awfl

the carriage and way Oh, I worked on large 14" inch hard drives, removed, replaced, and aligned the heads. It used an incandescent bulb and a glass grating to define the cylinders. The servo motor driving it weighed what, 30 lbs? and had a 4" stroke or so, which would take your fingures off. Much of the electronics were discrete analog, the large controllers firmware loaded via cassette tape, linked back to the mainframe massively parallel I/O through 1-1/2" coax bundles. Would create/adapt machine language test routines, enter them into memory from the the main CPU front panels, then execute - say, read track zero from the master system (boot) disk, whih we had hundreds online at the same time.

For me, it was RS-232 *hardware flow control*, getting the CTS/RTS/DTR/DTS correct, what each side needed, sometimes jumpering several together to satisfy the needs of the receiver, transmitter, or both. Let alone what systems actually supported it, didn't, or just faked it. *I worked on mainframe teletypes, card readers, punches, current loop, way back in the dark ages that truly I have forgotten about. Another was a metro or even larger global? fiber mesh network fabric system that each of multiple protocols was a software construct, say, TCP and IP where the network and its underpinnings, say broadcast, addressing, and the like was "emulated". oh, yeah, called ATM.

Yes; we were *building* the infrastructure from scratch, as it was being designed and scaled to commercial grade, spending my lunch time reading the OReilly animal books, RFCs, USENIX, IBM Redbooks, MS pre and after TechEd. Routers were under development - I discovered bad memory in a router only because my new compression algorithm was failing from across campus. There was no checking. I helped debug interoperability between fundamental protocols as they arose - UNIX, TCP/IP, RFC one way, MS doing something different, between US and Euro vendors at times. Had to ask my pharma CEO to contact MS and IBM directly to get .dlls released being witheld as competitive pressure. Network sniffers, sometimes multiple locations. Discovering how to wedge multiple protocols in MS boxes that weren't designed to coexist then, to comm across vendor domains. Anyone remember 3Com servers? SunOS? IRIX? Banyan? Netware? IBM -and- MS OS/2. And even then, the vendors like AT&T were shit, having to take them to task publicly to get them to resolve issues. IBM legacy, uninteresting protocols. And that was the hardware/network. Software was another huge issue. When you are in a regulatory and scientific environment, how exactly do you transition to MS tools, say from the vastly different PC word processors? It's not like those vendors will help you. How do you NOT lose historical document fidelity where every symbol has a legal and scientific meaning? How do you bring in a 100 years worth of said paperwork into the digital age? How do you bring thousands of secretaries with typewriters and carbon paper into the Word world? Teaching them how to use EMail instead of inter-office envelope? I did a lot of this, was rewarded and awarded. I cannot imagine how boring it would be today.

It is understood that a single business dis-continuity of just a few days even, say from an IT failure, said business will fail in over 90% of the cases. I won't justify this here, it's in the literature. So if your IT isn't connected into the organization, they may unknowingly be in trouble.

I did last year; just be sure to keep your income low to qualify for ACA. Then at 65 apply for Medicare, which is running about roughly $400/mo with drug coverage (I'm not there yet). My house paid off, so there is money left for incidentals too. Oh, and get your teeth done beforehand! Im a guy with LOTS of hobbies and broad skills so I stay busy, busier than when I worked - As they say, retire TO something, not FROM something and you'll be fine.

nah, mine under 30 know them each well. though they prefer to watch/binge John Oliver.

If I recall, and my info may be old or wrong, only 5-10% of people are salt sensitive like that, and more that have african descent? For me, for well over a decade, over 4 drugs, after losing 1/3 my body weight and serious exercise, little has changed. And I was tested for aldosterone, adrenal, scanned for kidney tumors, an so on. nada.

Same; I'm on over 4 meds, depending how you count, for over a decade now. As I noted elsewhere I also lost 1/3 of my body weight, eat little carbs, exercise, yet nothing has changed nor my A1C. It seems to be like your vision changing at a certain age, an epigentic change.

same. for well over a decade now. many meds. Thing is, lost a 1/3 of body weight.since, go to the gym, eat well. Never got better, neither did A1C. Something in my epigentics flipped, like your vision, and will never go back. I suspect thats why they always ask if it runs in your family.

