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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : age

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jirsoft

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Joined: 18/09/2020
Location: Czech Republic
Posts: 532
Posted: 01:58pm 26 Jan 2023
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53 soon...

Started with TI programmable calculators, then ZX Spctrum, C64, parallel to it Elliot and IQ151, later SGI, DEC Alpha, Macintoshes (from Quadra 900 to iMac today).
Today for fun CMM2, ESP8266+32, rPI and playing with ZX Spectrum, C64+C128, Mac Plus+SE+SE/30...
Jiri
Napoleon Commander and SimplEd for CMM2 (GitHub),  CMM2.fun
 
hitsware2

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Joined: 03/08/2019
Location: United States
Posts: 705
Posted: 02:25pm 26 Jan 2023
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79 ... Started with VIC-20
Now dabbling with RUBY because SONIC-PI is based on it .....
And PYTHON because it is so available on RASPBERRY PI ...
my site
 
jirsoft

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Joined: 18/09/2020
Location: Czech Republic
Posts: 532
Posted: 02:33pm 26 Jan 2023
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53 soon...

Started with TI programmable calculators, then ZX Spctrum, C64, parallel to it Elliot and IQ151, later SGI, DEC Alpha, Macintoshes (from Quadra 900 to iMac today).
Today for fun CMM2, ESP8266+32, rPI and playing with ZX Spectrum, C64+C128, Mac Plus+SE+SE/30...

I totally forgot BASIC+ARM programming on Acorn Archimedes A4000  
Jiri
Napoleon Commander and SimplEd for CMM2 (GitHub),  CMM2.fun
 
Mixtel90

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Joined: 05/10/2019
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 5648
Posted: 03:33pm 26 Jan 2023
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It's an age thing....   ;)
Mick

Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini
Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs
 
stanleyella

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Joined: 25/06/2022
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 1567
Posted: 04:01pm 26 Jan 2023
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I started with valve amplifiers too.

I had a quad as a teen... all there were
Now "valve sound" pre amps.. with blue leds under the valves
 
Mixtel90

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Joined: 05/10/2019
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 5648
Posted: 06:00pm 26 Jan 2023
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I've posted this pic a couple of times in the past. It's lovely though. :)
Headphone amp with paralleled ECC82 followed by a source-follower MOSFET output stage. Runs nice and warm, hence the spacers under the heatsinks. The circuit is "Starving Student" (modified to use the ECC82).

Mick

Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini
Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs
 
palcal

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Joined: 12/10/2011
Location: Australia
Posts: 1755
Posted: 07:11pm 26 Jan 2023
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I bought a so called valve preamp and found out the valves did nothing. It was solid state amp with blue leds under the valves that weren't connected.
"It is better to be ignorant and ask a stupid question than to be plain Stupid and not ask at all"
 
stanleyella

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Joined: 25/06/2022
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 1567
Posted: 08:27pm 26 Jan 2023
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  palcal said  I bought a so called valve preamp and found out the valves did nothing. It was solid state amp with blue leds under the valves that weren't connected.


Relevant statement in this fake everything market place.
my point was my tunes are mp3 and a valve preamp did nowt even if it is 2 triodes.
Analogue is so old... oh I forgot vga :)
I remember someone saying in the 80's when "hi fi" started.. "as long as it's got bass"
As I got older that thought means something, treble drops off... and you don't dance to treble anyway... imho :)
Dumped my vinyl player, and cd, cassette, dvd for digital storage.
I use wharfdale diamond iv speakers and sansui feed forward amp. annoy the neighbours bass.
It's connected to the tv which has a 2TB usb hd connected and optical out to a box that converts to phono. I select the file from a file named music and the tv remote selects the file to play. It's a sofa job and not how others play music and stuck with 42"TV with files on screen and can do nothing else.
 
Nimue

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Joined: 06/08/2020
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 367
Posted: 09:14pm 26 Jan 2023
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  hitsware2 said  SONIC-PI is based on it .....
And PYTHON because it is so available on RASPBERRY PI ...


Nice -- have used Sonic-PI in class to some "limited" success -- trouble is I'm not musical!!

