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 Max's old man rant for today's Teenagers. (Page 1)
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| Author | Topic: Max's old man rant for today's Teenagers. |
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maxomai Super Geek  
Posts: 184 |
posted July 19, 2002 15:12
   
Back in my day ("oh no...") being a geek meant that you knew the best way to cheat at Ultima IV, that you could hack assembly on your Apple IIe, and that you had at least one Dungeons and Dragons character going. I can still remember when they taught undergraduate programming classes in Pascal, when Java was another word for Coffee, when the Web didn't exist, and when people like me had to waste time on USENET in places like alt.tasteless and alt.fan.star-trek.wes.crusher.die.die.die. I remember when people would take classes over again just to have an account on a particular UNIX machine. I remember when on-line gaming meant you had a character on a MUD. Hell, I even remember "state of the art" personal computers with two floppy drives. You kids have never played Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (yes, there was a game called that), or Tank War. You don't remember the Clipper Chip, the Windows 95 release (MS hired Anthony Edwards .. the guy who played Mark Greene in ER, to do an hour-long prime-time infomercial on NBC), or the 1984 commercial that announced the Mac. Someone talks about MacGuyver and you scratch your heads. You kids are used to taking an old box (by old, I mean 400 MHz Pentium III, which is practically brand new compared to my machine), burning a Linux ISO image, and having a UNIX workstation. Back in my day, a low-end UNIX workstation cost three grand. That's not adjusted for inflation, either. Linux didn't even exist. Sonny Bono was a second-rate 60s pop star and not a dead Congressman whose legacy was screwing the consumer. We were pissed about President Bush, but back then, he was the brains and the shadowy operatior and his VP was a total idiot, not the other way around. Metallica didn't suck. Dead Kennedys were against censorship and stupid-ass lawsuits. You could turn on the radio and hear more than eight songs all day long; and if you didn't like top 40, you could usually find a station that played music you did like. We didn't have AOLers, DMCA, CBDTPA, or Win XP. And we sure as SHIT didn't have 1337-talkers. "Faith" was a song by George Michael (NOT Limp Biskit). Doc Martins were considered work boots and not fashion items. AIDS still scared the crap out of people because there wasn't a treatment for it. Silvester Stalone still looked passibly beefy. Yes, you younger geeks have no perspective. Which isn't to say everything's changed. After all, Bob Hope is still, inexplicably, alive. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to play with the new Debian release. IP: Logged |
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annie Alpha Geek Posts: 334 |
posted July 19, 2002 15:30
quote: Me too! And I'm still in University (they changed that three years ago after I did my first year in Pascal, now it's all Java)!!! IP: Logged |
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maxomai Super Geek
Posts: 184 |
posted July 19, 2002 15:41
quote: I skipped modulo 3 and went right to Oberon. I think some of my code is in the complex number modules. (This is my 144th post. Wow, that was anticlimactic.) IP: Logged |
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neotatsu Highlie 
Posts: 606 |
posted July 19, 2002 16:27
quote: anywho, I still see your point, I just wanted to make my comments, ciao IP: Logged |
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LifetimeTrekker Highlie
Posts: 645 |
posted July 19, 2002 17:53
quote: I hear you there, and agree. Eventually they'll get here, too. IP: Logged |
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SpikeSpiegel Highlie
Posts: 529 |
posted July 19, 2002 17:56
ITs the music that we choose lalala  ------------------ IP: Logged |
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TheAnnoyedCockroach Highlie
Posts: 672 |
posted July 19, 2002 18:47
Heh... back in your day doesn't seem to be so long ago. I remember all of that. All of it, y'hear? 'Course then I'm lucky to remember to put on pants in the morning. Funny how my memory's selective like that. Ah, but I'm not as old as you anyhow. I guess I'm still just a young 'un. ------------------ IP: Logged |
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Alien Investor Assimilated 
Posts: 438 |
posted July 19, 2002 20:26
Back in the day ... There were a more unsolved problems in math. Fermat's Last Theorem hadn't been proven. The four-color theorem hadn't been proven. I drew a lot of little maps looking for a five-color counter-example. In the periodic table, the second f-shell row was incomplete (the actinides). The last d-shell row that you see now did not even exist yet. Computers could play chess. Or so we read in the news. It took considerable geek access to get to a computer that could actually play chess at all. Any good chess player could stomp the crap out of every computer. Isaac Asimov cranked out bazillions of books and essays. They are still pretty damn good, and it was cool to read them and think "this guy is writing these books faster than I can read them!" It's sad to think that there won't be any more. Robert Heinlein cranked out stacks of books about his solipsistic multiverse, which was mostly populated by an old cranky bastard named Lazarus Long and hordes of young women who wanted to have sex with him. Thank god there won't be any more of that. "Star Trek" came in only one flavor. Computers came in three flavors: "computer", "minicomputer", and "microcomputer". In the world of microcomputers, 640k really was enough for everyone. 640k of memory cost more than a good used car. Music geeks had garages full of tubes, not computers full of software. And the old farts, which I wasn't yet, were talking about how great things were when THEY were young, particularly the sex, the drugs, and the Robert Heinlein novels. IP: Logged |
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Alien Investor Assimilated
Posts: 438 |
posted July 19, 2002 22:15
And how could I forget ... When I was a kid, stock markets could go DOWN as well as UP. And they spent a lot of time moving SIDEWAYS. IP: Logged |
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Jas Geek
Posts: 65 |
posted July 20, 2002 18:30
quote:
i know of most of that stuff... but i do long for days when there were no 1337-speakers. ------------------ IP: Logged |
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Super Flippy Super Geek
Posts: 182 |
posted July 20, 2002 19:14
I'm right there with ya on everything except Doc Martins not being a fashion item. I mean, what do you think the mohawked masses wore to Dead Kennedy concerts? But then again, I grew up in California, and I think trends were different out there, maybe a little ahead of the times. I think we had computers in schools in my county before a lot of other places did, and some of them even had 16 COLOR MONITORS! Woo-hoo! 
