The price of technology

[RKDinOKC]

Refused to take computer programming is college because it would require messing with punch cards. I had an AppleII at home that load and saved to cassette tapes for goodness sake.

[John Rogers]

I am pretty much like your dad.....when I went to US Navy's nuclear power school in 1966 we did two weeks worth of "math work books" for 6 hours a day. We did not have calculators or computers yet but the practice helped with the later classes especially the binary math I.E. adding 1's and 0's. This is one of the few times being diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome actually helped as I can remember long strings of numbers or do complicated math in my head. This never came out until high school. Anyways oltime engineering is way fun!

[masraum]

Your dad's bad-assed!

[asphaltgambler]

One thing for sure, the calculator would work when you turn it on, the Fiat? Doubt it. Your Dad was the winner in that deal.

[dad911]

Still have the receipt but not the calculator?

I still have the box my $1300 (40 megabyte) hard drive came in, but got rid of the drive. Box more useful now.

[Mark Henry]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

This is a receipt I found for my first custom built "mega computer". This replaced my 4.77 MHz PC with just one meg or RAM and a 32 MB hard drive.

That new 2400 baud modem was a big improvement from the 300 baud modem I was using. Look at the price of the RAM. 4 megabytes (not Gigabytes) of RAM was just $449.

In college late 80's I worked for the AV dept. Dropping off the AV cart to a computer class I remember the instructor saying that his work computer had a ridiculous size hard drive at 80MB and that no one would ever need anything bigger than a 40MB hard drive.

[IROC]

I'm still using the HP-41CV I bought brand new in 1982...

[shadowjack1]

Back in 74', when i was on the NOPD I arrested a guy for stealing a calculator, it was over $500.00, charge was grand theft. He was in jail for 2 years.

Is that the bridge near Columbia, MS?

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by masraum

Your dad's bad-assed!

Yes he is. You are a lucky man to have a cool dad still around at that age.

Back when I bought my first floppy drive for my Commodore 64 the sales clerk told me I should get a box of 10 floppies. They were only single sided floppies 170K per side. The 1541 floppy drive cost almost a grand in today's dollars.

Floppy discs cost several bucks each so I just got two. Not two packs of ten, but two discs. One for all the programs I had and one for backup. I bought a lot more over the years.

[id10t]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Yes he is. You are a lucky man to have a cool dad still around at that age.

Back when I bought my first floppy drive for my Commodore 64 the sales clerk told me I should get a box of 10 floppies. They were only single sided floppies 170K per side. The 1541 floppy drive cost almost a grand in today's dollars.

Floppy discs cost several bucks each so I just got two. Not two packs of ten, but two discs. One for all the programs I had and one for backup. I bought a lot more over the years.

If you got the double sided/double density disks you could use a razor to cut a read/write notch on the opposite side so you could flip the disk over and use the other side.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by id10t

If you got the double sided/double density disks you could use a razor to cut a read/write notch on the opposite side so you could flip the disk over and use the other side.

Even easier, open up the drive and put in a toggle switch on the side. Just flip the switch and it turned off the write protect so you could write to that side. Just be sure to flip the switch back up or you could overwrite a good disc.

No more messing with punching the disc.

[vash]

wow. those two cranes are ancient. they dont even have outriggers!!

[SCadaddle]

Originally Posted by shadowjack1

Is that the bridge near Columbia, MS?

Yes, that would be the one.

Dad was a very forward thinking kind of fellow, in the late 40's-early 50's he was instrumental in the State DOT creating a smaller division now known as the Office of State Aid Road Construction; he designed and detailed all of the standard bridge plans for the County Engineers to use in a cook-book fashion, and later on revised them twice into the 70's. He is credited with having at least 6,600 bridges in the State inventory built according to his plans, not counting numerous MDOT larger type bridges.

I wanted to lobby the Legislature and have them name this bridge after him, then I found out they had already named this stretch of Highway 44 after another WWII Vet (Deceased) from the small community that survived the Bataan death march. I told this to one of his engineering associates and he said "how do you compete with that?!" and I agreed.....you can't!