N
Entropy is not what it used to be
 
palcal

Guru

Joined: 12/10/2011
Location: Australia
Posts: 1755
Posted: 09:19pm 26 Jan 2023
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Expensive equipment not much good to me, at 79 I've only got $2 ears
"It is better to be ignorant and ask a stupid question than to be plain Stupid and not ask at all"
 
CaptainBoing

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Joined: 07/09/2016
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 1983
Posted: 09:35pm 26 Jan 2023
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  palcal said   I've only got $2 ears


hah! I am banking that!
 
hitsware2

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Joined: 03/08/2019
Location: United States
Posts: 705
Posted: 11:07pm 26 Jan 2023
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  Nimue said  
Nice -- have used Sonic-PI in class to some "limited" success -- trouble is I'm not musical!!
N

Sonic-Pi has been a Godsend for me ....
( an example ) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x--qj6RKjo&t=51s


Strange that Ruby has never been mentioned here ...
( that I ' ve seen anyways )
my site
 
Rickard5

Guru

Joined: 31/03/2022
Location: United States
Posts: 328
Posted: 07:07am 27 Jan 2023
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I'M 54 and I Started on the Ohio Scientific Challenger 2 in the late 70's then on to AppleSoft Basic at school. the School I went to in upper Grade School / Jr. High School was Brand New at the time, and kinda Progressive for real Texas, Anyhow I tell this because being a late 70's progressive school, the schools were laid out in pods where there was a teacher "Resource" room surrounded by 5-6 class rooms. And in every Resource Room was an APPLE ][+ or //e. and I quickly figured out if I  got in just enough trouble IU'd get sent to the Resource Room where the Apple was, and if it looks like I was doing something "Educational" they left me alone
I turned the volume on the monitor to max and could hear sound. Thanks Stanleyella
 
Grogster

Admin Group

Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9030
Posted: 05:42am 28 Jan 2023
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@ Rickard5: Removed your duplicate post.
Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!
 
Paul_L
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Joined: 03/03/2016
Location: United States
Posts: 769
Posted: 01:15am 30 Jan 2023
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  PeterB said  G'Day Darth et al.

I'm not sure I was ever 56. Since I'm sure I started at about 0 and am now 85, simple maths indicates I went through 56 but I don't remember it.
PaulL is much younger than me so am I the oldest? What a dreadful thought.

Peter


Looks like I'm the second oldest among us geezers here. I'm a little younger than you Peter, I'm 83.

I grew up during WWII in New York City's Queens County. I began playing with computers at Cornell in the 1950s when I wrote the far jump resolution for an assembly language compiler for an IBM 1401 mainframe. I learned FORTRAN and COBOL when they first appeared. I met Grace Hopper in 1958 at Cornell.

I met John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmounth College in the 1960s and wrote some rudimentary code on their GE time sharing system at that time.

In the 1970s I avoided the Altair 8800 and the TRS-80 MODEL I because of their fragile interconnections between multiple cabinets, but when the one piece TRS-80 MODEL III showed up I bought several. I wrote a suite of MODEL III accounting programs for my wife's NYC CPA firm using the DOS PLUS MODEL III basic language.

All of this was a sideline for me. Beginning in 1959 I was really working on keeping the communication and navigation equipment working for Pan Am. My first job was to make an automatic antenna tuner work with a variable length transmit antenna wire trailing behind a DC6 aircraft in flight. I stayed with Pan Am until they closed down in 1991.

Since then I rebuilt tugboats in Texas, designed radio stations, recording studios and fooled around with geothermal heating and cooling heat pumps.

There is an unlimited reservoir of low density heat available just a few feet underground which drifts up from the molten iron and nickel core of the earth below the crust which can be tapped easily at a depth of less than 10 feet below the surface. This heat source could easily heat almost all of our buildings worldwide.

The rampant stupidity of the human race is appalling. Burning oil and natural gas in order to heat buildings is asinine!

Paul in NY
 
NPHighview

Senior Member

Joined: 02/09/2020
Location: United States
Posts: 187
Posted: 03:12am 30 Jan 2023
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Creeping up on 67 this August.

First real exposure to math at Chicago's Adler Planetarium "Astro-Science Workshop" as a senior in high school. Algorithms to calculate stellar interior temperatures by depth, as difference equations, for fusion thermodynamics.

My first exposure to BASIC was at DePaul University (Chicago) in 1973 as a freshman. The university had an HP timesharing system (ASR-33 terminals on 110 baud modems), and the Physics department had, I believe, HP 9815 and HP 9825 desktop "calculators". I wrote FFT, polynomial least-squares, and orbital dynamics algorithms in BASIC for the physics profs, which got me a job and a tuition waiver :-) for the rest of my undergrad years. Picked up my first (of many) HP calculator (HP-35) while an undergrad - thanks, parents!

As a summer student, I assembled (from components in shipping crates) an HP 2116 data acquisition computer for Argonne National Laboratory's Core Components Test Loop for Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors during the summer of 1976, and demonstrated its functionality running TREK73 on their BASIC booted from the front panel and spools of paper tape. This job got me a surplus cabinet and power supply for my first computer kit, a Digital Group Z-80 machine with an astounding 2Kbytes of memory.

