- Extra GEEK points if you know what "L.E.W.P." stands for
"Leading Edge Word Processor"
I think I can lay my hands on my copy of that software at home in under a minute... sigh.
I had a Leading Edge Model M (manufactured by Mistubishi, IIRC), and also later a Leading Edge Model D (manufactured by Daewoo, I believe). I though it was a great machine.
You are a rich old geek who said that any program should fit into 640 K of memory.
You are a old geek if you read “The inmates are running the asylum” more than once.
If you “own K&R” ( I know I got TWO , but being old have no clue where they are!)
If you've played Space War on a PDP-1.
If you've had to insert time delays in your program as part of the addressing of data
If you had a job watching for "blooms" in a memory array or if you even know what that might be
You might be an old geek if you've ever used a disk notcher to double the storage capacity of a 5 1/4 inch floppy, so you could store up to 88K on each side of the disk!
You might be an old geek if you've ever referred to a 320 x 192 pixel screen as 'hi-rez'!
You might be an old geek if you've ever turned up the volume knob on your TV so you could hear if the data being read by your floppy drive sounded OK!
If you have done 98% of the stuff in this thread and understand 99% though were born after 1975, you might be a young starting old style geek (Me born 1978, started on the Apple II 1982).
You might be an old geek if you've ever used a disk notcher to double the storage capacity of a 5 1/4 inch floppy, so you could store up to 88K on each side of the disk!
Or even older if you have done that trick with 8 inch disks. For an Intel MDS in mt case.
"You might be an old geek if you've ever used a disk notcher to double the storage capacity of a 5 1/4 inch floppy, so you could store up to 88K on each side of the disk!" - lol
This is fun, we could go on and on.... how about 'bumping' or 'yanking' the floppy at a specific sector during a disk format to purposefully create a bad sector as a means for copy protection. If you've done that then you might be an old geek.
How about whistling at just the right pitch over the phone to start modem negotiation? - that might qualify as an old goof ball rather than a geek.
I've done the whistle. Can still get a FAX machine to start it's second phase of negoiation.
Ahh, copy protecting floppies! Yep. Messed with those in all sorts of ways. One interesting story pops into mind. Once, I ordered a update to a CAD package being used to develop sheet metal flats for a small shop I worked for. (yes, they still used paper tape, with the big discussion being mylar, or oil paper --I was in the oil for sure camp) That "floppy came all bent to Smile. Sliced the case, transplanted it into a fresh case, removed the top of the computer, and applied light pressure to the head to copy it ONCE. Thankfully, it was not copy protected.
The whole time, flop, flop, flop.... scary stuff. Would have taken a week to get another, and we needed the patch for a model I built that exceeded some pointer size in the CAD system. Had the thing in bits, waiting to be assembled and rendered down for a 2D drawing. Was almost quicker to just draw it by hand.
You might be an oldish geek, if you modified a Spool to Spool tape system to use for data storage on your microcomputer (because those fancy cassette recorders were just to expensive and did not hold enough).
Know what a disk doubler is.
built your own paper tape reader with two pieces of wood and two led arrays, the faster you pull the tape the faster it loads, then loaded 5k basic into a scratch built z80 and know now how to recognize the block markers on paper tape as well.
- If you assembled large electronic projects with a wire-wrap gun
How do you define 'large'?
...
Just finished this one last week.....
homosapien, that's a nice wire-wrap project. I didn't think anybody used wire-wrap much anymore. The project I worked on in the late 70's used small cards with 16 wire-wrap DIP sockets on it. These cards were wire wrapped together to create modules consisting of 2 to 6 cards. The modules were inter-connected using flat cable. There were probably a total of about1,000 wire-wrapped sockets in the whole assembly.
I once networked 26 Atari computers to a single Atari 810 disk drive my Sophomore year of high school (1985) for the 'computer science class' ... And it was capable of expanding to 32 computers! Does that make me an old geek?
Very first computer... Altair 8800 A kit. Yes... toggles switches and LED's.
