wiseoldtech said:
My experience of getting older is we accumulate a lot of old injuries from being kicked by Life. I wouldn't put young people down. They have a simpler approach to the whole thing.
But lately I have enjoyed listening to Carol Dweck:
Developing a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck - YouTube
Whatever age you are, you are either growing or have given up:
Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives – Brain Pickings
Older people have knowledge and experience, but have different knowledge. Also but sometimes, they are also set in their ways. That's why my dad knows JCL and I don't, but I can fix his Linux install when it borks and he can't. Younger people have plenty to add that older people have no idea about and vice versa. I find it quite complimentary sometimes.
When I was five, I was the one setting the clock on the VCR
I didn't need the manual, it just made sense. My friends houses mostly had "flashing 12s"... Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they were stupid. It's not my place to say.
When I was five, I was the one setting the clock on the VCR
I didn't need the manual, it just made sense. My friends houses mostly had "flashing 12s"... Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they were stupid. It's not my place to say.
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Funny, I remember 5-25 year old jumping up and down and doing stupid things long before the world wide web. It's innate for young males trying to impress females and a fairly standard animal behaviour programmed into us.
The internet is 50 years old after all...
P.S. dunno about how the demographic of this forum is evolving but more threads are becoming like the 'four yorkshiremen' round here.
The internet is 50 years old after all...
P.S. dunno about how the demographic of this forum is evolving but more threads are becoming like the 'four yorkshiremen' round here.
True, but not all old people are stupid, as there are also climate activists who are well over 90 years old.
When I was on primary school, out of sheer curiocity, I once deliberately connected myself to the 220 V AC mains. In retrospect, that was really stupid.
Read as someone who first started computer programming in 1974 and has been online since 1993.
The first affordable Sony transistor radio was late fifties.
In the mid sixties when I built a four bit machine they(transistors) were cheap in small quantities, but the new LEDs were too pricey for students, so we used grain-of-wheat bulbs for the row of lights we decoded for our results.
A few years later they were cheap(andsmall) enough for the HP calculators.
In the mid sixties when I built a four bit machine they(transistors) were cheap in small quantities, but the new LEDs were too pricey for students, so we used grain-of-wheat bulbs for the row of lights we decoded for our results.
A few years later they were cheap(andsmall) enough for the HP calculators.
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We didn't have any internet when we were kids, we lived in a rolled up newspaper in a septic tank.
I thought it was valves in those days.
Dropped from the engineering curriculum the year before I started university. I was trying to explain last week to one of my junior techs how my start in computing meant wrapping punch cards in wax paper and rubber bands to keep them dry on the ~three mile after-school bike ride to the board of education where the only computer in the city available to high school students was homed.
It was Sanskrit to him.
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It's gotten really bad with the pandemic. My analog professor, for example, has found his exam questions (complete with diagrams) on Chegg, for example.
It's become depressingly clear to me that you can graduate with a degree in EE and not know a **** thing about it.
I think that some older people are smarter, more analytical, etc. I've also met some who are either woefully ignorant or so deeply set in their own biases that they are willing to make themselves look extremely stupid in the process. I have a relative in her mid 50s (we don't talk much anymore) that genuinely believes that the first nuclear fusion reactor will consume the Earth in a ball of fire. No matter how much I explain the physics, no matter how many papers I show her, she refuse to believe it, even going so far as to say that an entire physics department is "just a bunch of r******* idiots who are too dumb to understand it". I won't say what her educational background is, but you can be assured that it is not physics.
The same sort of thing is prevalent regarding flat-earth, climate change, face masks, the moon landing, etc.
What I'm not sure about is whether people are genuinely as stupid as they act, or if they have such strong internal biases that they are willing to denounce overwhelming evidence against them. Neither option reflects well on them.
I'm not really sure how the bias thing would explain flat-earthers though.
The same arguments from people who don't know a neutron from a pineapple resurface whenever a high-profile physics research project is about to do its first shot. People said that kind of thing about the LHC, and although it came before my time, I'm sure people said the same things about JET as well.
I find it very distressing that some of these people think they're smarter than a team consisting of what are quite possibly some of the smartest people in the world.
I hesitate to call these people armchair scientists, because I think that's giving them a little too much credit.
I find it very distressing that some of these people think they're smarter than a team consisting of what are quite possibly some of the smartest people in the world.
I hesitate to call these people armchair scientists, because I think that's giving them a little too much credit.
In my case it was 1975 and 1993.
"Real computer" kits became available to the DIY builder in 1975. There was a hobby / electronics / computer store within driving distance from me at that time. It was a local store that sold mostly magazines like Kilobaud and Microcomputing and some parts. They also had some sales flyers for "systems."
Then a Byte Shop opened in Miami. I went there twice that I can remember. They had a box called the "Apple" which later became known as the Apple 1. Both times I went to see the Apple, and neither time they could make it work. If I had actually bought one, and kept it, I would be rich today.
By this time MITS had began selling their Altair 8800, which made the front cover of Popular Electronics Magazine in early 1975, and the local store had one working, it was crude, and program entry was by front panel switches!
I was working for Motorola, so I wanted a MC6800 box, and there was this flashy brochure in the local store for a complete fully expandable MC6800 system from SWTPC. Since I had already built every Tiger amp in their catalog, and cloned several of them, I spent the $$$ and ordered the complete SWTPC computer system kit. The stand alone terminal was available at the time, and the computer "would be available before I could finish building the terminal".....NOT. Bits and pieces arrived as they became available, but it would be well into 1975 before I got enough stuff to see it boot from a cassette tape.