I do not see a problem with debt. I see a problem with future motivation for investment in the US. If they screw the dollar pooch, as you say, at the same time as forcing a credit crunch (a la Dimon?), not fixing healthcare, creating and leaving little expendable income for quite a while, no one will spend. And it will get very dark economically here. Adaptability is one thing, but few americans remember and know how to deal with that kind of austerity.

I see it from a slightly different angle. I'm remembering when things were built in this country like TVs, clothing, tools. Things were crude, poorly designed, lack of innovation, and very expensive as US labor always has a healthcare tax added on. Then, everything from the screw to integrated circuit is trapped by the wholesale middle man, with minimums, lead times, and can only be purchased by licensed dealers. We lost our commercial electronics industry, the textile and tool, and almost lost our auto industry to this, not on just cost but innovation. To the point, there is little we want to buy like that beyond the basics, there is little profit motive to create factories and sell it, and it will be expensive. Its almost like back to a bleak soviet like style world. And damn to be a youth coming up; I hated (as a technologist/engineer) growing up that expensive awful world.

middle 1970s. My sister would say it.

Soylent Green predicted the oceans dying and the food chain collapsing, forcing us to eat "Soylent" which hasn't happened (yet)... hmmm, looking at ingredients lists maybe it has? btw, I do not deny many such rational predictions of the future, from the past, as they very well may happen, sooner than later.

1970 here, 4dr powder blue, 400 engine, wound out to at least 120? Btw, could walk on the hood, as I recall .. but at the least got a few friends in the drive in in the trunk......

Haha so much fun in these in high school with buddies!

head on collision on highway in mine, was pristine. Into old Buick. Glad I was as it took the entire impact, not making us unalive. Rocket 350 sucked sooo much gas I'd have to kill it myself seemingly soon after anyways. Fam had two used.deuce and a quarter Buick 225s, replaced with 2 Cadillac devilles. Yeah, sure did love em...

I was responsible for building out this thing called "email" and "Word" and other apps for many thousands of global users in a top 5 company headquarters and subsidiaries. As well as writing install and support code, and developing the training infrastructure where we took many thousands of secretaries and users from IBM Selectrics/Carbon Copies/Memos to PCs and office apps and networks. As well, introducing this thing called "The World Wide Web", "The Internet". Point is, I got to see so much of the corporate culture, the good and the bad - regulatory areas for FDA approval, marketing and sales, decision sciences, scientific research, statistics, global telecommunications, mid-level management, the CXO suite. I rode above the politics having high level authority, even soliciting support with our CFO to deal with peers at Microsoft directly, at least for awhile, simply because of the urgent need to technologically evolve. Personal and corporate change is so hard, so petty and intense at times, the hate of computers by so many, and stressed every personal and working relationship. I took a lot of professional heat but kept pushing on to eventual success and reward. Of course, I did not do it all myself, but was personally responsible for many, many thousands of user's minute to minute costly productivity. When I was down or screwed up, legions sat idle.

Things were very much as diverse, and knowledge and responsibilities more silo'ed back then. The mainframers did their thing, with big hardware and global connectivity which included strong security and encryption, and forcing their technologies like token ring and other weird tech to interop onto desktops. Digital Equip had enterprise wide DECnet for PCs to attach to their very popular systems, as well as all the early PC networking and enterprise servers like 3Com, Novell, Banyan, MS. They all had completely unique, disparate and non-interoperable tech, and they were trying to all run on the same limited PC and often separate network infrastructures at the same time. Very new but primitive gateways and routers pre-Cisco with experimental and limited protocol support. TCP/IP did not exist as a common protocol, at all. Some were proprietary, let alone anyone existed who understood all the protocols in use. Let alone be able to understand the disparate backend OSs like OS/2, Vax/VMS, UNIX, Solaris, MCP, all the alphabet of IBM mainframe software... No, it was as very much complex. Just different, much more local.

