# Catching up on geekhood



## shesulsa (May 31, 2006)

So back in 1986, I was the tech geek in the Accounting dept.  Other departments actually called me in to unpackage and set up their Compaq computers and install their Lotus 123 and Multimate software.

Remember when we wrote macros?  I wrote them for the hot shot CPAs.

Those days are long gone and my focus has pointed elsewhere and I've missed A LOT.  I really, really, really, really ........... reallyreally HATE relyling on other people to fix my PC, which I unfortunately now must do.

How do ya catch up?????


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## Martial Tucker (May 31, 2006)

The only way I know is to read.....I read everything I can get my hands on about most any topic, but I have been called a "closet geek" my whole life.
"Closet geek", because most people say I look more like an NFL linebacker than a geek, as if you can't be both.....

When you say you need to fix your computer,  are you referring to a hardware or a software issue?

Funny to hear your Compaq/accounting story. In 1983, I set up the 1st IBM PC's in the investment dept of a major bank, and wrote BASIC  programs
to do financial analysis functions.  This was when 128 MEGS of RAM, and a 20 MB hard drive were luxuries!


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## shesulsa (May 31, 2006)

Martial Tucker said:
			
		

> Funny to hear your Compaq/accounting story. In 1983, I set up the 1st IBM PC's in the investment dept of a major bank, and wrote BASIC  programs
> to do financial analysis functions.  This was when 128 MEGS of RAM, and a 20 MB hard drive were luxuries!



Yes they were indeed!!  :lol2:  I tried the Basic programs, but my CPAs wanted to see the calculations and tweak them if need be, so we wound up doing a LOT in Lotus.


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## Andrew Green (May 31, 2006)

Martial Tucker said:
			
		

> This was when 128 MEGS of RAM, and a 20 MB hard drive were luxuries!



128 mb ram and a 20 mb hard drive.... hmm...  I suspect a typo 

Ok, the question:

Hit some tech forums, start poking around window's insides.  If you want to get back into programming I'd suggest starting with web scripting, learn HTML / CSS as a warm up, then dive into javascript and php


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## Martial Tucker (May 31, 2006)

Andrew Green said:
			
		

> 128 mb ram and a 20 mb hard drive.... hmm...  I suspect a typo



Actually, it was a typo....the PC's had 128 K (as in kilobytes) of RAM. 
2 large floppy drives of 64K capacity each. 

You could buy a 20 MB hard drive as a free-standing add-on, but it cost a fortune.....for that matter, the antiquated PC I just described cost about $3000 in 1983.


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## Bigshadow (May 31, 2006)

Remember the 1200 baud modems and the 2400 baud modems?  I remember the 1200 baud modems starting at around $400 (maybe higher than that) back when they first came out.  before that, I believe it was 300 baud, but that was slightly before my career path.


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## Andrew Green (May 31, 2006)

oh yeah, 2400 bps hitting the BBS's, thought it was pretty speedy stuff


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## Bigshadow (May 31, 2006)

Andrew Green said:
			
		

> oh yeah, 2400 bps hitting the BBS's, thought it was pretty speedy stuff


I used to run a Maximus BBS and was a member of FidoNET.  It was a lot of fun.


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## Kreth (May 31, 2006)

I got my start on a TRS-80 with a mammoth 16K of memory. And hard drives? Ha! In those days you used a tape recorder for data storage...


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## Bigshadow (May 31, 2006)

Kreth said:
			
		

> I got my start on a TRS-80 with a mammoth 16K of memory. And hard drives? Ha! In those days you used a tape recorder for data storage...


Dude, I programmed on those Trash 80s my senior year of high school.  Never looked at them again as I quickly went to the IBM side.  Before that, I had a commodore vic20 with a tape drive and  a whopping 6K internal memory and 3K expansion card.


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## Phadrus00 (May 31, 2006)

shesulsa said:
			
		

> So back in 1986, I was the tech geek in the Accounting dept. Other departments actually called me in to unpackage and set up their Compaq computers and install their Lotus 123 and Multimate software.
> 
> Remember when we wrote macros? I wrote them for the hot shot CPAs.
> 
> ...


