Greetings Professor Falken

alleyes4girls · 22-06-06 03:29:23

Hi All,
I'm new here. The only other forum that I have been an active member of, I also posted an initial forgetable subject. Looking forward to chatting with you all.

An old computer geek from before 'War Games',
Alleyes

Last edited by alleyes4girls (22-06-06 03:34:22)

Burlesque · 22-06-06 03:36:44

Hello there, Alleyes! Welcome to the forum, for real this time. I hope you do chat a lot. That way I and Elfman won't be so conspicous .

Before "War Games"? Now that's what I call experience!

Burlesque.

alleyes4girls · 22-06-06 03:43:12

Yea, burlesque,
Thanks so much for the welcome. It was a few years before "Object Cobol".

I'm still getting used to the forum. Is there anyway that you can see who's on?

Alleyes

Burlesque · 22-06-06 04:00:24

Any way to see who's on? NOT ANYMORE! I've been meaning to bitch about this fact, but for one I am a very non-bitchy guy, and also, it seems that they're working on it. When I joined, there was an online list and a member list visible/accessible in the main forum menu, but it has since disappeared. We have been told this has to do with some kind of computer-related work in progress compilation synergy type of sort of kind of thingy.

However, I'm quite sure this will be remedied, as hints have been dropped recently that some kind of update is coming along any day, and anyway, the people who work at IFM have a tendency to sort any problem out, so they will no doubt do so this time too. They just need to finish up the above mentioned computer-related work in progress etc first.

My first contact with a computer was through playing a seemingly little-known game called "Battle Squadron" about little space ships in an alien environment. This would have been around 1988 - 1989.

By the way, I recommend the "Sexual Taboos" and "Women and Lapdances" threads - there have been a few quite engaging posts and discussions there lately, so if you haven't checked them out, do so and contribute your own experiences!

Burlesque.

Last edited by Burlesque (22-06-06 04:10:13)

alleyes4girls · 22-06-06 04:29:19

Burlesque,
I love to listen to what brought people to computers. I graduated from college in 1977 but where I lived they didn't have computers and I graduated with a Business Admin. degree. The next year 1978, I took a computer course in a different part of the country, but it wasn't a programming course like you'd expect, but a course called Systems Analysis. With my business background, when I took that course, I realized what potential, businesses were looking at when using computers.

I went out to the mall to Waldenbooks, that was one of the largest malls in the U.S. and there wasn't one book on computers!!!

My girlfriend was with me and I kept telling her, "I can't believe it, I can't believe they don't have ANY books about computers. If I had known then how right I
was, I would be far wealthier than I am now. (I'm not wealthy, by the way).

Thanks for chatting,
Alleyes

Warmtouch · 22-06-06 11:50:25

David: "Is... this... a.. game... or... is... it... real?"
Joshua: WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

One of my favorite lines from that (or any) movie.

(loved his acoustic coupler modem, didn't you?)

cynicism · 23-06-06 00:53:31

War Games was OK, despite the horrible flaws. There were similar films before it, though. I think The Forbin Project is the most obvious.

BTW: it's not called Object Cobol. The correct name is "Add 1 to Cobol". (very geeky joke. Be glad if you don't understand it)

nihpuad · 23-06-06 08:32:21

alleyes4girls wrote:

I love to listen to what brought people to computers. I graduated from college in 1977 but where I lived they didn't have computers...

I graduated from high school in 1977. My school had a roomful of TTY machines with acoustic modems (300 baud, IIRC), rolled pulp paper, and paper punch tape printer/readers, and we hooked up to a CDC Cyber6000 at a regional computing center shared by dozens of suburban school districts. Since our user accounts were on the same machine that all those schools used for admin, we were constantly trying (with no luck) to hack into the class schedules and grade reports (except that none of us had heard the word "hack" at the time!). We did have a great time playing the old mainframe based "Star Trek" and "Lunar Lander" games.

A few years later a buddy of my dad's who worked for IBM built his own 8080 machine. He was a marketing guy, not an engineer, but he was a pretty accomplished spare-time tinkerer. I can still remember how proud he was when he finally cobbled together a keyboard interface and wrote a driver; before that, the only input method was a row of big paddle switches on the front panel.

My dad bought one of the first Apple ][s in town, and later one of the first 128k original Macs. I had an Apple ][+ of my own when I went away to grad school. Those machines didn't have working shift keys (display was ALL CAPS by default, though there were mods available), and the first word processor I had (SuperText ][) used the escape key as a shortcut to embed the command code for caps in the file. I got so used to hitting (and then releasing) esc instead of holding shift that my keyboarding is still mildly hosed up, more than 20 years later!

