Time to retire the name.
I've been using the "handle" "Eisboch" since my early days on the net back
in 1989 or '90. I had a super modern 286 computer, 13mhz clock speed and a
huge hard drive with 20 mbytes of storage space. It ran on DOS with a
pre-MSWindows software suite called "GeoWorks". GeoWorks actually had a
windows type format and even included a word processing program called
"GeoWrite". I signed onto an internet access through Prodigy and was
heavily involved in some of the midi sequencing groups and "chat" rooms.
You had to have a screen name, so I became "Eisboch" because I happened to
be drinking a Coors Eisboch blend that night.Anyway, it's time to retire the handle. Mrs.E thinks it's stupid, and I am
getting kind of tired of it anyway. From now on I shall be known as ...... "Sam Adams" Just kidding. RCE |
Eisboch
Jan 26
2006
|
| Procomm ? |
jabadoodle
Jan 28
|
| Tom,
I didn't know anyone who was in the math club. Did you have a pocket
protector and a slide rule strapped to your belt? ; ) Up till the early 70's all the Engineer Students kept a slide rule on
their belt, and most had a slide rule.
|
Reggie
Jan 27
|
| Analog or digital? I remember when Heathkit was selling an analog computer kit sometime
back in the early 60s. |
Wayne.B
Jan 27
|
| analog. it actually was a very old Navy gunnery targeting computer
that they were experimenting with. >I remember when Heathkit was selling an analog computer kit sometime
>back in the early 60s. i remember that. my fondest memories of heathkit though were the
lunchbox 5 watt transcievers. i built a ten meter one and my very
first dx as a general was a dl5 off an eleven meter whip on a vw van
that my boss at the tv store used to deliver and pickup tv sets in. i was so excited, i damn near couldn't talk. |
Shortwave
Jan 28
|
| It's hard to reply when you've been humbled by a star!!!!!! |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
| The first that I ever saw of a computer's ability to talk to another
computer was at my brother's college. He took me to see a computer
(took most of a room), that he could magically ( to me) type in some
code, and another computer at Cornell would print out a dot matrix
picture of a Playboy centerfold. If you looked at it long enough, you
could figure out what it was! |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
| I did a lot of cad work on a 286 with a 12 mhz processor. When Autocad
came out, I was right there, and then you needed a math coprocessor.
Autocad ran under DOS long after windows became popular. I think
release 10 or 11 was the first to truly run under windows. |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
| Yeah, right...
--
'Til next time, John H ***** Have a Spectacular Day! *****
|
JohnH
Jan 27
|
| i was in the math club in high school - '62/63 - and one of our
projects was to help program the mainframe at sylvania in danvers, ma. with telephone jacks. and ladders. and vacuum tubes. |
Shortwave
Jan 27
|
| Depends on which side of the two lane blacktop he happens to be
staggering along. Left ditch...right ditch..?
That farm runoff can be dangerous. |
Don
Jan 27
|
| My guess is that Snipper is still dragging that old Bayliner around out
there. |
Harry
Jan 27
|
| Punched cards were hi tech. I started on punched paper tape with no
real editing capability. We had this huge clunky machine called a
Burroughs Flexowriter with a keyboard which punched the tape. The
computer was a Control Data 160A, as big as a desk, 4K of memory and
it cost about $80K circa 1967. To compile and run a Fortran program
it was first necessary to read the tape with the boot loader, then the
tape with the Fortran compiler, followed by the source code tape
(twice), and finally it would spit out a new tape with the object code
on it. At that point you were ready to re-boot and test your program. |
Wayne.B
Jan 27
|
| I'm kind of remembering that it was something like "Telnet" although
that may not be exactly correct. If you didn't have a Compuserve
local number, you could dial into their network and then log onto a
pass through connection to somewhere else. It was very hi tech in the
late 70s, early 80s. |
Wayne.B
Jan 27
|
| Behind his old John Deere tractor? |
Don
Jan 27
|
| Thanks, Bill. I think I'll pass on the generous offer. My wife is an RN so
our home is filled with pads of paper from pharmaceutical vendors. |
Bryan
Jan 27
|
| I remember punched tape. In 1973, I worked for a land company that
purchased a computer to keep track of the accounting of property owner's
installment contracts. The computer was made by Singer, of all things. The
program was loaded via punched tape,and the individual property owner
records were on large heavy paper ledger cards. Each ledger card had a
magnetic strip along the long side, retaining the data for each account.
