Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Really old school

I love this website and thought this was funny.

Engadget

BTW, I used to work on Mac XL's (actually converted Lisa's) and pined for one of those discmans. My freshman college roommate had one of those petsters. yeah, he was an uber nerd. We only lasted one semester...

Sweet. Those ASCII graphics bring back memories of 300, 1200, and 2400 baud modems.

To funny, I remember when I used to cruise all the local bulletin boards back in the late 80's looking for cool games on my Tandy 1000. Man I thought I was king [censored] when I got that 2400 external modem

2400? I used to surf w/ my screaming 300 baud Prometheus on my Atari 800. Used to use those Trash80's in high school. They were even networked so we could use the single floppy drive from one computer... Loved the great placement of the reset button. Only an engineer who wants to reboot would do that. Maybe he went on to develop CTRL+ALT+DEL?

Ah.....seeing that Comodore 128 reminds me of my dear ol' Atari 130XE; about the same as the 128 although a bit slower.

Didn't care much for acoustic modems in those days.....not many good reasons to get one.....then

1200 baud was my start. Setup things to download before bed, went to sleep, and if I was lucky they were finished by morning. As long as the connection didn't drop during the night it was usually enough time to get everything.

Oh, I can beat all your stories on modem speed.

First modem was a 110 baud, and I had to write my own terminal program...

10 PRINTCHR$(147);
20 OPEN2,2,0,CHR$(7);CHR$(0);
30 GET#2,I$
40 PRINTI$;
50 GETJ$;
60 PRINT#2,J$;
70 GOTO30

Wow, look, ma, I remember my CBM BASIC V2.

I was also a Files Staffer on a C64 Files BBS... on a 300bps modem, had to download and check every upload and okay it.

Bren R.

Ah the memories.........

Ah,...memories indeed

My first computer; a Sperry Univac(not all mine, actually)had no screen,.....just flashing regesters, and ran so slowly that you could watch the regesters flash thru their sequencing, we "debugged" it by removing the actual bugs that would be eating the coating on the wires It was cool though; it was "Solid-State"! It had an associated piece of equipment that had a tube compiler that was even slower

Later; while working for Bryant Computer, we built a new, larger/faster disc drive. It was the size of a VW bug, had an environmental unit of the same size, ran with 36" oxide coated discs which would cause an actual "crash" when some of that oxide would flake off and cause the data heads to stop "flying".

It was a whopping 4.2GB

My first exposure was in jr high w/ a PET. We still used punch cards to set up class schedules too. back in '79...

Man, you guys are OLD!!

Yeah, when I was a kid with my Commodore 128, my friend and I would start loading up a game with "good" graphics, go outside to play catch for twenty minutes or so, then come back in and the game would be ready. We really had to plan ahead. I don't remember too many of my friends who actually bought a game for the Commodore. It seems we all had a couple of shoeboxes full of pirated floppies. I don't think I ever got around to uncovering every single game I had hidden on those disks.

Commodore 128? Heck I couldn't even get a 64. Yeah I did my own "pirating" back then.

I had an Atari 800 w/ a cassette drive. I bought Zaxxon on cassette and played it. On a lark I played it on an audio cassette player (Sanyo IIRC). Just a bunch of blips and bleeps. I figured what the heck, let's see if I can dub the tape. Low and behold it worked and I returned Zaxxon...

You bastard you! Imagine all those hard working ATARI programmers you put out of work. I bet you are the kind of guy that burns his own CD's too. Pretty soon the whole Music/Film/Game industry is gonna go tits up because of people like YOU!


Just kidding...Sometime it is hard to tell when someone is joking and then people get their panties in a bunch...Wouldnt want that...

Commodore actually made their tapes nearly uncopyable by consumer equipment.... not sure how, but I tried a good many times to get them copied to no avail.

The blistering speed of the tape drive allowed 80 characters to be read in every second... but since the file was written to the tape twice in succession and it would read the second as a backup/verify of the load, that brought it down to a mean 40 characters a second... I was young when I got my first datasette (the European C2N rather than the American 1530) so my electrical engineering at age 8 was a little weak, but I deduced long after they had been scrapped in favour of the *ahem* "blistering" 1541 disk drives, that you could tie the data lines of two Datasettes together and make nearly perfect digital copies of the tapes. Still, the signal at around 720Hz clock was pretty impressive to listen to on a home audio device (assuming 80 chars per second, 8 bits per character and a parity bit for error detection - I'm not 100% sure if they used parity at all).

By the time the C64 rolled out with the 1541 drives, I was old enough to start taking screws out of things and making modifications... all my drives had device number selector switches... break connection #1, it changes from the default 8 to 9, break connection #2 and it changes to 10 and break both and it changes to 11. I also replaced the trim pots on the drive motor speed controller to ones that mounted through the case at the top (where I learned that all potentiometers did not carry the same sweep! Hmm... even at the lowest setting the motor is running too fast, what did I do wrong?) and a slot to view the 60Hz disc printed on the flywheel (set up a 60Hz fluorescent, turn the speed pot, when the disc appears to stop turning, it's within speed tolerance!)... the stuff was very easy to modify and there were books and books about all the internal workings. My modem had an immediate hang-up button - I'll let you imagine why you'd need to be able to drop carrier in a split second ... I had cold, warm and absolute reset buttons, a homemade tape dongle for whatever that game was that needed it.

Then my piece de resistance - I built an audio digitizer from scratch, plugged into the user port and used an ADC0820 IC to turn analog audio into digital audio. I could capture a wild 8KHz, 4 bit sample 8 or 9 seconds long! (and later in life, after I learned about data compression, I could capture enough of Moby's "Next is the E" to rebuild all the samples into the entire song) that's where I really got involved in digital audio. I was trying to figure out how to mix two samples... hmm.. add them - no that doesn't work and overflows, take every second sample from each and play them interleaved - that does work, but each sample is then half the resolution as... waitaminute... average them... VOILA! Now to mix them at different levels, you'd make them each a percentage of 200% before mixing them (say one sample at 150% (*1.5), one at 50% (*0.5) to get a 33% mix of sample B)... holy crap... now a delay, just average in the current sample at a position (samplerate X delay length in seconds) samples away, and using the same mix ratio as above... and reverb would be the same, only each delay would be delayed too... and thus, my interest in digital audio was born.

Though I still have no idea why the "clip" LED on the digitizer didn't work... still to this day... maybe the LED was in backwards or I had a bum LED.

Bren R.

Hey, Ken? You're not a nerd anymore...

Yeah, I guess not.

Dude, if you had written this on an MIT application, it would be a guaranteed admission. You know, it's never too late to go back to school...

Nah, it was Caltech with the free form essay thing. MIT was the one with the interview.



No, I didn't get into either.

Actually, I got a free pass to McGill in grade 10... knew the family wouldn't have been able to afford for me to go live there, would have meant the loss of my income plus the expense of me living in residence, so I tore it up.

Did pretty good for myself even without the catskin though, I think... and just imagine how much more of a p***k I'd be with letters after my name!

Bren R.

Bren R, B.S.

I dunno, some people might say it would work...

"...and a BMF besides!"

I'd go for:
Associate of Sound Science
Doctorate of Incidental Numeric Kinematics
Engineer of General Optics

Bren R.

Ken, that was priceless.


Bren, thanks for the glimpse into your burgeoning nerdiness.