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Back in MY day...
Jan. 18th, 2023 11:27 amWhen I first move to the lower mainland back in the 80s, I hadn't a friend to my name in my new location. My folks had let me move back in with them to give me a chance to get back on my feet, and Dad took a copy of my resume in to the office to see if he could at least get me some summer work at the Railway. That summer job lasted 31+ years.
The point is that I had no friends, but around that time I bought my first Amiga, and later got my hands on a 1200 bps modem. I did what any 20-something person who was new to dial-up would do at the time, and got my hands on a blurry, multi-generational photocopy of local BBS numbers. I went through the list, crossing out entries where confused people would pick up the phone at the other end, and made note of the numbers that actually connected me to something interesting. "Interesting" as in not being like 90% of the BBSs back then that were running the same software, with essentially the same dead forums, and same one-player games.
One of the numbers that worked was for the BBS belonging to the local computer club. Yes, those were a thing. That one seemed to be a pretty active and friendly BBS, and I got to chatting with some of the members. I learned that one of the members of the club lived a couple of blocks over from me, and that we both had an impressive library of Star Trek novels. Naturally we arranged to meet in person so that we could compare titles and swap books. One thing led to another, and he ended up pulling me into joining the local computer club (where I subsequently became their Amiga software librarian - but that's another story).
The club was an eclectic mix of folks of all ages and OSs. While a lot of the activity in the club involved helping computer newbies to get past the initial learning stages, we would also bring in our personal computers to show off the geeky and nerdy things that we did in our spare time.
There was this one older guy in the club - probably a few years advanced from where I am now - who was one of our MS DOS users. He didn't have much use for the Macs and Amigas, but if you wanted to see a gleam in his eye, all you had to do was ask about his latest antics in Lotus 1.2.3. Honestly, I found it all to be kind of boring and quaint, but I indulged him with the usual long-suffering patience of somebody who regarded the other as something of a computer dinosaur.
I was working on a report for work yesterday that required historical, daily metrics that were built around the calendar date and not the reporting date. In a similar situation, I'd managed to derive a calendar from the report data itself, but it was not a particularly elegant solution. Yesterday, I managed to figure out the logic to recursively build a base calendar of arbitrary length without touching any of the source tables. I thought, "This is so cool, and so elegant. I need to show somebody!"
Then it occurred to me that I am, and will always be the only person who actually cares about this.
I've become that old guy who gets excited over Lotus 1.2.3. scripts.
In retrospect, the stuff he was doing actually was interesting, and I wish I'd been a bit more attentive and sympathetic back in the day.
The point is that I had no friends, but around that time I bought my first Amiga, and later got my hands on a 1200 bps modem. I did what any 20-something person who was new to dial-up would do at the time, and got my hands on a blurry, multi-generational photocopy of local BBS numbers. I went through the list, crossing out entries where confused people would pick up the phone at the other end, and made note of the numbers that actually connected me to something interesting. "Interesting" as in not being like 90% of the BBSs back then that were running the same software, with essentially the same dead forums, and same one-player games.
One of the numbers that worked was for the BBS belonging to the local computer club. Yes, those were a thing. That one seemed to be a pretty active and friendly BBS, and I got to chatting with some of the members. I learned that one of the members of the club lived a couple of blocks over from me, and that we both had an impressive library of Star Trek novels. Naturally we arranged to meet in person so that we could compare titles and swap books. One thing led to another, and he ended up pulling me into joining the local computer club (where I subsequently became their Amiga software librarian - but that's another story).
The club was an eclectic mix of folks of all ages and OSs. While a lot of the activity in the club involved helping computer newbies to get past the initial learning stages, we would also bring in our personal computers to show off the geeky and nerdy things that we did in our spare time.
There was this one older guy in the club - probably a few years advanced from where I am now - who was one of our MS DOS users. He didn't have much use for the Macs and Amigas, but if you wanted to see a gleam in his eye, all you had to do was ask about his latest antics in Lotus 1.2.3. Honestly, I found it all to be kind of boring and quaint, but I indulged him with the usual long-suffering patience of somebody who regarded the other as something of a computer dinosaur.
I was working on a report for work yesterday that required historical, daily metrics that were built around the calendar date and not the reporting date. In a similar situation, I'd managed to derive a calendar from the report data itself, but it was not a particularly elegant solution. Yesterday, I managed to figure out the logic to recursively build a base calendar of arbitrary length without touching any of the source tables. I thought, "This is so cool, and so elegant. I need to show somebody!"
Then it occurred to me that I am, and will always be the only person who actually cares about this.
I've become that old guy who gets excited over Lotus 1.2.3. scripts.
In retrospect, the stuff he was doing actually was interesting, and I wish I'd been a bit more attentive and sympathetic back in the day.
