Right rudder applied - Spin Zone gone
- Thread starter overdrive148
- Start date
ChrisK
En-Route
I read every word. Thank you.
I was 10 when you turned 30, and my mother campaigned to buy me a Vic-20. It set me on a course to a career that has been mostly exciting and profitable. Like you, I have had a fair share of good timing and luck. I watched the Internet be born, and while I did not make the BEST bets, I did ok.
Keep inspiring kids with your story. It is important.
denverpilot
Tied Down
Same here. Entire family managed to scrounge up the price tag of a Tandy Color Computer Model 1 with 16K of RAM for Christmas in the early 80s, and I credit that Christmas the beginning of most of my livelihood.
The rest of the upgrades and accessories over the years after that were mostly on me. Since I couldn't afford the pre-built nice stuff, I had to build the stuff myself from scrounged parts. Soldered in the RAM for a whopping 64K. Hadn't soldered a thing in my life up until that point. Just had to be done.
Second big thing that happened was stumbling into a company that built products that had to integrate telecom and computers completely, and had a mix of old Bell System heads and early computer nerds. Learned a ton in a short time.
Mixing all of that, there is little I can't figure out how to make work in those disciplines. Heavy emphasis on the basics early in those early endeavors and having to build the stuff from parts, makes the modern stuff feel intensely easy. I can "see" the history of how the complex thing I'm looking at today came to be.
And troubleshooting really became second nature. Seriously.
They brought in some consulting company once to teach our entire product support engineering department at one employer, how to troubleshoot.
The lady teaching the classes had some pre made scenario and started around the room, asking what the scene was -- with only one piece of information -- and with each wrong answer the person could ask a question.
I was third. I told her what her scenario was.
She was kinda unprepared for it.
She said, "Well that's right, but we were supposed to go at least around the room a couple of times to get there! How did you figure that out?"
As I started to mumble something, my boss who I'd worked with for many years on and off at multiple companies interrupts and jokes, "He's really good at that. We didn't hire him for his stellar personality!"
I love troubleshooting entire systems. It's just plain fun for me. I get loud and ****y about it sometimes, and can invoke dad's training of how to cuss like a sailor during the process, but that's just noise when a branch of the troubleshooting tree in my head is blocked and I know there's no way to short-circuit a quick test to get around a nasty test.
It's why I loathe ADS-B. It's junk engineering from the late 90s, and doesn't accomplish any of the things used to market it and justify the price tag running in the billions. Really easy to see. Boondoggle. Seen a number of them.
Mason
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Mase
txflyer
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Fly it like you STOL it ♦
I STARTED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES LIKE PONG AND INTELLIVISION! AND WAS HERE WHEN THERE WAS A SPIN ZONE YOU PUSS! 
Thumper
Pre-takeoff checklist
I won't say I'm old, but my first computer class in college in 1969 was hard wiring circuit boards. I then moved up to writing binary machine code. An IBM 360 was state of the art and I went on to write Fortran and Cobal. In fact, I spent a couple weeks in class with Dr. (Captain) Grace Hopper, USN. That was long, long ago in a computer galaxy far, far away.
I shall step out of the "Way Back Machine" now...... Carry on.
I shall step out of the "Way Back Machine" now...... Carry on.
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Velocity173
silver-eagle
En-Route
My first computer was an IBM System 370/125 running DOS (not THAT DOS). It was also the first computer I played games on. I had a STAR TREK game in PL1 and BLACKJACK in COBOL. Since I was the system operator for 8 hours a day, I had a lot of spare time while running jobs, mounting tapes, loading punch cards, and printing and decollating reports. It didn't pay to badly for "part time" no benefits, starving college kid, job. It also led to 40+ years of working in IT, mostly doing operating systems.
My dream job used to be programming computer games but I just aren't that ambitious.
I'll miss the spin zone but there's plenty other sites where I can get my fill of similar type discussions. The purple board being one.
My dream job used to be programming computer games but I just aren't that ambitious.
I'll miss the spin zone but there's plenty other sites where I can get my fill of similar type discussions. The purple board being one.
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silver-eagle
En-Route
nddons
Touchdown! Greaser!
Soldering. Big deal. You probably just pulled up a YouTube video on how to do it. Oh, wait....
TangoWhiskey
Touchdown! Greaser!
I read every word too! "TAB Books"; wow, what a memory jog that was!
ChrisK
En-Route
Am I the only one who practically memorized the Jim Butterfield articles in Compute!?
denverpilot
Tied Down
Soldering. Big deal. You probably just pulled up a YouTube video on how to do it. Oh, wait....
Hadn't "found" Ham Radio or any "Elmers" yet at that age either. I figured I was about to destroy a very expensive piece of equipment and be very sad, or I'd boot it up and have 64K. Think I was about 13 at the time.
If I had ruined it, I doubt we'd have had the bucks to fix/replace it. Talk about being careful... But at that age I had plenty of time and little else to do so no reason to rush.
And of course back then I figured the soldering irons RatShack sold were actually a quality product... LOL... Nope.
I think the soldering techniques were straight out of some magazine article. We moved later and we were a lot closer to a public library which made young broke geek life easier.
Matthew
Touchdown! Greaser!
xyzzy
ChrisK
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SixPapaCharlie
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ChrisK
En-Route
Nicely done.
wanttaja
En-Route
ChrisK
En-Route
Yep, that's mine. I recognize the bad graphics.
Ron Wanttaja
It is kind of amazing what people did with the characterset-based sprites on the VIC-20. I had a Super Expander which helped a bit, but when you have to feed the lowest common denominator on 3.5k free RAM with those silly sprites, you can only do what you can do =)
The super expander was a ton of fun for math-based and "musical" projects though.
Scotty78
Pre-takeoff checklist
Being a bit younger, my first computer was an Apple IIC. I remember writing programs in basic. Fast forward to present, one of my hobbies is fixing and restoring golden age arcade games. Mostly board work/component troubleshooting. It's amazing how something using 30+ years old electronic technology can be so difficult at times. Vector games especially. But it's good exercise for the brain. What few new arcade games get produced all run on hard drives now that are nowhere near as stout as their multi board-stacked predecessors.
wanttaja
En-Route
Ha! One of the ways I splurged when the flight simulator took off was on an original "Space Wars" arcade game...exactly the kind of things you're working on.
Bought it from a game vendor; it didn't work, he said, would power up and show the idle mode, but won't actually start the game. Sold it to me for $25.
Got it home, and it wouldn't FIT in the home. So I left it in a friend's basement for a year, 'til we moved into a house with a garage.
Opened the back case and looked at it... and saw that it was all dusty. All of the board connectors were dusty, too. Except for one. I looked at that one more closely. It was dusty on the BOTTOM.
So I flipped it around, and it worked great. Me and my friends got a lot of mileage out of that.
Moved to another house in 1998, put it in the garage, and haven't tried it since. Figure if I ever DID try to power up, I'd better have it sitting outside with an extinguisher handy....
Ron Wanttaja