• Hi all!

    From scarface@21:1/101 to All on Sat Aug 30 12:23:57 2025
    Hi there. I'm scarface from New Zealand. I'm pretty new to BBS's, mainly just been playing the games (poorly haha). I've also been lurking the message board a bit and thought I should take the time to introduce myself.

    I'm a child of the late 80's, brought up with a mix of DOS, Debian, and various window's starting from 3.11. I've gotten to know a lot more about computers ever since, but always know there is heaps more out there to learn.

    In recent years, I mainly use linux, but dabble in other OS's in VM's. I've also made a decent effort at my own OS for the x86, purely for the learning opportunity of learning x86 assembly.

    For work, I started off a sysadmin at my dad's work, then did university and whatnot. After uni I've been a web developer, security consultant. On the side I do various projects in a bunch of languages. I like trying things out, even "esoteric" stuff.

    I'm probably a bit younger than the average age, but is nice to see there are even younger folks getting engaged with this sort of technology. I worry sometimes about the direction of the software industry. I'm not so sure it is always going forward haha.

    Anyhow, that's me. Using SyncTERM from ubuntu. Happy for recommendations of other clients to enjoy this though!

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  • From Zip@21:1/202 to scarface on Sat Aug 30 10:48:38 2025
    Hello scarface!

    Hi there. I'm scarface from New Zealand. I'm pretty new to BBS's, mainly just been playing the games (poorly haha). I've also been lurking the message board a bit and thought I should take the time to introduce myself.

    Thanks for the intro, and welcome! Nice to have you here!

    I was born in the late 70s -- almost early 80s! -- and also started off with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. Later some OS/2 2.1, OS/2 3.0, Windows NT4, Windows 2000 Professional, and then finally some Linux (mostly Debian), which I use for the BBS stuff (still using Windows for my desktop, but a bit tempted to try out MacOS any year now...).

    Working as a Linux/UNIX sysadmin since the early 2000s to this date, and just spent a couple of days of wading trough config files and whatnot after a Debian 13 upgrade. =)

    Best regards
    Zip

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Star Collision BBS, Uppsala, Sweden (21:1/202)
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to scarface on Sat Aug 30 09:12:01 2025
    scarface wrote to All <=-

    I'm probably a bit younger than the average age, but is nice to see
    there are even younger folks getting engaged with this sort of
    technology. I worry sometimes about the direction of the software industry. I'm not so sure it is always going forward haha.

    Welcome! BBSing benefits from people of all ages, I know I've had
    callers who weren't born when I put the BBS up! :)



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  • From Dumas Walker@21:1/175 to SCARFACE on Sat Aug 30 13:58:12 2025
    I'm probably a bit younger than the average age, but is nice to see
    there are even younger folks getting engaged with this sort of
    technology. I worry sometimes about the direction of the software industry. I'm not so sure it is always going forward haha.

    Welcome to bbsing! I suspect that most of us worry about the direction of
    the software, and general tech, industry, too. ;)


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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to scarface on Sat Aug 30 13:20:33 2025
    Re: Hi all!
    By: scarface to All on Sat Aug 30 2025 12:23 pm

    Hi there. I'm scarface from New Zealand. I'm pretty new to BBS's, mainly just been playing the games (poorly haha). I've also been lurking the message board a bit and thought I should take the time to introduce myself.

    Welcome :)

    I'm a child of the late 80's, brought up with a mix of DOS, Debian, and various window's starting from 3.11. I've gotten to know a lot more about computers ever since, but always know there is heaps more out there to learn.

    That's cool.
    I grew up in the 80s & 90s and mostly used DOS and Windows (starting with 3.0), and it went from there. My schools also had Apple 2 and Macintosh computers, so I was familiar with those too. I was also curious about Amiga computers but had only seen them in a couple places when I was growing up.

    I'm probably a bit younger than the average age, but is nice to see there are even younger folks getting engaged with this sort of technology. I worry sometimes about the direction of the software industry. I'm not so sure it is always going forward haha.

    I'm a software engineer, and lately I've been hearing people who are worried that AI might take people's jobs. I'm not sure if that will happen, or to what extent, but I'm hoping it won't have much of a negative impact on the job market.

    Nightfox
    --- SBBSecho 3.29-Linux
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  • From scarface@21:1/101 to Zip on Sun Aug 31 09:22:22 2025
    which I use for the BBS stuff (still using Windows for my desktop, but a bit tempted to try out MacOS any year now...).