When my first Apple ][ died in 1987, I bought a Mac Plus (the original Mac, souped up with 1 Mb RAM and a SCSI port for an external HD), and I've been a Mac guy ever since.

Had enough of this geeky nostalgia, Professor Falken?

Last edited by dauphinb2 (23-06-06 08:35:54)

Elfman · 23-06-06 17:53:16

I started using computers at work in about 1990 but that was just a basic database and a bit of simple word processing. I have only owned a PC for about 2 years and am a complete duffer with it. Nearly everything I know I've learned by trial and error and being taught little tricks by people like friend blissed. The thing that really pisses me off about the IT world is that everyone in it always assumes that we all have a fairly high level of computer literacy. They throw jargon and acronyms at you instead of plain English and expect you to understand it. If you really want to make a fortune from computing alleyes4girls invent a system that tells you "No. I don't think you meant to do that. If I were you I'd try this instead. Stop me if I go too fast for you". You would drive Microsoft out of business .

Elfman.

Last edited by Elfman (23-06-06 17:55:41)

alleyes4girls · 23-06-06 21:48:25

cynicism wrote:

War Games was OK, despite the horrible flaws. There were similar films before it, though. I think The Forbin Project is the most obvious.
BTW: it's not called Object Cobol. The correct name is "Add 1 to Cobol". (very geeky joke. Be glad if you don't understand it)

My best guess is that it's the "++" for Cobol??

Warmtouch wrote:

(loved his acoustic coupler modem, didn't you?)

I sure did. I actually used that type of modem at work for quite a few years after the movie was released.

daughinb2 wrote:

Had enough of this geeky nostalgia,Professor Falken

Actually, my boss at the time, ask me to write a memo about the Apple Lisa. He had another motive for me at the time to teach me how to correctly word memos, but I wrote the memo praising the Lisa, and with a red pen he said in big letters", "WRONG, TOO EXPENSIVE".

Alleyes

greycat · 23-06-06 23:05:11

ok, I'm way past worrying about dating myself:

grad h.s. in '65, it had never had a computer or even terminal connecting to one. or anyone who could use one.

college of course had computers, but I studied something else, one class, exactly one, in my curriculum, had us doing baby Fortran and loading punch cards in a reader.

grad school starting in '71,again not in a computer science field, had a room full of card punches and readers (well, maybe four of each) that went off somewhere to a mainframe. only a couple of years ago I found a box of punched cards in the garage and finally decided I wouldn't EVER need them again.

first TWO jobs, all they had were nainframes, with either punch card batch operations or 'dumb' terminals with a very kinky locally-written operating system.

BUT THEN CAME THE 8080: and yea verily the sun did break forth and the new age was born for non-programmmers with the publication of, are you ready for it, VISICALC, followed not long afterward by the very first version of Wordstar. at least three years before Lotus, VISICALC was the first spreadsheet for dummies, let programming-illiterates like me actually DO something!

My IBM PC had TWO 5-1/4" floppy drives, and two monichrome monitors, one for text and one for (oh the misery of it all) graphics. OMG the POWER I HAD!!

in 86, got an original COMPAQ sewing-machine style transportable, with the incredibly stupid flip-out red-on-black LED (?) display. oh life was good.

skipped 386 generation and got an early 486 and after that it gets boring.

I also had in about '71 one of the first TI calculators, with teeny-bitty red LED letters, had no memory as I recall, and the only function was 'percent'. about $100. and at work they had a Wang system with four desktop calculators about size of old typewriters cabled in to a central box., and had maybe 4 or 5 such systems . they used neon-glow tubes to display numbers.

never used a mac.

well allright, this is getting long, so I'll stop.

alleyes4girls · 23-06-06 23:12:33

Thanks Greycat,

Get this. I have a 300gb external hard drive. I read in a leading (legitmant) computer magazine that in 1956, (the year after I was born), that this hard drive that I paid $200 for, would have cost, get this,..... 14 billion dollars!!!!
WOW!!!