 
Shesulsa, welcome back to the Geekhood.  Lots of things have changed since last you graced our halls but I am sure you will quickly find your way about.. *smile*  no, no.. pocket protectors are out... Laser pointers and sandals are in...  and try not to tell too many people about any Dungeons and Dragons playing you used to do.. it still scares them..  But umm.,.. we do have a game here every Friday night...Shhh keep it a secret... *smile*

Well setting up PC's has become easier..and harder than ever, mostly due to the range of choices one has.  Fixing PC's has become an art really given the number of possible combinations of stuff that can trip one ip, but the Intenet does provide a vast array of resources for you to tap into..well like now!  *smile*

First of all you are going to need a beachead from which to stage your triumphrant return to Geekland.  Here are a couple of good locations:

http://www.tomshardware.com/
http://www.anandtech.com/

These sites are all about the hardware but are excellent because they have lots of well-written articles about how things work and explain different technologies and features.  The PC Hardware world has exploded especially in the area of Graphics Cards and Performance.  There are more choices for CPUs, chipsets, motherboards, memory, you name it.  These sites will help you understand the basics as well as get a grip on what is upcoming.  the good news is that it can be fun to tweak and tune your PC as well as customize it's look.  Boring old boxes are a thing of the past.

Ok..  Now you have to delve into the world of Operating Systems.  This can be hard or this can be really hard.  Really hard is that you want to dive into Linux and play in that world.  It's cool, it's amazing, and it's heavy lifting to learn.  Windows is easier to learn and use but there are now many more things to tweak and twiddle with so diagnosing a problem and solving it can be hard.  Again, the Internet to the Rescue. 

www.google.com

Seriously..  Google knows just about everything.  Get a copy of Google Hacks.  It's a geeks best friend!

Oh and Networking.  It's gotten Huge.  REALLY Huge.  Separate Thread Huge.  Wifi, Ethernet, Intranets, VPN's, etc.  Know This and you are a God among Insects...  And possibly a Meglomaniac... *grin*

Programming.  Oh boy.  Ok...  Some stuff has changed.  Basic, Fortran, Cobol, C and other procedural programming languages were assaulted by two elements, Windows, Event Driven Programming and Object Oriented Programming.  New languages and new hybrid languages emerged.  Large holy wars were started and many lines of code were lost.  Just as it seemed like a new, fragile peace might be in painful reach (CORBA - Common Object Request Brokering Architecture), the Web Came along and changed everything.  Giant Comet Hitting the Programming World Style.  Slow moving Cobol programmers dying and falling into pits to decay into oil, dark sky's, cataclysm, blah blah blah...  Now we had applications written in bits and pieces everywhere.  Some was on the client, some was on the Application Server, some was on the DB Server.  And languages, lots of languages, php, pearl, cold-fusion, HTML, CSS, ASP, JSP, Javascript, Java (Not related), VBScript, it goes on...

Have I scared you yet?  Ok.. the Good News is that programming is far more democratic now.  tools and technologies are widely available and there are lots of cool resources to help you out.  You don't need to buy expensive compilers or software to put together interesting and useful applicaitons.  The bad news is that there are more moving pieces to worry about now.  I would recommend a couple of different things to try.  One is .Net Programming.  It is where Microsoft took all it's technology and it tries to bring together all it's various elements (client programming, web programming, application server programming, web services, etc.) into one unified approach.  They even offer a free version of their DEvelopment Tools called Visual Studio Express:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default.aspx

If you are really adventurous you may want to look into something called Ruby on Rails.  It's the hot new thing but it's still in it'as early stages.  You can find it here:
http://www.rubyonrails.org/

Good Luck.  Ask lot's of questions, we do... *smile*

Rob "Professional Geek"


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## Phadrus00 (May 31, 2006)

Bigshadow said:
			
		

> Dude, I programmed on those Trash 80s my senior year of high school. Never looked at them again as I quickly went to the IBM side. Before that, I had a commodore vic20 with a tape drive and a whopping 6K internal memory and 3K expansion card.