Account activity was also printed on the ledger card by a dot matrix
printer. The same device read and wrote the mag strip and printed the
activity on the card. Presumably the individual account data needed to be
stored on the ledger cards because the computer itself didn't have the
storage capability to do it. At the same time I was taking a Fortran class in college. I would type code
into a teletype machine and then sometime later go to the computer center to
retrieve a stack of punch cards. The punch cards would then be loaded into
the computer and the program compiled and run and a printout delivered.
Only to find a typo on line 32. Arrrgh! Start over. |
RG
Jan 27
|
| BTW, bassie, did I tell you I loved NASA's World Wind? Great program.
--
'Til next time, John H ***** Have a Spectacular Day! *****
|
JohnH
Jan 27
|
| you guys remember the early days of tcp/ip when you had to type in the
entire path to move a message from one part of the state to the other? i can remember staying up nights making and probing open connections
from pc to pc thinking what a big deal it was to find a route to nyc,
then omaha and finally ca!!! those were the days man, good times, good times. |
Shortwave
Jan 27
|
| Yeah, that is a cool one! |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
| Oh, and I can't wait till someone's birthday comes up.... thanks! |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
| GEnie? |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
| My very first computer was a Sinclair, you hooked it to the T.V. It
only had internal memory, no drive, so if you wrote a simple basic
program with it, you had to re-enter it if you turned it off. |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
|
Just *how* old are you, anyway? Methinks maybe you were Al Gore's mentor.
You did it, he just took credit for the invention. RCE |
RCE
Jan 27
|
| Little black miniature keyboard with plugs on the back? Yep. Had one of
those too.
In fact, it's dawning on me that my whole life has been a series of gadgets
with wires. No wonder Mrs.E likes horses. RCE |
RCE
Jan 27
|
| You're welcome! Hell, I sent one to you and to Chuck, but hadn't heard
anything. I figured I'd get a lot of complaints about the caterwauling',
but then I figured y'all didn't get the emails.
--
'Til next time, John H ***** Have a Spectacular Day! *****
|
JohnH
Jan 27
|
| I think he just got on the internet before we did. |
Wayne.B
Jan 27
|
| Exactly! The wire you hooked to the TV had a slide switch on it, to
switch between channels 2 and 3, in case you received one, you'd slide
the switch to the other! |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
| I think I still have my 300 BAUD modem somewhere in my collection of "No, I
will not throw it away. It's still useful! stuff. I went hog wild when I
upgraded (that word didn't exist at the time) to my US Robotics 2400 BAUD
modem! When I did that I was able to view gifs; one a day. |
Bryan
Jan 27
|
| Then I should be "MacTarnahan" |
-rick-
Jan 26
|
| I started out on the Internet with a DEC PDP. Probably an 11/05 but maybe
an 11/34. Still have a great spicy peanut noodle recipe printed on dot
matrix printer. When it was a text only world. Except for ascii art. |
Calif
Jan 27
|
| TI-99. I think it is still in the gargage. Had the best game for kids.
