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Old June 13th, 2021, 07:45 AM   #16
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

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Originally Posted by Paul R Johnson View Post
anyone remember Elcassette - I loved them ¼" tape in a cassette at 3 and 3/4IPS.
I remember them well. They sounded so much better than the early Philips cassettes. Here in the states they were marketed by RCA and others.
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Old June 19th, 2021, 01:51 PM   #17
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

Old enough to remember people getting themselves into an excited lather about "bubble memory" some sort of a revolutionary new tech which was going to come our way. I wonder whatever happened to it.

Learned enough about DOS3.2 to unpick and manually rewrite from a handwritten copy a somehow damaged batch file for Olivetti word processor which used a proprietory software called SWS.

Strangely enough, a screenwriting program of that generation works in Windows 10. It was originally a DOS software but in its version 5, was given its own shell which emulated the look of the Windows GUI but did its own thing. I am still using it and it was one of the few softwares which was millenium bug proof.

Olivetti SWS sent a much newer computer quite insane but sometimes it worked, blisteringly fast with the cursor going off rapidly like a disco strobe. Now Windows and its core guts is such a huge beast, I have no hope of mining into its gizzards to heal it.

Presently there is a conflict going on between a Nvidia graphics driver and Windows 10 that neither company is doing much to correct. Once COVID is put to bed, I guess some progress will be made.

Now does anyone have enough wrinkles and fullness under their chin to remember CTOS, Unisys and Token Ring networking. I never knew how it worked but it did and quite well so long as you learned and remembered all the keyboard shortcuts for WordPerfect 4 I think it was..

Last edited by Bob Hart; June 19th, 2021 at 02:00 PM. Reason: can't spell
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Old June 22nd, 2021, 10:46 AM   #18
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

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Old enough to remember people getting themselves into an excited lather about "bubble memory" some sort of a revolutionary new tech which was going to come our way. I wonder whatever happened to it.
The bubble burst. ;-)
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Old July 12th, 2021, 03:33 AM   #19
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

I'm old enough to remember how we used to sweat over the possibility of dropped frames.

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Old July 14th, 2021, 07:27 AM   #20
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

Seeing as this has become a 'computer throwback' thread I'll chime in.

I remember freshman year of college 1991 I was assigned a computer class my first semester. My Dad worked in programming & an older brother was a computer science major, so I sorta knew a bit about it. I was keeping up, then about halfway thru we were assigned a 'calendar project', where we had to code a working calendar (pure data/BASIC, not like graphics too). Different days in month (28, 30, 31) and leap year. The horror!

I was really struggling, I'd break ground (28 days for February) then run into another obstacle (July/Aug 31). I'd complete it for a year, but it wouldn't flow into year 2. Then around Thanksgiving I got years done but couldn't get leap years. I kinda made friends with a kid in the class who was similar to me, ok at it but not a CS major, and saw him I think the last week of classes. I recall being in a near panic and asking him if/how he got leap years done. To his best, he tried to explain it or help, without fully giving it away, which I got. As much as I understood and respected him not fully telling me what to do, I was near pleading with him for help. I had met with the professor once or twice outside of class already, and was at my wits end. First semester and I'm almost flunking a class.

Anyway I took what he said and don't even remember but must've gone to the lab a few times or over the weekend and made progress. I do recall a point where I thought 'This might make it' after doing a change or two. I know it passed but I think there was something like it fell off after 100 year or a 1000, I just submitted it anyway. The professor noticed but I think I got a C or B & took it with pride. It was old DOS type computing before windows, kindof a stretch to assign a video major into back then for 'Intro to Programming'. Anyway, I look back on that with alot of pride, it really shows something about my sticktoitiveness & commitment.
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Old July 14th, 2021, 09:15 AM   #21
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

Congratulations. There is certainly a lot of satisfaction that comes from figuring stuff out and making something that actually works. People that just want to be handed the answer on a silver platter will never understand that sense of accomplishment or build up their troubleshooting skills that can be applied to all kinds of situations in life.

