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Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#51

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

I emailed my sons (Firstborn Son and The Kid) that I was giving them the best gift a parent could give - a crap-free house. Over the next 20 years I intend to recycle, throwaway, repurpose, gift and get rid of unused clutter, including stuff in the attic and basement, so they don't have too when I am gone.

First Born Son's response : Just so there is a written record of it, I call dibs on the box of old landline phones and charging accessories for devices we no longer have. KEEP YOUR GRUBBY MITTS OFF IT, KID!!!!!!

I am however, willing to compromise and split the four or five "perfect snowball makers" that are in the attic.

My response: There are snowball makers in the attic!!!!!!??????
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#52

Post by Maybenaut »

northland10 wrote: Mon May 17, 2021 8:41 pm A few years back, I was in the Cafe and noticed one of the building engineers phone notification went:

... / __ __ / ...

I thought that was pretty clever.
That is clever! My husband’s text notification is ._. The letter R was one of many “prosigns” we used to convey content without having to spell it out (R means I acknowledge receipt, or I will comply, depending on the context). Every time I hear it I jump out of my skin (did I nod off when I’m supposed to be guarding 500kHz?!). And I haven’t guarded 500kHz since 1988. It’s engrained.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#53

Post by p0rtia »

I had a Renault 10 that literally ONLY started by popping the clutch. Which it did faithfully from atop the smallest hill-ette, or with driver and passenger jumping out and pushing the doors for about ten feet (which was necessary if I couldn't get it out of gear and get my foot back lightly on the gas fast enough).

My sister painted "Le Heap" on the side of the car.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#54

Post by johnpcapitalist »

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 11:20 am I emailed my sons (Firstborn Son and The Kid) that I was giving them the best gift a parent could give - a crap-free house. Over the next 20 years I intend to recycle, throwaway, repurpose, gift and get rid of unused clutter, including stuff in the attic and basement, so they don't have too when I am gone.
My mother operates in a very similar way: she frequently says "at the reading of the will, you'll know which one of you I loved more because the other one gets the contents of the house."
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#55

Post by MsDaisy »

johnpcapitalist wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 12:46 pm
My mother operates in a very similar way: she frequently says "at the reading of the will, you'll know which one of you I loved more because the other one gets the contents of the house."
When My mother died... :faint: I swear she still had every cancelled check, utility receipt she'd ever acquired as an adult. Everything tied up in little bundles with string. She still even had dresses in the closet that were mine when I was 11 after having moved 3 or 4 times since! Boxes and boxes of old brown & white and black & white photos of people I didn't know.

I'm doing pretty good I've already purged most of my old photos & crap and all the family stuff, jewelry and such is bagged in little ziplock bags with a label identifying who's it was, where it came from and who gets it. 8-)
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#56

Post by Foggy »

Off Topic
My mom received my great-grandmother's wedding ring, which great grandma left for me as her only male great-grandson at the time of her death. It was from Tiffany's in Noo Yawk Citty, they don't even cut diamonds like that any more. But I was only a year old at the time, and I had no girlfriend, and no real plans to marry anyone. :blackeye:

So my dad was in the Navy, and they kept moving him around. My parental units had 5 kids, each of us born in a different city. I've lived in 11 states, and growing up, I never lived in the same town for more than a couple of years.

And moving to a new town is hard, as I learned when I became an adult. When we moved to Rawly, I finally did it with two kids, and holy mcgurk it was a ton of work! Yowza!

But every time my parents moved to a new place - with 5 kids, it's difficult to conceive, they moved so often - my mom would go to the bank and rent a safety deposit box for that ring (and some other stuff, of course). So when I was 41 and finally found a lady I thought would be a good fit for me for the rest of my life, I called my mom and said "Umm, do you still have that ring you talked about?" (I had never seen it, it was always in the safety deposit box.)