 
In high school (1985) we programmed on commodore SuperPETs.. the grand-daddy to the Vic 20...  We shared floppy disks and printers over somthing called a MUPPET (MUltiple Periferals for PET's I think)..  Essentially it was a switch for RS-232 Cables..  It was dumb so if two people tried to print or save it merged the results together.  the network Prtocol was "Hey I am saving my homework to disk, nobody save for a sec!"

Good Times..oh yeah...


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## shesulsa (May 31, 2006)

Wow! I feel so special!  :lol2:

Thanks, everyone!! And Phadrus ... what a post, man! I feel all caught up in the news area now. *snicker*


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## Bigshadow (May 31, 2006)

Yes, Google is a wonderful source, especially the groups side.  I use it often to find bits of information regarding programming or "How To"  Like how to dynamically instantiate controls in vb.net and still be able to trap the events from them (multiple controls of the same type) and for troubleshooting.   Now that one has elluded me for quite some time now.


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## crushing (May 31, 2006)

Bigshadow said:
			
		

> I had a commodore vic20 with a tape drive and  a whopping 6K internal memory and 3K expansion card.




Ah the Commodes.  I used to mess with the C= 64s at Sears and turn the monitor into a strobe light with a 'POKE 53281, 0' and a 'POKE 53281, 1' there with a couple FOR NEXT loops thrown in and a pinch of GOTO.

I wrote my first program on a C= 64.  It kept track of the horses we had.  It sure was nice going from the tape cassette drive to the 1541 disk drive.


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## Kacey (May 31, 2006)

Bigshadow said:
			
		

> Dude, I programmed on those Trash 80s my senior year of high school.  Never looked at them again as I quickly went to the IBM side.  Before that, I had a commodore vic20 with a tape drive and  a whopping 6K internal memory and 3K expansion card.



I worked on Trash 80s in 10th grade and school - and upgraded to a vic20 at home in 11th grade... wrote a program on it in BASIC that played checkers, as, at the time, my previous experience put me ahead of my computer teacher in knoweldge, so she told me to pick something that sounded sufficiently difficult and write a program that would do it.  The problem was, the whole program didn't fit on the drive at once, so it was constantly hunting through the tape drive... I eventually sold it to my uncle to use as a game machine (cartridges) with his kids, and bought an Apple IIc... and it's taken all this time for computers to get that small again!


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## Phadrus00 (May 31, 2006)

shesulsa said:
			
		

> Wow! I feel so special! :lol2:
> 
> Thanks, everyone!! And Phadrus ... what a post, man! I feel all caught up in the news area now. *snicker*


 
hehehehehehe...  My pleasure...  It's the abridged version!  *grin*

It may amuse you to know that I wrote that whilst tring to debug a Program... Written in Javascript...  In a JSP..  Calling a Java Class...  Over a Virtual Connection to the Server... Which is actually a Virtual Image...  *slumps into chair* 

Man I miss my old Microsoft C Compiler than ran on a single Floppy Disk... *sigh*

Rob "The Reminiscant"


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## Phadrus00 (May 31, 2006)

Bigshadow said:
			
		

> Yes, Google is a wonderful source, especially the groups side. I use it often to find bits of information regarding programming or "How To" Like how to dynamically instantiate controls in vb.net and still be able to trap the events from them (multiple controls of the same type) and for troubleshooting. Now that one has elluded me for quite some time now.


 
Mmmmm yeah David!  You got some Mad Programming Skills there!  Yo Da Dog!  NICE!  *grin*

Google does rock.  You can find just about anything you need.  I LOVE it!  

How long you been working in .NEt?

Rob


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## Xue Sheng (May 31, 2006)

I can remember taking an AutoCAD class, AutoCAD 8 I think, and everyone in class rushing to get the 486 because it was the fastest.

And my last programming class was Fortran and my first was Basic. 

And my office still writes the occasional Macro for MS Apps, most fortunately I that is not my job. But to be honest I miss DOS 6.22 sometimes


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## BlueDragon1981 (Jun 20, 2006)

Or you could do it how i did it.....lol. I took an older computer and basically ran it , installed whatever I could and crashed it and rebuilt it and did whatever I could to fix the problems from before from research and dumb luck....lol. Then again all the other suggestions are good too....


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