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#61
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Cool boat & travel computer
Hanz Schmidt wrote in
: Next u'll talk about the Pet Computer (Commodore 2000).... Oh, my....Pets cost more than Commode Door 64.... Whenever I call Knology about an outage, I ask them if they minded going back into the garage and plugging the Commodore 64 back into the wall so we can have internet in Charleston, again....(c; |
#62
posted to rec.boats.cruising
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Cool boat & travel computer
Next u'll talk about the Pet Computer (Commodore 2000)....
Hanz Larry wrote: "Capt. JG" wrote in easolutions: Some of the people at the company were truly strange. That could be said for every computer company....(c; Hell, look at Google! Who would have thought a bunch of kids playing in the sandbox would be filthy rich? |
#63
posted to rec.boats.cruising
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Cool boat & travel computer
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:59:42 +0000, Larry wrote:
Oh, my....Pets cost more than Commode Door 64.... Whenever I call Knology about an outage, I ask them if they minded going back into the garage and plugging the Commodore 64 back into the wall so we can have internet in Charleston, again....(c; I had a 64 and the Vic-20 before that. Who would believe in this day and age that we actually stored data and programs on audio cassette tape at one time. |
#64
posted to rec.boats.cruising
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Cool boat & travel computer
Wayne.B wrote:
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:59:42 +0000, Larry wrote: Oh, my....Pets cost more than Commode Door 64.... Whenever I call Knology about an outage, I ask them if they minded going back into the garage and plugging the Commodore 64 back into the wall so we can have internet in Charleston, again....(c; I had a 64 and the Vic-20 before that. Who would believe in this day and age that we actually stored data and programs on audio cassette tape at one time. Audio tape is for wimps, I used to store them on punched paper tape, ASR-33 teletype with integral tape reader and punch! Cheers Marty |
#65
posted to rec.boats.cruising
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Cool boat & travel computer
"Hanz Schmidt" wrote in message
... Next u'll talk about the Pet Computer (Commodore 2000).... Hanz Larry wrote: "Capt. JG" wrote in easolutions: Some of the people at the company were truly strange. That could be said for every computer company....(c; Hell, look at Google! Who would have thought a bunch of kids playing in the sandbox would be filthy rich? I bought my father one of those when it came out. He didn't like it, so I returned it. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
#66
posted to rec.boats.cruising
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Cool boat & travel computer
"Larry" wrote in message
... Hanz Schmidt wrote in : Next u'll talk about the Pet Computer (Commodore 2000).... Oh, my....Pets cost more than Commode Door 64.... Whenever I call Knology about an outage, I ask them if they minded going back into the garage and plugging the Commodore 64 back into the wall so we can have internet in Charleston, again....(c; Oh, that's what it was... the 64. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
#67
posted to rec.boats.cruising
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Cool boat & travel computer
On 2008-09-26 20:50:43 -0400, Larry said:
"Capt. JG" wrote in news:P8adnVJnxPX_ reasolutions: bought a 17 meg HD for $450 (on sale) Wow! a bargain! This thread is SO off-topic, but I'm laughing too much to say "stop". -- Jere Lull Xan-à-Deux -- Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/ Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/ |
#68
posted to rec.boats.cruising
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Cool boat & travel computer
"Jere Lull" wrote in message
news:2008092701031650073-jerelull@maccom... On 2008-09-26 20:50:43 -0400, Larry said: "Capt. JG" wrote in news:P8adnVJnxPX_ reasolutions: bought a 17 meg HD for $450 (on sale) Wow! a bargain! This thread is SO off-topic, but I'm laughing too much to say "stop". -- Jere Lull Xan-à-Deux -- Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/ Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/ Hey, my first modem was a 300 to 1200 baud... $475 new. It was so cheap I bought three of them! LOL -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
#69
posted to rec.boats.cruising
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Cool boat & travel computer
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:50:43 +0000, Larry wrote:
I wrote the system using Dbase III, but as CODE, not the automated Dbase bugware it wrote itself. The code was long because they kept adding to my tasking. The system, at 4.77 Mhz, slowed because of Dbase's interpreter, of course. Then, Clipper came out with this snazzy Dbase III COMPILER that assembled the libraries and machine code of your system into a huge .exe file that, by those standards, ran like greased lightning. My Clipper serial number is 1700...(c; Navy refused to buy it and we got caught trying to run around the end, so I paid $495 out of my pocket for it. NOTE: Since the friend I mention below has a Wauquiez 38' Hood Mark II and sometimes cruises, I deem this post not too far off topic. There were a lot of apps designed for small business and home use that couldn't make the transition to big time data flows. Dbase was pretty slick as far as it went. I knew a guy still doing Clipper work for small businesses in the mid-90's. I wrote an employee "database" interactive app for use by one of the consulting firms I worked for in Lotus spreadsheet macros back in the '80's. Screen flashing all over the place since it was interpretive, but it worked and management used it for years. MicroFocus came out with a beautiful compiling COBOL package for the PC in 1985, supporting an ISAM-like file structure and emulating interactive CICS, but it cost about 4 grand for the complete package, so it was easier to spend a few hundred for Dbase, Lotus, etc, and hack away. I recall MicroFocus was an English firm. I