During grad school at Ohio State University, I moved to Z80 and PDP-11 assembler for home and thesis projects, respectively. I can still remember the JUMP and CALL opcodes for each. I taught FORTRAN (yuck!) to business students as part of my responsibilities.

First full-time, real-world job was at Bell Labs, doing C programming on Columbus Branch ("CB-") Unix, using brand-spanking-new VT-100 terminals and the vi editor. Architected the fault-tolerant maintenance backbone of a geographically-distributed phone admin system.

Second job was coding PL/M on a multiprocessor 8085-based medical device, then medical algorithm development (back in BASIC) on an HP-9845 color desktop computer. That's a peak BASIC experience, for sure.

Lots and lots of C coding over the years in DOS, Windows, Unix/Solaris/Linux and varieties of RTOS. Pretty much all subject to very stringent software quality for patient safety for everything from dosing algorithms, ultrasound imaging, to drug autoinjectors that phone home.

Visual BASIC 6.0 (still my favorite Microsoft BASIC product) for automotive diagnostic development, developing primitive (mid-1990s, patented) AI routines later re-implemented in C.

Decades pass, covering SQL, C++, Objective C, C#, Haskell, F#, ..., again, requiring very stringent software quality for patient safety, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc. mostly in the Pharma industry

Retirement!

Color Maximite (sorry, "Colour") appears, and I fall in love with BASIC once again.
Edited 2023-01-30 13:25 by NPHighview
Live in the Future. It's Just Starting Now!
 
ElectroPI
Newbie

Joined: 27/04/2012
Location: Australia
Posts: 12
Posted: 10:26am 30 Jan 2023
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Started uni in 1974 and the computer we used was the Univac 1106. We programmed in FORTRAN and I still have my first program (formula to solve a quadratic equation) written on punched cards. We'd type (punch) the cards in the morning, slip an elastic band around to hold them together and place in the 'in' box. Sometime after lunch we'd check the pigeon holes to see if our cards and printout had gone through the computer. They had but there was an error so we'd re-punch the card(s) at fault, place back in the 'in' box and in the afternoon check again. If we were lucky we could get up to 3 runs through the computer in a day but usually it was 2.

Sometime in 1976 our computer lecturer received a National Semiconductor SC/MP II evaluation kit, the first time I had seen a microprocessor. We connected to its serial port using a VDU.
BTW for those who might be interested there's a great pdf available from the raspi site called "The Computers That Made Britain". Great reading!!
https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/books/computers-that-made-britain
 
toml_12953
Guru

Joined: 13/02/2015
Location: United States
Posts: 323
Posted: 02:43pm 30 Jan 2023
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  palcal said  Expensive equipment not much good to me, at 79 I've only got $2 ears


A buck an ear?

You're a pirate, right? (buccaneer)
 
JohnS
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Joined: 18/11/2011
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 3641
Posted: 03:49pm 30 Jan 2023
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  ElectroPI said  BTW for those who might be interested there's a great pdf available from the raspi site called "The Computers That Made Britain". Great reading!!
https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/books/computers-that-made-britain

Ooh, thanks for that!

(goes to download, opens file...)

OMG nearly 300 pages, time just vanished.

John
 
lizby
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Joined: 17/05/2016
Location: United States
Posts: 2989
Posted: 05:36pm 30 Jan 2023
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  NPHighview said  taught FORTRAN (yuck!) to business students

And here I thought I might be the only one here with experience with that language for business use. I worked for a company which had a FORTRAN system for tracking trouble calls for New England Telephone.

A decade later I had a need to make a 1 megabyte plus byte-addressable text file which would fit in the memory of a IBM 370/something mainframe. FORTRAN was the only higher level language available which could do it. I built a 90+ page report of every vote a class of Senators had been available to vote on, sorted by category (Defense, Public Works, etc.) with brief description. Then I plugged in a Senator's Yea/Nay/Absent vote, printed the report, and then plugged in the next Senator's vote and printed--nearly 30 years of votes for some Senators.

The report could only run at night because that was the only time that much memory was available. It took a couple of minutes to build the report, and a minute to print each individualized report for all the Senators in that class (e.g., first elected in 1962). Then build another report for the next class and repeat.

Prior to that, books had been printed for single years, without the vote type indicated, and an intern for each Senator had to go through and fill in the votes. One Senator was known for keeping boxes of these books in the trunk of his car, and handing them out to anyone who asked.
PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on fruitoftheshed
 
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