[SoCoSA/discuss] www.meetup.com

[gandalf at sonic.net]

Memories....I remember borrowing the Apple ][e in the computer lab at SSU. It was in a room right next to the printout distribution boxes. Later on they got a IBM PC and a Mac512 in there. I used to go there to goof off and play Ulitima V, program stuff and do term papers. I remember the System Administrator Dick something who once took me and my friends on a tour of the computer room and showed us the line printer which was about the size of a VW bug and was basically a daisy wheel but with a wheel for each character spot on each line. It would print something like ten pages a second. 

They had banks of disk drives that looked like washing machines. The disks where in these huge plastic drums that would lock into the drive from above. He showed us all the neat ASCI animations he had collected. The PDP-11 was the new kid in town and was about the same size as one of the disk drives. The Cyber-40 was one entire corner and probably 1/4 of the room. 

I was in the EXCEL program and then the Upward Bound program both at SSU. I loved the campus and the duck pond. I remember I used to chat up a college student named Sandy on the message boards and she was terribly disappointed to find out that I was all of 13. I remember chatting with eliza and playing lunar lander (no graphics). I was learning Pascal and writing it in edline (yuck). I remember trying to write my own word processor, because that one sucked, never finished it, but it did turn out to be pretty involved. I think I stopped work when I found something better. 

I remember one of the books I was reading "Machine code for the 6502". When I later took assembly in high school it was quite a bit easier. I remember getting in trouble for crashing the Corvus 5meg harddrive at the high school when me and my buddy created a simple email system that turned into a file war. The objective was to write files to your buddy's account as fast as you could with multiple computers while you had defensive programs deleting the files that he was writing into your account. Then my buddy got the idea to put control characters into the file names so I was working on a defensive program and the department head kicked us out of the lab. Poor corvus wasn't designed for that much activity. Hmmm, I wonder if that was the very first spam. 

Hehehe, those were the good old days, playing emon and those infocom games. Tryign to get an Apple ][ to sound like an electric guitar. Lots of fun stuff. 

What was I talking about.....

(imagine a cute or dirty tagline here)

 On Thu 22/01/09 10:03 PM , "Steve S." northbaygeek at gmail.com sent:
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Eric Eisenhart  socosa.org> wrote:
> > Where *DO* geeks hang out in Sonoma County,
> anyways?
> Yeah.  What gandalf said.
> 
> More seriously...
> 
> I presume you mean, "where do I go to hang out, that I'll meet other
> geeks"?
> SSU computer lab, sometimes.  I've been known to... uh...
> "borrow"some facilities there, on occasion.  Can be tricky, that.
> 
> NBLUG meetings, of course.
> 
> Hardware geeks sometimes strike up a chat at that shop on southerly
> S.R. Ave... whose name has been erased by my encroaching senility...
> Ditto the "geek" departments at BB & CC stores.
> 
> Also look to non-computer geekinesses... there are "overlaps,"
> e.g.comics/manga/anime/rpgs/etc... more than their fair share of
> computer-geeks at such stores.  Wear a penguin or /. tshirt, maybe
> carry some very-computer-geeky-book (a well-worn copy of "UNIX
> POWERTOOLS") and you may get chatted up by another geek.
> 
> Coffee shops.  Geeks and caffeine, doncha know... Again, the
> computer-geeky-book is your friend, here!  Don't be too immersed in
> it, or it may seem rude to approach you.
> 
> 
> - Steve
> 
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