off topic: new car advice for senior

[clare]

My first imprssion of both Mac and Wiindoze was : "Anything that takes that much memory and runs that slow has something wrong with it"

Back when 4K was a lot of ram.

[clare]

I "cut my teeth" on Motorola 6809 code.

[Don Y]

The first Reading Machine (KRM) had 8KB (4KW) of "core".

Granted, it was a dedicated device but far more complex than many pieces of bloatware currently offered (where most of the code is spent drawing pretty GUI's)

[Don Y]

6809 was considerably more capable than the 8080 and 4004. The 6800 was more on a par with the 8080. The i4004 would almost be physically painful coding for -- esp today.

Back then, we counted ram in "dozens of bytes" -- I can recall 256 bytes being A LOT!!!

[Tony Hwang]

i386 based box was embedded diagnostic tool using serial bit shifting method on logic circuits. Then water cooled back panel, the CDC made

96 layer back panel water cooled. I spent many years at local university campus. They were multi vendor user for political reasons. DEC, IBM, CDC, Honeywell. We site EICs were always got along very well. We almost cross trained ourselves among us, LOL! We used to have a French Bull made mid-level box which used CMOS VLSI using CML circuitry. One board was drawing like 35 Amps. We used to call it welding machine. That CMOS caused lot of headaches caused by static from mis-handling it. Then strict anti-static measure was implemented which was strictly reinforced. If a guy was found touching the board with bare hands without glove, strap and mat, he could be fired on the spot. You know the story about Zenith laptops during desert storm 1? What is your back? Process control? Or telemetry? One box solution for whatever?

[clare]

My backround was automotive - then I changed horses and got into computers. My main job at Trillium was putting CD Rom onto networks back before Novel knew what a CDRom was, and Unix didn't have a clue either. The company I worked for was at one time the largest reseller of hard drives for IBM PC and compatible computers (this was before the XT) and the largest distributor of CD ROM drives in Canada as well

- We were the first distributor of Hitachi CD ROM drives in Canada - We put CD Rom towers into university and medical libraries across Canada. We also built premium clone computers - with 2 year warranty.

Then the owner hired a "harvard MBA" type manager who wanted to "grow the company" - and also wanted it for himself. The business was mismanaged to death in several stages.

[John]

I use an I6 *(the previous smaller I4GS was just as good and an easier fit in your pocket) and will say its a nice 'phone/tablet/clock/radio/gamer/whatever gadget'.

But then again I am still working.

When I retire a *much less expensive* 'phone/tablet/clock/radio/gamer/whatever gadget' will be my choice.

John

[Tony Hwang]

Common story with Gung Ho type with fancy degrees, LOL! I always liked Plextor SCSI drives. I still have some on my desktop. It has 3 optical drives Blue ray writer, etc. which is handy. I still use Panasonic CD-RAM too for small back ups.

[Tony Hwang]

We used paper tape or indented puch card knocking off holes to program machine code instead toggling buttons of swwitches on control panel. Good old days. Biggest PSU was +5V Ault unit which puts out 150A. Some big system needed more than few.

[rbowman]

We had a few with the old AT form factor that had a few embellishments. You definitely didn't want to put the tin back on.

Vapor phase cooling, that's where it's at. It wasn't a computer but the first company I worked for made industrial dielectric preheaters for the plastics industry. The largest model was 15KW. Then there was the chief engineer's pet project. He wanted to squeeze 50KW out of a big Eimac triode and figured vapor phase was the way to go. The condenser had a striking resemblance to a Falcon radiator. What could go wrong with a

50KW Colpitts oscillator / steam kettle?

I wasn't even thinking about the iPhones, just the Apple desktop/laptops. My phone technology is stuck at the $19.95 LG flip phone level.

I did get an Android tablet when the company decided we needed a tablet product. As a developer I can attest Google throws a few curves with every new release. Fortunately I can still build and run the app on my old 4.0 and it mostly works. From our viewpoint, Android is much handier since we can just load up the apk and never go anywhere near the Google store.

That definitely helps.

They do have a dedicated customer base. The only Apple product I've ever owned is an iShuffle my boss gave out on Christmas. I didn't really appreciate the iTunes part of it. I have nothing against Apple but nobody ever wanted to pay me to develop Apple software. The closest I ever got was one DoD project where there were some of the 1st gen Macs. They were crap but they did meet the TEMPEST requirements.\

I pretty much hate phones in general. I guess an iPhone could be okay if I never had to talk on it.

[rbowman]

This goes back a few decades but I mostly associated Macs with desktop publishing and other artsy endeavors. One quirk I remember as a C programmer is the Apple II needed some sort of keyboard tweak to handle C. There was some character it didn't have natively, possibly curly and square brackets. I don't think it had ~ or ^ but those aren't real showstoppers.

