I'm Nerdier Than You Are

[Surfdaddy]

Space nerd since a kid. I watched the Lunar landing live, and rode my bike to a newsstand where I bought the LA Times on July 20, 1969 for 25 cents. I still have that yellowed newspaper.

My mother worked for TRW in Redondo Beach, part of the group that built the Lunar Module Descent Engine. After the successful end of Apollo 13, the astronauts visited TRW to speak. My mother let me skip high school that day and I shook hands with all 3 of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

[sanman]

I had the Commodore 1541 calibration kit and used it many times.  Click, click, click ...

The floppy disk drive? I had an ice pack bag I used to put on it instead, since it was thermal expansion which caused the drive read/write head to misalign (click, click, click...)
Oh well, at least it was a step up from the tape drive used with the ViC-20.

At a temp assignment one college summer where my job was basically just supporting the lead accountant, doing things like sorting RMA slips, I ingratiated myself with the greybeard who ran the IBM mainframe (System/370 maybe?), and he let me do some mindless data entry.  Some of it was truly mindless, like sequential numbers or something, so when he wasn't looking I dug into the binders (a whole wall of them), found the registers that the DB was using, and automated it.  As is typical with most such efforts, automating it absolutely took WAY more time than if I had just mindlessly typed it in, and absolutely ran the risk of corrupting the entire database.  But where's the fun in that?

At another such job I worked in the tape library adjacent to the mainframe room.  The greatest thrill was when they let me in on the console to type in the commands that reprioritized up some VIP's batch job.

So mainly JCL and zOS?

I spent a ridiculous amount of money on a 12 MHz "zero wait state" PC/AT clone.

As there were no versions of Linux or even FreeBSD that were backwards compatible with 286 processors, I ditched it for 486 laptop, and then quickly bought a Pentium PC when they suddenly came out.

At the time, teenaged me already knew that computers would take over ALL technical fields, and thus I did NOT want to major in Comp Sci, rather some other engineering sector, since I knew I'd work with them plenty.

And yet it's all those other fields where people seek supplementary training in computer skills in order to make use of that knowledge to facilitate whatever they're trying to do in their field.

[sanman]

Space nerd since a kid. I watched the Lunar landing live, and rode my bike to a newsstand where I bought the LA Times on July 20, 1969 for 25 cents. I still have that yellowed newspaper.

My mother worked for TRW in Redondo Beach, part of the group that built the Lunar Module Descent Engine. After the successful end of Apollo 13, the astronauts visited TRW to speak. My mother let me skip high school that day and I shook hands with all 3 of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

That's really amazing. What did your friends think when you told them? (Presumably your schoolteachers didn't mind)

Did you get a chance to see your mom's workplace as well?
I guess their famous pintle injector used in the LEM engine, and also later used in SpaceX's Merlin until 2012, must have been a valuable piece of IP for TRW.

[neoforce]

No unique stories, just typical stuff.  (physicist father, apollo 11 on black and white TV, math/science/sci-fi lover,  AW&ST junkie, tech professional as an adult)

But I do remember being so committed to the news on this site, in the pre social media days.  Back then the pace was pretty slow.  How slow?  I remember spending hours pining for an update about Nomadd's century plant.  (was so sad when it fell) 

[Eric Hedman]

One probably not so smart thing my brother and I did as a kid a few times was to take an engine for an Estes rocket and bury it in the ground facing down with just the nozzle end exposed pointing up.  Instead of an electric igniter, we would use the fuse from a firecracker.  We would wad up one end and stick it in the nozzle and then light it with a match.  It would burn for a few seconds with an exhaust plum rising up maybe ten feet in the air.  It was more fun than launching a rocket.  We got to watch it up close, maybe fifteen feet away.  I guess you could call the Earth our test stand.

[DanClemmensen]

I built my first home computer from a kit in 1977 when I was 27 years old. IMSAI 8080. "Built from a kit" meant soldering all of the components onto the PCBs and point-to-point wiring of the big unregulated 5v power supply (transformer, huge electrolytic capacitors, power diodes...)

