Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Stop, you're killing me!

You're not the only fogey in these parts
Fox — (archived)

Is there room on that porch for another rocker?

I still have my first portable "transistor radio" -- Silvertone, circa 1961, AM-only (of course! No one listened to FM) with the Conelrad triangle markings at 640 and 1240 KHz. I took it to school (4th grade) to track John Glenn's progress.

The first combination stereo amplifier/tuner in my parents' home that had an FM band at all required a plug-in demodulator to receive stereo FM signals -- it was built just before that technology was standardized. (see also the thread about CDs, DVDs etc.)

Went all through high school and the first two years of college using a slide rule. First hand-held calculator I saw was a TI; simple math and square roots is all it could do, cost ~$100.

First CAD system I ever used was a Calma (short-lived division of GE). Two workstations with big hoods each housing two CRTs -- one color for the vector graphics, one green-screen for commands. Processor rack-mounted in an adjacent room with a 9" reel-to-reel tape drive and one of those "washing-machine" hard disks (300 Meg, as I recall, weighed 20 pounds or more). Processing language was a dialect of Fortran. PCs were just coming on, and the company I worked for at the time didn't own any. Autodesk was a startup.

I could go on -- Party lines; B&W TV, pre-UHF rotary tuners (11 channels max, 2 through 12, and only four operating in the Chicago area) and roof-mounted antennas... been there, done that, printed the t-shirts.

Anybody think of doing a parody of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire"?

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