D.O.S

When our robot masters implement Agenda 21, .

Some place around here I have several books on it to code.

First computer I had was a Commodore 64 should have kept it they worth more today than I paid.

Like many of you here I served in the military. For me it was 81 thru 87 in the Navy. I was a Crypto Tech and maintained all manner of communications gear, multiplexers, encryption and decryption systems as well as computer systems. D.E.C., Burroughs, IBM , Wang and countless others.

The one system that sticks out in my mind was an old Burroughs system we used. I seem to recall that it used a 64 bit parallel shift processor and besides having the old reel to reel, Drum and multi-platter disc drives (about the size of a washing machine)it's buffer (or RAM) was Core Memory. The system had 100 racks each with 16 trays. Each tray had 1,000 tiny magnetic donuts (about the size of the tiny beads kids make bracelets with). As many of you know each one of these beads was 1 bit of information. So, each rack had 16K of ram. Which means the entire center had 1.6 Meg of ram.

This means that a simple iphone like my current 16gig 5s has about 10,000 times as much memory as this old system had ram.


I for one love technology. If it weren't for the incredible advances made in tech none of us would likely know each other. I would most likely still just have the one pipe and the one pouch of tobacco. Not to mention the fact that I wouldn't have been able to work from home or been able to have flown my plane for business as easily as I did utilizing moving map geo-referencing gps navigation.

As I sit here I'm looking at my schedule for next week, on my iphone, watching Jay Leno's garage on youtube over the internet on my television via Roku. (We haven't had cable or dish for over 3 years, stream everything through Roku's) and talkin with you all on my laptop, connected wirelessly to an internet connection that downloads information to my router @ Three Hundred Megabits Per Second (300mbps). That I pay for online using either the "Bill Pay" feature from my bank or on the website of the actual service provider.

And while doing all of this I'm smoking Rimboche S.J. in a beautiful Dunhill Rootbriar Pot, both of which I purchased over the internet using paypal.


So, yeah, for me, I'm much happier with the convenience technology has brought us, as well as the freedom.

They still make those. Just don't buy consoles. My favorite current sub game is Silent Hunter III (it's better than IV or V), and you still get to plot your solution if you want. Graphics a bit better than DOS I remember when I noticed the stars were correct when I saw Orion.

I have a 747 page book called Flight Simulator X for Real World Pilots. Takes you through all the book learning, from flying the traffic pattern in a Piper Cub, to commercial flying in the big jets. Lockheed Martin uses a proprietary version of FSX it uses for real flight training, called Prepar3d.

Real computer games are still out there, just not on the damn Nintendos and XBoxes.

An example from my FSX book: practicing an instrument approach to YKM in Yakima, WA:

Anyone know a good bowling game for Android?..I tried a bunch of them.I didn't like any of them.

Hey if you miss it www.dosbox.com/ . I think Windows 10 Insider 1703 is a bit better program . I remember working with DOS 3.0 on a IBM 286 feel the power desktop .

I started out with a Timex Sinclair. I started taking classes in 1987,and I worked for several companies setting up desktop publishing departments for printing companies, then selling Apple products, etc. Network Administrator at 3 companies, tried my own business, and ended up with a payroll company that had one server running Netware 3.1 for DOS clients. 18 years later I retired from there and 60 virtual servers. This is the first hurricane season I can relax and only worry about my own house getting damaged and not about the 400k client paychecks going out.