You got me there.... I bow to you.
My teacher started working at McChord AFB in the 60s during his stint in the USAF. They had a "computer" in the ground floor of the building for Early Warning Systems. Vacuum tubes. His job was to maintain the vacuum tubes. He told me that they had to run the AC on the second floor, full blast, even in the middle of January.
"Societies used to contain technologies. Now technologies contain entire societies." Jacques Ellul, 1964
I was just a kid when my uncle took me to work once where he was calibrating hard drives. He was working with an oscilloscope that had a figure-8 on it he was working to make symmetrical. The hard drive was about the size of a small refrigerator and the disks were the size of records.
I got into audio as an adult where I spent years in a garage installing stereos, amps, speakers, alarms, remote starts and later car phones. We expanded the biz to include aftermarket performance parts such as headers, intakes, polyurethane bushing / suspension components, turbo and supercharger kits and that kind of thing.
Around the time I finished my first undergraduate degree I moved from that job and started a biz with my cousin with some startup money from a rich relative to get into IT. We started building PCs in the late 80s and then moved on to networking and servers.
Some of the first networks I installed were token ring, and Novell netware. After that everything moved to tcpip by the mid 90s and most people and businesses then weren't using firewalls or security appliances or software.
Once the internet started to become big in the late 90s with AOL, malware started to become a thing and suddenly attention was being paid to security. Our company made more money running security audits than installing networks which by this time we were charging $90 a drop. We did work for some big names, names that are still around today. I remember we considered hiring some people who knew COBOL to work for us for customers who were concerned about the Y2K bug.
Boy how far things have come since I built my first PC which was a 12.5 MHz 286 with a math coprocessor which I used like crazy to make pictures like these:
These pictures would take hours or days to render one image on the hardware available back then.
Today there are GPUs that can run raytracing in real-time.
I got into audio as an adult where I spent years in a garage installing stereos, amps, speakers, alarms, remote starts and later car phones. We expanded the biz to include aftermarket performance parts such as headers, intakes, polyurethane bushing / suspension components, turbo and supercharger kits and that kind of thing.
Around the time I finished my first undergraduate degree I moved from that job and started a biz with my cousin with some startup money from a rich relative to get into IT. We started building PCs in the late 80s and then moved on to networking and servers.
Some of the first networks I installed were token ring, and Novell netware. After that everything moved to tcpip by the mid 90s and most people and businesses then weren't using firewalls or security appliances or software.
Once the internet started to become big in the late 90s with AOL, malware started to become a thing and suddenly attention was being paid to security. Our company made more money running security audits than installing networks which by this time we were charging $90 a drop. We did work for some big names, names that are still around today. I remember we considered hiring some people who knew COBOL to work for us for customers who were concerned about the Y2K bug.
Boy how far things have come since I built my first PC which was a 12.5 MHz 286 with a math coprocessor which I used like crazy to make pictures like these:
These pictures would take hours or days to render one image on the hardware available back then.
Today there are GPUs that can run raytracing in real-time.
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I remember the original military Athena computer used to control missile launches. Giant console required two persons doing simultaneous commands to operate it. It had less computing power than my dishwasher!
Wifey and I listening to the Cleveland OH classical station via Alexa during dinner when I mentioned that we needed more AA's. When I fired up the laptop I had adverts for batteries from Amazon and WalMart etc.
Anyone remember the VAXMate? Yes, DEC made an 80286 PC compatible. Most were diskless and booted over the net. There were some like the unit in the picture that contained an internal 5.25 inch floppy drive and they would boot DOS from that floppy. There were a very few that had an internal Seagate ST225 20 MegaByte hard drive. This picture is from about 1993 and is of my desk in an off-campus Motorola think tank. The VAXMate is sitting on the top shelf over my workbench and it has exactly one task. It controls the white rack mounted paging encoder which generates the data stream needed to send text to those little pagers that were so popular before cell phones. That data stream is fed to the RF signal generator below it to create a low powered stand alone paging system. All of this equipment was being used to develop an irrigation control system called OSMAC for commercial landscaping, primarily golf courses. That system is still being sold today by Toro. I included a picture of the parking lot. Guess which car is mine?
