OT: Valley of the Boom

[westx]

It is pretty cool how they are doing it. It is a documentary with some of the real people along with actors playing out a lot of scenes. It showed a lot of the inside happenings with the launch of Netscape in 1994 that led to the technology revolution, browser wars and investment frenzy. Good grief, watching this, I realize how out of touch I was through the 90s. I honestly can't tell you when I bought my 1st computer (I think '97 ish). I mean I used computers at work but, didn't have a need for home use. I went to college from 85-90 and nobody I knew had a computer. We typed our reports and still had to go to the library for any research. The 1st two were shown tonight. Pretty good.

 

[FlourBluffHorn]

I started with IBM keypunch cards, with keypunch machine and sorter and Acct machine, then I got me a Tandy with the disk like a small pizza, then 5.25 disk. then 3.5 disk and of course the memory was 640k and we had to make our own windows with a DOS batch file, my 1st language was Basic, then COBOL, RPG, Dbase4, then FORTRAN and Pascal, I programmed on the Mainframe at CCSU when it all started, yes . I am older than shit!, by the way, the DOS was 4.0 if any of ya know about programing


Hook'em

 

[clob94]

I'm sitting in my office watching this now aaaaaaand..... boy....... they take some liberties don't they? James Barksdale is a bit of a tool--- and always has been. I took a communications class in 95 that focused on data transfers and I got to watch the very first opera streamed over the internet. It was performed at NYU and it was broadcast directly to UT. The video had to be projected onto the wall so we could all see it and it was a sh!t show of skipping and frozen frames but the sound kept coming uninterrupted.

After the opera was over, Barksdale got on camera and acted like he'd just cured cancer.

Frankly, I didn't know what all the hub bub was about. Silly me.

 

[westx]

Well, it was a pretty big deal and being "1st mover" has its advantages (IPO starting at $28 and going to $70) along with bragging rights. I thought Barksdale and Clark were giving most of the credit to Andreessen. BTW, @clob94 , I know you have your reasons for not investing in crypto, but, many are expecting cryptocurrency to boom and revolutionize the same way the technology boom did.

 

[HornsRuleU]

I honestly can't tell you when I bought my 1st computer (I think '97 ish). I mean I used computers at work but, didn't have a need for home use. I went to college from 85-90 and nobody I knew had a computer. We typed our reports and still had to go to the library for any research. The 1st two were shown tonight. Pretty good.

Where'd you go to college?! At Moore-Hill dorm at Texas, in '85 many were getting Macintoshes. My roommate had one, and that same summer I'd gotten an IBM PC. DOS 3.1. He hated the clickety-clack of my keyboard.

 

[clob94]

Where'd you go to college?! At Moore-Hill dorm at Texas, in '85 many were getting Macintoshes. My roommate had one, and that same summer I'd gotten an IBM PC. DOS 3.1. He hated the clickety-clack of my keyboard.

When I went off to school my parting gift from my folks was a Compaq 486-66 (I think those were the numbers).

Anyway, I get to Austin and in study hall, all the computers were apple. i freaking hated doing homework on the Apple. Plus if I was working on a project in my dorm on my computer, I couldn't take the disk with me and continue working on the Apple in study hall.

To this day I have never bought a single apple product.

 

[FlourBluffHorn]

Apples suck! You can only do so much with them and that's it..

 

[HornsRuleU]

The Macintosh was cool, but my roommate and I would get into foolish arguments over which was better.

I was jealous, I admit, of the graphics & the mouse. So I wrote a keyboard-operated graphics program in HBASIC, a version of BASIC for the Hercules graphics card. HercPaint, I called it. It would let you create two-toned images, print them, save & load them. Circles, squares, triangles, lines, etc. And fill them in. I'm sure he despised it, but it was fun programming it. I probably lost some grade points that semester just from programming HercPaint.

I also became a WordPerfect 3.1+ guru. I'd program all sorts of macros to simplify (?) repetitive things. (More grade points, down the drain.)

The only Apples I've bought had a crunch when I ate them.

 

[FlourBluffHorn]

I am a WP guy myself , started with 3.1 I believe, lotta cool things after that version, I like 5.0 the best of all, I am a Lotus 123 fan also

 

[westx]

Where'd you go to college?! At Moore-Hill dorm at Texas, in '85 many were getting Macintoshes. My roommate had one, and that same summer I'd gotten an IBM PC. DOS 3.1. He hated the clickety-clack of my keyboard.