That ring was made in 1895, and ol' Wifehorn still wears it. :biggrin:
Out from under. :thumbsup:
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#57

Post by AndyinPA »

Foggy wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 7:37 am
Off Topic
My mom received my great-grandmother's wedding ring, which great grandma left for me as her only male great-grandson at the time of her death. It was from Tiffany's in Noo Yawk Citty, they don't even cut diamonds like that any more. But I was only a year old at the time, and I had no girlfriend, and no real plans to marry anyone. :blackeye:

So my dad was in the Navy, and they kept moving him around. My parental units had 5 kids, each of us born in a different city. I've lived in 11 states, and growing up, I never lived in the same town for more than a couple of years.

And moving to a new town is hard, as I learned when I became an adult. When we moved to Rawly, I finally did it with two kids, and holy mcgurk it was a ton of work! Yowza!

But every time my parents moved to a new place - with 5 kids, it's difficult to conceive, they moved so often - my mom would go to the bank and rent a safety deposit box for that ring (and some other stuff, of course). So when I was 41 and finally found a lady I thought would be a good fit for me for the rest of my life, I called my mom and said "Umm, do you still have that ring you talked about?" (I had never seen it, it was always in the safety deposit box.)

That ring was made in 1895, and ol' Wifehorn still wears it. :biggrin:
Also
Off Topic
I had my original engagement ring re-made some years ago. It was originally a solitaire. By the time I had that done, I also had a ring with two diamonds that was set in a contemporary setting. We had picked it (and a sapphire necklace) up at a pawn shop, the only time in my life I've ever been in one. When I went to pick up the re-made ring at the jeweler's, the jeweler told me that the two diamonds that had come out of the contemporary ring were antiques, or vintage, diamonds from sometime in the 1800s. He was more specific to time, but I don't remember exactly when he said. I've read that the vintage cuts are often not as nice as later cuts, but my diamonds have beautiful sparkle.

I like that your wife's has special meaning to both of you, though. 8-)
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#58

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

Wifehorn must be very proud of her ring. Antique diamonds are in this year. They are seen as repurposed for the green crowd.

I inherited my mom's wedding set circa 1946. The diamond is a sparkler!

For more info on cuts see https://www.gemsociety.org/article/old- ... t-diamonds.
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#59

Post by AndyinPA »

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 10:27 am Wifehorn must be very proud of her ring. Antique diamonds are in this year. They are seen as repurposed for the green crowd.

I inherited my mom's wedding set circa 1946. The diamond is a sparkler!

For more info on cuts see https://www.gemsociety.org/article/old- ... t-diamonds.
Thanks for the link. I had looked up information at the time when I found out those two diamonds were vintage, but I had forgotten a lot of the specifics.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#60

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

:biggrin:
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#61

Post by keith »

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 11:20 am I emailed my sons (Firstborn Son and The Kid) that I was giving them the best gift a parent could give - a crap-free house. Over the next 20 years I intend to recycle, throwaway, repurpose, gift and get rid of unused clutter, including stuff in the attic and basement, so they don't have too when I am gone.
My Brither in law has an unbreakable ritual. Every day for the last 3 years he has disposed of something out of the house. He's starting to get thin, but so far he hasn't complained of needing somethig he threw out last week.
Has everybody heard about the bird?
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#62

Post by northland10 »

keith wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 8:56 pm My Brither in law has an unbreakable ritual.
Is your brother-in-law a birther, so now called a Brither-in-law?
101010 :towel:
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#63

Post by keith »

northland10 wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 8:58 pm
keith wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 8:56 pm My Brither in law has an unbreakable ritual.
Is your brother-in-law a birther, so now called a Brither-in-law?
Nope. That is what, back in the day when high technology was ForTran and Cobol, we used to call a 'finger check'.

I was using an 8inch tablet, my fingers are too fat, and I hate on screen keyboards.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#64

Post by Lani »

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 10:27 am Wifehorn must be very proud of her ring. Antique diamonds are in this year. They are seen as repurposed for the green crowd.

I inherited my mom's wedding set circa 1946. The diamond is a sparkler!