My dream was to make computer based music. The 6800 system did make some crude 8 bit tones with a resistor ladder on it's 8 bit parallel port, but the technology wasn't quite ready yet.
Within a few years the SWTPC had grown to take up a full 6 foot workbench. The lights blinked when I turned it on. It had grown to a MC6809 system running at nearly 4 MHz with 96 KB of bank switched static ram and a real time multi tasking operating system (RT68-MX). Most programming was still assembly or basic. Someone, I don't remember who had a basic compiler for the 6900 that really sped up code execution. Even so it still took several seconds to read a bit mapped image of the Enterprise from RAM and send it to a TV set through the DIY MC6847 based graphics board. The "C" compiler for the 6800 really sucked, when it did anything. Still no useful music.
By the early 80's it had all been pushed off the bench by the Apple II clones we were building and a TRS-80 that I had acquired in a trade....As with nearly all early TRS-80's the external power supply had died, which required cutting open the plastic case to replace a dead fuse.
The Apple II did open up the door for some crude computer based music systems. The Soundchaser system was out of my price range, but I did have an ALF Music Card.
MIDI and the PC came into existence in the 80's and real time 16 bit audio appeared with the Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum in the early 90's.
A local chain store offered 4800 baud dial up "internet" access for $8.95 a month in 1993. The WWW was still not ripe. Most of us accessed BBS systems via FTP to download "stuff." They failed in less than a year, but the local phone company, Bellsouth came out with 14,400 baud dial up for $14.95. By this time there were the beginnings of the WWW, and we had a browser called Mosaic on our Sun and HP Unix boxes at work.....
The real fun started when the Netscape Navigator appeared for free, and it ran on a DOS / Windows 3 box. I still have and use my Bellsouth email address from 1974, even though Bellsouth no longer exists.
This "old guy" will turn 68 in a few days. The "younger" who started playing with DIY guitar amps at age 10 is still making music with DIY creations nearly 60 years on......
Never grow up, because when you grow up, you start growing old, and when you start growing old, you start dying......
.....never stop learning new things, when you stop learning, your brain starts growing old, and when your brain starts growing old, you start getting stoopid!
My parents really believed that the world would end when the "year 2000" problem caused all the computers in the world to turn on us humans. I tried to explain that it was all a marketing gimmick to sell us new computers, but they didn't listen. When we all woke up on January 1 to find ourselves still alive, she began to realize that I wasn't quite as stupid as they thought.
When they were moving out of the house that I grew up in, my brothers discovered a box of 8mm movies taken during our childhood. I got them dubbed to VHS tape and showed up at my parents house with the tapes and a VCR. I hooked it up to their TV and we all had fun watching things like a 4 year old me carrying a cat by it's tail. I did not remember having a cat as a kid. We didn't have a dog until I was much older.
When it was time to go, I tried to leave the VCR with them, but they did not want it in the house.......These people still had a rotary dial phone and a mechanical knob TV set....it was the 2000's. I promised myself never to be like them. Technology scared them. Cell phones were really an evil thing, and I was a cell phone design engineer....maybe they WERE right!
We're in the wrong thread here, gentlemen. But let's continue down memory lane:
No-one ever regretted buying an IBM was the motto, wasn't it? It's all come a long way from Big Blue, punchcards and text terminals. I did that stuff too in the seventies.
Usually took about 3 runs to fix the typing errors just to see if I could add 2 to 2....
Things got better in the Eighties with the smaller DEC Vax and PDP-11 mainframes. I was doing Fast Fourier Transform in the Fortran computer language. I am assured that Python is good stuff these days, but I gave up when I found I was hopeless at "C".
The top magazine for all things nerdish was Byte. Jerry Pournelle on the mystreries of MS-DOS . A couple of pages on the more interesting Apple computers:
I had several Apple IIs with disk drives. And various Apple Macintoshes. The Mac was so cute and easy to use.
This below was one of my better efforts. We discovered you could buy Intel's cheapest Celeron E3200 2.4 GHz processor for about £40. But a nifty bit of soldering a jumper on the motherboard pins made it run at 3.6 Ghz.
It took a lot of digging around to0 find out how to pull this hardware overclocking stunt, but fun.
No-one ever regretted buying an IBM was the motto, wasn't it? It's all come a long way from Big Blue, punchcards and text terminals. I did that stuff too in the seventies.
Usually took about 3 runs to fix the typing errors just to see if I could add 2 to 2....
Things got better in the Eighties with the smaller DEC Vax and PDP-11 mainframes. I was doing Fast Fourier Transform in the Fortran computer language. I am assured that Python is good stuff these days, but I gave up when I found I was hopeless at "C".
The top magazine for all things nerdish was Byte. Jerry Pournelle on the mystreries of MS-DOS . A couple of pages on the more interesting Apple computers:
I had several Apple IIs with disk drives. And various Apple Macintoshes. The Mac was so cute and easy to use.
This below was one of my better efforts. We discovered you could buy Intel's cheapest Celeron E3200 2.4 GHz processor for about £40. But a nifty bit of soldering a jumper on the motherboard pins made it run at 3.6 Ghz.
It took a lot of digging around to0 find out how to pull this hardware overclocking stunt, but fun.
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