Alpiner. My daughters loved that game. Tandy had one of the best early
PC's. Had the much superior Motorola 68000 and ran SCO Unix. I think it
was the 16B. We used it to develop a multi computer hook up disk subsystem
with 8 megabytes of Cache. When 8 Megs cost a couple of thousand dollars. |
Calif
Jan 27
|
| I forgot all about dot matrix printers. I realized the other day that my
kids have no idea about the punch cards! |
Bryan
Jan 27
|
| You want some. I still got a couple of thousand. We use them for note
cards by the phone. No holes in them. |
Calif
Jan 27
|
| Oh, man ... I have a hazy remembrance of that, but forget the name or
details. It was some bizarre way to get your computer hooked up ... It
will come to me. RCE |
RCE
Jan 27
|
| Believe it or not, I was still using Windows 3.0 up to about 1997 when it
finally just wouldn't run any of the newer software. I also had (should
have kept) the original Flight Simulator program. It came on a 5 1/4 inch
floppy disk and the "airplane" was represented by a simple cursor cross.
All the land representations were crude stick drawings. I spent hours
"flying" to exotic places like Derby, Kansas. The infamous 386 chip really burned a lot of people. The 486 was just about
ready for release but they dumped the 386 on the market just to keep up with
Apple. RCE |
RCE
Jan 27
|
| All these beers to try and so little time... Actually, I've always enjoyed the stronger brews but, alas, the beer
drinking days are just about over. Love the taste, but it no longer loves
me. Never acquired a taste for the hard stuff. Looks like it's now an
occasional wine. Starbucks Coffee Liquor with milk and ice ain't bad. RCE |
RCE
Jan 27
|
| That was it - a TI-99. Best thing about it was that you had to learn how to
write stuff in Basic, although I think it was called "TI-Basic". I
remember doing the examples from the manual - the little stick figure that
walked around and the program that was supposed to emit ultrasonic
frequencies to keep mice away. I kept looking at the dog to see if he
noticed. He didn't. My oldest son (now 32 yo) was about 4 or 5 at the time. He decided to drop
a dime into one of the air vents on the TI-99 and it went up in smoke. RCE |
RCE
Jan 27
|
| Man...GeoWorks.....THAT brings back memories! It was the first
graphical interface I used. I was anti-windows, because anything
graphical like that slowed my computer down too much. Besides that,
most programs at that time were still DOS based. Oh, I had prodigy,
also! I remember a guy I was going to school with bought a 386 that ran
at 20Mhz. I thought he was the cat's ass with that thing... I was SO
jealous! Oh, and remember, to get any real speed out of them, you had
to add a math coprocesser!! |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
| Skipper, which coast are YOU on? |
atl_man2
Jan 27
|
| Unlikely. The former Eisboch keeps the bottoms of his trousers rolled. |
Harry
Jan 26
|
| Suitable for an East Coaster. --
Skipper |
Skipper
Jan 26
|
| Let us go then , you and I ,
while the ethernet is spread across the sky .
Like a patient etherised upon a table.
T1, ISDN - 56Megabits per second -
the slow yellow vapor of twisted duplex cable
that connect you from I and me and this.
Let's chat a while
about Marx - Karl or Groucho? RCE |
RCE
Jan 26
|
| Please...this is the anti-literate rec.boats newsgroup. You are likely
to start a fight...go eat a peach. |
Harry
Jan 26
|
| Damn. Just when it was getting good. RCE |
RCE
Jan 26
|
| Are you ... Skipper A
or
Skipper B ? whomever you may be RCE |
RCE
Jan 26
|
| I didn't know you were an Allman Brothers fan. DSK |
DSK
Jan 26
|
| Harry's former handle was "Hoochie Coochie Man" RCE |
RCE
Jan 26
|
| Nice to meet you, Mr. RCE.