Kit cost about $1000 in 1977 dollars. 8-bit processor with 2Mhz clock, 4 Kilobytes of memory, audiotape storage, no peripherals until I added them later. 22-slot S-100 backplane (that's 2200 individual solder joints). I eventually added a salvaged CRT terminal, a used daisywheel printer, and dual 8" floppies, 64 kilobyte memory, and later a 15 megabyte 5.25" hard disk.  Ended up writing the business plan for my first company on that machine.

[Metalskin]

I built my first home computer from a kit in 1977 when I was 27 years old. IMSAI 8080. "Built from a kit" meant soldering all of the components onto the PCBs and point-to-point wiring of the big unregulated 5v power supply (transformer, huge electrolytic capacitors, power diodes...)

Kit cost about $1000 in 1977 dollars. 8-bit processor with 2Mhz clock, 4 Kilobytes of memory, audiotape storage, no peripherals until I added them later. 22-slot S-100 backplane (that's 2200 individual solder joints). I eventually added a salvaged CRT terminal, a used daisywheel printer, and dual 8" floppies, 64 kilobyte memory, and later a 15 megabyte 5.25" hard disk.  Ended up writing the business plan for my first company on that machine.

I remember reading those ads as a young kid in the late 70s and dreaming of building my own pc. I knew I would never be allowed to, just too damn exy. Eventually I got a second hand Sinclair ZX-80 from a distant older relative. Though was hard to use cause we only had one tv.

[sanman]

I fell in love with computers with my very first college level course (a one-credit introduction to FORTRAN and punch-cards), and wound up buying time on the university system the next term in order to play around.  Later that year (1977), I got a job at Radio Shack, and was there when they announced the TRS-80.  I wound up being my store's fourth customer for one.  I must have spent half what I earned at that store on things they sold.  I had to sneak the computer into the house since I knew my parents would not approve of me spending so much money on what they would think of as a toy.  They were quite "frugal", having grown up during the Great Depression and WW2.

In any case, I was the only guy in my school of engineering with a PC of any sort, and took full advantage of the fact.  Even if it was only an 8-bit Z-80 running at less than 2MHz with 48K of RAM.  But I bought a small flatbed plotter and wrote a driver to intercept the printer output and convert it to plotter commands.  The result was some pretty nice multicolor plots for my term projects.  I wound up turning one project in composed entirely of computer output (printouts and plots).  The next year I asked the professor if I could have it back for my portfolio, but he said that wasn't possible.  It was against school policy, and besides, they were up for accreditation, and he kept it to show off as an example of a "typical student's work".

"Real techies use punch cards, and don't need keyboards"

"Real techies use a keyboard, and don't need a mouse"

"Real techies use a keyboard with mouse, and don't bother with speech-to-text"

Now that we're in the newer era of AI, we can rely on it to do ever more of the heavy-lifting for us, whether on the input/interface side, or all the further downstream process steps right up to output.

Computer nerds and their esoteric knowledge will be increasingly obsolete, as AI takes it all off their hands.
What will nerds find refuge in, as technical knowledge becomes less relevant as a differentiator?
Will we all have to migrate to the very high end of the knowledge spectrum and cluster there, exploiting odd niches?
Or will we just go to space?

[Lee Jay]

I fell in love with computers with my very first college level course (a one-credit introduction to FORTRAN and punch-cards), and wound up buying time on the university system the next term in order to play around.  Later that year (1977), I got a job at Radio Shack, and was there when they announced the TRS-80.  I wound up being my store's fourth customer for one.  I must have spent half what I earned at that store on things they sold.  I had to sneak the computer into the house since I knew my parents would not approve of me spending so much money on what they would think of as a toy.  They were quite "frugal", having grown up during the Great Depression and WW2.

In any case, I was the only guy in my school of engineering with a PC of any sort, and took full advantage of the fact.  Even if it was only an 8-bit Z-80 running at less than 2MHz with 48K of RAM.  But I bought a small flatbed plotter and wrote a driver to intercept the printer output and convert it to plotter commands.  The result was some pretty nice multicolor plots for my term projects.  I wound up turning one project in composed entirely of computer output (printouts and plots).  The next year I asked the professor if I could have it back for my portfolio, but he said that wasn't possible.  It was against school policy, and besides, they were up for accreditation, and he kept it to show off as an example of a "typical student's work".

