Author Topic: You know you're old when.....  (Read 35593 times)

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Offline BrumbyTopic starter

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #250 on: July 27, 2021, 04:38:26 am »
... and Czechoslovakia                   :palm:
 

Offline BrumbyTopic starter

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #251 on: July 27, 2021, 04:50:48 am »
When you used:
 - an IBM 082 card sorter - regularly
 - IBM 3348 Data Modules - which weighed a few kgs each (and reminded me of the starship Enterprise).  We had the higher capacity ones that were 70MB each!
 - the only screen which was the main operator console
 - punched cards for everything
at your first full time job
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #252 on: July 27, 2021, 02:21:14 pm »
but then one open his case and takes out a telephone handset and says “hello”. After a short delay, he hands it to his companion, and says “It’s for you”.

When I first got my license we built a battery powered supply to ring a standard "bell ringer" phone (STC "princess" from memory) and we used to do that at traffic lights. Phone would ring, wait for odd look from the next car over then "answer" the phone and wind the window down, then hold the handset out with an "it's for you".

I'd forgotten about that.


One of my mates went one better---he mounted the phone under the bonnet ("hood) of his old Valiant.

He liked to do this with an accomplice.
He would stop at a set of lights with a busy flow of pedestrians, his mate would be crossing when the phone rang, & would pop the bonnet open, pull out the phone, "listen" for a couple of seconds, then hold it out, saying "It's for you!"
 

Online coppice

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #253 on: July 27, 2021, 09:24:01 pm »
you know were  Yugoslavi,bombay,peking,saigon,ceylon and burma are.
If you go to Saigon many of the signs still refer to it as Saigon, although its often using the Chinese characters 西貢.
 

Online themadhippy

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #254 on: July 27, 2021, 11:01:44 pm »
From what i recall  Ho Chi Minh is the entire city whilst Saigon is only the central part.Bit like New York and Manhattan i suppose
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #255 on: July 27, 2021, 11:14:45 pm »
When you used:
 - an IBM 082 card sorter - regularly
 - IBM 3348 Data Modules - which weighed a few kgs each (and reminded me of the starship Enterprise).  We had the higher capacity ones that were 70MB each!
 - the only screen which was the main operator console
 - punched cards for everything
at your first full time job

There is something fascinating and satisfying about watching an 082 card sorter in action.  They saved my bacon on more than one instance when I dropped a large deck.  I had one program that ran almost two boxes of cards.  Wouldn't mind seeing one in action again, but not willing to put the time and effort in to find and fix along with a card punch and enough cards to make the sort interesting.
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #256 on: July 27, 2021, 11:21:41 pm »
In my long-past youth, real programmers put sequence numbers in the right-most columns of Hollerith cards to allow such resorting.  You always started by sorting on the least-significant digit, re-stack, sort on the next digit, etc. until you reached the most-significant digit.  This type of equipment predated programmed computers.
 

Offline BrumbyTopic starter

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #257 on: July 28, 2021, 04:34:17 am »
In my long-past youth, real programmers put sequence numbers in the right-most columns of Hollerith cards to allow such resorting.  You always started by sorting on the least-significant digit, re-stack, sort on the next digit, etc. until you reached the most-significant digit.  This type of equipment predated programmed computers.

... and if you were doing an alpha sort, you would do two passes - zones and numeric, with special consideration to the '0' pile.   (Crikey - the things you remember.)

Edit:
A couple of years ago, I was helping a friend sort out some of their product storage and there were these booklets that were worth anywhere from $15 - $25 each and they had to be sorted in order on a 3 digit number.  Handling these was a risky business as their condition was most important in commanding the best price so I stepped in to show them how to do it.

They were rather concerned when I started, but by only handling each booklet exactly 3 times by simple placement (no shuffling, sliding, inserting, etc.) it was all sorted ... using the exact same technique as you would on an 082.