That's cool. I went to pharmacy school at Southwestern Oklahoma State. I did a semester at Angelo State. We used typewriters. I honestly don't remember anybody at all that used a computer. We were even trained on the manual file system as opposed to pharmacy computer software.

 

[Belldozer1]

I graduated in 89’ from the home of the mighty Unicorns and I vividly remember taking a typing class using typewriters, everyday computer use was something out of a bizarre episode of the Twilight Zone at that time.

 

[HornsRuleU]

Thanks, all, for reminiscing.

As an undergrad in the mid to later 80's, I used WordPerfect Office to multitask. You could suspend WP and go run another program, and when you returned, your document in WP would still be as you left it. (Jaws drop.) Amazing!!!

Later, in graduate school, we got email. Netscape was starting to be a thing, but there wasn't much on the web yet. Very basic stuff. And at home, AOL used slow modems that tied up your only phone line, while restricting you to the part of the web that AOL wanted you to see.

Had I any financial gusto, I'd have invested in some of the things I learned about early. Oh, well. Just keep plugging into that 401k. Dollar cost averaging my way to retirement (???). I was always more interested in the technologies themselves, and what they could do, than in getting rich. So I amused myself to this spot, I guess.

Sometimes I imagine what schooling & research would have been like had there been an Internet with high-speed access back then. Back then, we were going to libraries and maybe lucky if we found a good resource. I'm sure there's still a place for that (but have you been to the PCL lately? -- so very dusty), but now it comes down to knowing how to use advanced searching techniques in Google: quote marks, minus, OR/AND, and parentheses. Most folks still don't know how to do that, and so they don't find stuff.

 

[TX1972]

All right boys. My mother was a calculator, worked for Sperry and GE from 1942 to 1949. Sperry was building the first computer (Univac) for the Manhattan project. The government kept rejecting one of the components, I think it was a capacitor. Mother proved that the government test apparatus was wrong. The company took one of the components and gold plated it, put it in a glass box for her.

 

[clob94]

All right boys. My mother was a calculator, worked for Sperry and GE from 1942 to 1949. Sperry was building the first computer (Univac) for the Manhattan project. The government kept rejecting one of the components, I think it was a capacitor. Mother proved that the government test apparatus was wrong. The company took one of the components and gold plated it, put it in a glass box for her.

Nice. Wait-- so your mom was obviously really good at math, but weren't calculators usually male back then?

How did she get that job--- or did she ever tell you that story?

 

[TX1972]

Nice. Wait-- so your mom was obviously really good at math, but weren't calculators usually male back then?

How did she get that job--- or did she ever tell you that story?

Mom had a BA in chem with a minor in math. Her favorite prof was Dr. Ettlinger. Calculators were college educated women who could work a slide rule. The best known would be Henrietta Leavitt, she discovered the "standard candle" that Hubble used to get distances to the other galaxies. It was the best job she could find.

 

[HornsRuleU]

Human computers

 

[clob94]

Mom had a BA in chem with a minor in math. Her favorite prof was Dr. Ettlinger. Calculators were college educated women who could work a slide rule. The best known would be Henrietta Leavitt, she discovered the "standard candle" that Hubble used to get distances to the other galaxies. It was the best job she could find.

Wow. Seriously that's admirable. Your mom probably had some stories. If she is still alive, I hope you get all of them that you can. If she is no longer with us, I hope you got as many as you could.

 

[FlourBluffHorn]

That's cool. I went to pharmacy school at Southwestern Oklahoma State. I did a semester at Angelo State. We used typewriters. I honestly don't remember anybody at all that used a computer. We were even trained on the manual file system as opposed to pharmacy computer software.

I worked for a Pharmacy delivering back in HS and I have poped more dram lids together than a 10 Pharmacist and then I graduated to typing scrips on manual Typewriter, I know about that, and we had 4 Nursing home contracts to boot

 

[FlourBluffHorn]

I learned back in HS that having a slid-rule hanging from your belt made you look smart plus girls like smart guys and then ya start getting snatch cause your smart even if ya ain't,,or buying a old FB jacket from goodwill with all the Letters on it and say you just transferred to the school will make them think you are a jock and get some more snatch, shit! I could go all day

 

[TX1972]

Wow. Seriously that's admirable. Your mom probably had some stories. If she is still alive, I hope you get all of them that you can. If she is no longer with us, I hope you got as many as you could.

One of her favorite sayings was: figures don't lie, but liars do figure. Usually directed at liberals.