"Real techies use punch cards, and don't need keyboards"

"Real techies use a keyboard, and don't need a mouse"

"Real techies use a keyboard with mouse, and don't bother with speech-to-text"

Now that we're in the newer era of AI, we can rely on it to do ever more of the heavy-lifting for us, whether on the input/interface side, or all the further downstream process steps right up to output.

Computer nerds and their esoteric knowledge will be increasingly obsolete, as AI takes it all off their hands.
What will nerds find refuge in, as technical knowledge becomes less relevant as a differentiator?
Will we all have to migrate to the very high end of the knowledge spectrum and cluster there, exploiting odd niches?
Or will we just go to space?

Really?  I'm still waiting for the first time AI gives me the correct answer to a question.

[rpapo]

"Real techies use punch cards, and don't need keyboards"

"Real techies use a keyboard, and don't need a mouse"

"Real techies use a keyboard with mouse, and don't bother with speech-to-text"

Now that we're in the newer era of AI, we can rely on it to do ever more of the heavy-lifting for us, whether on the input/interface side, or all the further downstream process steps right up to output.

Computer nerds and their esoteric knowledge will be increasingly obsolete, as AI takes it all off their hands.
What will nerds find refuge in, as technical knowledge becomes less relevant as a differentiator?
Will we all have to migrate to the very high end of the knowledge spectrum and cluster there, exploiting odd niches?
Or will we just go to space?

If things continue on their present course, humans in general will be squeezed out of virtually all jobs, leaving a very small percentage of earners (in the C-Suite, generally, until Wall Street finds a way to dispense with them), and a very large percentage of people who cannot find work at all.

Fortunately, this has all been progressing far more slowly than some would predict.  I remember when I was told about a so-called fourth generation language that was going to make COBOL programmers obsolete... in 1984.  Every few years somebody says that we will soon not need expensive software developers.  To be honest, the biggest threat so far to software developers residing in the United States has been offshoring.  And the fact that offshoring has deprived potential new developers of a starting point for their careers.  They have to learn everything themselves now, as the only job openings here are for people with at least three years experience in this year's fad, whatever it is.

[litton4]

I built my first home computer from a kit in 1977 when I was 27 years old. IMSAI 8080. "Built from a kit" meant soldering all of the components onto the PCBs and point-to-point wiring of the big unregulated 5v power supply (transformer, huge electrolytic capacitors, power diodes...)

Kit cost about $1000 in 1977 dollars. 8-bit processor with 2Mhz clock, 4 Kilobytes of memory, audiotape storage, no peripherals until I added them later. 22-slot S-100 backplane (that's 2200 individual solder joints). I eventually added a salvaged CRT terminal, a used daisywheel printer, and dual 8" floppies, 64 kilobyte memory, and later a 15 megabyte 5.25" hard disk.  Ended up writing the business plan for my first company on that machine.

I remember reading those ads as a young kid in the late 70s and dreaming of building my own pc. I knew I would never be allowed to, just too damn exy. Eventually I got a second hand Sinclair ZX-80 from a distant older relative. Though was hard to use cause we only had one tv.

I built my own computer - a "Nascom 2" a UK system, that had the innovation of a proper bus structure, so you could plug in adapter cards. (Not many in the US will have heard of it)
Z80 2MHz, patched to run at 4 16K memory.
Started with audio cassette I/O and keyboard/screen.
Ended up with 5 1/4" floppy, 64K memory, I/O card, Timer Card, all with a rack mounted backplane.
Also I built an interface that drove an IBM 360/370 console printer.
It's all still in my loft, apart from the printer which was too heavy to get up there, so that had to go. 

Did my Degree project on it - cross compiling Pascal to run on it.
(Don't look at my next append)

Bletchley park wanted it, but I said no as it would just sit in a cupboard for many years.
Now it's sat in my loft for 40+. 