They were really happy.
« Last Edit: July 28, 2021, 05:05:33 am by Brumby »
 

Offline TerraHertz

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #258 on: August 01, 2021, 04:58:43 am »
When watching Professor Julius Sumner Miller on B&W TV was one of your childhood pleasures.

Collecting old scopes, logic analyzers, and unfinished projects. http://everist.org
 
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Offline BrumbyTopic starter

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #259 on: August 01, 2021, 05:14:45 am »
When watching Professor Julius Sumner Miller on B&W TV was one of your childhood pleasures.

Oh, yes!   :-+

In fact, my parents thought I wasn't applying myself at school, so they wrote to the good professor for some words of wisdom - AND HE WROTE BACK!  A quick note in felt tipped pen on the back of a flyer and signed by the good professor.  It's buried somewhere in the archives of my life - safely, I hope.
 

Offline AaronLee

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #260 on: August 01, 2021, 05:59:09 am »
When watching Professor Julius Sumner Miller on B&W TV was one of your childhood pleasures.

And you got up to manually change the TV channel. Those new fangled ultrasonic remote controls were a very expensive option.
 
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Offline BradC

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #261 on: August 01, 2021, 08:37:08 am »
One of my mates went one better---he mounted the phone under the bonnet ("hood) of his old Valiant.

He liked to do this with an accomplice.
He would stop at a set of lights with a busy flow of pedestrians, his mate would be crossing when the phone rang, & would pop the bonnet open, pull out the phone, "listen" for a couple of seconds, then hold it out, saying "It's for you!"

I can just picture that at lunchtime at the William St/Hay St lights on a weekday. That'd be excellent.
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #262 on: August 01, 2021, 01:46:17 pm »
My equivalent, growing up in the US, was "Watch Mr Wizard" with Don Herbert.  Lots of hands-on tabletop experiments with participation from one boy or girl guest.
There was a much later TV show "Dinosaurs" in US, with a "Mr Lizard" character.  The catch-phrase was "Time to get another Timmy" after yet another fatal lab accident.  "Gee, Mr Lizard, I've never looked down the muzzle of a cannon before!"
In my childhood, before deregulation and the explosion in the number of media channels, commercial broadcasters in the US had a legal requirement to run educational and cultural programming.  The other big influence on me back then were the "Young Peoples' Concerts" with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.
« Last Edit: August 01, 2021, 03:44:02 pm by TimFox »
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #263 on: August 02, 2021, 01:22:40 am »
When watching Professor Julius Sumner Miller on B&W TV was one of your childhood pleasures.

Oh, yes!   :-+

In fact, my parents thought I wasn't applying myself at school, so they wrote to the good professor for some words of wisdom - AND HE WROTE BACK!  A quick note in felt tipped pen on the back of a flyer and signed by the good professor.  It's buried somewhere in the archives of my life - safely, I hope.

"Is that not strange & wonderful?"
 

Online David Hess

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #264 on: August 02, 2021, 01:33:56 am »
When watching Professor Julius Sumner Miller on B&W TV was one of your childhood pleasures.

And you got up to manually change the TV channel. Those new fangled ultrasonic remote controls were a very expensive option.

And it was on the external UHF converter.
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #265 on: August 02, 2021, 03:35:26 am »
And all UHF tuners were detent-free (continuous rotation), just like an AM dial.
 
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Offline rdl

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #266 on: August 03, 2021, 07:18:26 pm »
I remember watching myself on TV.  There was a morning children's show produced by one of the three channels we had at that time. It was recorded live and then broadcast from tape with a delay. The audience always was made up of local kids. When it was done you could hurry home and see yourself in glorious black and white.
 

Offline mansaxel

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #267 on: August 03, 2021, 09:00:04 pm »
I remember watching myself on TV.  There was a morning children's show produced by one of the three channels we had at that time. It was recorded live and then broadcast from tape with a delay. The audience always was made up of local kids. When it was done you could hurry home and see yourself in glorious black and white.

