Death by Computer

So I'm at my dad's house, helping him out around the house after a recent stint in the ICU with pneumonia.

One of the things he wanted me to do is "look at his computer."

AAARRRGGGGHHHH. It's about 14 years old, has never had a virus update, has never been defragged, has never had any Windows updates, never removed any programs he no longer uses, his registry is hopeless, his orphaned files are close to ten thousand. It takes well over a half hour to boot, and I've been running utilities since yesterday noon and it's still just barely started.

He doesn't want to buy a new one because that would mean losing all his old programs that he knows how to run.

Shoot me. Shoot me now.

I thought you had decided that bullets are too messy. Or are you asking to be shot with an arrow?
Just wait, NoCo. Just wait.....

I was called on to fix an old guy's computer and all it needed was to have the dog hair cleaned out to stop the overheating of the power supply. And this old guy was a retired mathematics professor who wrote the best-known programming book for the IBM 360/370 main frame (back in the day).

Almost as bad as my dad. He was head of Boeing Computer Services back in the 1960s when they used punch cards.

The new iPad I bought him, to encourage him to use email and FaceTime, has so far flummoxed him. Maybe it needs more punch cards.

Ah, you kids. Those of us who actually used the damned things referred to them as Hollerith cards.

I sometimes - not often, but sometimes - find that what my children may see as lack of knowledge or ability is simply my lack of interest. As time passes, I've found that I've become less interested in investing the time required to learn new technology. And I've been a gadget freak all my life. Consider: with whom will your dad exchange email and use FaceTime? I bought my wife an iPad about a year and a half ago; we both carry iPhones (she also carries a company BlackBerry); and neither of us has any interest in using FaceTime. Different stroke for different folks.

I remember Basic. Does anyone recall that? Where the cursor was a little triangle they called a turtle. That's about as far back as I go. And that green and white striped computer paper.

I've still got a couple of boxes of striped computer paper in the garage, or maybe in a closet. 14-inches wide and pin-feed for my incredibly noisy dot matrix printer (which is also either in the garage or a closet).

Yes, I remember BASIC. It sucked then and it sucks now. But I never heard the cursor called a turtle, and I've never seen one shaped as a triangle.

_Howard wrote:

But I never heard the cursor called a turtle, and I've never seen one shaped as a triangle.

I was in fourth grade at the time, so perhaps those were just names they were using with the kids at the time- you know to make it kid friendly or memorable or whatever.

Then when I was 12 I got my grandpa to send me to computer camp. That was my first exposure to DOS I think. We wrote line by line programs, simple stuff like making it write your name in huge letters made of the letters of the name. Except the boys, they made boobs- of course, lol.

When I was 12, the abacus was the hot new technology. I went to abacus camp.

Lol!
I'm not even sure I could work an abacus.

That's because you never went to abacus camp. You wasted all your time in that silly computer camp.

My dad brought home cases of used punch cards, sorry Hollerith cards, for us kids to color on. It was darn hard because they were so small and had holes in them.

One of my early jobs had DEC PDP-7 based e-mail. My first computer was an Amstrad CP/M machine, where you loaded the operating system from a proprietary diskette. When I first started at the insurance company I worked at for 14 years, the computer ran instructions from tape and saved to 8" floppies.

I learned DOS batch file programming, BASIC programming and C programming. When C++ came out I had to relearn everything.

I still have a book of C++ Obfuscation Contest winners.

As a matter of fact my dad spent the evening telling me stories of the early days of computing. He likes to do that more and more.

He was (to hear him tell it) working hand-in-hand with Doug Ross to standardize APT and get it implemented across the aerospace industry. My dad was the national chairman of the APT Association.

NoCoPilot wrote:

My first computer was an Amstrad CP/M machine, where you loaded the operating system from a proprietary diskette.

My first computer was also CP/M with two 8-inch floppy drives. I bought it to interface with my type setting machine, using a custom card designed and built by a friend. It used a 50-pin connecter and a cable about a half-inch in diameter.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I learned DOS batch file programming, BASIC programming and C programming. When C++ came out I had to relearn everything.

The first language I learned was FORTRAN (punched into Hollerith cards for an IBM 370). Next was assembly language.

NoCoPilot wrote:

As a matter of fact my dad spent the evening telling me stories of the early days of computing. He likes to do that more and more.

He was (to hear him tell it) working hand-in-hand with Doug Ross to standardize APT and get it implemented across the aerospace industry. My dad was the national chairman of the APT Association.

That sounds like a fascinating bit of work. I always wanted to get into the software design level of CNC or robotics but never had the opportunity.

Call him. For a couple of schooners of scotch he'll talk your ear off.

If I could sit down with him, I think we would probably have some enjoyable and interesting (to us) conversations. But I fucking hate telephones!

_Howard wrote:

But I fucking hate telephones!

Off topic, but so do I! OMG I hate them. And yet, I am considered rude or at least weird when I do not want to sit and yak on one for hours on end.

Howard, next time you're in the San Juans let me know. I'll give you my dad's address.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Howard, next time you're in the San Juans let me know. I'll give you my dad's address.

Oh god noes! If they ever get together the collective power of their brains will throw off the space time continuum!

NoCoPilot wrote:

Howard, next time you're in the San Juans let me know. I'll give you my dad's address.

Yeah. Like that will happen.

Old engineers do like to talk about the old days. No doubt about that. When Al Shugart would come to the local site, he would always look me up and we would stand outside drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while we discussed the way things used to be in the industry. He had far more fun yakking about the good old days than being CEO.

Jenni wrote:

Oh god noes! If they ever get together the collective power of their brains will throw off the space time continuum!

Don't tempt me.

Over on my music board a couple of us were talking about our first exposure to Usenet groups, which was the precursor to the current system.

Some of the same folks.

I can't remember exactly when I started using computers.  I had a dumb terminal at a job I worked 12/79 - 5/89 but can't recall if it was there when I got there or not.  I think so.  Sometime during my tenure we switched over to IBM PCs and I bought my own personal PC clone in 1989.  

I had my Amstrad CP/M word processor for at least a year before that, but I don't think(?) it had any phone line attached?

So my online experience probably began late 1989/early 1990.  I have printouts of emails from 1991.  I took C Programming Fall quarter 1994.

Usenet is still alive and well and bigger than ever; I use it nearly every day. However, the days of "bulletin boards" on usenet is long gone for the most part.

My first exposure to computers was in 1974, programming in FORTRAN (on punch cards) for an IBM 360 main frame.

I was using the internet (ARPANET, sometimes DARPANET) on a CP/M machine before there was the world wide web. I Connected to the university using a professor friend's account. From there it connected me to the chancellor's office at UCSB, which let me out into the world. All this at a screaming 2400 baud.