[litton4]

I fell in love with computers with my very first college level course (a one-credit introduction to FORTRAN and punch-cards), and wound up buying time on the university system the next term in order to play around.  Later that year (1977), I got a job at Radio Shack, and was there when they announced the TRS-80.  I wound up being my store's fourth customer for one.  I must have spent half what I earned at that store on things they sold.  I had to sneak the computer into the house since I knew my parents would not approve of me spending so much money on what they would think of as a toy.  They were quite "frugal", having grown up during the Great Depression and WW2.

In any case, I was the only guy in my school of engineering with a PC of any sort, and took full advantage of the fact.  Even if it was only an 8-bit Z-80 running at less than 2MHz with 48K of RAM.  But I bought a small flatbed plotter and wrote a driver to intercept the printer output and convert it to plotter commands.  The result was some pretty nice multicolor plots for my term projects.  I wound up turning one project in composed entirely of computer output (printouts and plots).  The next year I asked the professor if I could have it back for my portfolio, but he said that wasn't possible.  It was against school policy, and besides, they were up for accreditation, and he kept it to show off as an example of a "typical student's work".

"Real techies use punch cards, and don't need keyboards"

"Real techies use a keyboard, and don't need a mouse"

"Real techies use a keyboard with mouse, and don't bother with speech-to-text"

Now that we're in the newer era of AI, we can rely on it to do ever more of the heavy-lifting for us, whether on the input/interface side, or all the further downstream process steps right up to output.

Computer nerds and their esoteric knowledge will be increasingly obsolete, as AI takes it all off their hands.
What will nerds find refuge in, as technical knowledge becomes less relevant as a differentiator?
Will we all have to migrate to the very high end of the knowledge spectrum and cluster there, exploiting odd niches?
Or will we just go to space?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pascal

https://www.usm.uni-muenchen.de/~hoffmann/roff/tmp/rpdup.pdf

[neoforce]

I built my first home computer from a kit in 1977 when I was 27 years old. IMSAI 8080. "Built from a kit" meant soldering all of the components onto the PCBs and point-to-point wiring of the big unregulated 5v power supply (transformer, huge electrolytic capacitors, power diodes...)

Kit cost about $1000 in 1977 dollars. 8-bit processor with 2Mhz clock, 4 Kilobytes of memory, audiotape storage, no peripherals until I added them later. 22-slot S-100 backplane (that's 2200 individual solder joints). I eventually added a salvaged CRT terminal, a used daisywheel printer, and dual 8" floppies, 64 kilobyte memory, and later a 15 megabyte 5.25" hard disk.  Ended up writing the business plan for my first company on that machine.

I remember reading those ads as a young kid in the late 70s and dreaming of building my own pc. I knew I would never be allowed to, just too damn exy. Eventually I got a second hand Sinclair ZX-80 from a distant older relative. Though was hard to use cause we only had one tv.

I built my own computer - a "Nascom 2" a UK system, that had the innovation of a proper bus structure, so you could plug in adapter cards. (Not many in the US will have heard of it)
Z80 2MHz, patched to run at 4 16K memory.
Started with audio cassette I/O and keyboard/screen.
Ended up with 5 1/4" floppy, 64K memory, I/O card, Timer Card. Also I built an interface that drove an IBM 360/370 console printer.
It's all still in my loft, apart from the printer which was too heavy to get up there, so that had to go.
Bletchley park wanted it, but I said no as it would just sit in a cupboard for many years. Now it's sat in my loft for 30.

As a teenager when the TRS-80 came out I begged my dad to buy one.  instead he got us a SWTPC kit.  he had the fun putting it together (he was a physicist and an IBMer) but i built wrote some incredibly inefficient code.  Connect four came out a few years before and i played with a couple of friends using paper and pencil.  I spent hours writing code on that SWTPC to make a game with the same rules.

[Surfdaddy]

Space nerd since a kid. I watched the Lunar landing live, and rode my bike to a newsstand where I bought the LA Times on July 20, 1969 for 25 cents. I still have that yellowed newspaper.

