OT Web Design

I think it is a natural for a person that wants to know how things work to get involved with software/hardware. It's great fun to emulate real life processes with anything from PIDs to neural nets.

To me computing is just one cursory interest and have many totally different interests that happen to use computing devices. (I've been into robotics, for instance - one of my experiments is at

In a social setting I hate to tell anyone what I actually do - immediately they'll want you to fix their PC. :) If I was a plumber, would they ask me to unstop their sink? A couple of times at parties and such, I've told people I fix bicycles. Went in great detail as to what huffy bike I was working on at that time - you should have seen the look on their faces.. :)

If having an interest into what makes things tick causes people to label us "geeks", label away.

Remco

Good for you. Joke 'em they cant take a ...

BTW, got my mate a Biria last month. Great commuting bike. Adding an electric engine next week.

Did you ever work with CoCo OS/9? We had this one geek at the computer lab that swore by it.

What was the earliest version of Windows you worked with? I actually got to use Windows/286, which was sort of Windows version 2.

Charles of Kankakee

It's Bicycle Repair Man. See how he uses the spanner . . . .

Just had to throw that one in for fun.

Charles

Coco - color computer by radio shack? Sure - I was one of those geeks that loaded OS9 on that thing. :) I actually liked that 6809; For its day, that was a slick 8 bit device. Did a lot of assembler for that thing; wrote a commercial hamster CW encode/decode program that basically parroted the conIO. One could write a simple keyer in basic this way.

The earliest windows version I hated was version 2 :)

I had a Vic 20 and then a Plus 4. Half a C64 and half a C128. Sort of a hermaphrodite. A freak with a little bit of each and not enough of neither.

Charles

Those Birias are nice! I used to have a Batavus (Dutch Mfr) touring bike , which is similar in its comfort (it got stolen). Very solid but was not really feather light.

Also had a Gitane race bike - very nice, light and fast, but also quite fragile: I snapped the handle bar in half once. I guess you can't pull on them things too hard :) Also snapped the pedal axle once (it just gave out and broke).

Back in the day, those were /the/ bikes to have, but now I am sure they are similar to the stuff they sell at toysRus..

Al did invent the Internet. He introduced the legislation that gave $$$$$$ to NSF to create it away from ARPAnet and MILLnet--putting it in the public domain. Stayed there for a long time. Now comes Internet 2 which will give our educational institutions freedom once again from the greedy pigs.

Did you now that HAL (from the movie) is one letter off from IBM (HI) (AB) (LM)

Bet you did not now this one--when we we writing WNT, (on the Microsoft team), we use the letters preceding VMS--because most of us came from DEC. (VW) (MN) (ST). Do you really think anyone would name something something Windows New Technology.

In 1965 HAL predicted the comming of OOPs by showing AI at work. Who created a new instance of Dave anyway--not HAL he had fallen.

Python / Apache rule

I guess "invent" can mean many things. I guess I just invented a cup of coffee and am about to invent driving a car.

Many, including me, had been using the internet way before Al had any clue. (come to think of it, many are still using the internet before Al has a clue -- bad joke, but couldn't help it. Please forgive me and mean no disrespect towards Al :)

Interesting history - thanks.

When was that?

We are on i2. It's awesome.

I only wish they had done a better job of following the VMS development methodology. VMS was developed by a rigorous committee of big minds who cared.

Well, I only go back to 1976 networking. Except for DECNet, and some other efforts, it was a wide-open trust system. My how things have changed.

I know the kind, can't program perl, nor even use vi.

My earliest networking was around 79 on a philips/four phase machine during my internment, eh internship :) at Philips. (The dig on Al was just meant to be a joke, btw -- I don't think he's an evil guy)

They sure have. Wonder what's next?

Anyone else ever use EVE on the VAX?

Charles of Kankakee

only for the carpets !

Rich

It leaves it smelling fresh? :)

This history stuff is fun: heard buzzwords I haven't heard in a very long time. EVE was an editor of sorts, wasn't it? Years ago I used an editor that was named EVE, I seem to remember..

I go back to TECO which was not only a full-screen editor, but a programming language. EVE was a configuration of TPU, also a language, which came later.

It was intended to be a followon to EDT, it was the Extensible Vax Editor, but on a 2 MHz 11/750 it used up so much memory only one person could run it at a time.

Then there was SPSSx. . . .

Charles of Kankakee