We (Motorola) hired contractors for short term (1 to 6 month) EE or PCB layout jobs. Those contractors were typically young unmarried males that didn't mind changing jobs and also moving house often. South Florida had a thriving tech industry in the 70's through early 90's with several large employers like IBM, Motorola, Bendix, Harris, Racal Milgo, and others. They are all gone now. A contractor who I had worked with on a PCB layout job at Motorola had grabbed a similar temp job at the IBM plant in Boca Raton where the PC was born. One day he shows up at my house with his car trunk full of stuff he had acquired from the dumpster after a major "cleanup the lab" kind of week at work. He dumps it all in my garage and asks me to make him the best PC I could from the pile, and I could keep the rest. I built him a 6 MHz 80286 "PC/AT"machine from mostly genuine IBM parts. I managed to put together a 5 slot 4.77 MHz original PC for myself. That started me down the 40+ year road, which one can see from the targeted adverts in the second picture in post#1 still continues today. Note the three adverts for RAM DIMMS.
Long before CMOS chips were even a dream there was TTL logic chips, before them there were DTL chips, and before those, RTL. Resistor-Transistor-Logic chips were available in the mid 60's and had faded from the market by the early 70's. Some serious dumpster diving at the Coulter Diagnostics medical electronics plant in the late 60's had netted me a trunk full of scrapped circuit boards full of DTL and RTL chips. I used those chips to create a digital music synthesizer in 1971 when everything was analog.
When things got really ugly at home, I had a short window to grab what I could, stuff my car to it's breaking point and leave. Everything I had left behind was trashed. I cut the 4 boards that I had spent nearly a year making out of the synthesizer cabinet which was far to big to take. I have never tried to power these up, and I doubt that every one of the 50+ year old chips still work. The picture shows two boards. The green one is a single monophonic voice (one note at a time) synth that was fully functional in 1972. The brown board was an attempt at a multi note polyphonic tone generator board which also worked. The two polyphonic voice boards are still in a box around here somewhere, but they were never finished, and all of the 1967 to 1971 vintage parts were lost forever along with all of my tube collection. There is a test board for a clone of a Vox Tone Bender guitar pedal. I fired it up and it does still work. The original pedal used germanium transistors and they had to be selected to get the right "tone" I had made a few clones with parts salvaged from junk transistor radios in the late 60's. The test board was a version with transistor sockets to screen transistors for their sound quality. Forget "tube rolling" I was transistor rolling while still in high school!
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I'm suddenly reminded of plugging in EEPROMS into a programmer which communicated with a PC XT via serial port.
The first serious programming language I learned was Turbo(!) Pascal and I did so on a 4.77 MHz 8088 with a green Hercules monochrome display.
I remember Edmund Scientific catalogs...
Sears. Mongomery Ward. Radio Shack.
Taxi. Charlie's Angels. Fantasy Island. Rockford Files.
I remember getting the 160-in-one electronics kit for Christmas when I was 10. My parents got the 2600 when it came out but I ended up playing with it more than they did.
The first serious programming language I learned was Turbo(!) Pascal and I did so on a 4.77 MHz 8088 with a green Hercules monochrome display.
I remember Edmund Scientific catalogs...
Sears. Mongomery Ward. Radio Shack.
Taxi. Charlie's Angels. Fantasy Island. Rockford Files.
I remember getting the 160-in-one electronics kit for Christmas when I was 10. My parents got the 2600 when it came out but I ended up playing with it more than they did.
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Use Safari browser with AdBloc.
Your phone, $300 home thermostats, smart TV's, video cameras/DVRs, etc., connected to the internet are sending/collecting data.