Alleyes

cynicism · 24-06-06 10:10:32

alleyes4girls wrote:

Thanks Greycat,
Get this. I have a 300gb external hard drive. I read in a leading (legitmant) computer magazine that in 1956, (the year after I was born), that this hard drive that I paid $200 for, would have cost, get this,..... 14 billion dollars!!!!
WOW!!!
Alleyes

First machine I owned had 10megabytes of hard disk space. I was asked repeatedly why I needed so much space; weren't floppies big enough? (floppies at the time held 360K) My current home servers have multiple terabytes. 1 terabyte is 1 000 000 megabytes, so I've increased my disk space by 5 orders of magnitude. I'm still being asked why I need so much space... plus ca change, plus le meme chose.

At least I have room to download all the IFM clips

PS: yes, AllEyes, that's the Cobol equivalent to ++

greycat · 25-06-06 18:57:00

I store most of my net files on a very cool device - Western Digital pocket drive, 120 GB, powered by the USB2 port it connects through, roughly 4" x 6" x 3/4". cost ~$130US on ebay. $10 bucks more from WD itself for a very nice semi-hard zip case (although the more IFM and AW I store on it, the harder it gets, go figure). Seagate makes a very similar product. cynic you have multiple terabytes AT HOME??!! and your own serverS??! plural?? WOW!. what is the fastest way (at home) to move stuff, presumably BIG stuff, between machines like that?

cynicism · 26-06-06 13:16:01

greycat wrote:

I store most of my net files on a very cool device - Western Digital pocket drive, 120 GB, powered by the USB2 port it connects through, roughly 4" x 6" x 3/4". cost ~$130US on ebay. $10 bucks more from WD itself for a very nice semi-hard zip case (although the more IFM and AW I store on it, the harder it gets, go figure). Seagate makes a very similar product. cynic you have multiple terabytes AT HOME??!! and your own serverS??! plural?? WOW!. what is the fastest way (at home) to move stuff, presumably BIG stuff, between machines like that?

Fastest? Or fast enough?

The answer to the second question is gigabit Ethernet: theoretical transfer rate between machines of over 100 megabytes / second. Doesn't require anything more than Cat5e cable. Almost every PC motherboard (and Mac) made today includes gigabit Ethernet (if yours doesn't, the card is only $25 to $35), so all you need is the cables (standard cables!) and the switch, and they make gigabit switches quite cheap these days. An 8 port gigabit switch can cost $130 to $170.

Lots of people think Wifi is easier than wired Ethernet, but it tops out at 54megabit standard (G), and 108 megabit non-standard(ish). Gigabit Ethernet is 10 times that fast.

richard · 26-06-06 13:32:57

alleyes4girls wrote:

Thanks Greycat,
Get this. I have a 300gb external hard drive. I read in a leading (legitmant) computer magazine that in 1956, (the year after I was born), that this hard drive that I paid $200 for, would have cost, get this,..... 14 billion dollars!!!!
WOW!!!
Alleyes

You want to be careful with those things, we've lost a heap of data off outboard HDD's. They're totally undercooled. So are most HDD's for that matter and if you want to extend their life, give them each a fan of their own.

Elfman · 26-06-06 17:46:51

richard wrote:

alleyes4girls wrote:
Thanks Greycat,
Get this. I have a 300gb external hard drive. I read in a leading (legitmant) computer magazine that in 1956, (the year after I was born), that this hard drive that I paid $200 for, would have cost, get this,..... 14 billion dollars!!!!
WOW!!!
Alleyes
You want to be careful with those things, we've lost a heap of data off outboard HDD's. They're totally undercooled. So are most HDD's for that matter and if you want to extend their life, give them each a fan of their own.

I was thinking of buying an external hard drive. Would all you clever IT people agree with Richard on this and if so can you recomend another form of large volume data storage?

Thanks.

Elfman

blissed · 26-06-06 18:14:54

I've got an Iomega portable HD USB2 60GB and so far touchwood, it seems fine. but I've got a Lacie portable HD as well with the same data on it. A good thing I read about storage is "if data only exists in one place, it doesn't exist at all."
http://www.iomega.com/direct/products/f … 1341805996

.

Last edited by blissed (26-06-06 18:15:37)

alleyes1 · 26-06-06 18:18:30

richard wrote:

alleyes4girls wrote:
Thanks Greycat,
Get this. I have a 300gb external hard drive. I read in a leading (legitmant) computer magazine that in 1956, (the year after I was born), that this hard drive that I paid $200 for, would have cost, get this,..... 14 billion dollars!!!!
WOW!!!
Alleyes
You want to be careful with those things, we've lost a heap of data off outboard HDD's. They're totally undercooled. So are most HDD's for that matter and if you want to extend their life, give them each a fan of their own.