    Haha, I too believe that I will try out MacOS any year. Some of my school friends had macs growing up, but just seemed foreign to me. I had some in the music lab at high school, which I just promptly got the software (Sibelius from memory) used on it onto my computer (I recall this was through a very legal purchase ;) ), which at the time was likely either Windows XP (for gaming), or debian/ubuntu with XP in a vm (for gaming, my friends always let me know how ridiculous it was that I used a vm, sometimes at the lowest resolution, just to join in at LAN parties haha)

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From scarface@21:1/101 to Nightfox on Sun Aug 31 09:27:12 2025
    with 3.0), and it went from there. My schools also had Apple 2 and Macintosh computers, so I was familiar with those too. I was also
    curious about Amiga computers but had only seen them in a couple places when I was growing up.

    I hadn't really even _heard_ of amiga growing up eh. a few friends had apples which seemed rudimentary as I had already explored DOS and linux quite a bit. In hindsight, I likely just haven't given it the chance to explore it at the time, but I can still do today!

    My high school had a couple of mac's we used in music class. the big colourful CRT unit all in one things. iMac's? Basically only used one piece of software on it, so I just .. acquired .. a windows copy. Majority of my software on my windows machine in that day would have been open source, soon to make the switch to full time linux.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From scarface@21:1/101 to Nightfox on Sun Aug 31 09:34:02 2025
    I'm a software engineer, and lately I've been hearing people who are worried that AI might take people's jobs. I'm not sure if that will happen, or to what extent, but I'm hoping it won't have much of a
    negative impact on the job market.

    ah I meant to reply to this as well. In my experience so far I doubt it will replace any intermediate and above level programmers/developers/engineers/scientists/whatever title you pick. For juniors potentially it will make a cohort which is less likely to understand the foundations/fundamentals. We've already seen some of this in recent years with the lower end reaching toward google/stackoverflow/etc more often and just copy pasting rather than understanding. I've seen some of this flow on into higher roles in some of my roles. Makes it hard when you kinda expect a colleague on the same level as you to understand something that they seem to have no knowledge of :shrug:.

    I read something recently showing that kids/adolesents are growing up in a world where things "just work" to some degree of "work", and are less curious about the _how_ it works. I can't recall what journal that was in, but I guess it shows that people are studying the effect, but that sort of research is sadly slow, and lagged behind the actuality of the present. Best we can do is talk about the effect as how _we_ see it, and what trends _we_ have seen play out etc. Otherwise ppl will just keep being sheep and ignore it all. Humans are made to do the easiest thing. Best dopamine to effort reward :)

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Zip@21:1/202 to scarface on Sun Aug 31 08:59:23 2025
    Hello scarface!

    On 31 Aug 2025, scarface said the following...

    Haha, I too believe that I will try out MacOS any year. Some of my school friends had macs growing up, but just seemed foreign to me. I had some

    Same thing here... Plus there's a new CPU every year which always makes it tempting to wait until the next one. =)

    Best regards
    Zip

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Star Collision BBS, Uppsala, Sweden (21:1/202)
  • From RetroSwim@21:2/150 to scarface on Sun Aug 31 04:52:44 2025
    Hi there. I'm scarface from New Zealand. I'm pretty new to BBS's, mainly just been playing the games (poorly haha). I've also been lurking the message board a bit and thought I should take the time to introduce myself.

    Welcome on in! Glad to have you :)

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  • From poindexter FORTRAN@21:4/122 to Zip on Sun Aug 31 08:34:53 2025
    Re: Re: Hi all!
    By: Zip to scarface on Sun Aug 31 2025 08:59 am

    Same thing here... Plus there's a new CPU every year which always makes it tempting to wait until the next one. =)

    That's what made the Mac secondary market so great - people ditching mostly new Macs for a slightly newer model...
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  • From Dmxrob@21:4/142 to Dumas Walker on Sun Aug 31 17:24:37 2025
    BY: Dumas Walker (21:1/175)
    On Saturday,August 30, 2025 at 12:58 PM, Dumas Walker (21:1/175) wrote:

    I'm probably a bit younger than the average age, but is nice to see there are even younger folks getting engaged with this sort of technology. I worry sometimes about the direction of the software industry. I'm not so sure it is always going forward haha.

    Welcome to bbsing! I suspect that most of us worry about the direction
    of
    the software, and general tech, industry, too. ;)

    Personally, I think its a disaster nowadays. Nobody knows how to debug anything. They put out the most inefficient code that is so full of errors and bugs that it would make you wince. Most folks don't even understand what the code even does just "ChatGPT told me to use this".

