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Gra
29th October 2007, 08:40 PM
You know you are an old geek when:
1. You remember when pair programming was a natural way of working because there weren’t enough computers to go round.
2. You speak HEX but have difficulty with any other foreign language.
3. You have a Sinclair QL lurking in the loft.
4. You remember when going online used to mean Compuserve and Bulletin Boards and 2400 baud was good!
5. You can program in Fortran, Algol, Pascal, Coral and a whole host of other unheard of languages and you remember when C was first invented.
6. You used to know how long every instruction took, and optimised your code accordingly.
7. You used bit shifts rather than multiply and divide, and wrote whole programs in scaled integer arithmetic because it was quicker.
8. You remember when Windows was a program that ran on top of the operating system and you had to type Windows at the DOS prompt to start it.
9. You remember when the operating system, compiler, editor and all the programs you needed ran in less than 28K bytes.
10. You used to write whole programs to draw lines and circles on the screen.
11. You’ve written an operating system, a screen editor and a compiler.
12. You invented “parallel processing” before it was ever called that because you needed to get 54 processors to talk to each other and crunch numbers for a real-time system.
13. Taking a backup used to mean generating a paper tape.
14. You remember when the computer occupied two whole rooms and had to be booted with a mylar tape and the disks were about 2 feet across.

Wood Borer
30th October 2007, 12:24 AM
Punched cards at uni:wink:

Skew ChiDAMN!!
30th October 2007, 02:12 AM
- you'd memorised the JMP tables for three different processors and knew that would keep you fed you for the next decade.
- you remember that HEX was considered a high level language.
- you remember that you couldn't understand the fuss over monitors... after all, the teletype did the same job.
- you can still recite the full Hayes command set, even after all these years.

munruben
30th October 2007, 10:58 AM
You know that a Commodore 64 isn't a Holden. and you actually know what a sinclair is.

Alastair
30th October 2007, 11:10 AM
Getting punch card stacks back in your pigeonhole that wouldn't run on the IBM360 at uni.

When you had to be a research fellow to be allowed to use the IBM terminals

Developing process control programs on an HP9825, using HPL, and running mylar tapes until they melted

Learning SUPERCALC as your first spreadsheet

When RAM was 640k

Running LP optimisations on IBM PC off floppy

Being the only bloke in the office who dared to use email, (and waiting for answers)

Gra
30th October 2007, 11:16 AM
was waiting for your reply Skew

Fuzzie
30th October 2007, 11:51 AM
Tapes... luxury.

When booting meant buttoning in the bootstrap on the front panel and you could read the blinking binary on the front panel lights.

Ernie47
30th October 2007, 12:06 PM
When 16K was all the go. (Or even before that when memory was $1/byte)
When 9600baud was gee whiz.
When it broke you were expected to be there 10 minutes before hand.
When you could read the data on a punched tape. (So you could tell which relay contact was stuffed.)
When you fixed real (3000 line/minute) printers, tape drives & disk drives, instead of throwing them in the bin.
When real computer rooms didn't have "windows".

MurrayD99
30th October 2007, 01:11 PM
Raised floors with pressurised air for keeping the beer cold. Those big tape drives. Punch & verify. Selling a customer a 1GB hard disk for 30,000 pounds.... Proprietary operating systems.

Ashore
30th October 2007, 02:48 PM
When that new termonology came in most thought it meant :doh:
LOGON: Adding wood to make the Barbie hotter.

LOG OFF: Not adding any more wood to the Barbie.

MONITOR: Keeping an eye on the Barbie.

DOWNLOAD: Getting the firewood off the Ute.

HARD DRIVE: Making the trip back home without any cold tinnies.

KEYBOARD: Where you hang the Ute keys.

WINDOW: What you shut when the weather's cold.

SCREEN: What you shut in the mozzie season.

BYTE: What mozzies do.

MEGABYTE: What Townsville mozzies do.

CHIP: A bar snack.

MICROCHIP: What's left in the bag after you've eaten the chips.

MODEM: What you did to the lawns.

LAP Where the cat sleeps.

SOFTWARE: Plastic knives & forks you get at Red Rooster.

HARDWARE: Stainless steel knives & forks - from K-Mart.

MOUSE: The small rodent that eat's the grain in the shed.

MAINFRAME: What hold's the shed up.

WEB: What spiders make.

WEBSITE: Usually in the shed or under the verandah.

SEARCH ENGINE: What you do when the Ute won't go.

CURSOR: What you say when the Ute won't go.

YAHOO: What you say when the Ute does go.

UPGRADE: A steep hill.

SERVER: The person at the pub who brings out the counter lunch.

MAIL SERVER: The bloke at the pub who brings out the counter lunch.

USER: The neighbour who keep's borrowing things.

NETWORK: What you do when you need to repair the fishing net.

INTERNET: Where you want the fish to go.

NETSCAPE: What the fish do when they discover the hole in the net.

ONLINE: Where you hang the washing.

OFFLINE: Where the washing end's up when the pegs aren't strong enough


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