Second computer... Cosmac ELF kit. 1802 cpu. 256 bytes memory.
First "real" computer... Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1
My first geeky project... Disassembling the Level 2 rom by hand so I could write basic programs using assembly language. Why? Still not sure, but I suspect having no life was a major contributor.
1) You've ever dropped a 4000 card deck and spent a few hours getting the cards back into order.
2) You know who Gary Kildall, Ken Olson, Lee Felsenstein, and Bill Godbout are.
3) You've wire wrapped an S-100 memory expansion board using dozens of chips just to get 16KB.
4) You have both the ASCII and EBCDIC character sets memorized. (Bonus points if you know what EBCDIC is).
5) You know how to unjam an ASR33 teletype machine.
6) You thought 64K of RAM is more an anyone could ever use.
7) You were impressed by the speed of your new 300 baud modem (that replaced your 110 baud modem).
8) You know what the "Kansas City" standard was.
9) You remember when Byte magazine was edited by Wayne Green, had over 500 pages, and printed real content.
10) You thought that a HAL-9000 type of system was not only possible, but inevitable, by the year 2001.
10 for x = 0 to 1000
20 read z
30 poke 49152+x,z
40 next
100 data 120,169,13,141,20,3
110 data 169,192,141,21,3
120 data 88,96
130 data 238,32,208,238,33,208,76,49,234
sys49152
... if this was your first PIC microcontroller databook:
This was before GI's microelectronics division was spun off to become Microchip Technology. Most of the PIC chips back then were NMOS (which explains why the battery in my bathroom scales ran down so quickly -- well, that and the LED display).
11) You still have your copy of Dr. Dobbs Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia issue #1.
12) You still occasionally type "PIP" instead of "COPY" in Windows DOS boxes.
13) You remember when disk drives were as large as a washing machine, had 14" platters, and held 40 MB.
14) You remember when compiling a 100 line program took four floppy swaps and 15 minutes.
15) You thought The Woz was a god (and still do).
You remember salivating over the COSMAC Elf kits in Popular Electronics, but couldn't afford one as a poor student.
I can certainly relate to that. I spent an entire summer and fall salivating over stuff I couldn't afford. I was working on a salmon troller in Alaska and received my Interface Age magazine subscription via General Delivery in Pelican. I drooled over those ads. By the end of the fishing stint, I had just enough saved up to buy my first computer, a Poly 88 -- and, hopefully, start a software biz. After I sent my 50% down payment, it took forever to arrive ('waited for delivery each day until three...), as my remaining salmon earnings dwindled to naught. 'Never could afford a floppy drive until I started making some bucks designing hardware.
you couldn't wait to spend a lot of time at the tube tester machine at the front of the store, and turning knobs that "helped" dad test various vacuum tubes while your mom shopped for groceries.
... if you ever tried to "align the heads" on a Commodore 1541 floppy drive, all 170K worth!
...if you ever bought a book on programming the 1541 (6502 assembly, 2k ram) to get around the @$#@#@ copy-protection schemes that used disk errors that caused the drive to try to reset itself which in turn forced you to have to align the heads...
Comments
"Leading Edge Word Processor"
I think I can lay my hands on my copy of that software at home in under a minute... sigh.
I had a Leading Edge Model M (manufactured by Mistubishi, IIRC), and also later a Leading Edge Model D (manufactured by Daewoo, I believe). I though it was a great machine.
You are a old geek if you read “The inmates are running the asylum” more than once.
If you “own K&R” ( I know I got TWO , but being old have no clue where they are!)
What do you get when you cross an automotive executive with vampire bat?
Autoexec.bat
If you've had to insert time delays in your program as part of the addressing of data
If you had a job watching for "blooms" in a memory array or if you even know what that might be
How do you define 'large'?
Just finished this one last week.....
You might be an old geek if you've ever referred to a 320 x 192 pixel screen as 'hi-rez'!