Build yourself a Faraday cage like Gene Hackman did in the movie Enemy of the State if you're really worried. Read "The Puzzle Palace" for some more info, but remember it was written well before Edward Snowden dropped the dime on the NSA.
Military aircraft have electronic warfare systems that used to be manually operated by the pilot or Electronics Warfare Officer (EWO). They have equipment that can detect electronic signals and a computer can jam the signal(s). We used to say "we jam harder, penetrate deeper and dispense in all modes of operation. And that was over 30 years ago. Imagine what gear the military has now.
Your new cars have "black boxes" where your speed, braking, location can be read by someone with the right tools. First thing the NSA or any government agency in any country wants to do is create a supercomputer that does quintillions of calculations per second to break your password. Super expensive, so your ordinary hacker isn't going to have one.
Your phone, $300 home thermostats, smart TV's, video cameras/DVRs, etc., connected to the internet are sending/collecting data.
Build yourself a Faraday cage like Gene Hackman did in the movie Enemy of the State if you're really worried. Read "The Puzzle Palace" for some more info, but remember it was written well before Edward Snowden dropped the dime on the NSA.
Military aircraft have electronic warfare systems that used to be manually operated by the pilot or Electronics Warfare Officer (EWO). They have equipment that can detect electronic signals and a computer can jam the signal(s). We used to say "we jam harder, penetrate deeper and dispense in all modes of operation. And that was over 30 years ago. Imagine what gear the military has now.
Your new cars have "black boxes" where your speed, braking, location can be read by someone with the right tools. First thing the NSA or any government agency in any country wants to do is create a supercomputer that does quintillions of calculations per second to break your password. Super expensive, so your ordinary hacker isn't going to have one.
Atari 2600- about 1976?
ELO - Out of the Blue. Got that LP.
One of the best investments I ever bought was a digital camera. My wife said her retirement hobby was going to be arranging all those expensive photos in photo albums. It's all sitting in the hobby room, hasn't been touched...
Thank Edward Bernays for that. Invented corporate brainwashing of the public for advertising.
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Just cell phone provider.
I go into phone settings and turn most stuff off off off off and off.
No poop ups.
I dont download " ad blockers" since they are add providers. Junk, resource hog
I do searches on parts express for speakers, then get google adds for speakers.
All good, better than flower pots and home loans
I go into phone settings and turn most stuff off off off off and off.
No poop ups.
I dont download " ad blockers" since they are add providers. Junk, resource hog
I do searches on parts express for speakers, then get google adds for speakers.
All good, better than flower pots and home loans
A lot of the talk here has been about corporates and their data gathering, but really the problem will be governments...
I don't know how many people here know much about the East German Stasi and the volumes of information they collected from informants.
But imagine what they could have done with facial recognition, gesture, expression analysis, car plate recognition, card sales data, phone metadata, cell tower location data.
All combined with the mountain of personal and financial data they already gather.
I don't know how many people here know much about the East German Stasi and the volumes of information they collected from informants.
But imagine what they could have done with facial recognition, gesture, expression analysis, car plate recognition, card sales data, phone metadata, cell tower location data.
All combined with the mountain of personal and financial data they already gather.
I don't really understand all this targeted advertising. Ok, I run adblocks on phone and pcs. But even when off, I never see anything relevant. I'm always pleasantly surprised at how truly bad they are at figuring what might interest me. But, adblocks on and see nothing. Even in-site like ebay, there are some adverts down the bottom, but who looks at those? And amazon, again, only ever offers me more of stuff I've bought...
I've never had a pop-up ad on my phones!
The algorithms and processes in use seem so bad, it's good!
I've never had a pop-up ad on my phones!
The algorithms and processes in use seem so bad, it's good!
