Comments on: A dinosaur in a modern world

By: Grandad

Grandad — Tue, 06 May 2008 10:01:01 +0000

Daragh – 30? You’re only a child! I preferred the Spectrum myself. And of course there is more to life – iPods? Mobile phones?

By: darragh

darragh — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:53:54 +0000

i turn 30 in August and i’m wondering what the hell i’m doing messing around with computers, blogs and the like. I started about 25 years ago with an amstrad cpc 464 and wish I’d stayed there. I’m neither interested or interesting enough to maintain the constant creativity of those whose blogs I read daily.

I don’t enjoy the frustration of a system or software not responding to commands, doing what I ask or taking ages to do something that it took a few seconds to do yesterday. Getting someone’s address to write to involves an @ symbol, before a number I’m asked for a bebo and the book people recommend is the facebook one where I can be poked, bitten by zombie vampires and tagged in photos I’d not show my own mother.

Ultimately I find I’m bored by it all. There’s more to life.

By: Grandad

Grandad — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:49:42 +0000

Karyn – I think I confused the issue! He has given such a long reply, that it will take me a while to respond! [and today is my day off].

Don’t forget – I’m a Digital Immigrant too, by virtue of age.

By: Karyn Romeis

Karyn Romeis — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:33:06 +0000

Thanks so much for stopping by! I had created a response of my own which I had been unable to post due to some or the other technical glitch. Perhaps if I were a digital native, I could have sorted it out in a jiffy. I doubt it though, because I asked one of my native offspring and he shrugged and said uh-uh-uh, which is teenager for “I don’t know (and I don’t much care)”.

I’m glad, though, because you made the point so much better than I had.

By: Grandad

Grandad — Sun, 04 May 2008 00:44:51 +0000

Bock – You needn’t. Thanks very much. It’s a past life now….

By: Bock the Robber

Bock the Robber — Sun, 04 May 2008 00:39:57 +0000

Anodes and cathodes?

Jesus, I could tell you about Wheatstone bridges, Van der Graaf generators and cloud chambers.

But I won’t.

By: Grandad

Grandad — Sat, 03 May 2008 00:27:17 +0000

Karyn – Ah! Interesting!! I have my opinions, as you will see

TT – You’re barred again for bad punning.

Thrifty – In three years, we spent about two weeks on the subject of transistors. I have a sneaking suspicion I once gave Jim Lacey a lecture on hysteresis loops!!

Charmed – With a name like that you have to start blogging. It’s never too early/late to start.

Jim C – “triodes, tertaodes, or pentodes?” – aren’t they all the same bar the number of grids? And one of the damned pins always bent when you inserted them. My favourite was the VHT Diode in a TV set – 32,000 Volts of raw lightening. It would wake anybody up!

I remember the awe at the sight of a half inch long bit of plastic with three wires that could do the job of a triode without any heat. Those transistors were so small!

By: Jim C

Jim C — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:36:17 +0000

Would you be talking about triodes, tertaodes, or pentodes? Of course for tubes we can also refer to Traveling Wave Tubes or TWT, magnatrons, klystrons, CRTs, and my own favorite Nixie tubes. Computing goes back almost as far with multivacs, and univacs. I even had a brief experience working with the Intel 4004, the predecessor to the 8008 that started the small computer revolution. The internet is just a more robust version of the bulletin boards systems of day gone by though I do far prefer by board band connection to 300 baud modem. DRAM is also much less expensive the magnetic core memory.

The only constant is change.

By: Charmed

Charmed — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:22:13 +0000

Yeah,I’m with Karyn, that digital native/immigrants idea has too many exceptions. Being neither native nor immigrant I’m not sure whether i’m young or old. Maybe I’ll get me one of these bloggy things……….watch this space

By: Thriftcriminal

Thriftcriminal — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:23:25 +0000

We did valves. Very briefly. Jim Lacey liked to describe how he helped build the first commercial computer for Lyons (to count cakes or something) out of valves. He then explained grids,anodes, cathodes etc. and how he initially thought the transistor was a passing fad. Ha. Triac?