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Originally posted by Ruthenius:
Do you remember "Press Play on tape"?

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I did that on my Texas Instruments computer, while I still used cassette tape...

]OLD CS1
REWIND CASSETTE TO START OF TAPE
THEN PRESS ENTER
PRESS PLAY ON CASSETTE TAPE
THEN PRESS ENTER

I used an old Panasonic cassette recorder, which connected to the computer console via a funky cable I had to pay extra for.

- uilleann

...as the msn instant messanger
Which, on the Mac, is buggy shit, but hey :) Actually, it's been ages since my sister last needed me to three-key it, maybe she's learnt all the things it conflicts with.

I read, though, earlier, something which confirmed my theories: Windows 9x allocates 128k of resources to User and GDI, but 2000 doesn't limit resources allocation. Consumer versions of Windows are just lame :) Anyhow, check to see you're not short of resources, and rid yourself of any unnecessary background processes (forever), such as those living in the system tray that you don't need (and all of those you can't see) - might mean a few trips to RegEdit.

And ditch MSN :) OK, I'm just biased, maybe the Windows version works, but, um, yeah, oh, look, there's a pig flying by my window and it's nothing to do with that Zurich bank...

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Originally posted by iQuadra:

Im not an old school geek.so sue me. in any case, is progress such a bad thing?

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Of course not, but you appreciate progress a little more when you've had to do things the old fashioned way.

I had an introductory CS course where we had to write a simple program in Pascal .. using punch cards. This was in 1991!! They had an old IBM punch card reader that would load our code into the Sequent, and then run the batch process to compile it. It was such a major pain in the ass that nobody after that complained about having to use the dummy green-screen terminals in the math building.

Syntax highlighting in VIM is next to Godliness.

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i can imagine looking back on those days with nostalgia, when there werent geek wannabes running around online, flaming random people.

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No, we had real geeks flaming around online. And the flames were ten times as ugly.

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but locking yourself into those "good old days" really doesnt make much sense.

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See, that's the young'un talking. It's not a matter of getting locked into the old days; it's a matter of appreciating what having to learn the craft then teaches us now.

But you're right about the dangers of old-geezer-dom. Yesterday on Slashdot I saw someone post about how he wouldn't want to teach Python to a bunch of Freshman unless it had a Visual Studio type IDE with all the trimmings. WHAT? I wanted to grab him by his Gap shirt and scream, "You fucking kids couldn't compile 'Hello World' without a full featured Click and Drool interface with a bunch of Wizards and some kind of arcane version control .. all the skill's gone out of software engineering, all the KNOW HOW and MAKE DO. Why once I wrote a whole compiler from scratch using nothing but vi and gnu tools over a 2400 baud modem connection. It took me a hundred hours! But it worked, you goddamn bet! You think Linus Torvalds or Dan Bernstein rely on Microshit or Bore-land for their software development needs? HELL NO! So do those students of yours a real favor and give 'em a command line and an editor to work with! OK?"

Of course, I didn't, because I immediately realized that there was a time when I couldn't get a job anywhere because I have no Visual Basic experience.

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Originally posted by maxomai:
I had an introductory CS course where we had to write a simple program in Pascal .. using punch cards. This was in 1991!!

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That's quite the experience! I took introductory CS courses in Fortran77 and Pascal in 1985 and 86. We used command line terminals for Fortran and Mac 512's for Pascal. My father used punch cards once, but that was in the 1970's.

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Originally posted by Alien Investor:
This was circa 1974, when I was 12 -- old enough to read a lot of Isaac Asimov books and encyclopedias and such, too young to get any formal instruction.

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My goodness, Alien, that makes me older than you, though admittedly not by much. A lady never admits to such things, so fortunate am not a lady. Remember being blown away at sight of television IN COLOR. Never knew the doomed security guy who dies in the first five minutes of Star Trek had a red shirt before. Sadly also remember JFK assassination.

From my college vantage point in the co-op next to the PURPLE house, there was no such thing as a personal computer, let alone PhotoShop or QuarkXPress. Registering for classes was done at CRISP: Computer Registration Involving Student Participation, quickly shortened to Crispy Critters. It involved many hours of sitting on the floor singing old protest songs with new registration-related lyrics (sort of proto-filk, I guess) while waiting for someone to restack punch cards on registration computers.

The music was awful. There's a reason people like Adam Ant aren't popular any more.

Star Wars was only one movie with no attendant merchandising aside from the action figures (kewl rotating R2D2 and original white on black T-Shirt probably worth lots of dough if dog hadn't eaten them). Star Wars also changed moviemaking forever. We'd never seen anything like it. It was the first movie I went to see in the theater more than once. Also good excuse for more outings with nerd boyfriend.

I seemed to be the only one in my co-op who wasn't either an engineering student or a computer science nerd (that was the word we used before "geek"). I was the hapless graphic designer, bravely creating mechanicals out of ink rulers and rubylith and x-acto knives (and I have the scars and bloody matboard still) and learning to spec type. Typesetting was done in a service bureau by a professional typesetter, not by some freshman with a wireless laptop out on the green.

When we asked for computers in the design program, we were told that "computers are for engineers, not for a bunch of painters." How the times do change.

Being the only non-geek in my house, I was tagged to test some new thing called a GUI that the nerd/geeks had helped build. It featured a tiny monochrome screen with a trash can in the corner. !. That was just the coolest thing. I wanted one immediately.

Six months after I graduated, Amiga (anybody remember them???) came out with the first viable page layout program and my entire field went over to computers in about five seconds flat. I have spent all of the intervening years playing catch-up. Realize with some great disappointment that all you geeks make about ten times as much money as I do without half trying.

Is it too late to switch careers or should I just go back and learn game design instead since whacking virtual hell out of some jerk who desperately deserves it seems to be my favorite Black Hole Of Time activity?

P.S. Am also huge fan of Asimov and Al Bester.

For all the younger geeks whose formative years were spent with primitive personal computers ... versus us 30-something geeks who grew up when "computer" and "personal computer" were not at all the same thing ... that difference does not actually matter anymore. Twenty years from now, everybody who used the Internet WAY BACK IN THE 20TH CENTURY will be an old fart!

To me, the most amazing thing about the 21st century (so far) is that more people are going to remember the 20th Century for the Internet than they will for 1969-07-20, which is the first major public event that I remember.