Posted on 04/16/2024 7:29:03 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Growing up, I knew a guy who worked at an arcade.
He got so good at Asteroids, that he could walk away from the console to perform his work, and he'd start losing ships (obviously). He'd be away for 30 minutes or more, and STILL have ships available to play when he returned.
Impressive. I was never even remotely that good.
I have 2 portable GPS devices (now outdated)that I have used. The oldest one worked pretty well, but the newer, a Tom-Tom was possibly a superior device but never lived up to the promise of permanent updated map service. I worked & worked with this, but could never get it to update. Partly due to this, I don’t travel much anymore.
Interesting post.
Interesting story, and as an engineer, this would have been a amazing product to be involved in the development of.
Never worked with an 11/750. I did assist in the management of an 11/780 though.
Somehow, unerringly and for decades I made my way to drilling locations all across the country with nothing more than a legal description and a book of county road maps. The only change today is printing a map with the address spotted on it and I can drive anywhere I need to go. God help us all if the lights go out.
"My top score in 'Asteroids' is..."
I see you put some work into getting the article on here just right. Great job! Some cry there's too many non-political items posted, but I find a total input of it makes Jack a depressed boy.
I'm looking for the best console unit where the radio used to be in my 2000 Camry. Low price, a real volume button near the driver, high memory - which is a hard stat to find on these things.
I like having a Thomas Guide in the vehicle.
Great history article....
I worked with the VT100’s on a PDP 11/70. Not only did they have an excellent keyboard, but the editor on the 11/70 was called EDT. It was ahead of it’s time. So far ahead that the stuff we currently use is way behind.
You could write programs, scripts, whatever you wish to call it (they are all the same, as are all languages and all computers) within the editor that could perform amazing and normally time consuming tasks on your files. We had a terminal room with about 8 VT100’s in it and I would sit there are night after having done backups/file maintenance on the 11/70 and work on two database programs (in the INFORM db language, another amazing computer software that was lost to time) on two terminals at once.
The DEC manuals for the operating system ALSO was the best I have ever seen. Many of my documentation skills were based on those manuals and the methods used. Compare this to IBM or any other ‘manuals’ available today and it’s no contest.
It wasn’t just DEC that was superior. There were many companies with hardware and software that were superior. But as soon as the elite find out what ‘power’ that gives t he individual , those things are removed/destroyed.
How long have we put up with ‘computer voice technology’ that provide crappy sounding voices with improper enunciation of many of the simplest words?
Back when I worked with the PDP 11/70, I had to call in whenever I need a CE to come out and ‘fix’ it. One evening I called in to DEC and talked to a guy, told him the problem, got service arranged, thanked the guy, and then waited for the CE to show up.
When he did, I told him how nice it was talking to the customer service guy at DEC and how responsive he was and nice to talk to.
Then he told me. And floored me. He said, “that wasn’t a person, that was the VAX”. I argued with him and told him I have been in computers and I can tell a computer voice from a human’s voice. He insisted, and he was correct. That was FORTY YEARS AGO.
There used to be a program for PC browsers (Firefox anyway) that let you scan through GOOGLE IMAGES in an almost 3D arrangement where each image was like a playing card or like overlaid tiling of ‘windows’ and you were flying along past them, scanning them to pick out the one you wanted to view individually. TOO HELPFUL, TOO AMAZING. It no longer is allowed.
Speaking of FIREFOX, it has been reduced to a hulk of it’s former self. It had too many amazing ‘add-ons’ and Microsoft finally bought it out so they could cripple it and eventually eliminate it.
I have seen this over and over. There is good software and bad. There are good programmers and bad. I was a Senior Programmer/Analyst for a government agency and it was my job to take the slow/difficult to use programs and rewrite them to make them faster, more efficient, and have them do what the USER wanted and not what some nerd programmer thought was cool because it would baffle the end user.
One thing I found was that Consistency paid off the most. If you find a method or program that works, stick with it..
Apple was a good example of that methodology. The basics in all ‘apps’ was always the same. You didn’t have to learn the command for PRINT separately for each darn program.
Now we live in a world where the ‘users’ are used to having their whole world change with each new ‘update’. And each update removes more of the technical abilities for the user and puts the control in the hands of the vendor.
You are given 10 more ways to do the simple things while having 9 things you could do taken away.
The ‘menus’ on software for cell phones is beyond crazy. The most important functions are buried in multiple layers of menu with unrelated headings.
Sometimes it seems the reason for all this confusion (updates that radically change the ‘operating system’ or ‘settings procedures’) is to keep the user unhappy with their current device and be fighting to get the NEW version of whatever device or software.
We had technology 40 years ago that surpasses what we have available today and yet we have instead followed the path to a dumbed down society that is led along on a leash called a cell phone. Will we wake up ?
Thanks for letting me get some of this out my system. Even if no one ever reads it. I wouldn’t blame them. Too long and rambles on about the past. Probably explains why I’m not the King of planet Earth who rules over all with my vast knowledge and skills. Oh well.
BTW, Free Republic is also an example of IT IT WORKS, DON’T FIX IT. Best forum format I’ve ever used. Thank you Jim.
HAVE DRIVEN OVER A MILLION MILES in pst 68 years using ONLY maps.
NO THANKS.
Indeed. I have used other platforms (diqus, for example), and by comparison they suck.
On the operating system side, I agree that Microsoft in particular have made things worse. Much worse. Every release of Windows makes the system management tasks harder to find.
OTOH, some things are really improved. MS Office and Libre Office are huge improvements over what was available in our VAX 11/whatever days. They’re better than what was available in my Sun/SGI workstation days. MS Visual Studio (the paid for version) is excellent. The only beef I have with Solidworks is that it doesn’t run on Linux.
And then there’s the microcontroller and single board computer world ... there, these are the good old days.
“With that in mind, Stan decided to call his company Etak, which is a Polynesian term for moving navigational reference points”
I thought it was just “Kate” backwards.
What a great article. You wonder who the visionaries are today. Hopefully not just dystopian stuff.
I was mostly VAX 11/780 clusters and MicroVAX; had the latter at home for a while.
And STILL Android Auto is flaky with the mapping on my phone! (The slightest change anywhere, on the phone or the car’s firmware and I have to delete and recreate the whole setup). Although an Android guy, I admit that Car Play is more reliable (sometimes I take an old iPhone in the car just for the mapping).
Great article, thank you!
bookmark
I did! Early digital typesetters at that time (late eighties).
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