Oldsters

[GreyGeek]

Re: Oldsters

Oh, no! You had to bring up Heathkit ...

Wow, do I miss that company. I believe I built almost everyone of their kits, including a console color TV.

I used the Heathkit DX-60
[img width=400 height=296]http://www.ohio.edu/people/postr/bapix/DX60work.jpg[/img]
driving into a 15' cubical quad antenna, which I also built, and got 5-9-9's out of Japan. Some reported my signal being stronger than 1Kw rigs using yagi antennas. Not bad for a 60 watt CW signal sending Morse code using a paddle. WN5VSX was my call sign.

I used to reach out the window and turn the shaft supporting the antenna to maximize incoming signal strength. So much fun .... But, alas, graduate school required all of my time. I never went voice and never returned to amateur radio after I finished grad school. My last heathkit project, was an EC-1 Alalog computer.
[img width=400 height=256]http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-heathkit-ec-1-analog-computer.jpg[/img]
It's manual is located here and includes an excellent discussion of Operational Amplifiers and how they can be wired to solve 2nd order DiffEqs, with several excellent examples. I was using that computer in my 12th grade physics classes between 1974 and 1978. All my physics demos were switched to my Apple ][+, which I bought in the Summer of 1978,.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Oldsters

Lol, reaching out of the window!

Our first t.v. antenna on the farm was a piece of half inch copper tubing that I bent into an "L" and taped a wire to it, and then taped the tubing to a back door post, wire going to the t.v. screw. Turned the pipe crosswise of the station to get reception! lol

woodsmoke

[Detonate]

Re: Oldsters

Hope the FCC is not monitoring this frequency. I had an old Radio Shack Navajo SSB CB that was modified to operate in the band between 10 and 11 meters that is unassigned. I built my own 4 element beam antenna using the Radio
Relay League book on antennas. I rotated it with a TV antenna rotater. Talked all over the world with that thing.

CQ DX.

[perspectoff]

Re: Oldsters

Many twisty passages all alike was Wumpus (later called Caver).

That was one of the first computer games. I played that one by teletype, using paper tape with holes punched in it. Back then largely only universities, the military, and NASA were networked, and then only by modem. The "phone book" of teletypes with modems (the) old type you actually stuck a real phone handset into) was probably only 10 pages thick. (I played at the university computer lab, since that was the only place it was available.)

There was also a planetary trading game (Star Trader or Galactic Trader, or something like that) that I played on the teletype as well, where you bought and sold resources while flying between the planets of star systems (I guess in modern terms like a Ferengi trader). I played both these games in 1970 and 1971, when I was 10 years old.

The teletype with paper tape was a luxury compared to the cards (on which we had to fill in bubbles) we used before that.

By the time I got to high school they had Micro-PDP-11's. My high school bought one just for me. wow, flipping switches to program -- that seemed to me such a luxury. It was only a short time later the Commodore 64 came out, and the Atari (or vice versa). Cassette tape storage was huge!

Now its amazing to see hard drives on which the equivalent of several hundred movies can be stored.

Time to watch Battlestar Galactica or something about the Borg, again. Computers are evolving far more quickly than humans are (in fact, humans seem to be regressing). You go, Cylons!

[erchie]

Re: Oldsters

Howdy, everyone. I finally joined KFN on May 24 after being a Kubuntu user for five years, and I've been lurking here ever since I signed up, staying up until 5am for each of the last two days! This is the best forum I've ever seen. I've already learned how to solve the little problems of my new Natty Narwhal installation, like eating RAM to within a whisker of OOM over several hours, causing everything to crawl and become erratic, requiring a logout to make it go away, and my AMD Athlon II x2 255 CPU running continuously at 100% load on core 0 and core 1. After I upgraded to KDE 4.6.3 earlier today, the problems seem to have disappeared altogether. I sure hope so. I'm not positive that KDE was the only cause of the problems, because over the past two days I have made so many other adjustments that possibly some of them also had a part in the solution. For a while, I was getting as many as 50 concurrent instances of udevd writing to a b1.1 file in /dev/.udev/links ~tags and ~data, but that has dropped down 1 or 2 instances since the new KDE upgrade.

