Watched war games on TV, feeling old

[sammyg2]

War games with Mathew Broderick has been around for a while, it's a classic, but it doesn't seem like it's THAT old.
The 80's weren't that long ago.

I was watching it yesterday and was amazed at how dated the technology was.
Modem where he had to land the phone receiver, DOS computer interface, etc.
He wanted to research Falken so he goodled it, right?
Wrong. he went to the library and read magazines, articles, even checked out a VHS tape.

Later he went to a pay-phone that had the old style dial.
When was the last time you saw one of those?

The computer (WOPR) was searching for launch codes and you could watch them on the screen.
In the real world that would happen so fast it would only take a split second, right?
Lots of stuff has changed.

/rambling.

[flipper35]

Some things have changed, but movie people will still use a lot of artistic license with computers and hacking.

I liked it when it first came out. I haven't seen it in a long time so I have no opinion on how timeless it is.

[vash]

i still use:

"i'd piss on a sparkplug if i thought it would help"

[gorthar]

[id10t]

And some of us cut our teeth on that technology....


First computer I had at home was a TRS-80 Mk 4, 32k of ram, 2 floppy drives. Could also save on tape using a cassette recorder hooked up to the RCA in/outs on it.

First modem was 150 baud. Dial on rotary home phone, wait for squeal, slam into acoustic coupler, flip a switch or two, if you were lucky you could connect at the full 150 baud, otherwise it would drop down to 75... Baud = 1 bit per second...

[ckissick]

Originally Posted by id10t

And some of us cut our teeth on that technology....

No kidding. I took a FORTRAN class at UCSB, using these:

[id10t]

Originally Posted by ckissick

No kidding. I took a FORTRAN class at UCSB, using these:

I missed out on punch cards by a couple of years...

First languages were BASIC on the TRS-80, and some assembler on it. Then Turbo Pascal, Fortan, and Cobol in high school (TP on 286 machines, Fortran and Cobol on green screen terminals hooked up to a mainframe at UF). Then when I finally went to college in the 90s, C, C++, Java, self learned VisualBasic (to help wife with her schooling), javascript, PHP, Pearl, and bash shell scripting.

[sammyg2]

with a lead-in like that, who could resist?

Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.

Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?

Terry Jones: You're right there Obediah.

Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?

MP: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

GC: A cup ' COLD tea.

EI: Without milk or sugar.

TJ: OR tea!

MP: In a filthy, cracked cup.

EI: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

GC: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

TJ: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

MP: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, 'Money doesn't buy you happiness.'

EI: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.

GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

TJ: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!

MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

EI: Well when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.

GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

TJ: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

MP: Cardboard box?

TJ: Aye.

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

TJ: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'

MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

ALL: Nope, nope..

[Wetwork]

Thanks^^^^^...was feeling blue, then read about my betters.-WW

[masraum]

Originally Posted by id10t

And some of us cut our teeth on that technology....


First computer I had at home was a TRS-80 Mk 4, 32k of ram, 2 floppy drives. Could also save on tape using a cassette recorder hooked up to the RCA in/outs on it.

1st computer was a Commodore 64. When we bought it, they didn't yet make a floppy drive for them, so we could only buy the tape drive. About 2-3 months later, the floppy drive came out. I have no idea on the specs. I tried my hand at doing some of the BASIC programming out of the manuals, but I just couldn't deal with typing for days for next to nothing to happen.

Originally Posted by ckissick

No kidding. I took a FORTRAN class at UCSB, using these:

I've never, in person, seen a computer punch card. I did take Fortran 77 in College in the late 80s. Blech!

Originally Posted by id10t

I missed out on punch cards by a couple of years...

First languages were BASIC on the TRS-80, and some assembler on it. Then Turbo Pascal, Fortan, and Cobol in high school (TP on 286 machines, Fortran and Cobol on green screen terminals hooked up to a mainframe at UF). Then when I finally went to college in the 90s, C, C++, Java, self learned VisualBasic (to help wife with her schooling), javascript, PHP, Pearl, and bash shell scripting.

Oh, you're one of those "special" people: programmers.

I'm now forcing myself to learn python and tried to learn Pearl, but didn't have the right motivation. I really need to learn Python now as the days of being a CLI jockey without and scripting/coding are dwindling.

[DanielDudley]

My grandfather was born on the turn of the last century. He remembered a time before cars, common electricity and telephone. When I was a kid, most boats were made of wood, and only a very few cars had any kind of mechanical fuel injection. Lead in gasoline was standard fare.

My Grandfather knew people who were alive during the civil war, and those people knew people who were alive during the revolutionary war times. Sails were still a common sight on commercial vessels.

Kids today have no connection to a time before the cell phone or the computer unless you provide it for them. But even then, they have no real concept of that reality.

[epbrown]

Originally Posted by sammyg2

War games with Mathew Broderick has been around for a while, it's a classic, but it doesn't seem like it's THAT old.
The 80's weren't that long ago.

We should be hearing a LOT about War Games next March, as the movie plays a significant role in Ready Player One, a Spielberg movie coming out then (along with Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Old tech cracks kids up, like me telling my nephews I once started downloading a file, went to bed, woke up showered and dressed for work and it still wasn't done. It was a 15MB update to AOL. (That's what starts my cranky old man rants - internet glut and software bloat. Today's download speeds with Windows 95-era file sizes would be EPIC!)

What's funny is hearing about younger audiences finding this stuff for the first time. Sam Jackson says he always gets 15 year olds saying "Say what again. Say what one more time...." because every year a new crop is old enough to see Pulp Fiction.

Then again, Matt LeBlanc was recently asked if he was the guy that played Joey's dad.

