1x32: A Hannu-pancha-festi-christ-wanzaa-newton-vent Story

That sounds like an interesting story! What did Uncle Clive do?

http://oldwww.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/sinclair/uncleclive.htm

Absolutely not. I talk to my friends on Twitter. My daughter talks to her friends on Facebook. I find links to web games on reddit. And you tell us about how you got into tech on community.badvoltage.org.

Hrm.

I talk to my friends with Twitter.

I talk to my friends via Twitter.

I talk to my friends inside Twitter.

I talk to my friends utilizing Twitter.

I talk to my friends whilst logged into the Twitter online service.

Oh what a great little present right before Christmas!!!

Great show guys!

Well I explained a lot already in a previous topic, but a few years after the Amstrad PCW, I got into video games by the Amstrad GX4000 (basically a CPC shaped like a video game console that miserably failed on the market because it arrived just before the Megadrive and Super Nintedno 16 bits console were released), then a very classical Gameboy, then a Super Nintendo.

Funny thing: I tried no longer than yesterday to emulate a GX4000 using MESS on my Linux desktop and it was very disappointing (like 3 frames per second, totally unplayable thing)… Any good Amstrad CPC/GX4000 emulator there?

You guys mentionned the fact that we may all have a memory unit inside our house to store all our data. I already have that, and it’s called a NAS! Alright, it’s not a brick built into my flat (fortunately, since I’ve moved 4 times in the past 5 years), but I’ve actually been using it for 2 years now and I’ve been pleasantely surprised at how easy it had been to install and how many services it provides (Dropbox alternative, Google music alternative, Evernote alternative, music player, Download station, video library for my OpenElec device, Web server)… maybe I should write a review!

@sil, you discussed about microphones. I own a Zoom H2n which has the feature of recording in “surround” mode and in two separate files, and it’s not extremely expensive (I got it for around 150 USD). Could this help you in your interviews?

Happy whatever, people! And don’t worry, you could have been a month late, there would still have been one holiday to go: Chinese New Year (it’s due mid-February in 2015).

Yeah, a Zoom would help, but it’s a hundred and fifty quid. :slight_smile:

I’d like to add to @jeremy 's point about tech in the home by predicting that it’ll all be running Andriod. Imagine Nest running Android Wear.

My dad is a surveyor, and had an Amiga 500 for drawing plans. He also had 2 big diskette storage boxes full of cover disks and games of dubious origin. Thus, when my brother and I were old enough to know how to turn it on (as I recall about 4, so this was c. 1992), this became “the family computer”. At primary school, each classroom had a single Acorn Archimedes, but the games looked rubbish. My brother did get his own Acorn, and showed me some progamming (although I wasn’t interested in that at the time).

One of my friend’s dads had a software business of some sort, so his house was full of IBM-compatible PCs running OS/2, MS DOS and early versions on Windows. We played lots of games (yes, there were games for OS/2).

I didn’t get in to programming until much later (13, by which time we had a Windows '98 PC), so my initial “how I got in to technology” was all about the games. Open source and Linux followed soon after.

Oh, God, Jesus, no.

Good God, man, Zarch was fucking epic.

I’m not saying I’d like it, but that’s my prediction.

[duplicate]

There were games for OS/2? I remember that I installed it from 14 3,5" disks on a 286er with a 20 MB seagate RLL-harddrive to replace GEM and the horrible MS-DOS. Before I had a Toshiba T1100 with an attached TV, both of them fell off a lorry somewhere. I always envied the Amiga guys but with Borland Pascal, Railroad Tycoon and later Wing Commander it nailed it for me to stay on the lousy platform. The “IBM-PC and compatibles” went from -1 to +12 as my weapon of choice. I jobbed at a small startup an we used DESQview to get multiple instances of Wildcat BBS and a Fidonet node up and running. The PC that ran his setup sounded like a 747 with all engines on full power. You couldn’t stand next to it and talk without yelling.

With the 486 entering the picture my mad skillz weren’t needed anymore, I went through school, was drafted, went to India and when I came back, Windows 95 was everywhere. That was horrible. Didn’t matter though, since I adopted a Rock’n’Roll lifestyle and moved into a room in an apartment with university friends who introduced me to FreeBSD. I signed with IDG after the first Dotcom bubble burst in 2001 because I was afraid that IT will be maginalized. Lot’s of friend went bust with their start-up and some of them never recovered and are now web designers or PHP-survivors. That time sucked.

