Icon's Massively Parallel Old Boy Computers & Tech KUNG FU™©®

[conmee]

Brethren and Sistren,

I'm gonna init this topic by calling on all ATARIfanatics™©®, AMIGAistos™©®, ALTAIRians™©®, COBOLers™©®, PASCALers™©®, FORTRANnies™©®, C+ians™©®, LISPers™©®, AssemblyBarbarians™©®, AppleIIers™©®, UNIXgeeks (AIX 7 Bitches!)™©®, SUN & Solaris Refugees™©®, ONEHITWONDERS (Coleco, Commodore64+Vic20, TI-99ers, TimexSinclair, TRS80)™©®, MAINFRAMErs™©®, UNIVACians™©®, DOSdweebs™©®, CP/Mers™©®, OS/2ers™©®, WINDOZErs™©®, MacOSers™©®, MAME/MESS Emulatorians™©®, JAVAristas™©®, BASICdorks™©®, PUNCHCARDretirees™©®, TECHIES™©®, GAMERS (PlayStation, XBox, Nintendo, SNES, Atari, PC, all of it)™©®, GUI/ObjectOrientedPussies™©®, and COMMAND LINE GODS™©®!!!!!

This thread is about sharing a) Your Bio & KUNG FU CREDENTIALS™©®; b) Killer Tech Moves and Secrets; c) Gaming Prowess; d) Photos and Stories of Past/Present/Future; e) Serving Hot Cups of SHUTTHEFUCKUP™©® to the ILL-INFORMED™©® and those WITHOUT GAME (Don't Sing It, If You Can't Bring It!)™©®...

That is all.

Icon™©®

[twonabomber]

Commodore 64 checking in!

playing old games via emulation, but i still have the C64 i got for Christmas back in the 80's, and two other systems (with 1702 monitors!) from my friends.

the 1702's work great as regular video monitors, the old Commodore "chroma" and "luma" inputs are an early form of S-Video. make an adapter and you can hook up S-Video DVD players, etc. i currently have one hooked up to a Roland S-760 sampler.

[conmee]

Brethren and Sistren,

Welcome Twonabomber!!!! I completely forgot to mention MAME/MESS Emulation™©®!!!! Will add to the description above...

Here's my response to that HEATHEN™©® Sesh.... which got me motivated to kick off this whole thread in the first place... I'll post a formal BIO™©® shortly...

------------------------

Brethren and Sistren,

Not to DERAIL™©® this GAY™©® THREAD™©® but I must respond to that NO GOOD ATHEIST BODICE-WEARING SCOTTISH SACK LICKER™©® our very own Sesh™©®....

How DARE YE IMPUGN™©® my technical credentials?!?!?! I was KEEPIN' SHIT REAL AND SIMPLE AND REAL SIMPLE™©® for the novices!!!!! You've known for YEARS™©® that my 9TH DEGREE KUNG FU™©® is beyond REPROACH™©®!!!! Who the fuck do you think keeps this shitty site's LINUX SERVER™©® well-oiled and running with more or less 72% UPTIME™©®?!?!?! I started programming Assembly at the TENDER™©® age of 13, was a UNIX MASTURBATOR™©® during university, wrote TERM PAPERS™©® on WORDMOTHERFUCKINGPERFECT 5.1 on MS-DOS 3.31 on these shitty COMPAQ™©® desktops the size of Volkswagens using every conceivable CTRL+ALT+TAB+SHIFT+FN+KEYCOMBO, and have spent 3/4 of my career at IBM and Microsoft... HOW FUCKING DARE YE™©®!??!?!

You know DAMN WELL™©® that I'm no MACTARD™©® and only use the FRUIT-BASED™©® technology because folks in the advertising business look at you like a fucking BEAN COUNTER™©® if you show up to a client briefing with a PC™©®....

I hope all your customers you've LOCKED™©® into Visual Basic/Excel Macro/SQL Hell revolt and burn down your Scottish equivalent of a TRAILER PARK™©®!!!!!