IP: Logged |
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SpikeSpiegel Highlie
Posts: 529 |
posted July 20, 2002 19:56
quote: yes one that if im not mistaken is in your away messages way tooo much.. that or "days goooo by and still i think of youuuuu" you are one to talk about speaking l337 ... you use it all the bloody time... ------------------ IP: Logged |
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ilovemydualg4 Highlie
Posts: 522 |
posted July 22, 2002 09:27
I have played zork, hitch hiker's guide (i found it online, it's a java access, but yes, the old command line version,,, no mod), and tank war...
let's not wage war (yet) ------------------ IP: Logged |
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maxomai Super Geek
Posts: 184 |
posted July 22, 2002 10:29
quote: My usual reply to 31337 speak: d00d j00r 4 pH0<k1n6 m0Ron I had to create a macro for it on IRC. *sigh* IP: Logged |
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SpikeSpiegel Highlie
Posts: 529 |
posted July 22, 2002 10:42
quote: whenever he im's anybody he uses l337... james is being really hypocritical when he said that..
quote: d00d n0 im n07
IP: Logged |
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Colonel Panic Geek
Posts: 93 |
posted July 22, 2002 11:38
... and we had to walk, up hill both ways, 2 miles just to log on to a computer at 3 AM ... ... and we didn't have eyeglasses in about an hour -- so you HAD to tape your glasses together ... ... and if you didn't know how to use a slide rule, why you didn't know nuthin'. ... and there was no Star Trek, only the Outer Limits, and Will Robinson .. ... and Canada, Canada was for draft dodgers ... Kid geeks these days. I could kick their soft little heinies in a rousing game of Pong anyway. Colonel Panic IP: Logged |
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Erbo Super Geek
Posts: 191 |
posted July 22, 2002 11:41
I hear you, man. I've been around long enough to have written Pascal code on an HP 3000 with MPE V. My undergrad programming classes were Pascal; Turbo Pascal 3.0, in fact (so fast, and so small!). I also discovered Usenet back then, and had "cue cards" for anonymous FTP sites to pull software down from. (How many people downloaded stuff from the Simtel archives when it was still wsmr-simtel20.army.mil, a TOPS-20 box at White Sands Missile Range?) Back then, our computer lab had a bunch of Sun 3/50 diskless workstations in it, along with some Mac IIx boxes (which we mostly used to play games). I bought my first PC in my third year of college, a Jameco XT clone kit. I even spent the extra bucks for the 20 Mb hard drive (Seagate ST-225XT with a Western Digital controller card, the "classic" configuration from those days) and enough extra RAM chips to bring it up to the full 640K. That ran me $1500...and it didn't even have a modem or printer; my friends took up a collection to buy me a 2400 baud modem, and my parents later got me an Epson 24-pin dot matrix printer as a birthday gift. Once I got the modem, I could dial into the campus network, connect to the lab and make use of those Sun workstations remotely for reading news, or upload my homework using Kermit. (Ethernet in the dorms? I was lucky to get a working phone line in there sometimes...) Later on, I subscribed to great technical magazines like BYTE, Programmer's Journal, and PC Techniques (all of which have fallen by the wayside, though byte.com is around these days). I subscribed to the original Prodigy service, and to BIX. I once spent an afternoon while waiting for a backup to complete (at the place I was working at the time, where I was a network admin) by writing some COM port routines in assembly (based on an article from the PC Techniques mag I'd just gotten a week ago), wrapping them in some C to make a teeny terminal program, and trying them out. It was good enough to let me talk to the modem, dial the Tymnet access number, and log onto BIX. Is that "old school" enough for you? IP: Logged |
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Jas Geek
Posts: 65 |
posted July 23, 2002 17:05
lol i use it because its annoying. hehe. dont call me james... Jas plz... d0wn wi7h 1337-5p34k! ------------------ IP: Logged |
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ilovemydualg4 Highlie
Posts: 522 |
posted July 23, 2002 17:10
jasmes ok? ------------------ IP: Logged |
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Jas Geek
Posts: 65 |
posted July 23, 2002 18:15
if you prefer to type the 3 extra characters go ahead ------------------ IP: Logged |
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SpikeSpiegel Highlie
Posts: 529 |
posted July 23, 2002 20:30
