HUMOR: How long have you been in this business?

[Gerry M]

You are all making me feel younger.

I was thinking the same thing, except I'm not quite forty yet.

I was in High school during the Challenger explosion. Between mid winter exams senior year at my buddies house drinking beer. It was a fun party until the explosion happened.

 

[elevmike]

..you can remember the project you were working on during the Challenger Shuttle disaster. Bonus points for you if the place is still open, and the project you were working on is still running.
..you've bid on a project to upgrade or ripout a project you originally installed 'years ago'.

I've got two with one stone! This day, we have a team over there tearing out the system I was installing on the day the of the Challanger disaster.. I was a lowley apprentice at the time..

 

[danw]

Has anyone replaced any "Nixie Tubes" lately?

The first digital display freq counters on the military equipment were 19" rack mount units with Nixie tube readouts. That was 1973. Terribly heat sensitive circuitry and not robust by later standards. Haven't seen a nixie tube since.

My Dad brought an antique HP counter home from work, a real boat anchor, the one with columns of ten neon indicators, one column for ones digits, one column for tens, another column for hundreds, etc.

Dan

 

[cntrlfrk]

...at my buddies house drinking beer. It was a fun party until the explosion happened.

Don't know how many times I've said those words.

I was actually sitting in my senior high school physics class, watching the blast off on TV.

Class of '86.

I was feeling old this year, bearing down on 39 this month. But you guys have made my day.

I have used handheld programmers though, first computer was a TRS80, learned in computer class on the all powerful Apple IIe.

 

[ndzied1]

I was in college during the Challenger explosion. (And I don't feel so old anymore )

Has anyone every connected the Tandy Color Computer to the TV in a hotel room only to have a visit from security, thinking you were trying to steal the TV?

I did have a TI-99/4A with a cassette deck to backup programs on which used a TV for the monitor.

In high school we had an IMSAI (think Mathew Broderik's computer from the War Games movie) that we could write BASIC programs on.

I still remember what BASIC stands for.
And FORTRAN.
Forgot what COBOL means...(who cares )
Read about the derivation of the name for the 'C' language in the original addition of the K&R book. (Who knows what K&R is?)

In college I used paper line editing terminals (missed punch cards by a few years). Had to learn FORTRAN as part of the engineering core on IBM mainframe's.
Took the assembly class for IBM mainframes... for fun (and it was. They had 16 full registers as opposed to the Intel weird register names and 20 bit addressing)

Used the original IRC program which was something called TALK hosted on the UIUC mainframe (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign).

I started life as a mechanical engineer so the oldest electrical automation thing I worked on was a SLC 150 with the hand held programmer.

First modem I bought was 1200 baud ('smokin')
First Hard Drive I bought was a Segeate ST251-1 with a whopping 40 MB. The 10MB that was in the borrowed computer I had got filled up with a database program and data. The program took 20 to 40 minutes to compile.
Who remembers what the difference between MFM and RLL is?

Once wrote my own version of XMODEM that was multi-threaded so the PC could do serial data logging at the same time it was hosting the XMODEM session.

Learned about Nixie Tubes last year here (sort of cheating):
http://www.nutsvolts.com/toc_Pages/oct06toc.htm

 

[brucechase]

I was in college when the Challenger accident happened. I watched the launch from my apartment which was 20 miles away from the Cape, I had seen several up close and I knew there was something wrong when it happened. Another tidbit of info, I just finished one of my co-op terms at NASA that December (4 weeks earlier). I went back and co-oped there 2 more times after the accident. Saw the building where the crew compartment was (couldn't get in though). I even watched them bury some of the items on the site - down the old minuteman silos and capped with a huge concrete cap. Very sad times there, moral was very low.

My first computer was an Apple Mac SE. It had 2 floppy drives. I could have the OS on a disk along with Macword and Macpaint and several documents (and these were the 800K disks). Used to argue with my geeky roommate who had this monster of a computer and the large 8" floppies. Funny thing was whenever he needed to write a paper or just play games, he used mine.