That is fucking all.

Icon™©®

[conmee]

Brethren and Sistren,

I first laid eyes on a BIG FUCKING COMPUTER™©® on the USS Constellation (CV-64 aircraft carrier) that my dad was assigned to in 1976. Just being a YOUNGUN™©®, I can't tell you what the computer was, but I think the yeoman in charge of the thing was none to happy when my little sister and I "organized" his stack of PUNCHCARDS™©®....fucking ENLISTED SEAMEN™©®.... uh huh uh huh...

Ok, so my first USE™©® of a computer came a year later in grade school, when the reward for excellent grades was time on the COMMODORE PET™©® (Personal Electronic Transactor... yeah Computer Marketing needed help in the 70s and 80s). We'd play HANGMAN™©® and ARTILLERY™©® and BATTLESHIP™©®... had to load games with a cassette tape.

Of course, everyone my age probably had an Atari 2600... still the GRANDADDY™©® of consoles! While I liked video games, I was one of those PERCOCIOUS™©® kids that liked to take shit apart to see how it worked, and was somewhat adept at putting shit back together without ending up with spare screws and parts afterward. I remember my wonder at looking inside an Apple II. But my favorite childhood computer was the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a Home Computer™©®, a silver and black computer with optional SPEECH SYNTHESIZER™©®... figuring out all the ways to say curse words PHONETICALLY™©® was endless fun. And I thought it looked cooler than the Commodore 64 and VIC 20, it had this HUGE PERIPHERAL EXPANSION BOX™©® that gave it the heft of a MINIFRAME™©®... and a seriously loud fucking fan... back in the day, I wanted my computers LARGE AND LOUD™©®!!! On the veritable TI-99 is when I started programming Assembly™©®, BASIC™©®, PASCAL™©®, and would save my lunch money to buy boards/capacitors/resistors/soldering equipment and build peripherals. One of the first things I built was an RS-232 serial interface so I could hook up this Star Micronix dot matrix printer to my TI-99 via the joystick port! Oh, yeah... and with the analog coupler modem (the kind you actually set a phone handset into), I'd jump onto electronic bulletin boards BBS™©® before there was a public Internet. I can still remember downloading an 8-bit grayscale silhouette of a nude woman... that's right brethren and sistren, I downloaded my FIRST PORN™©® in 1984 off a 200 baud dialup bulletin board...

More to come.

Icon™©®

[Nitro Express]

In 1971 my best friend's dad worked on some big ass computer for a mining company. He would bring his old punch cards home. They had this huge living room and we used to make these huge card buildings out of them like you do with a deck of cards. We built a huge card city and then ran the family dog through it to wreck it. Looking back at it we were pretty cheap to entertain.

[conmee]

Brethren and Sistren,

Here's a TWO HUNDRED BAUD ACOUSTIC COUPLER MODEM™©®. This is how old people got "online" back in 1982.



That is all.

Icon™©®

[Seshmeister]

How DARE YE IMPUGN™©® my technical credentials?!?!?! I was KEEPIN' SHIT REAL AND SIMPLE AND REAL SIMPLE™©® for the novices!!!!! You've known for YEARS™©® that my 9TH DEGREE KUNG FU™©® is beyond REPROACH™©®!!!! Who the fuck do you think keeps this shitty site's LINUX SERVER™©® well-oiled and running with more or less 72% UPTIME™©®?!?!?! I started programming Assembly at the TENDER™©® age of 13, was a UNIX MASTURBATOR™©® during university, wrote TERM PAPERS™©® on WORDMOTHERFUCKINGPERFECT 5.1 on MS-DOS 3.31
[/I]

WORDMOTHERFUCKINGPERFECT 5.1? Try writing papers on VI®© and then come back to the NERDPLATE©®™

[conmee]

SESH™©®!!!!

:i

Don't even get me started you KUNT™©®!!!! I have an entire topic on VI/SED/EMACS/EDLIN!!!!