Before Natty, I was running Kubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, which was very stable, but it didn't support my new printer fully, even with an upgrade to the latest hplip driver. With Natty, everything works perfectly on the printer now, as it should. I am also running the open source fgrlx video driver from jockey, after trying the proprietary ATI Catalyst latest driver, which gave erratic problems while running videos. Maybe now, with KDE 4.6.3, I will try the Catalyst driver again-- and then again, maybe I won't: why fix it if it ain't broke, and right now it's working fine, especially after I downloaded the new Firefox add-on Flash-Aid 2.1.1. this afternoon. Give Flash-Aid a look-see. It has stopped Flash crashes while trying to run in full screen.

I have learned a WHOLE LOT from this forum in the past two days. There's a lot of smart critters on this forum.

I had Linux user number 80xx when I signed up on the Linux Counter in 1996-- but I misplaced it when I came ashore for good in 1999, and I can't remember what the last two digits were, nor can I remember what my email address was then-- Panama was just getting into the internet, and I was switching ISPs right and left. I hadn't really thought about it at all until I saw members posting their Linux Counter numbers, and now I wish I still had mine.

I have been a Linux user since Caldera 1.0, back in 1996. After using Caldera for a month (what was the desktop called? Spyglass?), I switched to Red Hat 4.06 for a couple of weeks, and then read somewhere that Linux Torvalds liked S.u.S.E. for his own computer, so I got S.u.S.E. 4.x, and used it until Novell became a Microsoft partner back in '06. Within days of reading that bit of news, I switched to Kubuntu Edgy Eft and have stayed with Kubuntu ever since. With Feisty Fawn, I switched to 64-bit, and have never gone bact to 32.

I have burned live CDs of other distros, like Debian, Sidux, PCLinuxOS (I actually had it installed on a 32-bit computer for several months, and liked it, but no 64-bit killed PCLOS for me when I got my first 64-bit box), Mandrake (when they called it that), Ubuntu (couldn't hook-up with Gnome's simple-mindedness: no fine grained control), and Arch, but I keep coming back to Kubuntu. It fits me like an old, comfortable shoe. And once you get past the kinks in a 0-day version of a new release, Kubuntu is as smooth as 18-year old single malt scotch. Nothing finer!

[lcorken]

Re: Oldsters

Welcome to our forum erchie.

Yes, we do have the best forum.

I also like to sample other distros. and also keep coming back to Kubuntu, actually never quit. I keep the latest Kubuntu on one partition and experament on other partitions.

I love a good single malt too but this old body tends to complain more now, just like my old P4 computer. Sigh.

Ken.

[Snowhog]

Re: Oldsters

I had Linux user number 80xx when I signed up on the Linux Counter in 1996-- but I misplaced it when I came ashore for good in 1999, and I can't remember what the last two digits were, nor can I remember what my email address was then-- Panama was just getting into the internet, and I was switching ISPs right and left. I hadn't really thought about it at all until I saw members posting their Linux Counter numbers, and now I wish I still had mine.

You might still be able to get this resolved. See I registered my personal information more than once. What should I do? at the Linux Counter. Contact them and give as much information as you can concerning your forgotten account. It's worth a shot at least.

So your foray into Kubuntu was with Edgy Eft. Small world, as that's the Kubuntu I also started with, and I've been a 'Kubuntuer' since. I've tried Ubuntu, and currently have Ubuntu 11.04 on my laptop (triple-booting) so as to be able to assist my father when needed (he is using Ubuntu 10.10 and is new to Linux).

45 years as a Merchant Marine! Thank you for your service. I'll guess you saw a lot in all those years.

KFN is a rare gem of a resource, so say many of us here. Happy to have you aboard.

[Spadge]

Re: Oldsters

I am penultimate years old and my first computer experience was with my mum's commodore pet in '79 or so.