I don’t use twitter at all. It seems so awkward and complicated. I simply send a GPG encrypted email beacaus I have my friend’s public key and they have mine.

Looking again, most of the games I remember playing from then were actually running on MS-DOS, not OS/2. However, there’s a company called Stardock (now known for WindowBlinds and other MS Windows customisation tools, as well as a few games) who released a game called Avarice, and the original versions of Galactic Civilisations for OS/2.

I think that I got my start in computers because of Mr. Spock and Mr. Scott from Star Trek, and Barney Collier from Mission:Impossible. I always thought that was so cool, that while the rest of the team was pulling off the scam on the bad guys, Barney was in some tunnel, building these amazing gadgets to make it all work. Yes, I am a child of the 60s…

So I started working with computers in the mid 70s, taking computer classes at the local university in the summers, back in the days when batch processing was the norm, and a computer was a room in the back of the computer center, where the staff wore jackets and sweaters even on the hottest days. The first system I worked on was a CDC Cyber 70 Series. When I started college, the first year, we were still submitting jobs on punched cards, in the early 80s. The university I went to shared an IBM 4331 and 4341 between all of the campuses. Plus, this was the year that the original IBM PC came out.

So my first PC came years later, and it was a 286/12 with a 10 and 20MB hard drive, which I have been upgrading a part at a time so that, in spirit, it is the same machine, though with none of the original parts. I upgraded it to a 386/16, then a 386DX33, then a 386DX40…then straight to a Pentium 100. Today this machine is a quad-core AMD with 8GB of RAM. The machine ran DOS, then once I had the horsepower, OS/2 2.x and then Warp. At work I ended up inheriting administration of some SunOS boxes, so I started playing with Linux at home, since Sun machines were 4 or 5 figures at that time.

Started with Slackware, then moved to Redhat, and then in the late 90s/early 00s, went to Debian, where have been since…Though the whole systemd instability in Debian has me working with PC-BSD and I just stood up a FreeNAS box, and it is amazing.

That’s so not what Twitter is for :slight_smile:

My first contact with computers would have been my uncle’s Amstrad 1512. I played Frogger and Paratrooper on it some time in the late 80’s. My dad was working as a project lead on various IT projects at the time, so we always had a PC at home. Earliest memories I have from that time, is using an old Compaq “laptop”, also for gaming. My dad had made a batch file that started a kind of menu where I could select what game to play. Eventually I asked him how I could add a new game to the menu or modify it, and so I got to editing the batch file. Not much after that I was taking things apart and putting them back together with varying degrees of success. We had your 286’s, 386’s and I think the first machine to be “mine” by definition was a Compaq Presario 420 (I think?) which was a 486 multimedia pc. Which meant it had a sound card and a CDROM drive.

First time I used Linux was in 1999, and it would have been Red Hat 5.2 I think. There was no coming back. When I asked one of my fathers co-workers how I could get online since the ISDN card wasn’t supported in Red Hat, he casually told me to “write my own driver”. I wasn’t quite that adept at age 15 or so, but I didn’t give up. Eventually the ISDN card got a driver, and I could get online on Linux.

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Great podcast again guys!, it helped me wile away some miles between Belfast and Dublin.

Being a '90s baby, my beginnings were a lot different than most of what I hear in the tech community. My first real tangible memory of using a computer was my grandads gateway pc which ran windows 95. It had a few games on it which we played a lot of. The original sim city and doom and warcraft. Additional to this, there was a basic interpreter that my grandad had compiled some sample programs for. I remember running them quite a bit (there was a monte carlo simulation) but never really edited them.

First computer in my parents house was an old Dell which ran Windows ME. It was constantly breaking and going back in for service. My first real win in the computer world was when I googled and found out how to run a malware detector and saved my parents a nice trip to the computer fixer. From there, we finally got Windows 2000 professional, but that only lasted about 2 months before we upgraded to XP. I mostly sat and played championship manager and age of empires on this one, also some small amount of dial up internet usage.

My first laptop was a second hand dell laptop. It had 256 mb ram and was good for not a whole lot. It ran windows XP, but only just about. It was the computer where I really started to learn to program, I used liberty basic first on this one and even made my own launcher for launching executables from the win32 directory. I learned a lot from having these crappy resources and not just being able to load everything first time. This laptop never got graced with Linux, that privilege would come in the not too distant past of 2008 when I installed ubuntu on my Acer, windows rarely booted on my machine after that point.