Fuckin' vi... you're gonna come at me with fuckin' vi?!?!?!

[esc]
:wq

That is all.

Icon™©®

[Nitro Express]

Brethren and Sistren,

Here's a TWO HUNDRED BAUD ACOUSTIC COUPLER MODEM™©®. This is how old people got "online" back in 1982.



That is all.

Icon™©®

Yeah but even having one in the day meant you were cooking with gasoline. I remember trying to load programs on my Trash 80 with cassettes. What a pain in the ass that was. When I got my first taste of an Apple II with floppy drives, man. Welcome to the space age!

[Seshmeister]

I downloaded my FIRST PORN™©® in 1984 off a 200 baud dialup bulletin board...

Icon™©®

I don't think I was as early as 1984 with the rude pictures stuff that came later.

As I remember in those days it was stuff like



which would do less for even TEENAGE LOVE APPARATUS™© than the lingerie section of the average catalogue.

[Seshmeister]

SESH™©®!!!!

:i

Don't even get me started you KUNT™©®!!!! I have an entire topic on VI/SED/EMACS/EDLIN!!!!

Fuckin' vi... you're gonna come at me with fuckin' vi?!?!?!

[esc]
:wq

That is all.

Icon™©®

It was better than that abortion your pals at HAL came up with - DISPLAYWRITE©

[conmee]

I don't think I was as early as 1984 with the rude pictures stuff that came later.

As I remember in those days it was stuff like



which would do less for even TEENAGE LOVE APPARATUS™© than the lingerie section of the average catalogue.

True, SESH™©®, but if you were BEATING OFF™©® to this back in the day, you were BEATING OFF™©® to the POTENTIAL™©® of computer-generated PRON™©®, not to the pixelated silhouette.

That is all.

Icon™©®

P.S. Sesh, you have SERIOUS KUNG FU™©® as well, make sure to tell your story, you FUCKING HACK™©®!!!!

[Seshmeister]

The problem is that I used my SERIOUS KUNG FU™©® for evil rather that taking the path of purity and riches.

Back in the late 80s I decided I was going to become a ROCKSTAR so came up with a plan that I thought was more cunning than a fox that used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University(©E.Blackadder)

I wrote a script that looked like the login screen to all the terminals in the computer lab but the first time you logged in it sent your username and password to a text file in my directory, displayed 'incorrect password' and then exited to the login screen.

That may seem like pretty fucking basic SKULLDUGGERY™© nowadays but in 1988 it worked like a dream with people who were typing passwords into computers for the first time in their lives. It allowed me to skip all my classes and steal the code of all the smartest students in the CUNTRY™ leaving the simple job of choosing the best people with different tutors and bolting their code together an hour before each bit of work was due. This allowed me to spend a solid 98% of my time on the music/debauchery.

This was a brilliant plan right up until the point of sitting in an exam hall at the end of the year, having not become a rock star and getting the second lowest mark for programming in the year, a mighty 6%...

PART II - Where our hero leaves the world of computers under a cloud and joins the LAW SCHOOL™© where lying and cheating were seen as positive character traits...

[Panamark]

I played Zork on a Remington main frame.

Command prompt unix...
Thought that was the shiznit at the time...

Lets not forget the Z-80's and TRS-80's if we are talking desktop.
First desktop I played with was a DEC Rainbow.

[Panamark]

Used to repair computers that had core memory...
Physical mini ferrite cores, each one a magetic "bit"
Eight ferrite rings a "byte"

Great thing was they retained data without power.
Fuck all storage capacity compared to todays ram
modules.

[Panamark]

Prime, DEC, IBM and Data General were all big boys when I started...

[Panamark]

The problem is that I used my SERIOUS KUNG FU™©® for evil rather that taking the path of purity and riches.

Back in the late 80s I decided I was going to become a ROCKSTAR so came up with a plan that I thought was more cunning than a fox that used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University(©E.Blackadder)

I wrote a script that looked like the login screen to all the terminals in the computer lab but the first time you logged in it sent your username and password to a text file in my directory, displayed 'incorrect password' and then exited to the login screen.