My mother worked for TRW in Redondo Beach, part of the group that built the Lunar Module Descent Engine. After the successful end of Apollo 13, the astronauts visited TRW to speak. My mother let me skip high school that day and I shook hands with all 3 of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

That's really amazing. What did your friends think when you told them? (Presumably your schoolteachers didn't mind)

Did you get a chance to see your mom's workplace as well?
I guess their famous pintle injector used in the LEM engine, and also later used in SpaceX's Merlin until 2012, must have been a valuable piece of IP for TRW.

I don't really remember telling anybody. In those days, a few missions past Apollo 11, most of my friends didn't really care. It was just a personal thing for me.

In the much more recent "Two truths and a lie" business icebreaking game, one of the truths I've used is "I have touched the hand of the human who has been further from the earth than any other human in history". Apollo 13's trajectory behind the moon was further from the earth than any of the other Apollo missions.

[LittleBird]

I built my first home computer from a kit in 1977 when I was 27 years old. IMSAI 8080. "Built from a kit" meant soldering all of the components onto the PCBs and point-to-point wiring of the big unregulated 5v power supply (transformer, huge electrolytic capacitors, power diodes...)

Kit cost about $1000 in 1977 dollars. 8-bit processor with 2Mhz clock, 4 Kilobytes of memory, audiotape storage, no peripherals until I added them later. 22-slot S-100 backplane (that's 2200 individual solder joints). I eventually added a salvaged CRT terminal, a used daisywheel printer, and dual 8" floppies, 64 kilobyte memory, and later a 15 megabyte 5.25" hard disk.  Ended up writing the business plan for my first company on that machine.

I remember reading those ads as a young kid in the late 70s and dreaming of building my own pc. I knew I would never be allowed to, just too damn exy. Eventually I got a second hand Sinclair ZX-80 from a distant older relative. Though was hard to use cause we only had one tv.

I built my own computer - a "Nascom 2" a UK system, that had the innovation of a proper bus structure, so you could plug in adapter cards. (Not many in the US will have heard of it)
Z80 2MHz, patched to run at 4 16K memory.
Started with audio cassette I/O and keyboard/screen.
Ended up with 5 1/4" floppy, 64K memory, I/O card, Timer Card, all with a rack mounted backplane.
Also I built an interface that drove an IBM 360/370 console printer.
It's all still in my loft, apart from the printer which was too heavy to get up there, so that had to go. 

Did my Degree project on it - cross compiling Pascal to run on it.
(Don't look at my next append)

Bletchley park wanted it, but I said no as it would just sit in a cupboard for many years.
Now it's sat in my loft for 40+. 

Nascom gone but not forgotten, see e.g https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8934/Nascom-1/

and

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3653/Nascom-2/

[litton4]

I built my first home computer from a kit in 1977 when I was 27 years old. IMSAI 8080. "Built from a kit" meant soldering all of the components onto the PCBs and point-to-point wiring of the big unregulated 5v power supply (transformer, huge electrolytic capacitors, power diodes...)

Kit cost about $1000 in 1977 dollars. 8-bit processor with 2Mhz clock, 4 Kilobytes of memory, audiotape storage, no peripherals until I added them later. 22-slot S-100 backplane (that's 2200 individual solder joints). I eventually added a salvaged CRT terminal, a used daisywheel printer, and dual 8" floppies, 64 kilobyte memory, and later a 15 megabyte 5.25" hard disk.  Ended up writing the business plan for my first company on that machine.

I remember reading those ads as a young kid in the late 70s and dreaming of building my own pc. I knew I would never be allowed to, just too damn exy. Eventually I got a second hand Sinclair ZX-80 from a distant older relative. Though was hard to use cause we only had one tv.

I built my own computer - a "Nascom 2" a UK system, that had the innovation of a proper bus structure, so you could plug in adapter cards. (Not many in the US will have heard of it)
Z80 2MHz, patched to run at 4 16K memory.
Started with audio cassette I/O and keyboard/screen.
Ended up with 5 1/4" floppy, 64K memory, I/O card, Timer Card, all with a rack mounted backplane.
Also I built an interface that drove an IBM 360/370 console printer.
It's all still in my loft, apart from the printer which was too heavy to get up there, so that had to go. 