BTW, imagine if you had to do that with IBM punch cards and you could only press "run" once every 24 hours to debug. You'd still be working on it! :-)
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Old July 15th, 2021, 12:18 PM   #22
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

This is more my vintage:

- how things have changed!

Also, I believe that I was one of the first in the UK to use a computer for editing digital audio recordings for subsequent release on CD. The system was based on an ATARI computer and went by the name of Sound Maestro, manufactured by Audio Design and Recording, a well respected audio company here in the UK. This would have been around 1985/6.
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Old July 31st, 2021, 07:49 AM   #23
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

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Sorry, but if your first computer had a hard drive and 64K, you're not an "old man" (unless you got a late start). ;-)
Right. We didn't even know what a hard drive was. Some people incorrectly called the 3.5 floppies hard disks. Wow a HDD was a nice thing to have.
64K? a dream when 16K was all you had. :)

What ever happened to bubble memory?

These things were big deals to me when they became available: HDD, VGA, Sound cards, CDROM. Heck, even 16 color EGA was impressive when it came out
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Old July 31st, 2021, 08:00 AM   #24
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

I can remember when the family computer only had a couple of floppy drives in it, and it would make some satisfying noises with your floppy as a file was written to the disc.

Then we had a family friend's computer for a time (can't remember why) and I saved something. All that happened was a small light on the front panel of the computer blinked - that was it. Apparently this computer had something called a "hard drive" and the file was already saved in that very split second. Heady times!

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Old August 13th, 2021, 12:10 PM   #25
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

First computer I owned was a used Radio Shack TRS-80. Affectionately known as a "Crash 80".

I remember:

Shooting with JVC cameras recording to a VHS deck hanging off my shoulder.

Thinking S-VHS was Super Pro. 400 lines holy crap!

Shooting for the first time with a 40 lb Beta cam on my shoulder.

Discovering DVINFO.net (then the XL1 Watch Dog) because I was building my own computers to edit digital video. All of the guys here were fighting our way through the same problems and this was the place for answers.

Paying $3,500.00 for cameras I would get a $100,000.00 ROI with.

When firewire was king. Everything had it. It worked and it worked in both directions

Shunning the DSLR innovation for many years. I was a camera snob."if it didn't have an XLR input I wouldn't shoot with it".

Hand carrying magnetic tape and film through security at airports, even though they claimed it would not be damaged.

And more recently; I paid over $3,000.00 for my HP Zbook that does everything I need for portable editing. It has never shown me the "blue screen of death" for those of you that remember that.

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Old August 14th, 2021, 01:58 AM   #26
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

I’m old enough to remember when lighting desks did NOT have computers in them, and last night’s Drifters show did not have the blue screen of death 1 hour before showtime!
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Old August 14th, 2021, 06:21 AM   #27
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

As a young electrician and lighting designer, I saw that all first-hand. Began lighting community theatre shows in the church basement in 1961, built my own dimmer rack from four huge discarded resistance dimmers, it weighed a ton! Then through the years, lots of variac transformers and resistance dimmers. Learned how to use my hands, arms, legs, feet and even chin to move a bunch of dimmers at the same time!

In college during the late 60's I was house electrician for the theatre where all the Broadway tours came, that was a great experience for a kid, learned all about "piano boards" from the road-worn IATSE guys. Our stage had the latest technology though, a Century (I believe this was before they merged with Strand) Edkotron solid state SCR board with a massive 36-channel 2 scene setup. What a disaster - good, modular idea but terrible quality control. The control handles were cheap plastic and the gears all stripped out. It became almost unusable in a short period of time.

As a senior in 1971, I saw a demonstration of one of the first computer boards - the Q-file. Was it Kliegl or Century? Can't remember. First "real" job was technical supervisor for a new performing arts center at Ocean County College in 1972 with a new Century "C-Card" 36-channel board. It was like a two-scene preset board, but the the handles were on big plastic "cards" that you preset for each cue and swapped out. Good idea, but very awkward and lots of reliability problems, the factory reps were visiting often to fix problems. Then, one of the students spilled a cup of coffee on the desk that got inside and really messed things up - that was an expensive fix.