That may seem like pretty fucking basic SKULLDUGGERY™© nowadays but in 1988 it worked like a dream with people who were typing passwords into computers for the first time in their lives. It allowed me to skip all my classes and steal the code of all the smartest students in the CUNTRY™ leaving the simple job of choosing the best people with different tutors and bolting their code together an hour before each bit of work was due. This allowed me to spend a solid 98% of my time on the music/debauchery.

This was a brilliant plan right up until the point of sitting in an exam hall at the end of the year, having not become a rock star and getting the second lowest mark for programming in the year, a mighty 6%...

PART II - Where our hero leaves the world of computers under a cloud and joins the LAW SCHOOL™© where lying and cheating were seen as positive character traits...

Masterful ! lol... Ahead of your time Seshman.

[conmee]

Brethren and Sistren,

I think BenJammin mentioned being a COBOLer™©® and droppin' names like UNIVAC™©® and Honeywell... Well... when I was a UNIX (AIX)™©® MASTURBATOR™©® in the early 90s at a credit union, we had this old ass HONEYWELL/BULL DPS/6 computer to do all our processing, and it was the size of a couple refrigerators and a backyard BBQ™©® all in one. In one cabinet, we had the magnetic tape drives. In the evening, I'd MOUNT™©® these 10" tape reels and backup the daily transaction data and other system config info. The DPS/6 was running a PICK OS™©® and Pick/BASIC™©® environment for some financial apps package called ULTRAFis™©® by a defunct company called ULTRAData™©®.

Here's a photo (not of the credit union DPS/6) to give you an idea of this ancient technology. You'll also notice some of the 10" tape reels hanging on a stand in the background...

This thing had a SHITLOAD™©® of wires and multiplexers aka MUXes™©® in the back of one of the refrigerators and under the FALSE FLOOR™©®. This is where the 120 or so WYSE™©® terminals jacked into the DPS/6. These WYSE terminals were basically VT100 DUMB TERMINALS™©® that had green or amber phosphor screens and a keyboard. If shit got out of control or locked up, desk side support was simple: "Turn the terminal off and back on." Done.

In 1992, we finally got the hell rid of that old DPS/6 in favor of a brand spanking new IBM RS/6000™©® with AIX 3 at the time. It also was loaded with a whopping 64MB of RAM and I think we had 120GB of hard drive space RAID5 baby!!!! This was a MONSTER™©® in 1992. We also had IBM PS/2 Computers all over the place in the computer room and they were used to run our voice response (using OS/2) and credit reporting services.

Because the CREDIT UNION™©® was operating on the cheap in 1992, we spared no expense and bought a boatload of PC clones by a company called PACKARD-BELL™©® which were complete and utter shite! They also all came pre-installed with MS-DOS 6 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11. Christ Almighty™©® the primitive TCP/IP Stack™©® that came from Microsoft (they were pushing NETBIOS™©® and "workgroup" networking) was a bitch and a half and was horrible to troubleshoot. Add in that ACCOUNTING™©® had some LANTastic™©® and Netware (IPX/SPX)™©® departmental servers, and CLUSTERFUCK CENTRAL™©®. Also didn't help that the TOOLS™©® installing our new network weren't exactly WELL-VERSED™©® on TCP/IP and TOKEN RING™©® integration. See, TOKEN RING™©® was IBM's BRAIN FART™©®, and well... I just don't want to RELIVE™©® that era. Bottom line: I learned a hell of a lot about networking, security, and all sorts of other shit about UNIX maintenance, etc.