Did my Degree project on it - cross compiling Pascal to run on it.
(Don't look at my next append)

Bletchley park wanted it, but I said no as it would just sit in a cupboard for many years.
Now it's sat in my loft for 40+. 

Nascom gone but not forgotten, see e.g https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8934/Nascom-1/

and

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3653/Nascom-2/

Well, carrying on this one, I was at Uni with Nick Austin of Level-9:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_9_Computing

I *think* I got rid of my INMC and 80-Bus mags, but they may still be up in the loft...which i have a plan to clear out (needs boarding  and insulating more), so maybe it can come out for display (even if it's in the loft as I don't think the Mrs will like it downstairs). Hmmm next year maybe

[Apollo22]

Space nerd since 7:  August 24, 1989 when Voyager send back pictures of Neptune. It amused me that it had a big blue dot, somewhat like Jupiter with its big red dot. I started a big aerospace scrapbook that lasted well into the 1990's - when Internet took over. 

Nice to see I'm not the only one coffee turns into a Tex Avery -like Crazy Squirrel. And I'm talking about just one small cup. I know people that can drink coffee as if it was tap water. Well, not my case.
I mean, is it normal that a cup of ordinary coffee, drank before 10 in the morning, keep me awake like a wrecked chipmunk at 3' o'clock in the night, the next day ?  And they say caffein is eliminated in six hours ? bollocks. Must be like alcohol with my wife, she is drank with - well, almost nothing. Must be our liver not eliminating the damn toxin.
At least it is useful when driving long distance. One brief trip to McDonald to get a single coffee, and I'm good for 700 km or more.

[LittleBird]

I kept minor differences as one, the spacecraft is by name. So one for Soyuz and also not one for voskhod because it was just a stripped down vostok.
Also no Starliner because it didn't bring the crew home.
Next one is probably SLS in February.

Can't help feeling this friendly argument over how many crewed spacecraft launchers there are is our version of the Nick Hornby character who wasn't sure if Abbey Road should be filed before or after Let It Be ...

[LittleBird]

Space nerd since a kid. I watched the Lunar landing live, and rode my bike to a newsstand where I bought the LA Times on July 20, 1969 for 25 cents. I still have that yellowed newspaper.

My mother worked for TRW in Redondo Beach, part of the group that built the Lunar Module Descent Engine. After the successful end of Apollo 13, the astronauts visited TRW to speak. My mother let me skip high school that day and I shook hands with all 3 of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

That's really amazing. What did your friends think when you told them? (Presumably your schoolteachers didn't mind)

Did you get a chance to see your mom's workplace as well?
I guess their famous pintle injector used in the LEM engine, and also later used in SpaceX's Merlin until 2012, must have been a valuable piece of IP for TRW.

I don't really remember telling anybody. In those days, a few missions past Apollo 11, most of my friends didn't really care. It was just a personal thing for me.

In the much more recent "Two truths and a lie" business icebreaking game, one of the truths I've used is "I have touched the hand of the human who has been further from the earth than any other human in history". Apollo 13's trajectory behind the moon was further from the earth than any of the other Apollo missions.

Pintle engine seems to have had a vey varied history, see article here http://www.rocket-propulsion.info/resources/articles/TRW_PINTLE_ENGINE.pdf   from which grab below was taken:

[sanman]

After it was announced that Prof Wolfgang Ketterle had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for having achieved the first Bose-Einstein Condensate, I'd decided to email him congratulations, and also asked him if this newly achieved Bose-Einstein Condensate could be used to achieve nuclear fusion. I think my question must have caused him considerable amusement, because he immediately emailed back laughing that -- HAHAHAHA NO! --  a BEC did not have anywhere near the density required to achieve nuclear fusion. He told me that a BEC only looked like a single super-atom from a distance, and that on closer inspection the internuclear separation distance is actually quite great. I'm glad I gave him his laugh for the day.