You might be an old geek if you've ever turned up the volume knob on your TV so you could hear if the data being read by your floppy drive sounded OK!
-Phil
Or even older if you have done that trick with 8 inch disks. For an Intel MDS in mt case.
This is fun, we could go on and on.... how about 'bumping' or 'yanking' the floppy at a specific sector during a disk format to purposefully create a bad sector as a means for copy protection. If you've done that then you might be an old geek.
How about whistling at just the right pitch over the phone to start modem negotiation? - that might qualify as an old goof ball rather than a geek.
Ahh, copy protecting floppies! Yep. Messed with those in all sorts of ways. One interesting story pops into mind. Once, I ordered a update to a CAD package being used to develop sheet metal flats for a small shop I worked for. (yes, they still used paper tape, with the big discussion being mylar, or oil paper --I was in the oil for sure camp) That "floppy came all bent to Smile. Sliced the case, transplanted it into a fresh case, removed the top of the computer, and applied light pressure to the head to copy it ONCE. Thankfully, it was not copy protected.
The whole time, flop, flop, flop.... scary stuff. Would have taken a week to get another, and we needed the patch for a model I built that exceeded some pointer size in the CAD system. Had the thing in bits, waiting to be assembled and rendered down for a 2D drawing. Was almost quicker to just draw it by hand.
F666G
and that means that in another room, a girl gets a spool of magnetic tape and LOADS it into the tape machine.
Atari guy here! Antic and Pokey rocked!!!
That the only way you could get anything done in a timely fashion on the Sinclair. FAST and SLOW statements!
Bill
built your own paper tape reader with two pieces of wood and two led arrays, the faster you pull the tape the faster it loads, then loaded 5k basic into a scratch built z80 and know now how to recognize the block markers on paper tape as well.
Dave
uber geek is more like it. Nice project, though I would imagine the file conflicts and seek times were brutal!!
Very first computer... Altair 8800 A kit. Yes... toggles switches and LED's.
Second computer... Cosmac ELF kit. 1802 cpu. 256 bytes memory.
First "real" computer... Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1
My first geeky project... Disassembling the Level 2 rom by hand so I could write basic programs using assembly language. Why? Still not sure, but I suspect having no life was a major contributor.
Amanda
1) You've ever dropped a 4000 card deck and spent a few hours getting the cards back into order.
2) You know who Gary Kildall, Ken Olson, Lee Felsenstein, and Bill Godbout are.
3) You've wire wrapped an S-100 memory expansion board using dozens of chips just to get 16KB.
4) You have both the ASCII and EBCDIC character sets memorized. (Bonus points if you know what EBCDIC is).
5) You know how to unjam an ASR33 teletype machine.
6) You thought 64K of RAM is more an anyone could ever use.
7) You were impressed by the speed of your new 300 baud modem (that replaced your 110 baud modem).
8) You know what the "Kansas City" standard was.
9) You remember when Byte magazine was edited by Wayne Green, had over 500 pages, and printed real content.
10) You thought that a HAL-9000 type of system was not only possible, but inevitable, by the year 2001.
What a great time.:cool:
This was before GI's microelectronics division was spun off to become Microchip Technology. Most of the PIC chips back then were NMOS (which explains why the battery in my bathroom scales ran down so quickly -- well, that and the LED display).
-Phil
12) You still occasionally type "PIP" instead of "COPY" in Windows DOS boxes.
13) You remember when disk drives were as large as a washing machine, had 14" platters, and held 40 MB.
14) You remember when compiling a 100 line program took four floppy swaps and 15 minutes.
15) You thought The Woz was a god (and still do).
-Phil
How about 240 bytes of - ready for this - delay line memory (aka the bits in the machine go round and round) (Olivetti Programma 101).
Does that make me a reallly old geek?
Walter
...if you ever bought a book on programming the 1541 (6502 assembly, 2k ram) to get around the @$#@#@ copy-protection schemes that used disk errors that caused the drive to try to reset itself which in turn forced you to have to align the heads...
Walter