lakkal

I still have my CIS userid (76344, 2701) number burned into my brain, 25 years since my last login.

That's my story, too - learned about sine and cosine by playing around with plotting the results in Applesoft Basic. Wasn't until the following year that I learned what they're for in Trigonometry class.

I have a printout of a Pascal Othello/Reversi game I wrote in 1985 for a class, as well as some C and DCL stuff from 1986-1987. The oldest I still have online is some more C stuff from work in 1988.

Lucky you! I was in Salem, where DEC had some facilities (and in fact, I'm typing this from a building that used to be theirs), and the high school had 3 Apple ][+. They did get a Rainbow from DEC the year after I graduated. I know Pinkerton in Derry had a PDP of some variety.

And in the opposite direction, when a Russian MiG-25 was landed in Japan by a defecting pilot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25#Western_intelligence_an...

Back in the mid 1980s, I learned Pascal immediately before learning C, and to this day I (internally) pronounce C's -> operator as "up dot".

Someone (http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/theories/twinkies.htm) preserved an old Usenet post comparing Lembas to Twinkies:

From postings to rec.arts.books.tolkien by BThompson <williamt-aaaaaaat-lamar-dawt-colostate.edu>, dated 11 April and 18 September 1995.

Has anyone else noticed the apparent similarities between Lembas and Hostess Twinkies? Please consider the following:

1) Both are lightly-baked cakes with creme filling.

2) Both are hermetically-sealed in some type of wrapper (mallorn leaf for lembas and malleable plastic leaf for Twinkies).

3) Both will remain fresh if their wrapping remains unbroken (in fact, Twinkies are reputed to have a shelf-life of several million years either in or out of their wrapping).

Are lembas an early prototype for the modern-day Twinkies? Any and all comments are welcome.

I was listening to REO Speedwagon's 'Golden Country' just recently and thinking about how it's still relevant 46 years later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXseI1LAxbM

It's neat that this manual from 1980 actually has an author prominently attributed and "Personal Note from the Author".

I had an RX-80 that, that I loved, until it died in the same lightning storm that killed my Atari 800. I replaced it with a Panasonic, don't remember the model, but it was also a very good dot matrix printer.

I use this for file viewing and managing:

https://www.fileviewer.com/index.html

(the web page describes it as 'an all-purpose File Manager for Windows with a powerful inbuilt text file viewer')

Medications are usually dispensed in amber-colored vials and bottles (my Dad used to work for a company that manufactured them).

Also, amber used to be a common color (though maybe not as common as green, from my experience) for monochrome terminals and computer screens.

I still see the word used often enough that I don't think it should be declared dead quite yet...

And the space shuttle Enterprise is there now.

One day in Spring of 1983, I was a junior in high school, and the whole school was supposed to be gathered in the gym for some sort of pep rally or something. I and a fellow computer geek had absolutely no interest in this, so we spent the time walking around the empty halls talking about the programs we were working on (in 6502 machine language on the school's Apple ][+ machines). We ran into a teacher, who asked us why we weren't at the rally. We waved our diskette boxes (the badge of a computer geek at the time) at him and mumbled something to the effect of, "Oh, we're doing computer stuff", and he let us continue on our way rather than dragging us to the gym.

Same here, I'm typing this on a Model M, and have 4 in storage. That said, Everex keyboards from the early- to mid-90s had a really good feel to them, too.

I'm using a Dell mouse (can't tell what model) right now that has a relatively solid, weighty feel to it that I like. Just 2 buttons and a middle button/wheel.

I never made it to any of the developer conferences, but I remember the mood on the Fox forum on Compu$erve being very grim when the announcement was made. People joked about jumping out of windows...

I'm no fan of Access or VB, either. I do everything outside the main application in Python, too.

Nice. I'm almost 52 and still work on the FoxPro application I started working on in 1987, which was originally in dBase II, then moved to FoxBase+, then to FP DOS and now VFP. Now, 32 years later, it's finally being phased out - to move our data into an application written in RPG :-).

I worked for several months in Corbin, KY, the town with the restaurant/museum. I still occasionally wear the t-shirt I got there.

Sadly, I don't know (or remember) any more of the story than that, and she's not around anymore to ask... It doesn't seem likely that they would have gotten huge amounts of coal by doing it.

As a little girl during the Great Depression, my grandmother and her friends used to throw rocks at the engineers on trains, to provoke them into throwing pieces of coal back at them. They'd then take the coal home for warmth.

I'm really hoping they'll choose southern NH, where I live. You get most of the advantages of Boston, somewhat lower cost of living, and an opposite commute from what typically happens now. I'm not interested in working for Amazon and would like to leave the area, so it would make it easier to sell my house...

I thought it was neat that Esperanto was used in the books. I first learned of it in about 1980 from a book belonging to a friend's father, who was in the military. It was called 'Esperanto: The Aggressor Language", because it was used by the US Army in their training games.

I GM'd a game of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringeworthy where I had the UN exploration teams use Esperanto as a common language.

In about 1977, we had a TV with a remote control. Very often, sneezing would cause the channel to change. I think jingling a keychain would cause it to happen, too.

Route 128, "America's Technology Highway", is at the edge of the Greater Boston area. It would certainly have qualified as an 'economic center' back in its prime (through the 1980s at least).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_128#.22Ame...

This looks great! Is there any chance that it will work with MS SQL Server? Sadly (i.e. over my recommendations) my company uses it rather than PostgreSQL.

I had the lesser model of Mavica that I think could only take pictures in 640x480; at least, it seems like all of my pictures with it are 640x480. Not sure now whether it could do 800x600 or whether that was just the more expensive model.

My Dad's was also from the late 50s or early 60s, and was still in excellent and very usable condition in the mid-90s, when I unfortunately lost it :-(.

SIMH emulates a lot of things, including VAX. You used to be able to get a Hobbyist license for OpenVMS from HP. I'm not sure whether you still can.

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

I agree with all of this. I have very little patience or interest in the 'red tape' aspects of home-buying (and not a lot of practical home ownership knowledge), so having an agent who really knew what she was doing made things a lot easier for me, so much so that I used her when I bought my first house, then again a few years later when I sold that and got a new one.

My first exposure to a machine bigger than a 6502-based home computer was a Cyber at the University of Lowell (MA). Not sure the model number, ?600. In 1984 the freshman CS classes were in Pascal, on print terminals. I think my year was the last to use that machine; the following year it was replaced by a VAX 11/780 running VMS.

Someone posted a link to multicans.org a few years ago and I spent a few very good hours binge-reading everything on the site. Stories of those days are great to read.