So on that last photo, you can see on the left our "communications" tower which included some old ass 1200 baud modems to dial up VISA™©® and EXPERIAN™©® and to do some ACH™©® transaction uploads. The four boxes at the bottom were SERIAL MUXES™©® in that they were needed to connect all our SERIAL PRINTERS™©® to the network. These horrible OKIDATA dot matrix units that made all sorts of fucking noise. Although we did have one really cool HUGE industrial printer that would crank out BOXLOADS™©® of financial statements and CERTIFICATES OF DEPOSIT™©®. Moving on, you see the RS/6000 on the floor and it had (at the time) a cool and nifty DAT tape backup, which was much faster and higher capacity than those old 10" reel tapes. Next to the RS/6000 on the floor was the hard drive enclosure. I think we had 10GB drives so it housed 12 drives for a total of 120GB or something like that. You can see a shitload of tapes all over the place. On the far right was an IBM PS/2 computer with MicroChannel Architecture (MCA)™©®, another IBM innovation which was actually better than E/IDE (Compaq/Intel's answer to slow IDE bus and MCA). But just like SONY™©®, IBM priced the PS/2 and MCA right out of being a fucking standard. Boards were costly, so everyone went with E/IDE peripherals and shit.

I worked at this credit union from 1990-1995 until I finished my master's degree. Here is the SALT MINE™©® where I learned and earned my first few degrees of KUNG FU™©®!!!!!

More to come...

Icon™©®

[Panamark]

Ah the Wyse terminals !!! God, I fixed a few Wyse 75's back in the day....
Dumb fucking terminals (literally)

[twonabomber]

one place i worked had the big ol' mainframe i nan air conditioned room, and it had two big disk platter machines next to it. they'd back that sucker up at the end of the day, probably had some tape drives too. our desktop terminals were those blue on black monitors with the keyboard built in, repair guy had the case off and it looked like fiberglass over chicken wire.

[LoungeMachine]

And not ONE of you saw a VAGINA during any of this time......

[Panamark]

And not ONE of you saw a VAGINA during any of this time......

Not on the screens....
After hours, I had a perma-girlfriend at the time..

It wasnt that nerdy I would surround myself with the rackmount frames
when I was stoned so the boss couldnt see my really red eyes.
That worked until he called me in for my "review" and I was
so stoned I just sat there and said nothing. Then he said I
was good and gave me a pay rise ??

[Yount]

My dad got a T 86 similar to this one. That was my first look at a computer. Used to play heaps of Micro League Baseball as the 1982 Brewers and enter the stats into Lotus. Played 162 game season 2 or 3 times. Vuckovich would never pitch like his stats, he'd always get hammered. In fact the whole pitching staff besides Sutton and Fingers was very suspect. Ah memories.


I can't compete with any of you tech heads though

[conmee]

Okay, Lounge, that was actually funny.

But as fate would have it, much like Panamark, I turned that computer room into a den of iniquity on weekend evenings. In fact, I committed acts of FORNICATION™©® with one of the credit union tellers on that very DESK™©® that is currently occupied by those PCs and the IBM PS/2 in the photo above.

That is all.

Icon™©®

[FORD]

Still have my old Atari 2600 and a dozen or so game cartridges, but the Commodore 64, and Vic 20 are long gone, and I don't think I ever even took the Timex/Sinclair 1000 out of the goddamn box.

Tried using that MAME emulator a few years back, but I never got any decent games to work with it, so I got bored with it. Maybe they have improved it since then. Might be easier to try to figure that out than attempting to plug the old Atari into a modern TV.

[Panamark]

I still have the Atari 2600, Nintendo 64 and the Sega !
They all still work, Atari is great for a real Space Invaders hit,
my fave game was Superman, blocky graphics and all.
Sonic Hedgehog was trippy and in the Nintendo
range, Tysons Knockout, Duck Hunt, mario Bros and Rad
Racer were most excellent when participating in herbal enjoyment !

[Panamark]

Its cool seeing "Baud Rate" being spoken in public again

[Panamark]

Those old dumb terminals, had to have the right protocol, baud rate, parity bit etc
or you would literally receive gibberish on the screen. A Hard disk change involved
5 men. The disks themselves were in huge vacuum platters. I am officially
an old fuck I realise. Why am I suddenly thinking terminal mode and ASCII.
An old door just opened in the grey matter. It was not always RS232 either.
Oh yes I know you all think RS232 rocks, mwahahahah Thats all those Uarts could
do !!!! hehehehehhe YOU ARE ALL WRONG there was other protocols
dammit !!!