if you people got worried when me and dualg took over a thread be scared now.. with jasmes here it will be even worse  ------------------ IP: Logged |
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Jas Geek
Posts: 65 |
posted July 24, 2002 03:04
ph34r m3! lol sry couldn't resist... man i gotta rack up some posts and catch up to you guys... btw dualg i got the mod to lower spamblock time ------------------ IP: Logged |
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dajt Geek Apprentice
Posts: 42 |
posted July 24, 2002 06:43
Back in my day I learned to program on a PDP-8E with 16K of memory (core). It ran timeshared basic with half-a-dozen terminals. Once in a great while we could boot it into single-user mode and play Star Trek on it. Then I graduated to a PDP-11 running Unix, and never looked back (well, much). My undergraduate assembly language class was taught on a PDP-11. You had to toggle in some of your programs on the binary front panel and demonstrate them to the TA. I remember before IBM introduced the PC. I also remember seeing the first Mac, and wondering why anyone would buy something with such a tiny screen and NO SLOTS. I have (or at least had) programs stored on paper tape. And 8-inch floppy. I built my first modem from a kit. I was too lazy to build a proper acoustic coupler for it, so I just taped the speakers to the handset. It ran at 300 baud, and I attached it to a (highly modified) Heathkit H9 terminal I remember back when you were only allowed to have one phone in your house. The phone didn't belong to you--it belonged to the phone company. It was black, had an actual dial, and had a real bell in it. If you were lucky, you hade one that plugged in instead of one that was wired into the wall. Touch-tone wasn't avaliable in our town, but you could dial certain numbers by only dialing the last four digits. I remember the Great Usenet Renaming. I remember the introduction of DNS and the retirement of the hosts file. I used the 'net before the web existed. I remember mail addresses full of !s. Mine was ...!ucbvax!ucbernie!hack I remember when RMS started the GNU project. Enough old-farting. I've gotta go sling some code. IP: Logged |
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daveyt Geek Larva 
Posts: 21 |
posted July 24, 2002 18:17
We only ever got to Fortran 77... and we had to do CAD by co-ordinate plotting... Usenet was it... Mosaic was a rumour... There were no cd's... Portable computers meant that it came with it's own suitcase... New Coke sucked... I was scared someone was going to roll me for my docs for three years straight...
------------------ IP: Logged |
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Xanthine Highlie
Posts: 787 |
posted July 24, 2002 19:50
quote: Dang. You just dated yourself there. I've never seen a table like that. I have seen tables that only went out to 106 (Unh), but an incomplete actinide series? When was this? IP: Logged |
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SpikeSpiegel Highlie
Posts: 529 |
posted July 24, 2002 20:54
quote: jasmes.. good job on the spam block.. havent recieved it that much anymore.. jasmes dont uber post.. you dont want people to become sick of you now do you.. but dont worry.. i outpostsed dualg.. im sure you will as well ------------------ IP: Logged |
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Jas Geek
Posts: 65 |
posted July 25, 2002 10:38
lol mike you guys have so few posts... on xen i have like 1k now ------------------ IP: Logged |
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SpikeSpiegel Highlie
Posts: 529 |
posted July 25, 2002 12:26
yes but you have been posting on xen for a while now.. ive only been here for 2 months or so and dual g for a bit longer.. hardly enough time to amast a lot of posts.. ------------------ IP: Logged |
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Alien Investor Assimilated
Posts: 438 |
posted July 25, 2002 12:37
quote: 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. There was a huge wall-sized periodic table in the Lawrence Hall of Science, which was the coolest place on earth for a 12-year-old geekboy. My memory has gaps here. I don't remember the particular last elements of the time. I'm pretty sure that every table had Einsteinium in it (#99), and I'm also certain that Lawrencium (#103) was not present in the first table that I saw. I remember looking in lots of places for more recent tables with more elements, and finding them. Reconstructing, the first table I saw probably went to #99 or #100, and I didn't see #103 for several years. I'm sure that I never saw #104, Rutherfordium, before I started college in 1979. This says more about the dates of the tables that were accessible to me than the dates of the element syntheses, because #103 was synthesized in 1961, and #104 was synthesized in 1964! IP: Logged |