    If you ask someone to help/assist with something outside their domain, they look at you like you are an alien. They simply don't understand how to take skillset "A" and translate that into at least a beginning knowledge for "B".

    As the workforce retires, I am very concerned about the future of anything dealing with technology. Too many folks think because they play Fortnight or Minecraft they are "IT" experts.

    -dmxrob


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    * Origin: Off the Wall - St. Peters, Missouri - #VoteBlue (21:4/142)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to scarface on Sun Aug 31 11:24:09 2025
    Re: Re: Hi all!
    By: scarface to Nightfox on Sun Aug 31 2025 09:27 am

    I hadn't really even _heard_ of amiga growing up eh. a few friends had apples which seemed rudimentary as I had already explored DOS and linux quite a bit. In hindsight, I likely just haven't given it the chance to explore it at the time, but I can still do today!

    What kind of Apple? I think the Apple 2 was a bit rudimentary compared to a DOS PC, though the Macintosh was a bit more advanced than the typical DOS PC when the Mac came out.

    My high school had a couple of mac's we used in music class. the big colourful CRT unit all in one things. iMac's? Basically only used one piece of software on it, so I just .. acquired .. a windows copy. Majority of my software on my windows machine in that day would have been open source, soon to make the switch to full time linux.

    The iMac came out right after I finished high school. My middle school had beige Macs - they had a few with color screens in the library (I don't remember if they were LC, Performa, or something else), and they had some classes (such as my typing class) with Mac Classics (the small all-in-one with a black & white screen that looked like a refreshed original Mac). My high school had a bunch of beige Macs of various models with color screens (LC, Performa, and a lot of the Power Mac 5200). My high school also had a computer lab with some DOS PCs in it.

    Nightfox
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    * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to scarface on Sun Aug 31 11:27:16 2025
    Re: Re: Hi all!
    By: scarface to Nightfox on Sun Aug 31 2025 09:34 am

    I read something recently showing that kids/adolesents are growing up in a world where things "just work" to some degree of "work", and are less curious about the _how_ it works. I can't recall what journal that was in, but I guess it shows that people are studying the effect, but that sort of research is sadly slow, and lagged behind the actuality of the present.

    It seems to me that's the case these days. When I was growing up, computers still seemed like a relatively new thing, and it seemed that there were more people (like myself) who were curious about how they work. I like to build my own desktop computers, and I feel like I grew up in a time where a good number of people did that, and know how to fix things that go wrong. These days, even though a lot of people use smartphones & other computer technology, it seems a lot of people don't really have much idea about how it works or even a curiosity about it. It seems a bit counter-intuitive.

    Nightfox
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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to Zip on Sun Aug 31 11:43:00 2025
    Re: Re: Hi all!
    By: Zip to scarface on Sun Aug 31 2025 08:59 am

    Haha, I too believe that I will try out MacOS any year. Some of my school
    friends had macs growing up, but just seemed foreign to me. I had some

    Same thing here... Plus there's a new CPU every year which always makes it tempting to wait until the next one. =)

    I feel like it's a little weird that Intel and Apple have been doing that lately (new CPU each year). With the yearly new CPU models, it seems like the changes are pretty small. Some time ago, I remember seeing some advertising (I think from Intel themselves) where they talked about the performance of their current processors, and it said something like "Compared to an Intel PC from 5 years ago". They had to go back that far for there to be a noticeable difference in performance. It reminds me of how cars have model years - often there's just small differences in a new model year, and only every several years there will be a new overall design.

    Nightfox
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  • From Digital Man@21:1/183 to Nightfox on Sun Aug 31 13:54:13 2025
    Re: Re: Hi all!
    By: Nightfox to scarface on Sun Aug 31 2025 11:27 am

    It seems to me that's the case these days. When I was growing up, computers still seemed like a relatively new thing, and it seemed that there were more people (like myself) who were curious about how they work. I like to build my own desktop computers, and I feel like I grew up in a time where a good number of people did that, and know how to fix things that go wrong. These days, even though a lot of people use smartphones & other computer technology, it seems a lot of people don't really have much idea about how it works or even a curiosity about it. It seems a bit counter-intuitive.