[conmee]

Those old dumb terminals, had to have the right protocol, baud rate, parity bit etc
or you would literally receive gibberish on the screen. A Hard disk change involved
5 men. The disks themselves were in huge vacuum platters. I am officially
an old fuck I realise. Why am I suddenly thinking terminal mode and ASCII.
An old door just opened in the grey matter. It was not always RS232 either.
Oh yes I know you all think RS232 rocks, mwahahahah Thats all those Uarts could
do !!!! hehehehehhe YOU ARE ALL WRONG there was other protocols
dammit !!!

Ah yes and setting the DIP switches, to select baud rates on modems and change timing on old school motherboards?

Icon™©®

[Panamark]

Ah yes and setting the DIP switches, to select baud rates on modems and change timing on old school motherboards?

Icon™©®

I think the last DIP switch was always Parity......

[Panamark]

Or (it gets deep now)

odd or even parity !

[Panamark]

Lets not go all CRC, parity was the bytemaster !

[twonabomber]

And not ONE of you saw a VAGINA during any of this time......

not true here either.

one of the lunchroom ladies at HS ran a BBS on their Apple II. her daughter was a hot ginger with big tits. they threw a BBQ at the beach one summer and the daughter and i spent most of it groping each other in the lake.

then at the job with the mainframe, my then GF would come downtown after i got done so we could go to a concert or something. we'd kill a little time before the show on the exec secretary's desk, or on the big "sample table" down in the sewing room. being the last one there had it's advantages sometimes.

[ELVIS]

Brethren and Sistren,

I'm gonna init this topic by calling on all ATARIfanatics™©®, AMIGAistos™©®, ALTAIRians™©®, COBOLers™©®, PASCALers™©®, FORTRANnies™©®, C+ians™©®, LISPers™©®, AssemblyBarbarians™©®, AppleIIers™©®, UNIXgeeks (AIX 7 Bitches!)™©®, SUN & Solaris Refugees™©®, ONEHITWONDERS (Coleco, Commodore64+Vic20, TI-99ers, TimexSinclair, TRS80)™©®, MAINFRAMErs™©®, UNIVACians™©®, DOSdweebs™©®, CP/Mers™©®, OS/2ers™©®, WINDOZErs™©®, MacOSers™©®, MAME/MESS Emulatorians™©®, JAVAristas™©®, BASICdorks™©®, PUNCHCARDretirees™©®, TECHIES™©®, GAMERS (PlayStation, XBox, Nintendo, SNES, Atari, PC, all of it)™©®, GUI/ObjectOrientedPussies™©®, and COMMAND LINE GODS™©®!!!!!

This thread is about sharing a) Your Bio & KUNG FU CREDENTIALS™©®; b) Killer Tech Moves and Secrets; c) Gaming Prowess; d) Photos and Stories of Past/Present/Future; e) Serving Hot Cups of SHUTTHEFUCKUP™©® to the ILL-INFORMED™©® and those WITHOUT GAME (Don't Sing It, If You Can't Bring It!)™©®...

That is all.

Icon™©®

The language in this post alone is frightening...

When you tekkies were having green screen visions of command prompt sugar plums™©® dancing through your heads, I was ripping guitars apart, re-wiring, re-painting, trying to convert right hand whammy bars to the proper left hand, ect...

I was anti-school, anti-computer...

I used to skip school with a bunch of kids and we would go to my house, smoke weed, and I would jam out for them until we had to go back to school so we could catch the bus back home...

Those were the days...