But Duke 58 has the 8 TRACK TAPE! LP's from the dark ages can still be played. Some of mine date to the mid 60's. Virtually zero 8 track tapes survived more than 6 months in a hot car in Miami Florida. Many of mine gave the original meaning to the word streaming.......how many feet of magnetic tape can be seen STREAMING behind your car while zooming down the Palmetto Expressway at 65 MPH? I even had the Roberts / Akai 808D 8 trach cartridge recorder to make my own mix tapes. Roberts and Akai sold identical products, Akai was "fair traded" Roberts was not, and therefore considerably cheaper. The clever salespeople in the Olson store could convince the students from the University of Money to buy the Akai because it was "better."
The Amazon and Mercedes adverts that showed up on my phone appeared as a text message.
The "Microsoft Start" page is the page full of mindless crap that appears when opening a new Edge session or a new tab. Here is the junk that appeared when I just opened a new tab. There is the "useful to some people" weather and stock market info, and Stories or videos that are "recommended." Yes, MalwareBytes Ad Block is enabled, but despite the label stating "AD" on the PC hardware items, these are not blocked because "they are relevant to me" since I have purchased these items in the past from the suppliers being advertized. I rarely even scroll down to see if anything is interesting, and I have learned not to click anything other than the weather tab, unless I want more of the same. Scrolling down just shows more of the same for the equivalent of about 5 more pages. This seems to be a harmless activity as long as you don't click anything. Sometimes it is amusing to see how poorly these snippets are put together, bad spelling, grammar and punctuation are common, but often the picture does not match what they are trying to convey. I used to get DigiKey ads mixed in with the "stuff." Adverts for small transformers often showed a power transformer on a pole! I guess Digikey gave up since I no longer see ads from them.
I don't know where this weather forecast comes from, but it does not match the Weather Channel app on my phone, and the Weather Channel apps on my two phones often do not match each other! We live in a rural area with poor cell coverage. Now that the trees are losing their leaves it is getting better, but it will wane when spring comes. I have a cheap Motorola on Mint (T-Mobile) and an old iPhone 10 on Comcast / Xfinity (Verizon) and a wired digital landline on Comcast. Our neighbor has a cell phone on AT&T and an old analog twisted pair line on Frontier. There have been times when NONE of these work, usually during a power outage caused by a winter storm.
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Remember how many 8-track tapes you would see along the road, after they failed and the driver ripped it out?
When I was a high school kid, I worked at a gas station with four other high school boys. One of the kids had a nice Mustang with a 8-track player, always blasting Jethro Tull's "Aqualung."
When I was a high school kid, I worked at a gas station with four other high school boys. One of the kids had a nice Mustang with a 8-track player, always blasting Jethro Tull's "Aqualung."
Governments only really care about order and law compliance. Corporations are out to extract every possible cent from everyone that they physically can. Regardless of their politics or whether they are complying with the law. People’s everyday lives do not interest governments, but they DO interest sales people! That kind of control, to me, seems far more dangerous. And criminals want to find ways to drain any account they can get their hooks into. Corporations, by their greedy policies, trying to make payments easier and easier to encourage people to spend money, seem to give them the means to.
I thought I read where Biden squashed the import of electric automobiles from China, as it could not be vetted whether they would be sending every and all information possible back "home". Like, where everyone driving one happens to be at a particular moment.
This vetting of someone's connected OS is going to be a continuing problem. Everybody needs to have the most whizz in the bang possible, which is the problem's source. I think Toyota's minimal pickup truck is the design that solves the issue. A physical key to start and a headlight switch. BYO entertainment system. You have to admit, there's a certain "appeal" there.
I suppose it could be handy for the car to "know" when it's parked in my garage. On the other hand, if it knows, someone else probably knows as well. That I can easily live without.
One time I picked a connected garage door opener at a yard sale. Of course, doesnt just work "straight" off your phone - SuBScRiPtIoN!
Back in the donate to thrift store pile that went. You have no need to know when my garage door is open or not; I'll take a pass, just use the wall mounted button - thanks for the idea though. It was interesting for about 10 minutes...