I thought was funniest was him missing the fact that calling a key "A" was completely arbitrary too.  None of the human organs resonate at 432 Hz. either (the heart, for example, is at 289 Hz., give or take a radiation period of a cesium atom). 😀

Answer:  Yep.