Not dissin' just sayin'

[FORD]

Hey, I had a guitar too.... I just never could play the goddamn thing

[twonabomber]

Still have my old Atari 2600 and a dozen or so game cartridges, but the Commodore 64, and Vic 20 are long gone, and I don't think I ever even took the Timex/Sinclair 1000 out of the goddamn box.

we had a 2600 but wanted to get a ColecoVision when they came out. mom said we could get one if we found someone to buy the 2600, and we had to put the funds gained toward the 2600 adapter. friend of ours loved to play Video Pinball, so we sold the 2600 and pinball cart to him. still have the CV and the adapter, the original boxes are still in my mom's attic. i gotta get over there one day and grab those.

later mom was at a local appliance store and they were blowing out the Bally Astrocade systems, she grabbed one and a pile of games all for under $100. i shoulda took that when i moved out of her place in '89, not sure if it's still there. there is a cool vintage toy store in Cleveland and he usually has an Astrocade but he wants stupid money for it.

got the C64 for Christmas, i went to what used to be Children's Palace to buy the disk drive. they were what, over $200? so i go in there with a wad of lunch money i'd saved up. i remember getting maybe under $20 back in change and the cashier making a joke about being careful with that much money. dad cheaped out and bought me the tape drive and i struggled with that for maybe a month.

Tried using that MAME emulator a few years back, but I never got any decent games to work with it, so I got bored with it. Maybe they have improved it since then. Might be easier to try to figure that out than attempting to plug the old Atari into a modern TV.

if you just want to play 2600 games, get Stella. it's the best 2600 emu out there. the ROMS are easy to find, too.

i bought a Wii just to mod it to run emulators. i have 2600, 7800, CV, MAME, Sega Genesis, and C64. can't remember the last time i even had that sucker plugged in, though.

may not be easy finding a new TV with the correct inputs. i modded my ColecoVision to work on composite inputs, there is a mod for most of the major systems. the 26" Vizio i bought for a PC monitor has composite in, but the 46" i have in the living room only has HDMI, component, and VGA ins.

[Seshmeister]

I think BenJammin mentioned being a COBOLer™©® and droppin' names like UNIVAC™©® and Honeywell... Well... when I was a UNIX (AIX)™©® MASTURBATOR™©® in the early 90s at a credit union, we had this old ass HONEYWELL/BULL DPS/6 computer to do all our processing, and it was the size of a couple refrigerators and a backyard BBQ™©® all in one.

Oh man Honeywell™©® brings back mammaries...

After rejecting the world of law after my first job being with a Grisham style FIRM™©® I bluffed my way into an IT job way way over my head at the city's maternity hospital not realising I would be the only guy there doing IT Support.

Around the second day their Honeywell monster thing which took up half a room went down, no one could register new babies in the city. I puzzled over this for a while. I tracked the network cable all around the building, this thing was on a COAX ring network so if the connection to any terminal in the hospital came loose the whole thing went down, genius!

I distinctly remember having to move placentas out of the way to get behind these things to check the connections. It all looked fine so I went back and sat down looking at this big brown slab of a thing for a bit.

I didn't even have a root password for it and then was inspired. I independently came to the most important law of IT support. I switched it off and on again. I know this sounds so obvious a thing to do to the kids these days but when you are doing it by flicking a switch half the size of your arm back then ending a huge amount of whirring and droning it seemed a brave thing to do.

Needless to say it worked a treat and from that day all the staff in the hospital thought I was a fucking genius GURU™©® who could save them the expensive call out and long waits for the Honeywell engineers.

I never ever switched it on and off in front of witnesses to give away my secret and did it on demand every week or two for 18 months...

[twonabomber]

I independently came to the most important law of IT support. I switched it off and on again.

at Progressive i'd call the help desk when my PC would jam up during a quote. they'd go through three things to try and then they'd tell you to reboot...so i quit calling the help desk and would just reboot.

[FORD]

Anybody else remember dialing into this with their 1200 baud modem?



This was the company which eventually became America Online. And yes, they sucked then too!

[FORD]

Q-link software came bundled with something called GEOS, which was the C-64 attempt to run a GUI at the time when the original Macintosh was getting popular.....