It had tape. I remember the hallowed day it got a floppy disk, and later on when my older brother took a drill and soldering iron to the motherboard to upgrade RAM to 32K.

Since then I have had a zx81, spectrum, bbc-b, atari ste, PCs.

In my first office job I astounded everyone by fixing an IBMPC internal 1200/75 modem (it had a loose wire), and I used to use a 300bd acoustic coupler on another machine to update stock market prices daily.

I bought my first PC in 1996 from a box-pusher that was so poorly slung together I vowed never to buy a pre-built PC ever again.

[erchie]

Re: Oldsters

My account vanished. I don't know what happened, but when I tried to jump into the fray on KFN this morning, I showed up as 'guest'. I thought it was because my login had expired, so I tried to log in again, and the little red message popped up that said my username was 'unknown'. Strange. I tried several times to log in, with the same result. So I went to 'register' and typed in everything again, using the same information I had written before. It worked, and KFN sent me a knew activation email, so I clicked on it, and rebuilt my profile, just as it was before, with the same picture, hardware list, etc. Now I'm going to leave the site and return again, to see if everything is still there. If my profile shows up, I will know it took. Here goes (with crossed fingers).

[Snowhog]

Re: Oldsters

Was a corrupted database. Restoration was required, and unfortunately, around 400 user accounts were lost. See Open Sources's post on this here.

[erchie]

Re: Oldsters

Yay, everybody!

My Natty system is moving well along to the level of perfection I have always expected from Kubuntu. I have the malloc issue under control-- RAM use no longer climbs from normal levels to near OOM threat levels in just a few hours. I have udevd constrained from issuing 50+ child processes, CPU use no longer hovers at 99% on both core0 and core1, and I am running Nepomuk and Strigi again. Note that I have achieved this not through use of code patches to the kernel (I am not a coder), but by temporary run-arounds, like 'sudo killall udevd' after observing RAM resource wastes, and deploying an occasional (every several hours) logout and login routine which takes just 20 seconds. I broke a promise to myself on .0-day final release of 11.04 by leaping immediately into the 'download the brand new final release before it cools off' frenzy, which I knew well from past experience was bound to reveal previously undiscovered post-beta bugs. I spent time combing the bug list of the kernel, and expect the malloc issue to be fixed very quickly, like in the very next glitch upgrade of the 11.04 kernel from the repository, at which time I'm confident that I will be able to abandon all of my run-around solutions because Kubuntu will be rock solid again. I also installed KDE 4.6.3, and immediately after that things seemed to be better, though I can't say for sure the old version 4.6.2 was the cause of all the problems, or for that matter, any of them. Things are 'just plain working' now, as has always been my experience using Kubuntu over the years. The problems just took a little patience, and plenty of good technical advice from the wizards (GreyGeek, Snowhog, dibl, claydoh, woodsmoke, et al) who inhabit KFN. I don't think for an instant that it hasn't been a total blast-- I'm learning a LOT of new things. and having a GREAT time doing it.

Regarding my 'disappeared' KFN account last night, I suspected it was a technical glitch (we all know those things DO happen now and again) and now, thanks to Snohog's comment #40, that is exactly what it turned out to be. My account is fully back in play again, and I am no longer paranoid that I must have committed an innocent breach of the forum civility rules. I really am one of the community again.

[jelang]

Re: Oldsters

72 years
mainframe

Anyone else remember 90 column round hole punched cards?

[GreyGeek]

Re: Oldsters

I remember 80 column rectangular holes in hollerith cards.
[img width=400 height=215]http://img.tfd.com/cde/_PUNCHCD.GIF[/img]

[woodsmoke]

Re: Oldsters

lol
we used to get our phone bill that way and those were what the "keypunch operators" transferred our R.O.P.Eval data to in the 60s 70s!

EVERYBODY said THOSE were the "jobs of the future" and would NEVER go away! lol

woodsmoke

[tdockery97]

Re: Oldsters

Our Navy paychecks used to be hollerith cards.