was contracting for a very large IBM shop in Chicago when the MicroFocus package came out. A friend - who is a sometime cruiser - consulting at the same shop asked the manager of Tech Support to get a copy from MicroFocus. MicroFocus had the tech support guy swear up and down to keep it closely guarded for the evaluation. Within an hour of it arriving about 7 of us had full copies, and we were busy lugging InstaPrint copies of the manuals from the copy shop across the street. So much for promises. Think it was about $50 apiece for copying the manuals. My friend told me he did an app for an accountant friend of his, and I used mine to write a complex mult-module/file thoroughbred handicapping app, employing many variables that had to be keyed in daily. It was structured, slick, and *almost* turning a profit running the projection module when Arlington Park burned down and I gave it up. I found futures trading a better way to gamble. I really don't think the MicroFocus package found its niche in the market, and believe it was later absorbed by MS. But it was certainly better for developing small business apps than the competition. Just too expensive, and you needed to know COBOL. At that time everybody thought they could buy software off the shelf to run their business. Maybe they really can now! --Vic |
#70
posted to rec.boats.cruising
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Cool boat & travel computer
Vic Smith wrote in
: Screen flashing all over the place since it was interpretive, but it worked and management used it for years. Being a Navy installation, our XT opened each morning with "The National Anthem" playing on the crappy little computer speaker while the green flag waved on the screen. This was, of course, if you had the code for the HARDWARE LOCK board which intercepted the bootup on its way to the drives. No code? No access IN HARDWARE! One of my problems was convincing the mainframe security types at the yard HQ that it wasn't a threat to national security (not to mention their own jobs, which is why they attempted to defeat every microcomputer installed outside their office for years). We didn't NEED them any more. It must have been terrifying that the "little people" has so much power on their desktops. The head of IT Security spent hours trying to crack into my system sitting at its terminal. "What do you do when you go home at night? How do you secure it then??", he asked my boss, pointedly. "We turn the goddamned thing off and lock the door on our way out of the Secure Nuclear Industrial Area", my boss retorted. "If they get inside the CIA, I doubt they'll go for the PC with the calibration records on it!", he said louder to get his point across. (He always got louder when excited.) Knowing they were coming one day, I shooed Gloria away from the keyboard and popped a floppy into the drive with some fun stuff on it. One program made all the letters on the screen fall into a random-looking pile on the bottom of the screen if you didn't do anything for 60 seconds. You had to press CTRL-END and the letters would jump back to their normal position, completely usable as ever with no effect on anything but a little CPU load. Another one popped up a green picture of a goat who stuck his tongue out at you until you pressed a key to make him quit. We baited the hook just as the guy arrived and Gloria sat back down as if everything were "normal", whatever that meant in the crazy lab full of mischievous engineers. The computer was already up and running so we had no excuse not to let him in. I kept him talking just long enough for the letters to fall off the screen in front of his eyes. "What have you done to our system!", I said in a loud voice. Right on cue, my big boss came storming out of his office all in a fake huff and accused this jerk of trashing our system to protect his turf, which is exactly what they were trying to do without ever saying so. The goat popped up while they were arguing and raspberried him through the little speaker. My boss lost it and couldn't keep a straight face holding his stomach. Our ruse worked perfectly. Now, convinced we were all insane, they never bothered us again and refused to report the incident. Everyone in our command structure knew what they were trying to achieve and backed us. What we did solved the major problem with the Navy's ancient batch processed paper system.....right in the lab. My job was Electronic Technician, not computers. If I had not been a GS employee, I'd have never been able to do it as the wage grade's union would have filed grievance after grievance until I was stopped. This is why I took the job in Metrology Laboratory in the first place. I came from the yard's Instrument Room, a WG blue collar job. My old shop asked for my help. Someone dumped a complete Wang MVP-2200 system on them noone wanted. It had to be "somewhere" because some bigshot had bought it for hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars. It had two disk pack drives plus a fixed disk and a 8", hard sectored, floppy drive for input. Only one console came with it and a really noisy chain printer we put in a closet when I installed it. It ran Wang Extended BASIC and I had to learn BASIC all over again to do anything with it. It was stupid, but available. I wrote a Wang BASIC program for it that stored and tracked all the Shop 67 (Electronics) and Shop 51 (Electrical) tech manuals, which were in the thousands, a collection from before WW2. This way there was something besides a green log book you had to search through to find out who had the manual you wanted checked out...by hand. I tried to dump the Wang and build the shop another "Parts PC" from Bob's Computer Warehouse, but they had to use the Wang. Sure was fast finding a record with all that power for the day....(c; I tried to figure out how I could steal one of the disk pack drives and hook it to my calibration PC to do backups faster than the little tape drive I had on B: but never found an interface. I could back up fast to the 9-track NEC, and did so several times, but I got a deal on the little data tape drive and it would operate without my baby sitting it the NEC software required. It just made a drive image. |
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