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neotatsu Highlie
Posts: 606 |
posted July 25, 2002 13:44
quote: its not the quantity of posts you have that matters here fellas, it's the quality of what you say IP: Logged |
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ilovemydualg4 Highlie
Posts: 522 |
posted July 25, 2002 18:16
quote: exactly! i do think that 90 seconds was a bit long, but it was ok. and mike.... now i have nothing to do and i'm here more. jasmes.... you flip out a bit to much in my opinion [not flame bait] ------------------ IP: Logged |
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neotatsu Highlie
Posts: 606 |
posted July 25, 2002 19:01
quote: thats true, I just kept getting my posts deleted because of it and I hate retyping, but it's really not all that big an problem... IP: Logged |
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quantumfluff Uber Geek 
Posts: 925 |
posted July 25, 2002 19:26
Judging from the posts, the only one who comes close to my old-timeliness in this thread is dajt. I've been programming for money since 1976, on more platforms and in more languages than I can remember. So don't try to "Four Yorkshiremen" me, my lads. IP: Logged |
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maxomai Super Geek
Posts: 184 |
posted July 25, 2002 19:43
quote: Aha! Let's see who wins the Battle of the Old Geeks! Platforms: OS/390, OS/400, Apple ][, DOS, Win 3.1, Win32, AIX, SunOS 2.5 & 2.6, Solaris 7 & 8, Linux (different varieties), Oberon System 3 Languages: COBOL (admittedly using Synon), RAMIS, FORTRAN, BASIC (Apple and Quick), Pascal and Delphi, x86 and MIPS assembler, C, C++, OCaml, SML-NJ, Perl, Python, Java and Java 2, Smalltalk, Oberon. If I cheat, I can add BASH, LaTeX, JCL, HTML and Javascript. Not that I think I'll win, I just want to be awed by your lists. IP: Logged |
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ilovemydualg4 Highlie
Posts: 522 |
posted July 26, 2002 03:16
quote: ie 5.2 saves forms, i don't know about other browsers, you can just hit back button ------------------ IP: Logged |
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quantumfluff Uber Geek
Posts: 925 |
posted July 26, 2002 07:55
Originally posted by maxomai: Aha! Let's see who wins the Battle of the Old Geeks! Platforms is an vague concept. Does that mean *using* the platform or administering it, or having to understand it well enough so you make platform specific tradeoffs for it. I only count it if you wrote software to run on it, or, when porting software to multiple platforms, understand how to make it work on it.
Wrote in various languages on:
I don't count HTML as a real language, because it has no conditional features, but I do count troff and XML/XSL, which are turing complete, even though you shouldn't be writing programs in them. IP: Logged |
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Ruthenius Newbie 
Posts: 5 |
posted July 26, 2002 08:27
I'm surprised that no one has yet mentionned the Commodore VIC-20, with it's cassette drive to save program files on. Do you remember "Press Play on tape"? Cheers! ------------------ IP: Logged |
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neotatsu Highlie
Posts: 606 |
posted July 26, 2002 13:50
quote: The problem is sometimes when I hit the back button the post still gets deleted,and some of these posts are even fairly long winded too... IP: Logged |
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TheAnnoyedCockroach Highlie
Posts: 672 |
posted July 26, 2002 14:46
Then you should cut down on the amount of wind you produce so's it's not so heart-rending if you lose it. Heh... wind production... ------------------ IP: Logged |
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iQuadra Maximum Newbie 
Posts: 15 |
posted July 28, 2002 18:03
Im 14 years old. the oldest computer i can remember having was a quadra 840 AV, which sadly died a few weeks ago.Im not an old school geek.so sue me. in any case, is progress such a bad thing? i can imagine looking back on those days with nostalgia, when there werent geek wannabes running around online, flaming random people. but locking yourself into those "good old days" really doesnt make much sense. computers change constantly. you dont have to rush as fast as you can to catch up, but dont restrict yourself to older computers. it really makers no sense. however, i wish i knew how to play D&D, and i remember watching MacGuyver with my dad when i was younger.as far as older computer games goes "Cosmic Osmo and the worlds beyond the mackerel" was the GREATEST. IP: Logged |
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What about MODULO 3, anybody ever had to do any of that???