For more info on cuts see https://www.gemsociety.org/article/old- ... t-diamonds.
There is also a new cut - Cento. The brilliant cut has 33 facets on the top and 24 facets on the bottom. Cento diamonds have 37 facets on the top and 63 facets on the bottom. Those diamonds are amazing! The additional facets allow the light to reflect and refract to create more brilliance.
Cento Diamond.png
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#65

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

:biggrin:
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#66

Post by AndyinPA »

:thumbsup:
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#67

Post by roadscholar »

One of my started-but-never-finished Majors in college was Computer Programming. So I had to learn a bit of COBOL, and boy I hated it. Tedious. Long-winded. Mundane. In 1975, Edsgar Dijkstra famously proclaimed that “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”

and yet...

I now find myself writing file names such as "peale-museum-2nd-fl-upper-sash-dwg-full" :o

Yeesh.

But now I hear they're begging some young hotshots to learn it, because huge institutions and government entities still use it, and there's a shortage of programmers who know it. Specifically, the now burdened Unemployment systems country-wide are desperate for COBOL support.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/ ... f495167d0f
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#68

Post by FiveAcres »

I'm old, so my first programming language was Fortran, on punch cards! I hated punch cards so I took an intro to using what we called teletype machines which were a big improvement. The next language was Pascal, since it was then the trendy language for computer science novices. I signed up for a database class, and the first day, the prof said "your class exercises will be done in COBOL." A room full of students stared at him in shock. "You'll pick it up in no time!" he said. Oddly enough, he was right. One or two people may have dropped because of the COBOL requirement, but the rest of us managed just fine. As it happened, I got a job six years later on the strength of being able to say I knew COBOL based on that class. I think somewhere in there I had some instruction on Structured Programming in COBOL, which is possible if you are disciplined. The hardest part of COBOL was coming up with variable names that made enough sense that some future maintainer wouldn't be calling down curses on your head.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#69

Post by neonzx »

FiveAcres wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 3:36 pm I'm old, so my first programming language was Fortran, on punch cards!
Yeah, you WIN. You are older than me. My aunt, who when I would stay with her as a wee-child (8ish years old) would sometimes take me to her job. She worked the overnight shift at a Fortune 500 company data center back in the 70s. That's the first time I saw punch cards. I was fascinated by the high-tech(for the times) in a big space with all these computers in a very secure place. It was like being in a sci-fi movie. We were the only persons there, other than roaming security on-site. Those experiences probably contributed to me going into IT related professions. She probably would have gotten in trouble if her superiors knew she brought me to work -- maybe she did.

My first language was Pascal.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#70

Post by neeneko »

Ooof, I am so glad I missed out on COBOL, but I did do a bunch of FORTRAN in college and actually rather liked it.. though it was confined to limited sections of a larger FORTRAN/C/C++ code base, which meant it only got used for things it was really good at and one jumped to other languages for things they were good at. Fun times.

My first language was actually LOGO, which surprisingly enough is seeing a bit of a renaissance, though Python is slowly eating its mindshare.

I am a little sad that I missed the haydays of LISP. I was in the last year that LISP was taught in my college and by the time I hit industry the few game companies that used it had moved on due to difficulty in finding LISP programmers... but.. Python kinda ate that mindshare too. Still, I keep my eyes open for a used Symbolics Macivory or something to play with someday, just for the fun of it.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

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Post by Uninformed »

My first programming was in Algol68 on paper tape...
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#72

Post by sugar magnolia »

My dad ran the computer part of the highway patrol when I was in high school and we'd go down before football games and grab huge bags full of the colorful punches from the punch cards to throw like confetti at the games. That shit is as bad as glitter to try to get out of your hair and clothes.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#73