This goes on to this day. I work at a TV station. We have a summer morning show with audience that used to be live but we've found out that it is more popular and has a better audience if we record it a day in advance, so the audience can see themselves tomorrow.

Offline GlennSprigg

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #268 on: August 04, 2021, 12:26:58 pm »
(Recently)... When you find old bits of 'Code' you wrote years ago, or try to understand it!!!    :scared:

I keep my old Laptop Hard-Drives, like some people have BOOKS!   I 'must' go back, and find my old "Snippets"
software, where I used to keep/save all my old 'bits' of interesting & reusable Code, for the categorized use
of 'C', 'C++', 'Basic', 'JavaScript', 'Delphi' etc etc.  Was a great way to have reusable bits/modules on hand!!   8)

P.S.   Sometimes, I would DELIBERATELY write some confusing 'code', that perfectly did the job, but purposely resulted
in people way off track when trying to 'decipher' it, even if they go their hands on the Source-Code!   :phew:
Diagonal of 1x1 square = Root-2. Ok.
Diagonal of 1x1x1 cube = Root-3 !!!  Beautiful !!
 

Offline mansaxel

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #269 on: August 04, 2021, 01:14:37 pm »
(Recently)... When you find old bits of 'Code' you wrote years ago, or try to understand it!!!    :scared:

I keep my old Laptop Hard-Drives, like some people have BOOKS!   I 'must' go back, and find my old "Snippets"
software, where I used to keep/save all my old 'bits' of interesting & reusable Code, for the categorized use
of 'C', 'C++', 'Basic', 'JavaScript', 'Delphi' etc etc.  Was a great way to have reusable bits/modules on hand!!   8)

P.S.   Sometimes, I would DELIBERATELY write some confusing 'code', that perfectly did the job, but purposely resulted
in people way off track when trying to 'decipher' it, even if they go their hands on the Source-Code!   :phew:

You know you're old when yes, you have code snippets like above, but instead of putting them on GitHub (the new way) or having a laptop HDD in storage (the medium-old way), you have an actual networked file system that is reachable from your computers and has history since you started with computers, available, on-line, without having to dig out a perhaps-spinning drive. And, there is not a single thing in this that runs over HTTP! Mostly because HTTP was not invented when version 1 of the system you're using was released.

As for me, when I dig out old code, one of two things happen:

  • I understand it and am embarrassed.
  • I do not understand / remember it, and am embarrassed only after I've reverse-engineered it.

Offline RJSV

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #270 on: October 14, 2021, 04:23:36 pm »
TOO OLD WHEN:
Remembering (Too) Eager JOB RECRUITERs.
...when you KNOW what the 1980's lable
"HEAD HUNTER" really means... (it ain't a good thing).
No genius technician required: Just have temperature / pulse and maybe keep saying:
"...think there's A BIT, getting set, somewhere..." That's
I.U.T.J.  (Idiot Using Tech Jargon).
...to placate worry-prone middle managers...
...pretty sure...CODE is setting a bit...and I'll maybe find it...after lunch...

1980's had a mix of in-competent folks, along with US genius'es...ahem...
 

Offline Ground_Loop

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #271 on: October 14, 2021, 05:36:45 pm »
You involuntarily grunt when lifting yourself out of a chair.
There's no point getting old if you don't have stories.
 
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Offline MT

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #272 on: October 14, 2021, 08:30:18 pm »
When you cant see the difference between 0805 and fly farts while manually assembling a PCB!
 

Offline Neper

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #273 on: October 14, 2021, 08:36:31 pm »
When you read that a video is available on DVD and VOD and you wonder what a VOD is...
If I knew everything I'd be starving because no-one could afford me.
 

Offline tpowell1830

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Re: You know you're old when.....
« Reply #274 on: October 16, 2021, 02:53:06 am »
When you remember the phrase "shave and a haircut, 2 bits..." and you know how much 2 bits are.

EDIT: Nothing to do with computers...
« Last Edit: October 16, 2021, 02:57:41 am by tpowell1830 »
PEACE===>T
 


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