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I managed computer network infrastructure for 30 years. Network performance ain't luck.
That's my story and I am sticking to it.
That's my story and I am sticking to it.
No that was when one had to feed the mice to keep the drum turning. O)ne had to place a stack of cards and let the computer read the punched out slots. About as good as the Florida Voting Machines
MountainStoveGuy said:
Actually the first one I installed and managed was the very year that the Atari 400/800 were introduced. 1978. It tied eight company remote branches to each other and headquarters and, when it was working, allowed them to communicate at the blazing speed of three hundred characters per second. Not each person. That was total available bandwidth for each location. If a location was printing reports, which took hours, nobody could use the email that we installed the next year until printing finished. A ton of my time was taken up with people in our company's industry coming to see the thing in action.
Have you hugged your DSL/cable modem today?
I'm not hugging my cable model - charter is terrible - on and off....I called service and they have a recording "Problems and we don't kwow when they will be fixed!".
Well, I can tell you this - hearth.com is working well on a dial-up (me- now).
DSL is available here - I am tempted since this cable connection has been bad for a long time.....constantly not able to get to the net although network works up to where charter is.
Well, I can tell you this - hearth.com is working well on a dial-up (me- now).
DSL is available here - I am tempted since this cable connection has been bad for a long time.....constantly not able to get to the net although network works up to where charter is.
- Nov 18, 2005
- 701
It's funny how fast technology changes. We just got new computers here at work and none of them have 3.5" floppy drives. The oldtimers are pretty upset, even though we all got USB jump drives to use. Reminds me of how upsetting it was that I couldn't use my 5" disk with Oregon Trail on it when 3.5" came out.
MountainStoveGuy said:
Hey... hey... HEY... Lighten up on the Atari 800! Plug that sucker into the Atari 850 Centronics port interface and a decent Hayes 1200 and the world was at your fingertips... a vast improvement from my original 110 baud teletype printer/modem which I... ahem... "appropriated" from NY Tel on Pearl Street... Oh, and the Atari 800 beat the hell out of the CoCo, Vic-20, Timex-Sinclair 1000, TI 99/4a, and the godforsaken Trash-80 Mod 1. Think about it... Sprite graphics AND sound... in ONE box... unheard of. Oh, and unloading that Daisy Wheel printer and getting the state of the art 5 pin Epson dot matrix was sheer bliss!
Ahhhh.. the heady days of BitNet... the InterWeb V1.0... when I ran a BBS for 5 years on an Atari 800 and 2... count em... 2 Atari 810 disk drives... each with a mind-boggling 90K per disk... 180K if you were handy with a hole punch. Who knew that a career was being formed from a desktop full of beautiful beige equipment. And the funny (pathetic?) part... I still have the whole system in a box in the basement... and it works.
-- Mike
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Mike Wilson said:
As do I the fully loaded TRS-80 Model I that I bought in 1977 and started the trek to techie old age. The Mod I is also lovingly packed away in boxes about twenty feet from where I am sitting.
48K of user RAM, 2 90K drives, two 300 baud tape drives, 300 baud modem and IDS Paper Tiger printer. Total investment $5,364 in 1977-78 dollars.
I asked my wife once if she had begrudged me spending all that money back then. She said "Yeah, I thought about it. But then I look at he houses we've had, the cars etc. and I guess it wasn't such a bad deal.".
heath.com performance feedback...
Craig, hearth.com is working great for me at this time. Much, much improved over the last couple days.
(aside)
Wow. I'm in good computer company here.
I have a TRS PC-1 handheld, 1980 model (or so). 1.4k of main memory with an abbreviated BASIC interpreter. All instructions were limited to 3 chars. It has a special printer caddy with a single line, 16 character thermal printer and a 300 BAUD serial cassette tape deck secondary storage. Not sure how much one of those tapes held. They always failed before I filled 'em up.
I may have been the first student to ever 'check my calculus function test answers' using a hand held 'calculator'. Hee-hee. Still had to show my work, though, so I didn't feel like I was cheating.
I've also got one of the original red LED TI-1000 calculators from the 1970's (I believe). The 3 is non-functional... doh!
