I figured it out
- Thread starter LAY THE WOODY
- Start date
He’s much closer to an Al Gore than an algorithm.
Dan's consistency to argue the absurd over and over. Gotta be an algorithm.
If Dan is an algorithm, he is running on a 286 Compaq blistering the CAT-5 connections & mother board humming at a blistering 33 Mhz. Of course this is largly offset by his gargantuan 10Mb hard drive. Screamin' baby!!!
Even better, Atari 400 with a blazing 1.79 MHz 6502C processor with an incomprehensible 8k of RAM, 5.25 floppy, and a 410 cassette recorder.
Forgot the wife has this, instantly thought of Dan. The parts in the noggin checks all the boxes except for the great idea one but the others are spot on. 🤣
Don't knock Ataris. I learned to write BASIC as a kid on an Atari 660 with a whole 16k of RAM and a 5.25 floppy.
I had one of these. I certainly would have never been a doctor (successful anyway) as a result of how many buzzes/red lights I caused. Much better as a geologist/engineer.Forgot the wife has this, instantly thought of Dan. The parts in the noggin checks all the boxes except for the great idea one but the others are spot on. 🤣
Commodore 64 rocked it back in the day. Apple II sucked.
My first box was an Apple II C w/2 5in. drives. My first spreadsheet was VisiCalc on that "beast".
I had a c64.
I also had a computer class my Jr in HS. I was the only Jr in the class as it was restricted to Srs. Not sure why I was allowed to take it. It was 86 and I think that was the first year a computer class was ever offered. We used Apple IIs. C64 was easier to use, had better sound and graphics and a whole system was half the cost of the Apple II. So when it comes to choosing between apple and another brand I always choose the other.
Yep, same here. No Apple, no way.
My whole professional career was in software, nasty math heavy software, and that Apple (1980) was the only Apple product I ever owned or used. I progressed to MS/IBM - DOS green screens to Windows 1.9 which was totally unstable. It was not until Windows 2.1 that you could competently write scientific software in, which we did for upstream O&G. For many years I supported 5-Apple cell phones being the only holdout for an Android. Wife & I had our 42nd anniversary this year with her still on that damn I-Phone & it's proprietary connection hardware.
Windows 3.11 was job security with needing to customize ini files and some low level programming. I used to put dos, win 3.11 and a network software package on a zip drive and drive down to one of the distribution centers to install a new machine. It beat trying an install over a fractional T1. It only took about 2 hrs instead of 4-6.
Win 95 saw my workload cut by 70% and win 2000 with citrix saw a lot of my work outsourced to Lockheed Martin IT services. I was still setting up labs for training and customizing the PCs for each lab. But training labs were not used every day.
I was laid off after it was obvious that my average day to day work had evolved into changing toner cartridges. Jobs in IT were scarce and all the big names had laid off around that time. I have a comp sci degree and was an MCSE. I tried for over a year in this area with not even an interview. If I had been willing to move maybe I would have faired better.
I haven't been in IT since. I do not miss it at all. I just help friends and family or tinker with my own setups.
Wow, impressive. People like you provided a career for me. I never knew more than first base about hardware but learned enough to stop trying to fix my own. Were you around long enough to deal with the cloud? Client/Server was a huge change from perpetual stand-alone and the cloud changed the way software was licensed in a major way. You pretty much cannot get a 'perpetual license' anymore, everything has gone to subscription. Great for the user, sucky for sales. Even MS has been pinging me yearly to subscribe to my perpetual user license for Word, Excel, PowerPoint & Access, even though Access has gone away.Windows 3.11 was job security with needing to customize ini files and some low level programming. I used to put dos, win 3.11 and a network software package on a zip drive and drive down to one of the distribution centers to install a new machine. It beat trying an install over a fractional T1. It only took about 2 hrs instead of 4-6.
Win 95 saw my workload cut by 70% and win 2000 with citrix saw a lot of my work outsourced to Lockheed Martin IT services. I was still setting up labs for training and customizing the PCs for each lab. But training labs were not used every day.
I was laid off after it was obvious that my average day to day work had evolved into changing toner cartridges. Jobs in IT were scarce and all the big names had laid off around that time. I have a comp sci degree and was an MCSE. I tried for over a year in this area with not even an interview. If I had been willing to move maybe I would have faired better.
I haven't been in IT since. I do not miss it at all. I just help friends and family or tinker with my own setups.
Simple people like me need things as simple as we can make them. A liter of water weighs 1000 grams. Volumn is is 1000 mL. Distance is 1000 cu. cm. So there!!! Water (H2O) EXPANDS when cooled. All other known combinations of elements contract.
I am looking at converting my windows 10 Pc over to Linux mint as it does not meet the requirements for 11. Win 10 "expires" in October. I can either hack it over to 11 or just put linux on it. As for office I use Libre Office. 365 is supposedly free if you run it from the website.
My son is a freshman in college and decided to take a C++ class. I helped him with his first two programs. I surprised myself with what I remembered. I haven't programmed in C++ in 30 years. Even then most of my programs were in plain C. When I was in corporate I used C, basic, scripts etc. I wrote programs/scripts to help me do my job. Between contract jobs I was inhouse as a network admin and wrote many scripts and programs to automate my day to day task on Win NT and BSDi Unix boxes.
NT processed payments, the BSDi servers ran email, DNS, Web hosting and usenet news.
This is extremely interesting. In 1989 I was working as an independent geologist generating prospects on paper at the geologic library, where all the data was stored. A fellow geologist decided one day that he was "effin' tired of looking for oil & gas with a pencil and dividers and I'm going to go make some money". Fast forward, he started a software company that wrote software for the newfangled PC that would store, manipulate & create maps of said data. This is the bread & butter of being a petroleum geologist.
Fast forward, the idea took off and he next created a program that would contour & map the data automatically. The 2-items I listed saved a geologist 80% of their time to triage & generate drilling prospects. The pisser was that at the outset only major companies that had big main frames could load the object code and use it. God smiled on us as IBM released the first PC & Gates cut his deal for MS-DOS to be on every one.
We began in green screen as Windows/mouse technology was near but not there. If you recall, green screen required users to know DOS. Not many geos out there knew it. As I mentioned before our code only ran with any stability on Windows 2.1. Both Windows & our code was not totally stable so customer support sometimes resulted in the client having to format their hard drive. This was not popular.
At the time of Windows 3.1, MS told us we were the most sophisticated programs running on the Windows platform to dalte. Pretty cool stuff.
Fast forward, our code progressed, hardware got faster, peripherals got better & cheaper and we sold the company to a major O&G software company that was subsequently purchased by Halliburton in the mid 90's.
My youngest son came out of the Coast Guard several years ago & was trying to figure it out. One day he announced that he was going to become a "computer programmer". He paid for 6-months of schooling, got out, got hired, got some big company experience (J.P. Morgan) and now is the IT manager of a very aggressive manufacturing company headquartered in SE OK. He travels to their 9-locations ensuring whatever it is that you big brains ensure to keep company infrastructure humming.
I would have not given you a plug nickel to bet on me working in upstream O&G software for 35-years when I was even still in college. I had to learn FORTRAN in engine school using punch cards & learning about do-loops in the worst possible way. Strange.