    Same here. My first tech "job" was building and selling computers and LANs. I got bored of that pretty quick, but it was a start. Now when I hear a proud parent brag how their child is so tech-smart because they "built their own computer", it turns out they're just buying gaming PC components from amazon or newegg and assembling them. Sure, they've learned *something* through the process, but they're a long way away from turning that knowledge into a career. When I was building computers, it was still just a lot of assembly work, but you still had to know how to use 'debug.exe' to invoke the expansion ROM firmware of a "Winchester" controller, know how to low-level format a drive, know the differences between MFM and RLL encoding, platters, tracks, cyclinders and clusters and why it might matter for the customer, etc. Chips and cables weren't "keyed" and you had to know where pin-1 was and why it mattered. Nowadays, all those details are abstracted away from the system builder. And the software stack is much higher now than back then, so the chances of one person knowing it all is even less likely, even when they do know enough to have a job in the field. I enjoy blowing the minds of youngsters when I'm able to demystify things and explain why things (in tech) are the way they are. But I also feel bad that they may not really retain the knowledge since they didn't "live it" and that could be a big handicap for the generation(s) taking over.
    --
    digital man (rob)

    Synchronet/BBS Terminology Definition #24:
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  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to Digital Man on Sun Aug 31 14:03:45 2025
    Re: Re: Hi all!
    By: Digital Man to Nightfox on Sun Aug 31 2025 01:54 pm

    Same here. My first tech "job" was building and selling computers and LANs. I got bored of that pretty quick, but it was a start. Now when I hear a proud parent brag how their child is so tech-smart because they "built their own computer", it turns out they're just buying gaming PC components from amazon or newegg and assembling them. Sure, they've learned *something* through the process, but they're a long way away from turning that knowledge into a career. When I was building computers, it was still just a lot of assembly work, but you still had to know how to use 'debug.exe' to invoke the expansion ROM firmware of a "Winchester" controller, know how to low-level format a drive, know the differences between MFM and RLL encoding, platters, tracks, cyclinders and clusters and why it might matter for the customer, etc. Chips and cables weren't "keyed" and you had to know where pin-1 was and why it mattered.

    Yeah, when I got my first computer, I learned about low-level formatting the hard drive, and also having to occasionally re-scan it to mark (new) bad sectors as the drive continued to develop problems (and I think that also required backing up, re-formatting and restoring my backup, as it would then be aware of the new marked bad sectors); also I was familiar with using jumpers to configure IRQ addresses for my various expansion cards & such. Part of the reason I know all of that was because my first computer was a hand-me-down 286 with a MFM hard drive (I got it in 1992). I was 12 years old at that time.. When I got my first job in 1996, the first thing I spent my first paycheck(s) on was parts to build a brand-new computer, and by then, PCs were using IDE hard drives, which (from what I remember) didn't require low-level formatting or marking bad sectors anymore. Expansion cards were still using jumpers to set IRQs, but by then, the only expansion cards I remember having were a Sound Blaster card and a video card, as the motherboard had the I/O built-in. Motherboards were still using jumpers to configure things like the bus speed and multiplier for the CPU clock speed & such. But as we know, jumpers eventually went away, and now it's quite a bit simpler to build a PC.

    Nowadays,
    all those details are abstracted away from the system builder. And the software stack is much higher now than back then, so the chances of one person knowing it all is even less likely, even when they do know enough to have a job in the field. I enjoy blowing the minds of youngsters when I'm able to demystify things and explain why things (in tech) are the way they are. But I also feel bad that they may not really retain the knowledge since they didn't "live it" and that could be a big handicap for the generation(s) taking over.

    Yeah, I feel similar.

    Nightfox
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    * Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)
  • From scarface@21:1/101 to poindexter FORTRAN on Mon Sep 1 10:36:47 2025
    Same thing here... Plus there's a new CPU every year which always makes tempting to wait until the next one. =)

    That's what made the Mac secondary market so great - people ditching mostly new Macs for a slightly newer model...

    Haha yeh, same for a lot of technology. There is a lot of pretty decent hardware you can get for cheap. And there are some newer hobby OS's that perform pretty well on old hardware but also have a lot of modern quality of life features. I can't recall their names, but I've tried a few that were quite good! My hobby OS is not (yet?)

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  • From scarface@21:1/101 to Dmxrob on Mon Sep 1 10:48:05 2025
    Personally, I think its a disaster nowadays. Nobody knows how to debug anything. They put out the most inefficient code that is so full of errors and bugs that it would make you wince. Most folks don't even understand what the code even does just "ChatGPT told me to use this".