In 1980 I learned how to program an IBM 4341 System 360 (Mainframe) using IBM's Macro Assembler Language Compiler (ALC) and punch cards. Hoo-wee! We all dropped a stack at one time or another and proceeded to play an extended game of solitare with a 1000 card deck. Or we buggered up the edges of that 2 lb pack to where they couldn't be read. I still have my handy dandy System 360/370 Programmers reference card (actually a tiny little yellow book) that spelled out the EBCDIC code in binary, graphics chars that look like cuniaform writing, and other mysteries of the IBM universe. Anybody remember binary two's compliment, shift right/left register, packed decimal data format (1234567D -- that's a packed full-word, SOC4's and SOC7's, reading core dumps to find SOC1's (out of your pgm's memory area exceptions--oh dear god, not a SOC1--thank god for Abend Aid dump reading software) or laying out hard drive storage blocks, tracks, and cylinders for ISAM files and hash tables? Uhg! I spent 3 years programming that stuff on my first programming job back in 1985. No single programming term could be greater than 8 chars. Made a man of me, though.
Hey BB, I'll bet you used those old 8" Tandy floppies with single sided 180k storage. Or was it double sided and 360k? Inquiring minds want to know...
Craig, hearth.com is working great for me at this time. Much, much improved over the last couple days.
(aside)
Wow. I'm in good computer company here.
I have a TRS PC-1 handheld, 1980 model (or so). 1.4k of main memory with an abbreviated BASIC interpreter. All instructions were limited to 3 chars. It has a special printer caddy with a single line, 16 character thermal printer and a 300 BAUD serial cassette tape deck secondary storage. Not sure how much one of those tapes held. They always failed before I filled 'em up.
I may have been the first student to ever 'check my calculus function test answers' using a hand held 'calculator'. Hee-hee. Still had to show my work, though, so I didn't feel like I was cheating.I've also got one of the original red LED TI-1000 calculators from the 1970's (I believe). The 3 is non-functional... doh!
In 1980 I learned how to program an IBM 4341 System 360 (Mainframe) using IBM's Macro Assembler Language Compiler (ALC) and punch cards. Hoo-wee! We all dropped a stack at one time or another and proceeded to play an extended game of solitare with a 1000 card deck. Or we buggered up the edges of that 2 lb pack to where they couldn't be read. I still have my handy dandy System 360/370 Programmers reference card (actually a tiny little yellow book) that spelled out the EBCDIC code in binary, graphics chars that look like cuniaform writing, and other mysteries of the IBM universe. Anybody remember binary two's compliment, shift right/left register, packed decimal data format (1234567D -- that's a packed full-word
, SOC4's and SOC7's, reading core dumps to find SOC1's (out of your pgm's memory area exceptions--oh dear god, not a SOC1--thank god for Abend Aid dump reading software) or laying out hard drive storage blocks, tracks, and cylinders for ISAM files and hash tables? Uhg! I spent 3 years programming that stuff on my first programming job back in 1985. No single programming term could be greater than 8 chars. Made a man of me, though.Hey BB, I'll bet you used those old 8" Tandy floppies with single sided 180k storage. Or was it double sided and 360k? Inquiring minds want to know...
Actually the TRS-80 used the 5 1/4" but our key to disk machines at work used eight inch. My first job in the racket was as a 360 operator and then on to a 370. Thought we had died and gone to heaven when we upgraded the 370 mainframe to 32K of core memory and got the first DOS/VS disk system. We could run payroll and the general ledger in batch at the same time.
You mention the programming terms that make kids eyes roll back in their heads these days but what about de-bugging somebody's code who had use relative addressing? And I had been crawling through two foot high hex dumps for years before I went to work in a place that had Abend-Aid.
That yellow card holds a special place in my memory. The green one too. I was in the business already when I started to college. In Intro to Data Processing I pulled out a IBM card during the hex to decimal part of a test. The instructor told me I couldn't use it because in the real world you might not have one available. I told him that if somebody could wrap a $3.5 million dollar IBM 370/158 around me they could buy me a damned sixty-five cent card.
At the end of the test he made the statement that if anyone felt they didn't need the course they could leave and would get an automatic C grade. Me and the head of data processing for Kimble Foods in Fort Worth got up and left. The guy from Kimble needed the course to finish his Masters and he was running the most advanced DP shop in the state at the time.
You mention the programming terms that make kids eyes roll back in their heads these days but what about de-bugging somebody's code who had use relative addressing? And I had been crawling through two foot high hex dumps for years before I went to work in a place that had Abend-Aid.
That yellow card holds a special place in my memory. The green one too. I was in the business already when I started to college. In Intro to Data Processing I pulled out a IBM card during the hex to decimal part of a test. The instructor told me I couldn't use it because in the real world you might not have one available. I told him that if somebody could wrap a $3.5 million dollar IBM 370/158 around me they could buy me a damned sixty-five cent card.
At the end of the test he made the statement that if anyone felt they didn't need the course they could leave and would get an automatic C grade. Me and the head of data processing for Kimble Foods in Fort Worth got up and left. The guy from Kimble needed the course to finish his Masters and he was running the most advanced DP shop in the state at the time.
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