Remember having to go to the lab early in the morning to "warm up" the o-scopes (vacuum tube style) so we could get good results.
My college just got rid of the punch cards and we went to a VAX system. Didn't do much electronic stuff until the early 1990's (a TI PLC - I think a 5TI - only 4 I/O on a very large card).

Years from now, instead of the where were you when the challeger accident happened, it will be where were you during 9/11.

 

[tomalbright]

Years from now, instead of the where were you when the challeger accident happened, it will be where were you during 9/11.

Sadly, I was in the same office during both of those.

You got me with the CoCo hooked up to the hotel TV, though. I wonder what those people thought when I carted a full IBM PC XT into the hotel room a few years later? Laptops are overrated!

I know of nearly everything mentioned here, even though I haven't worked with all of it.

My electronics class worked us up through tubes and transistors and in the 4th and last semester we "touched on" IC's. The next semester after I graduated was an entirely digital curriculum. I nearly missed the cutting edge!

After 20+ years of working with electronics and automation, I took a job offshore doing IE work, with a good bit of PLC and HMI...

...and pneumatics. Yes, brings a whole new perspective to "relay logic". Air-powered relays. If I hadn't had the PLC experience, and good troubleshooting skills, I would have got off and walked home the first time I saw that.

 

[BobB]

I will place myself a bit further back than most of you. I was in a folk music club when Kennedy was shot at the tender age of about 20. The announcement was made and the folk singer sany Blowin' In The Wind of course (Kennedy's favourite song for you younguns).

Wiring control panels in the days before duct and spiroband - used to loom everything. We were not allowed to tie and cut either, the solid pvc had to be continuous, even and straight. If not or if the boss could see a wire vanishing from the top of the loom, he would put a knife through the lot and tell you to start again.

 

[harryting]

Ya, I remembered using the "Volksmodem" to connect to Compuserve and BBS in the days. I think CompuServe costed $12/hour?! Ya, I had an CoCo as well.

ASCII based multiplayers game rocks. The Autocad station in our school used 8 inch floppy.

I didn't work with punch card until later on when I ran into a Foxboro 1 DCS, complete with teletypers.. weeee... and there were this big 15 inch plate "disc" thing with the handle on top. I'm not sure those were called.

 

[504bloke]

We were not allowed to tie and cut either, the solid pvc had to be continuous, even and straight. If not or if the boss could see a wire vanishing from the top of the loom, he would put a knife through the lot and tell you to start again.

Those were the days, my dad served an apprenticeship like that...

The youth of today dont know how lucky they are!

 

[hd_coop]

I was 2 when the Challenger exploded so, no I don't remember where I was.

 

[504bloke]

I was 19 and at college when the challenger expoded. . .

We had a teacher in the Uk who had worked at NASA and somehow when it happened we all ended up watching the BBC News in an old shed with him out the back of the college with a small 10" B&W TV in it, the class were silent. . .

I can also remember the exact place i was and what i was doing on 9/11 and when Diana died. . .

 

[Ken Moore]

I was in the middle of a multi-million dollar expansion of a Textile plant in Augusta Georgia. Each production line had TI-500 PLC with five to eight double door free standing enclosures per line. (High tech for the time).
Since that time the company has folded, and all the equipment shipped to the pacific rim, the building is now an empty shell.

Glad I got out of the textile industry.

 

[TimWilborne]

I was in the 3rd grade when the Challenger exploded. Since there were limited number of TVs at the school we won the lottery and were able to watch it live on TV in the classroom. When it exploded, the teacher turned the TV off, rolled it into the hall, then came back and tried to resume teaching as if nothing had happened. Still remember the tears in her eyes and her shaking.

 

[DJM]

I did have a TI-99/4A with a cassette deck to backup programs on which used a TV for the monitor.

I had one. With an expansion rack for 32K more memory. 48K total with the fans whirring!

Forgot what COBOL means...(who cares )

Just in case you do.. COmmon Business Oriented Language