    This. I helped a senior platform engineer with using the chrome/firefox dev tools showing the debugger. I got the feeling they had never even thought of how they could use it so just avoided it. They were impressed with some of the things I did in vim during our session. Asked how they would do X that they could do in VScode, and I'm like hmm, like this. I suggested they stop by any time for a little applied vimgolf to our actual work. This is the peer programming I like, where knowledge gets shared.
    My wife who doesn't work in IT knows how to debug more than most junior devs. She does excel spreadsheets, which in previous jobs ppl have dismissed the idea of the utility of this (and one job I actively told ppl not to have macros), but I see what she produces. It does a job, and she has fun working out how to make it work. She applies it at work more and more. Gives her more opportunities.

    If you ask someone to help/assist with something outside their domain, they look at you like you are an alien. They simply don't understand
    how to take skillset "A" and translate that into at least a beginning knowledge for "B".

    As someone that has gone from sysadmin to web dev to pentester to security dev, I find it baffling the people that just stay in their own domain. I tell them about the projects I do on the side, purely for the sake of learning. I know I won't get anything good out of the project, and that something else that does whatever I can do better already exists, but meh. I don't know, and I want to know.
    Opens up a lot more career and hobby opportunities.

    play Fortnight or Minecraft they are "IT" experts.

    Once they start making mods, hosting servers, customising servers, build a (simple) clone game, then they become on the journey to become experts. And they find they are right at the start of a vast forest to journey through for this expert status.
    I think I'm an expert in some areas of IT, and I know, I just know, that I have absolutely no idea about some other area. I also know that stuff I did really well a year ago I might not be that great at now. I find my life journey of trying to close that gap as tight as I can.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From scarface@21:1/101 to Nightfox on Mon Sep 1 10:58:26 2025
    What kind of Apple? I think the Apple 2 was a bit rudimentary compared
    to a DOS PC, though the Macintosh was a bit more advanced than the
    typical DOS PC when the Mac came out.

    I think apple 2 by the looks of it. I think this was perhaps after we had windows 3.11, but uncertain. I guess I found the gui just slow and clunky. I guess I knew on windows if I couldn't do it there, I could most likely hack around in dos to get something I wanted.

    We also had linux machines, unsure if it had a gui or not. I think we had a freesco floppy disk router. All connected with a coax cable that required terminators on the ends. with a 14.4kbps modem, then a 56kpbs. Had a second phone line, and I downloaded a lot. I believe around 17G per month. When we moved to ADSL I had to buy a new harddisk quickly!!

    5200). My high school also had a computer lab with some DOS PCs in it.

    My highschool mainly had windows 98 windows 2k windows xp through the years. we learnt Logo turtle programming, BASIC, visual basic, then java. I may have gotten more than most as I showed an trait to picking up stuff quick. Wrote a wee chat program before I knew about others. ran it in our lab. Had a "backdoor" that let me shutdown ppl's computers (with a warning), really just any command, as a prank. Kids... The teacher thought I was hacking the network :D I disabled the backdoor and we were still allowed to "test" the chat program during class.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From scarface@21:1/101 to Nightfox on Mon Sep 1 11:01:31 2025
    smartphones & other computer technology, it seems a lot of people don't really have much idea about how it works or even a curiosity about it.
    It seems a bit counter-intuitive.

    I think it's just the layers and layers of abstraction they put on top. I like doing stuff a bit more low level. Add abstraction only when needed, not just whenever someone feels like it. I think the solution is people unrolling the abstraction and making simpler libraries that encourage curiosity or something. Who knows!

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From scarface@21:1/101 to Nightfox on Mon Sep 1 11:03:39 2025
    I feel like it's a little weird that Intel and Apple have been doing that lately (new CPU each year). With the yearly new CPU models, it seems

    Capitalism my friend. Sadly it is the only way people think, and not so much about societal value or impact of these practices.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From scarface@21:1/101 to Digital Man on Mon Sep 1 11:14:02 2025
    hear a proud parent brag how their child is so tech-smart because they "built their own computer", it turns out they're just buying gaming PC components from amazon or newegg and assembling them. Sure, they've learned *something* through the process, but they're a long way away
    from turning that knowledge into a career. When I was building

    haha, this is uh, how I "built" computers. I also learnt about networking stuff from helping dad set up a home network, and about various OS's. I think the latter helped me more with a career. That said, my first day on a professional job (as a web dev) was assembling my own machine and installing OS. That company aged out that practice eventually.

    Recently though (5 years or less maybe) I went through Ben Eater's 8 bit computer series. I'd learnt the "basics" I guess at uni, but never really applied them in such a way that I understood the foundations. During his videos I got curious on how the actual logic chips he used could be built with transistors. Got a bag of transistors of various types to try build each gate and latch. Fun! I then got interested in how transistors worked, and kinda understood it but decided that was as low as I wanted to go haha.