[WPOZZZ]

I remember using some word processor where you had to type in the command, then type what you wanted, to get the type in boldface or italics. Forget to type in the command? Backspace until you get where you needed to be and start all over.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by ckissick

No kidding. I took a FORTRAN class at UCSB, using these:

Me too. We would type the code out on the keypunch machine, which punched the cards. Then take the cards to a card reader in the same room that read the cards and sent the 1s and 0s to the mainframe in another building. Then you had to go to the printer room and get the printout of the results of your computation. More often than not you made a typo and go no result. It only took an hour or so to find out you left out a ":"

Good times!

[id10t]

Originally Posted by WPOZZZ

I remember using some word processor where you had to type in the command, then type what you wanted, to get the type in boldface or italics. Forget to type in the command? Backspace until you get where you needed to be and start all over.

WordPerfect 5.x

Used to use WordStar on my 8088 and 8086 systems, which is nice, because now I use joe as my editor in *nix and it is an exact clone - same keyboard shortcuts, etc.

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by id10t

And some of us cut our teeth on that technology....


First computer I had at home was a TRS-80 Mk 4, 32k of ram, 2 floppy drives. Could also save on tape using a cassette recorder hooked up to the RCA in/outs on it.

First modem was 150 baud. Dial on rotary home phone, wait for squeal, slam into acoustic coupler, flip a switch or two, if you were lucky you could connect at the full 150 baud, otherwise it would drop down to 75... Baud = 1 bit per second...

Our highschool had an early mini-mainframe (PR1ME 300) which was similar to a PDP-11. I broke my leg in (1976) 6th grade and had hang out in the library. They had a terminal with a built in acoustic coupler. I talked them into giving me an account and myself and two other guys started self teaching ourselves BASIC.

I think the PR1ME computer had 32K of core memory, originally two 1.5 MB disc platters (one removable), which was expanded to multiple 3MB disc packs.

We used to really irritate the Radio Shack guys when a couple of 12 year olds knew more about it than the store manager.

As far as Wargames is concerned, except for the war dialer, it was pretty stupidly unrealistic. Even our high school was smart enough not to do grades on its own computer system. Super secret computers aren't connected to phone lines.

[flipper35]

Originally Posted by masraum

1st computer was a Commodore 64. When we bought it, they didn't yet make a floppy drive for them, so we could only buy the tape drive. About 2-3 months later, the floppy drive came out. I have no idea on the specs. I tried my hand at doing some of the BASIC programming out of the manuals, but I just couldn't deal with typing for days for next to nothing to happen.

I've never, in person, seen a computer punch card. I did take Fortran 77 in College in the late 80s. Blech!


Oh, you're one of those "special" people: programmers.

I'm now forcing myself to learn python and tried to learn Pearl, but didn't have the right motivation. I really need to learn Python now as the days of being a CLI jockey without and scripting/coding are dwindling.

I bought a C64 in 8th grade and had to wait to buy a floppy drive for it. It was frustrating to program something and not be able to save anything for that bit. Since I had no money, once I got that floppy I went to town programming my own games, database for all my model rocket launches and CAD system. Moved up to an Amiga when the 500 and 2000 came out and then onto PCs.

Learned FORTRAN in college along with VB and C++. Learned HTML, SUMMUS, SQL and ColdFusion on the job when I worked for Pacifica Research in CA.

Now days I don't get to do much other than keep the facility running smooth, but I did get to create our intranet with ColdFusion.

[sammyg2]

And now, for something completely different:
I originally posted this in 2008.

My youngest brother bought a computer about 10 years ago, a couple of months later I asked how he likes it. he said it was the most expensive deck of cards he'd ever bought.

In the early 90's I got a promotion which required the use of a computer. I'd never touched one before, and knew absolutely nothing about one.

No problem, we'll teach you they say.

Gave me a password, showed me how to log on, etc.

About 15 minutes later I called my wife and said "my computers going nuts. What did I do?"
She asked what it was doing, i told her "the screen went blank and now there's a bunch of lines swirling across the screen".
She said that's the screen saver .
I said, "I don't care what it is, how do I make it stop?

That same week I went out and bought my first computer, an HP SX50 with 4 megs of ram, a 2400 baud modem and a 420 meg hard drive, cost $1500 with a printer. Man was that a fast machine!

The same day I got it home I took it apart and freaked out the wife, I told her if I was going to be using one I needed to know what's inside. I didn't.
Then I learned DOS, didn't really need that much. Then I learned MS basic, used it a couple of times in Access.
I actually bought one of those windows for dummies books.

After a couple of weeks I was getting really good at playing DOOM, knew almost all the secrets and could almost get through it in the toughest level.
Then I discovered Heretic and it all went downhill from there.

[flatbutt]

Originally Posted by ckissick

No kidding. I took a FORTRAN class at UCSB, using these:

Anybody else forget to number the cards...and then dropped the stack?

How many of you also used one of these?


I no longer have my K&E but I still have....wait for it....my pocket sized slide rule. Yup it fit into my pocket protector!

[KFC911]

Originally Posted by flatbutt

Anybody else forget to number the cards...and then dropped the stack?

...

Saw it happen once...and this was a 370 Assembler program too (high level languages would have been much easier ). While getting my computer science degree in the late 70s, I was exceptionally gifted, but the most important thing I learned was that I was NOT gonna program in high level languages for a living..booorrrrring . Spent a career as a communications systems programmer, systems/network designer, etc. Couldn't even begin to list the languages, network protocols, and computers I was quite adept with...

People just left me alone

Back when "geeks were geeks"...ah...the good ol' daze...