[Don Y]

I worked on a discrete ECL processor ("ALU", no memory) that drew 100A @ -5.2VDC. 600 (six hundred) bit data words.

7ns cycle time. (not bad for 30+ years ago!)

You took off all "jewelry" (belt buckles, rings, watches, metal framed eyeglasses) when you worked on it as a "slip" would quickly bring the item to cherry red *without* blowing the power supply fuse/protector!

We had a dedicated 440V service installed just to power the instrument (used to test the *core* memory in certain aircraft)

[rbowman]

I did okay on my own back in the '80s. The one thing I didn't enjoy was selling myself. Fortunately I'd made a few contacts that kept me in work but there was always the feeling my eggs were in only a few baskets. The bookkeeping and so forth didn't do much for me either.

Some people really want to have their own business; I just wanted to write code.

[Don Y]

Dunno. I only played with 68K Macs as servers of various types (WWW/FTP/DNS/TFTP/etc.). As such, usually running headless and "talking " to them over a telnet connection.

Trigraphs would handle that. But, from a telnet session, not an issue.

MacOS got *one* thing right, though -- putting the "menubar" for the "active window" at the top of the screen... instead of wasting all that screen real-estate drawing menu bars in EVERY application window (even those without the focus!)

[rbowman]

They tried. I was somewhat pissed when IBM put the Good Housekeping Seal of Approval on the 8088 piece of crap rather than the Z8000. Turns out Exxon had bought a major stake in Zilog and IBM was in a pissing contest with Exxon so the Z8000 was never on the table. The 68008 had been considered but IBM didn't think Motorola could reliably supply parts. At that time Motorola had a bad rep of hanging you out to dry if they got a massive contract from the auto industry.

I still have a Captain Zilog t-shirt around here someplace.

[Don Y]

Yup. I remember visiting accountant for my first tax return as a business. He looked over my records and said, "What the hell do you need *me*, for?" " I dunno. You tell me?!"

My downside was that clients wanted "repeat business" -- but, that would just be "another project very similar to the one you just finished". There's no appeal in that, for me. Sure, LOTS of appeal for client as I am now a "proven quantity" -- especially for projects of that sort! But, I'm not going to LEARN anything doing "model 2".

Yup. I am a terrible manager! My idea as to "management" is that *I* should facilitate getting whatever resources those "under me" need. I shouldn't need to monitor their progress (they're PROFESSIONALS, right?) or track their attendance, hours, etc. This is contrary to what most employers consider "management responsibilities".

I also want to be "in the thick of things" -- pushing the technology in different directions, exploring what *can* be done instead of what

*might*/should be done.

One of the most taxing projects I undertook was writing a user's manual for an existing device. I.e., I had no say in how the device was designed, how consistently it was implemented, how reliable it was, etc. Yet, had to codify all of this in a way that *seemed* intuitive to readers.

[I am NOT keen on writing/composition! OTOH, I learned a lot about how to organize material in a way that made it easy for folks to navigate and "recall" -- remember WHERE you found something is as important as finding it in the first place!]

I also developed ways of doing things that made "typographical errors" impossible. And, have extended those to other hardware/software design aspects so you defined something *once* and let the tools ensure that everything related to that is synthesized *from* that "gold master" (instead of transcribing things manually, etc.)

[Don Y]

Apple products remind me too much of B&O. Too much emphasis on "glitz" over function. My iPods are tedious to use -- a *mechanical* wheel (or even a four way navigation bar) would be far more reliable as an input device than the capacitive "dial" that it employs. Try using it without WATCHING what you are doing! Ditto for every other Apple product.

Ditto for hating phones. I don't think I would use an iPhone for anything that I can't already do with a PDA -- just more horses under the hood!

[rbowman]

Square D, the industrial controls manufacturer, entered the solid state fray with NORPAK. They were modules a little smaller than a VHS cartridge that you mounted on a backplane and interconnected with taper pine jumpers. Each module had a number of discrete gates. As the name suggests, most of them were NORs with a few NANDs and NOTs for good measure.

Theoretically you can do anything given enough NORs. You can also run up a hell of a bar tab trying to restore your brain to normal operation after doing so.

[rbowman]

I had a 68000 development board when they first came out, but missed the

6800, 6809, HC08, HC11 and the rest. No particular reason, I just went down the Intel/Zilog path instead. In later years I went with Atmel rather than PIC. Again, no particular reason.

[rbowman]

I did a hand held pH/ion concentration meter using the 8048. It was fun. You knew where every damn byte was at all times. The counter top lab devices used the Z80 and I hardly knew what to do with all that space.