Lots of others along the way, but the first big computer board I used as a designer was 1979 at the Civic Center in Syracuse, NY where I was working for the Syracuse Opera. Very impressive, 100 channels with 350 dimmers located in a bunch of separate rooms throughout the complex. There was a huge matrix on the wall with 35,000 pins (100x350) that were used to physically patch the dimmers into the channels. Powered by a PDP-11 Minicomputer, it was also setup for use as a 2-scene preset board with physical dimmer handles.

Cool as it was, kind of a designer's nightmare. No tech table display, you had to give the electrician levels one channel at a time on the headset. And the physical dimmer handles weren't motorized, so editing cues was really tedious. The whole thing was not very reliable, especially that pin matrix, very hard to make changes without accidentally affecting something else.

On tour we started using the little Kliegl Performer boards and that was a real breath of fresh air - although they were also pretty buggy, memory battery would go bad and "forget" the cues and the tape backup was not very reliable. Started using Strand Light Pallete boards at Philadelphia Opera in 1993, and mostly used those (with some ETC) until I retired in 2011.

It was a fun ride, but honestly, I don't miss it much. :-) BTW, we always called them "boards" in the US, not "desks". I suppose that's a holdout from the days when the old dimmers were actually mounted on a piece of wood?
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Old August 14th, 2021, 11:55 AM   #28
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

Actually we did use boards, but when the small electronic ones came out it moved to desks.

The Q-File was the Thorn. It sold a few here in the UK, but we did bring in some Berkey Colortran controls - the one I remember (and hating) being the channel track. This is when lighting operation split between the US and the UK. The American preference (when memory was expensive and often less than ideal) was to store changes to cues, but the Brits preferred to save EVERY channel in each cue. Our system was memory hungry, so our maximum channel count was often less than idea, while the Americans only stored channels that had changed between cues. This of course mean, we could instantly go to say, cue 37, but the US people would have to go back to the last cue where every channel was recorded, then go forward. Now of course, you get the choice.
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Old August 14th, 2021, 12:10 PM   #29
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

Great memories! I was a grad student at Carnegie-Mellon and we had one of the infamous George Izenour Thyratron dimming systems, had to turn it on well in advance for the tubes to warm up. Cues were keypunched on large IBM-type cards and placed into readers. Quite a ridiculous system by 1971 when I arrived there but Izenour was a good friend of William Nelson, who ran the lighting design program.

Evidently there was a twin system at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, but when I started working there in 1976 it was gone. The story was, the master electrician came in drunk one night and when it started acting up during rehearsal, he kicked the dimmer rack repeatedly and totally destroyed it!
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Old August 14th, 2021, 03:18 PM   #30
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Re: I'm old enough to remember ...

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This is very similar to my experience duing high school in the late 70's. I was learning FORTRAN and had to keypunch the whole program on IBM cards and then . . . send them overnight to the local community college where the printout would come back the next day. A 24 hour turnaround for every chance to debug a program. It forced you to really, really, look at every line of code before putting the cards in the tray.

A few years later I wrote a Yahtzee game for the Commodore 64 that was on par with any computer game back in those days, complete with animated dice and everything. I wish I had that kind of spare time now to dabble in apps.

I was always told that the purpose of math classes were to teach you how to THINK -- not that you'd ever use the actual math in the real world. Well, if you want to learn to think logically and learn to problem solve, take a course in coding and learn how to program from scratch. That teaches you how to think. That FORTRAN class was probably the most valuable single course I ever took in high school or college.
At university in Ontario 1973/74 there was a flavor of FORTRAN called WATFIV (pronounced WAT five, created by Waterloo University). We would type our code on the punch cards in one class room full of those punch machines, then carry the stack down the hallway to wait our turn outside the room with the computer. An attendant would take the stack from you and you waited for your printouts at the next door down the hall. The demand was non-stop so it would run through the night. We often first went to the pub until closing, hoping the line would be shorter after midnight (not usually). Oh hell, we would go to the pub anyway, who am I kidding?

One time a student came down the hall at a brisk pace holding his stack of cards and collided with another student coming out a doorway, sending the cards flying around the hall. You know how long it takes to punch a 3 inch stack. There was some crying going on from that, poor guy.
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