Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

<< < (62/187) > >>

dspelley:
Grew up in New England, spent a few years on a Navy submarine (WWII vintage) and then moved to AZ to finish a degree in Chemical Engineering in the mid-1970's.

Spent hours in a room filled with card-punch machines building card decks to run batch FORTRAN programs for class. In one of our labs we had a DEC PDP series computer - all of the I/O was through a teletype-like keyboard with a long roll of paper. Both input and output were typed onto that paper roll - no monitor. Programs were stored on and loaded from long thin strips of paper punched with holes. Had to make sure you made a new strip once in a while because the holes sometimes got worn or torn and generated errors.

In the early '80s I bought a Times Sinclair 1000 computer for about $80. http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html Came with 2K RAM (that's right- 2 K!) that could be expanded with a plug-in RAM module up to 64K. Programs had to be stored on a standard cassette tape recorder - nightmare!

I started working for a large energy company and was thrilled when I got a dual-floppy IBM PC that could run Lotus 1-2-3 and IBM DisplayWriter software. Taught myself some assembler language and wrote a bunch of goofy little utilities for my own use - had to write one to convert DisplayWriter files from EBCDIC to ASCII because the files often got corrupted.

Thought I was in Heaven when I was given an IBM PC/XT with a 10MB hard drive - couldn't image how I would ever use that much storage!

As my engineering work took more and more of my time, I had less and less time to learn and/or program in the newer languages of the time(C, Pascal, etc). Now I manage a pretty active R&D program for my company and am basically a user/consumer of software rather than an author.

I do still look for and try lots of software and really appreciate the experience and recommendations of all the other DC folks.

Darwin:
Welcome to Donationcoder, dspelley!

leland:
I am 38 and am a system and network administrator for a small business in Chico, CA.  I have been into computers since I was in grade school where we had Apple IIe computers.  When I graduated from 8th grade my grandfather bought me a C-64 with monitor but no storage device.  I spent the next year learning to program and would write programs, play with them and then shut it down each night to start over again the next day.  I learned much from this.  Eventually I got a disk drive and printer and was able to write much larger prorgams.  I remember for Christmas one year I got a Simon's Basic module which greatly expanded what I could program and gave me the ability to write structured basic programs.  With that I wrote my own CAD program for fun.  I don't do much programming these days except scripting; although I help some friends with their code occasionally.  I love to try out new software and especially have a passion for free software of all sorts, be it freeware or open source.  I have been a member here for quite some time, but I don't have ton's of time to post the way I would like.  When I do find products I like I do like to share about them on various forums including here.  Well that's about it for now.

Leland
:D

Carol Haynes:
Welcome leland to DC.com - do join in the forums (I see you have already and that's great).

Darwin:
Yes, welcome leland

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page