You started with one of them fancy high-powered 286's of which I could only
dream! I started with the 8086 xt and a 20, yes 20, MB HDD. I loved my
DOS; I didn't understand why people needed all that Mac and Windows
nonsense. DOS: just tell your computer what to do and it did it! Simple as
that. Remember when the excitement of opening a gif meant starting the
process and coming back after dinner to see if the gif had finished filling
in all the pixels? I actually started with an Apple (was it IIC?),
encountered a mac in grad school, and switched to the DOS world when I
couldn't find a mac program that could handle the graphical representation
(believe it or not) of my lab data. Boy that was a long time ago! |
Bryan
Jan 27
|
| Among others. |
Harry
Jan 26
|
| I KNEW IT!!! caps is hard to do with one hand. |
Shortwave
Jan 27
|
| >From now on I shall be known as ...... you may now call me galactic overlord - his imperial highness teafran. |
Shortwave
Jan 27
|
| It is. My super fast "Pal" 286 even ran CADD 1, an early cad design
program. CADD was developed through version 6 as a DOS only program then was
bought out by Autodesk (Autocad). CADD was recently re-introduced in a
Windows version and I just downloaded a copy. It's like old times. The Pal had a normal clock speed of 8 mhz, but had a "turbo" button that,
when pushed, took it to a lightning fast 13 mhz. RCE |
RCE
Jan 26
|
| oh crap, here we go. i built an altair 8080 which, well wasn't the neatest thing on the
block, but it worked - i did some rudimentary switching with the
thing. then i went to work for small time mini-computer company and
had my run of minis until about '79 when i bought an apple ii. then
an apple iie. then a vic 20, commodore 64 and into the pc world from
there building my own until five years ago when it became a silly
quest to roll your own when you could buy for less than you could
build. |
Shortwave
Jan 27
|
| over the years i have had more than 200 handles some of which were
directly related to having some fun. and no, im not telling what they were. |
Shortwave
Jan 27
|
| RCE,
Who the hell are you anyway?
|
Reggie
Jan 26
|
| Had Commodore 64 for a while - replaced my first computer - A Texas
Instruments TI-1 or something like that. It didn't have a disk drive - had
16k of memory - and you saved your programs to a cheap Radio Shack reel to
reel tape recorder. In our business, we built a fully automatic vapor deposition coating system
using a Tandy Trash 80. I still shutter when I think about it. Eisb ..... ooops ... RCE |
RCE
Jan 26
|
| What an earful of familiar names. We've come a long way. Or have we? |
Bryan
Jan 27
|
| Just a figment of your cyber imagination, 'tis all .... RCE |
RCE
Jan 26
|
| Is that pronounced AR'- see, or Ar-SEE' ?
--
'Til next time, John H ***** Have a Spectacular Day! *****
|
JohnH
Jan 26
|
| Arse, see...as in horses. --
Skipper |
Skipper
Jan 26
|
| I'll be darned, always thought it was a play on "ice box" for some
reason. You certainly brought back a few memories with mention of Prodigy and
MIDI. IBM/Prodigy squandered almost as many opportunities as DEC did
with AltaVista. And then there is always Compuserve of course, who
thought they knew it all until they didn't. I had a Compuserve account back in the early 80s when 300 baud was
high speed and acoustical couplers were high tech. :-) What was the name of the network utility that you could use to connect
with Compuserve? That was my first inkling that some sort of
universal connectivity might someday be possible. |
Wayne.B
Jan 26
|
| Uhhhhhh, no. |
Wayne.B
Jan 26
|
| Started with a VIC 20, then upgraded to a C-64 the day they hit town. Hot
stuff. But not nearly as hot as the next trade up to an Amiga. The Amiga
was way ahead of its time, but unfortunately was a Commodore product and
therefore doomed in the marketplace. Commodore, from a marketing
perspective, had the unfailing ability to screw up a one car funeral.
Finally switched to a 386 PC running Windows 3.0 in 1990 I think. |
RG
Jan 26
|
| ah - well we can take care of that little problem. just watch our for the black helicopters. |
Shortwave
Jan 27
|
| I am glad my latest post (ping: Eisboch) brought you to your
senses..although it is a pretty cool and unique handle. ;-) |
Jan 26
|
| From now on, your new name is J. Alfred Prufrock. |
Harry
Jan 26
|
| I like it! I like it! J. Alfred Prufrock. Sorta has a ring to it, ya' know? Hmmmm..... Think old T.S. would be pissed? RCE |
RCE
Jan 26
|
