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I can remember when the first video arcade game hit the local bowling alley. It was Pong. Before it came, it was all pinball machines. We kids began to stand in line to play it. To look at that game from today's perspective, it's hard to understand how we could have been so fascinated with a black CRT with 2 white bars and a little white square, but we were. Man I fed that thing a LOT of quarters.
oops, double post
That, and any command that includes "Regular Expressions". That's why those who've mastered it are called "Wizards"! 8-o
When issueing a sophisticated "find" or "sed" command or a complex "vi" command or a five segment pipe it's called "casting a spell". Great fun to do at lightning speed while a new initiate looks over your shoulder. (*wicked*) If you do it in the dark and look carefully you might even see sparks fly from your fingers. (*snicker*).
That, and any command that includes "Regular Expressions". That's why those who've mastered it are called "Wizards"! 8-o
When issueing a sophisticated "find" or "sed" command or a complex "vi" command or a five segment pipe it's called "casting a spell". Great fun to do at lightning speed while a new initiate looks over your shoulder. (*wicked*) If you do it in the dark and look carefully you might even see sparks fly from your fingers. (*snicker*).
I once had sparks fly from my fingers, then the magic smoke came out of the computer :(
That, and any command that includes "Regular Expressions". That's why those who've mastered it are called "Wizards"! 8-o
How to say anything without saying anything:
[-a-zA-Z0-9,.;:"'!()]*
I once had sparks fly from my fingers, then the magic smoke came out of the computer :(
I must have at one time fouled up a spell. During the mid 80s I was computer analyst for a research laboratory at the Mitre Corporation outside of Washington DC. The laboratory had it's own computer room at one end of the lab behind large glass windows. The computers were rack mounted in 5 and 6 foot tall racks. I happened to look down the lab into the computer room and saw flame roaring out of the top grill of the rack like a blowtorch because of the forced ventilation from the raised floor. One of the hard drive control cards had burst into flames. A few days later we got a recall notice from the hard drive company warning that the card might get hot. 8-o
We let a LOT of magic smoke out the chips that day!
Remember, professional computers in the 80s were still big iron. Disk drives were 300 Megabyte,100 pound monsters housed in separate racks, and the CPU chassis circuit cards were all at least twice the size of a modern PC large motherboard, and they were covered with chips! Not like the half dozen megachips that comprise a motherboard today. A device controller was a separate board covered in (apparently flamable) chips. Today a controller is implemented by a single megachip or the corner of an even denser super megachip.
One quote I like repeating, but can't remember where it's from is that there are more transistors in your cell phone than EVER went to the Moon. :gulp:
Did a lot of work with Apollo computers in the old days. The early ones had 14" disk drives housed in a cast Aluminum housing that looked like a thermonuclear device. They were 70MB or 140MB, IIRC. The drives had MANUAL locks on the spindle and the head arms. One day, somebody in the Marketing dept. turned on an Apollo without unlocking the drive (poof!). The early Apollos also had 8" floppy drives of 1.2MB capacity. Loading a major software update was quite a chore...
That, and any command that includes "Regular Expressions". That's why those who've mastered it are called "Wizards"! 8-o
When issueing a sophisticated "find" or "sed" command or a complex "vi" command or a five segment pipe it's called "casting a spell". Great fun to do at lightning speed while a new initiate looks over your shoulder. (*wicked*) If you do it in the dark and look carefully you might even see sparks fly from your fingers. (*snicker*).
And Perl is often described as the only programming language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption. :lol: If you know exactly what the following snippet does, you have my sincere condolences...
for ($i = 0;$i < $spec;$i++) {
$rest[$i] += 4294967296 if ($rest[$i] < 0);
}
$data = pack "N$spec",@rest;
TRS-80 model I had no hard drives or floppies. It also had no operating system. Every program had to fit completely in memory and access all the hardware directly. The programs were loaded via an audio cassette.
My very first computer (sometime before 1965) was this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I
I had the original plastic one. I could follow the instruction book and with some trouble (the "clock" mechanism was clunky and didn't always work smoothly) could get it to count up or count down and all the other "or", "and", "add", etc. operations. But I really didn't understand it at all. However, I kept it for probably 20 years, and at one time it sat on top of my computer rack in the Launch Control Center at the Kennedy Space Center. And I even think I had it on the computer racks at The Mitre Corporation for a while.
I eventually threw it away after all the special sized little rubber bands disintegrated and the white plastic yellowed and some of the parts broke. Yeah, it was clunky and sometimes would give wrong answers unless you hit it in the right spot. However, like all computers it worked exactly as designed to do when "off". It just sat there looking cool!