Post by johnpcapitalist »

roadscholar wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 3:27 pmBut now I hear they're begging some young hotshots to learn it, because huge institutions and government entities still use it, and there's a shortage of programmers who know it. Specifically, the now burdened Unemployment systems country-wide are desperate for COBOL support.
My son thinks the road to riches lays along the path of slinging Python for a hedge fund. I have told him he could make more money with less pressure by moving to Omaha to work for First Data Resources, which handles most of the credit card clearing in the US and probably globally as well. It's all in COBOL, and uses two extremely fast & reliable but extremely arcane technologies including the IMS database (non relational but screamingly fast) and TPF (a TP monitor, way faster but way harder to code than CICS). All the old guys that wrote their stuff are retired or dead, and they'll pay a lot of money to get rookies on the platform and then stay there. But given that he's a Brooklyn hipster, he can't imagine living in Omaha. Can't say that I blame him.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#74

Post by keith »

roadscholar wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 3:27 pm One of my started-but-never-finished Majors in college was Computer Programming. So I had to learn a bit of COBOL, and boy I hated it. Tedious. Long-winded. Mundane. In 1975, Edsgar Dijkstra famously proclaimed that “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”

and yet...
And yet when I first 'played with Cobol' I hated it too. Then when I had to use it in actual anger I had no problem with it, in fact it was great.

My first language was IBM 1401 Autocoder (assembler) and a bit of Fortran. Then BASIC back when it was really basic. Then CDC Assembler with Fortran and a bit of Cobol. I was pretty good with both CDC Assembler and Fortran. But then I got a job at an IBM shop and I got really good with 360 assembler and Cobol. I hacked the lousy ancient Fortran compiler so we could compile SAS and read Census tapes because the freebee Fortran couldn't read multivolume tape files nor the large data records the Census came on. I would put me in the 'super programmer' class during that time - alas I'm far from it today. I got Fortran and Cobol to talk to each other when IBM said it couldn't be done. I got Fortran routines to run under CICS when IBM said it couldn't be done. Years later I got CICS and IMS to communicate seamlessly when IBM said it couldn't be done. I should have applied to do a redbook study on that one. Cobol had one of the first 'Object Orientation' models that you could actually use in real life projects - and yes, it actually looked like Cobol. I got to be pretty good with SAP/ABAP over the years too. Today I do my hobby hacking in Delphi Pascal.
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Re: Clueless Youth Struggle With Old Technology & Stuff We Grew Up With

#75

Post by keith »

FiveAcres wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 3:36 pm I'm old, so my first programming language was Fortran, on punch cards! I hated punch cards so I took an intro to using what we called teletype machines which were a big improvement. The next language was Pascal, since it was then the trendy language for computer science novices. I signed up for a database class, and the first day, the prof said "your class exercises will be done in COBOL." A room full of students stared at him in shock. "You'll pick it up in no time!" he said. Oddly enough, he was right. One or two people may have dropped because of the COBOL requirement, but the rest of us managed just fine. As it happened, I got a job six years later on the strength of being able to say I knew COBOL based on that class. I think somewhere in there I had some instruction on Structured Programming in COBOL, which is possible if you are disciplined. The hardest part of COBOL was coming up with variable names that made enough sense that some future maintainer wouldn't be calling down curses on your head.
Yes, exactly that.

Once you learned to think structured, it was easy, and came natural.

At my first 'serious' job, for my very first project, the boss asked me to retrofit an old assembler language program that used 'direct access' and get it to use 'indexed sequential access' for the database. That part was actually pretty straight forward but there was a lot of code that just didn't make sense, so I spent three days flow charting it to ensure I didn't screw it up royally. One day the boss came by and said how long is this thing going to take for crying out loud? I said 'I dunno, there is a lot of crap in here, I am struggling to figure out what is real and what is just rubbish - can I just rewrite it in Cobol?' He laughed and said 'by all means' and I finished the rewrite in about a half a day it got tested and put in production two days later. Turns out that program had originally been written in 1401 Autocoder and IBM had run it through a translater when they upgraded to a 360, and then had been updated many times since then. The old coders just left old crappy code intact and branched around it or just never called it - hey we might need it again!. It was just absolutely filled with detritous.

And yes, we were working on punch cards back then.
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