Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Quasi game for the tech heads

Collapse
This topic is closed.
X
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #16
    I told Mrs. IA about this thread. Here are some of the older systems and languages she has worked on over the years:

    NCR 315 - NEAT assembler language and COBOL
    IBM 1401
    IBM 370/165 - COBOL and OS/HARP/MVT
    RCA System Spectra 70 - assembler and COBOL
    Honeywell 6000 - assembler and COBOL
    UNIVAC 1108/1110 - NARDAC software
    "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

    Comment


    • #17
      I fondly remember our Commador 64... my mother bought the game turtletracks. It taught you to write code in DOS to make pretty pictures. She has always been disappointed that she entered the IT field after teaching us to play it, but neither of her daughters showed any will to do any IT related work.
      "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
      - James Joyce

      Comment


      • #18
        For me, it all began with the family's Tandy 8000. The brand is relevant; this particular machine ran a proprietary variant of DOS that had a fancy menu and some other nicestuffs.

        Then game the hand-me-down Dells (back when the name "Dell" was only known by some IT gurus and the occasional hobbyist) and many, many, MANY permutations of MS-DOS, starting from 4.something and finishing with 6.22 plus Windows 3.11, before shortly segueing into Windows 95 and 98.

        Interesting thing about this timeframe is this was my first brush with networking. Cat5 hadn't become affordable at the consumer-level yet, so in our house, we had a 10BASE2 network linking our DOS machines communicating via IPX, and this network was used exclusively for gaming. We had LAN parties before the term "LAN party" had even been christened.

        Around this time I also got a few legacy machines. An Apple ][c (that I ultimately destroyed; I was an abusive kid), a TRS-80 Model III (that still works), and a TRS-80 CoCo 2 (also still works). This is also about the time I started to learn real programming.

        At our school, we had an entire room of Apple ][gs's, that I would consistently get in trouble with, for "hacking" or some such. Just practicing my BASIC, teacher! I'd also do Oregon Trail speedruns. Yes, speedruns. I could finish the game in about fifteen minutes, and was quite proud of myself at the time.

        Later on, Macs showed up. LC series, plus the occasional early PowerPC unit. I don't remember the exact OS version, but there were a few toys on them. Didn't spend a whole lot of time on them.

        Then, the PC rose to power; the Apple ][s and Macs were taken out and Compaqs running Win2k Workstation brought in. At home, I saw just about every version of Windows except the server editions, but we stuck with 98 until a year or two into XP, because 2k wasn't very gaming-friendly. From that point onward, all my experience was with PCs and their variants.

        In middle school, my Linux hobby began. I can't even remember all the distros I played with, but I started with a retail copy of Mandrake 6.5, before shortly upgrading to 7.2. From there, slackware, punctuated by bouts of many many minor distros (anyone remember Sorcerer?), the occasional experiment with RedHat or Debian, and then, I discovered Gentoo. I still love Gentoo, but the reasons have changed over time, and now, it's more about familiarity than anything, as I know more about Gentoo than my mechanic knows about my car.

        At my current job at The Gerbil, I sometimes deal with some interesting arcade hardware, including Atari Denver boards and a Sega NAOMI, as well as a metric fuckton of PLC-based redemption games. It's simply absurd the number of hardware variants in the redemption industry; it's common for a special proprietary hardware design to be used for only one game.

        Quoth Captain Trips View Post
        (no one ever used DOS 5.0)
        We did! We actually ran 5.0 for a while on the home machines, until we discovered 6.22.
        Last edited by roothorick; 01-01-2011, 06:12 PM.

        Comment

        Working...
        X