Starwatcher2001
- Karma
- 446
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- November 19, 2014 (11y ago)
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Started in 1979 (hobby) with TRS-80 (BASIC, Z80 Assembler, Hardware hacking).
1983 first paid gig.
1985 (Career) with IBM PC MSDOS (BASIC, COBOL, 8x86 Assembler, C), C#, SQL
2018 Java & Android
2023 - I'm 62 and still doing this stuff as a career and for fun. Still learning.
Been in software dev for 43 years. Done the 6am and 96 hour weeks. Then realised I'd missed a big part of my kids growing up, and once they were dead, spending little time with my parents. Too busy you see. I'd…
I seem to recall that "Drain" spun up the motor on the floppy drive to create the spin dry cycle.
Amateur telescope makers can make glass mirrors accurate to 1/10 of the wavelength of light using very simple tools and processes. https://www.bbastrodesigns.com/JoyOfMirrorMaking/Intro.html
One of my first "serious" electronic builds in the 1970s was a variable, current limiting PSU from Heathkit. (Advertised in Practical Electronics). Used that together with a breadboard kit to launch a life long interest…
“what have you been up to lately?” Be a little careful with this one. I asked a similarly worded question at an event over Easter got the answer "Burying my husband." Thankfully the lady was good natured about it and we…
My wife leaves the toilet door open when she's in there, which annoys me. One day I asked her why and she told me she used to do it deliberately when the children were little so she could hear what they were up to, and…
"That still mystifies me: The 6502-equivalent of an if-clause was branch-not-equal (BNE), but how did that work in reality? What's happening on the silicone then? How can a lifeless thing make a decision? Never really…
Nicholas Carr's book "The shallows - What the internet is doing to out brains" is a little old (2011), but an eye-opening read. "One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you…
You might consider humanism. It provides purpose and community, without requiring a deity.
>Replacement of nice physical controls with touch screens and touch panels. It's so nice to have tactile feedback when you turn a knob compared to pressing some virtual button. And vital to anyone visually impaired.
I'd put it back in the box and return it as defective.
> I am terribly afraid of death That's understandable. I'm concerned for my loved ones and the impact it may have on them when I go, but I have no fear of death for myself. I have no memory of the millions of years that…
Yup. Light pollution filters are practically useless now. When I started observing 25 years ago, galaxies and nebulae were viable targets from my back garden, now I'm limited to solar system objects unless I load up my…
Wonderful resource. I may well get around to clearing my collection from my loft.
Thats a really good point. In a similar way the number of available technologies gets bigger and bigger as we age, more choices, more to know and more things to fiddle with. Decades ago the whole MSDOS machine was mine…
I'm 62 and have been in this industry for 40+ years. The BIGGEST regret in my entire life has been the time I spent as a young man working stupid hours on "super important" jobs, and missing seeing much of my kids…
I recall there was a whole paragraph written about the sound command and that 20Hz was the resonant frequency of a chicken's head, discovered empirically. Borland did seem to be a playful company in contrast to…
This is one of my favourite sites on noctilucent clouds: http://www.nightskyhunter.com/Noctilucent%20Clouds.html It describes what they are, how they differ from normal clouds, and how to recognise them.
We needed to take delivery data from a proprietory legacy system. It already printed delivery notes so I spliced into the RS232 cable to the printer and took a feed into a second PC. I then wrote a quick and dirty comms…
I'm on the list to donate my body. Perhaps a medical student will gain just a little more insight or skill by practicing a technique on my body, and perhaps that will help them save or help a patient or two in the…
I came across a council system for recording the holes that ultility companies dig in roads. Often a specific job would require several additional "associated" holes to be dug around the main one. The programmer chose…
Good old laplink. I've still got a "hydra" cable in my desk drawer. Back in the 90s I used the parallel port to interface a PC to a TRS-80 to allow me to store games on the PC. As another commenter has mentioned, the…
I bought a TRS-80 in 1979 and still have it (and a couple more). I cut my programming teeth on it, learning BASIC, then assembler and even a little hardware hacking. I dislike the "trash" term as for me it…
Pretty sure it's not in the original TRS-80 model 1 Level II ROM. (Also a Microsoft version). I disassembled it to see what unused key words it had, then revectored some of the disk related commands to my own code.…