Thanks for the tip, Richard. How do I do that, get a little fan and blow on it from the front? I have a Maxtor. Actually, I hadn't heard about the cooling problem but I had thought about getting a second one just for a backup of the one I have.

BTW, I love the external drive. It worked great right out of the box with XP. I just plugged it in to a USB port and it recognized right away.

Thanks,
Alleyes

Last edited by alleyes1 (26-06-06 18:22:09)

Elfman · 26-06-06 18:27:31

blissed wrote:

I've got an Iomega portable HD USB2 60GB and so far touchwood, it seems fine. but I've got a Lacie portable HD as well with the same data on it. A good thing I read about storage is "if data only exists in one place, it doesn't exist at all."

I can second that blissed. Some time ago I managed to accidentaly delete all of the BA submissions I had saved to my PC and had no backup. It took me hours to download and edit them all again. Now I back up everything onto data discs religiously every two weeks.

Elfman.

alleyes1 · 26-06-06 20:38:33

Elfman wrote:

blissed wrote:
I've got an Iomega portable HD USB2 60GB and so far touchwood, it seems fine. but I've got a Lacie portable HD as well with the same data on it. A good thing I read about storage is "if data only exists in one place, it doesn't exist at all."
I can second that blissed. Some time ago I managed to accidentaly delete all of the BA submissions I had saved to my PC and had no backup. It took me hours to download and edit them all again. Now I back up everything onto data discs religiously every two weeks.
Elfman.

I third, Elfman. The money spent for backup capability is paltry compared to losing everything.

ae

cynicism · 28-06-06 11:14:55

Elfman wrote:

blissed wrote:
I've got an Iomega portable HD USB2 60GB and so far touchwood, it seems fine. but I've got a Lacie portable HD as well with the same data on it. A good thing I read about storage is "if data only exists in one place, it doesn't exist at all."
I can second that blissed. Some time ago I managed to accidentaly delete all of the BA submissions I had saved to my PC and had no backup. It took me hours to download and edit them all again. Now I back up everything onto data discs religiously every two weeks.
Elfman.

I assume that saving them religiously involves prayer? ("Please God don't let my hard drive full of porn fail")

richard · 28-06-06 13:30:57

alleyes1 wrote:

richard wrote:
alleyes4girls wrote:
Thanks Greycat,
Get this. I have a 300gb external hard drive. I read in a leading (legitmant) computer magazine that in 1956, (the year after I was born), that this hard drive that I paid $200 for, would have cost, get this,..... 14 billion dollars!!!!
WOW!!!
Alleyes
You want to be careful with those things, we've lost a heap of data off outboard HDD's. They're totally undercooled. So are most HDD's for that matter and if you want to extend their life, give them each a fan of their own.
Thanks for the tip, Richard. How do I do that, get a little fan and blow on it from the front? I have a Maxtor. Actually, I hadn't heard about the cooling problem but I had thought about getting a second one just for a backup of the one I have.
BTW, I love the external drive. It worked great right out of the box with XP. I just plugged it in to a USB port and it recognized right away.
Thanks,
Alleyes

The ones we had which failed were Maxtors. HDD's spin very fast, get quite hot, and the clearances between heads and surface are miniscule. You only need a slight warp of the surface or the axle and *blam*. In a PC, the drive has a lot of space around it and the case is usually fan cooled. If you open an external HDD you'll find it's just an ordianry drive suspended between rubber bushings - so it has no thermal connection to the casng, and just a little airspace around. In a bearing, friction and temperature work towards each other, so it's a positive feedback loop. It's crap design.

Just to make matters worse, Maxtor will take the dead disk back for 'testing' and replace it if it's under warranty, but you can forget your data. Even if the disk surface is fine, and therefore the data is recoverable (by exchanging controller boards) they won't give it back. And if you open it to retrieve the data yourself, no warranty. For most people the data is worth more than the disk so Maxtor won't have much of a warranty liability! I think they suck very much. (I haven't looked into the other manufacturer's warranties and they're probably not much different.)

Suckful too are the companies who charge by the gigabyte to retrieve data. I mean, you can fix it or you can't, that's just blackmail.

alleyes1 · 28-06-06 19:27:20

Was wondering if anyone has a good alternative to these external hard drives. As I said earlier, it is a 300gb drive and it's got about 100gb of "data" on it. Anyone have a better plan?

Thanks,
Alleyes

#1 22-06-06 03:29:23

Greetings Professor Falken

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