The hardware world of networking was a strange mystery to me for a time. I had my 300 bps modem and understood that world. Then I got on the internet in 1990 and understood that world. unix + VAX/VMS made sense to me. IP addresses I ‘got’.
But token ring networks? What’s that? NETWARE? What’s with these // things? How is this a “network operating system”? It didn’t start ‘clicking in’ how it works until the mid 1990s and even THEN I was still mystified by that side of things.
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Oh I had Amiga envy. The Commie64/Amiga world with Video Toaster and stuff… I wanted a part of that. But it wasn’t to be. I’d see my friends with their ability to do things with video on their Amiga 500/1000s that I couldn’t on my system. [but I could fit more text on my screen and had better BBS’! … well, more of them]
1990 was my first experience with IP addressing. I had notebooks filled with important FTP sites and… whatever other stuff you could do back then with an IP address.
I was in love with BITNET and VAX/VMS. They had real 2-way communication. Bitnet chat was just awesome : you saw them typing as they typed and they saw you typing as you typed. I wasn’t impressed with IRC – never expected it to last. 2017, still going strong and is the hidden chat mechanism behind Minecraft chat, twitch, and most online gaming chat portions. I backed the wrong horse there 
🙂
[I also liked Gopher over www when www came out… and I was rooting for minix over linux. Then again, most people I vote for in US elections also never got in so… 🙂 ]
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Tandy Color Computer 2 was my first. Me at age 11 in 1983. That book on BASIC I read so many times that the spine glue gave way and it was in pieces by 1989, when I got my first PC – a 286.
I went from BASIC to Pascal to a number of other easy programming languages were around. I could modify code in C but not write in it. Wanted to learn LISP (for ai) but there were a lot of pre-requisites and I ran out of $ to finish college anyway.
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Always envied two kinds of folks : the people that had the soldering irons and could make stuff. [my hands are percussive (fast typing) but not good for fine movement (soldering, drawing) and assembly/c programmers. I could twist wires with nuts and could program in high level languages but too much boilerplate code would drive me nuts.
Yeah – TP3 and TP4.
Wrote a few things in TP, including an audio sound converter. The Tandy 1000 TL I had had a unique 3 voice sound chip with an 8-bit DAC, and I figured out how to get other sound formats into it and wrote a conversion program. I wrote other things but this one was my favorite, especially when someone I didn’t know found my code and updated it with new features. That’s when I *really* understood the power of releasing code freely.
(******CONV2SND.DOC******)
* *
* CONV2SND.PAS: 2.02 *
* *
* February 3, 1993 *
* Kenneth Udut *
* Revised 10/15/96 *
* J.L. Hayes *
* *
(******CONV2SND.DOC******)
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I come up as INFP, although my F/T were always really close. I broke the test once by trying to imitate all 16 types. Took me a year of trying until I could mimic them all. Now I can’t take it anymore 🙂
I found my interest always was in conversions. Even today, I love transforming data from one format to another. For example, I love being able to grab a youtube video, extract the sound, convert it to MIDI, then recording it *back* to a video and uploading it…. giving a “piano voice”, along with other audio/video games.
I’m the same with data: Give me the messiest data and I’ll get it in a spreadsheet and do something interesting with it. Yet, databases never interested me.
The show looks interesting : I’ve been on a “little/no TV” kick for a few years now but maybe if there’s a marathon I’ll make it a point to go through it. It looks like a fun show!
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Yup. Sometimes I suspect I’m more “T” than “F”, although I have this damn empathy thing that keeps getting in the way. Yeah, I straddle the line.
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I have to have a purpose for the puzzle. If someone gives me a thought experiment that doesn’t seem to have a purpose other than to lock me into a logic game, I find a way around it, usually to their annoyance.
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Oh that’s awesome! My mother says my older sister and I had our own language until I was about 3.5/4 years old. We’d babble to each other. One day, my sister wasn’t where I expected her. I babbled to my mom, who didn’t understand. Then, apparently I had a frustrated look on my face, and said, “Where Lin-Lin?” She was amused and mad. “You mean you could talk the WHOLE TIME?”
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I have some early memories but that’s not one of them 🙂 Interesting though how we both had very early childhood languages and both fell easily into computers, even though we had different paths.
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This is the standard memory retrieval curve. I’ve been working to document as much as I can in my personal timeline to improve these numbers. I *hate* following an average curve when I can help it
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That’s amazing. I never had that kind of connection. Even though my sister had our own language, once I began to assert myself more (she was more dominant), that connection was broken. Being 1/2 deaf / 1/2 blind I’ve always been hyperaware of input and output and a lot of time analyzing my own internal processes. Probably what made me ‘kin’ to computers more than people, yet I can get easily pulled into another person’s emotional state (real or fictional) so I stay on guard for that.
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I was very “open” and expressive as a kid but 3rd grade (8 yrs old) shut that down. Never understood why the outer world wasn’t like my inner world. Anxiety attacked ensued, so introversion was *probably* a coping mechanism against excessive negative social input and I got good at it.
Yes – it was a great conversation! Thank you!
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