    I think it is a great skill to tinker around with stuff you don't know, just to find out how to know about it. I do programming videos of my hobby projects and some comments I get is that people love seeing the whole experience, the failures, as well as the successes. It helps show that even deep technical work can be started from a state of not knowing much, but applying different knowledges from other areas in different ways you can start to learn a lot more. sure you muck it up sometimes but ya know what I like about computers/electronics, you can usually fix it even if you muck it up (noting this may not be the case for shorts/fires/explosions/network mishaps, but you can do some basic stuff to prevent those risks).

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From Nightfox@21:1/137 to scarface on Sun Aug 31 16:42:26 2025
    Re: Re: Hi all!
    By: scarface to Nightfox on Mon Sep 01 2025 11:03 am

    I feel like it's a little weird that Intel and Apple have been doing that
    lately (new CPU each year). With the yearly new CPU models, it seems

    Capitalism my friend. Sadly it is the only way people think, and not so much about societal value or impact of these practices.

    From what I remember, it wasn't common practice for CPUs until Intel started their Core i3/i5/i7 line (in 2009, I think?) and they started making new versions every year. I remember with the 286, 386, etc., it was maybe 3-4 years between new generations of a CPU, and in the meantime, you'd mainly just see faster versions (higher megahertz) and different variants sometimes, such as SX and DX, etc..

    Nightfox
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  • From Gamgee@21:2/138 to Digital Man on Sun Aug 31 22:00:11 2025
    Digital Man wrote to Nightfox <=-

    It seems to me that's the case these days. When I was growing up, computers still seemed like a relatively new thing, and it seemed that there were more people (like myself) who were curious about how they work. I like to build my own desktop computers, and I feel like I grew up in a time where a good number of people did that, and know how to fix things that go wrong. These days, even though a lot of people use smartphones & other computer technology, it seems a lot of people don't really have much idea about how it works or even a curiosity about it. It seems a bit counter-intuitive.

    Same here. My first tech "job" was building and selling computers and LANs. I got bored of that pretty quick, but it was a start. Now when I hear a proud parent brag how their child is so tech-smart because they "built their own computer", it turns out they're just buying gaming PC components from amazon or newegg and assembling them. Sure, they've learned *something* through the process, but they're a long way away
    from turning that knowledge into a career. When I was building
    computers, it was still just a lot of assembly work, but you still had
    to know how to use 'debug.exe' to invoke the expansion ROM firmware of
    a "Winchester" controller, know how to low-level format a drive, know
    the differences between MFM and RLL encoding, platters, tracks,
    cyclinders and clusters and why it might matter for the customer, etc. Chips and cables weren't "keyed" and you had to know where pin-1 was
    and why it mattered. Nowadays, all those details are abstracted away
    from the system builder. And the software stack is much higher now than back then, so the chances of one person knowing it all is even less likely, even when they do know enough to have a job in the field. I
    enjoy blowing the minds of youngsters when I'm able to demystify things and explain why things (in tech) are the way they are. But I also feel
    bad that they may not really retain the knowledge since they didn't
    "live it" and that could be a big handicap for the generation(s) taking over.

    And don't forget -

    1. Setting jumpers/dipswitches to select IRQs/ports/DMA for expansion
    cards. Had to be right or they wouldn't work.

    2. Juggling the order (and command line switches) for device drivers in autoexec.bat and config.sys for maximum free memory (via "loadhigh", "devicehigh", EMM, EMS, etc. (This assumes we're going all the way back
    to MSDOS days). ;-)

    3. Swapping out the UART chips on the MB (or expansion serial card) to
    use the high-speed 16550 UARTs, to properly use 19200/33600,56K modem
    speeds.

    4. On my first PC (a Kaypro PC), I upgraded the 8088 CPU to a VIC-20
    and it was a noticeable speed increase.

    5. Numerous tweaks to BIOS settings and hardware (math coprocessors,
    VESA-bus (?) video cards, and more, to try and squeeze out a little
    better performance from games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

    6. Massive, complicated batch files to run a mailer and BBS package for FidoNet. For me it was FrontDoor (and later Intermail) and PCBoard.
    LOTS of errorlevels and branches for mail/callers/doors/maintenance. I
    still have my masterpiece batch file that made it all work together.

    Ahhhhh - the good old days!! :-)





    ... I didn't know it was impossible when I did it.
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