15 grand cash and counting in the past two years... my old fillings, crushing under pressure, split my molars. An single implant - $5k, not covered by usual insurance. Dentist botched a crown ($1600 ea), nerve died, needing a $1300 root canal, then another $360 re-filling. I have been covered continuosly for 40 years - yet they did not warn me of my teeth wearing, grinding, until too late.

Rural midwest, my kids got through high school, learned well enough to get through state university, and knocked it out of the park - all college bills and new cars paid off, significant money in the bank if they want a house (they're waiting for the price bubble to pop) <30yrs old... seriously, I don't know why so much bitching about the (public school and university) system. I did well in it too.

saw it premier; simply loved it then and now repeatedly. It was always supposed to be "weird", as the 1920s and 30s b/w fleischer cartoons were too... where I loved how he talked under his breath, mocking, like exclaiming "whoooa..."; Olive Oyl the same. The toons were back then were *surreal* .

My 2 stroke Suzuki(s). My 1960s HO slotcars. Riding a bike, tube and transistor stereo for my now classic music. I now want to live where its warm at night to roller skate, cruise on my bike and cycle, especially I see there are groups doing just that. Just like I used to.

On the Beach (original). Fail Safe(original), and of course Dr. Strangelove.

Read manpages, newsgroups, dns, x11, uenix, find the animal books at the bookstore; there was little info available outside of industry and academia. IBM red books. If course games, but Atari then Amiga. PC was bleep bloop then. Thing is, so new and different of technology, so mad busy implementing and evolving systems, not much downtime.

Entire fam grew up near the factory (and Post), worked there for decades; after the legendary factory tour they would give you the smaller version of this, a paper hat, and ice cream w/ froot loops on the top. I smelled toasting cereal walking to school every morning.

In my 60s now; am riding my dirt bike and 4 miles yesterday on my bicycle, leisurely pace. Just gotta keep movin' - movement is life.

aw hell; I saw this; dad would always call me in for these kind of things... especially Topo Gigio; kissame g'night Eddie!

Exactly. I was told this by Republicans in the earliest of 1980s. You can indeed read about it in the SS own Actuarial report. But it will surely go if we believe those Republicans who want it gone, and do nothing to fight for it. btw, imagine this country with all the old people broke; small business will hurt as they have come to rely on seniors spending in their stores, to grease the economy every month, in good times and bad

Oh yeah!

Plain mushroom soup, that's one. Mom bought a few cases for some reason and thats all I had for a long time. Oh, and little cans of mushroom pieces. Salt, pepper, butter - yum, just like Ponderosa used to make.

Bothers me, a little. My two are extremely successful and have freedoms that our generation did not. I can live without grandkids if it takes away my kids freedoms, and in the end mine, with all the commitments. What I find really *interesting* though is people and their dog ownership, even value signing? perhaps, perpetually locked into early parenthood, the difficulty and expense of feeding, vets, travel, of moving homesteads, moving and day to day living home or around the world, as if getting older isn't hard, expensive, and complex enough. And I grew up around lots of dogs. C'est la vie.

You are of course being factual, but we must all understand it's the framing of the issue that is wrong. Suppliers setting prices where a certain percentage cannot afford it is a forever capitalism salesman's game, one used by monopolists and luxury item vendors, where they have said directly, stating theirs being a "premium" product, they don't want you as customers (if you can't afford their made up prices). Cars, watches, film makers come to mind. For whether medical industry likes the idea, a nation makes choices in its priorities. And unlike the US, other nations choose its people first. But yeah, instead lets blame the old, the poor, and the sick for making the made up game "unsustainable".

My tolerance was low, and I did, it was magic! under immense pressure during a corporate buyout, all my coworkers were being reorganized forcefully, including me, and tasking us with things, at 42, I simply could not see myself ever doing that for the rest of my career. And like the skies literally opened up, they offered a half year of salary for anyone to leave. And being frugal all my life, I could and did just that. That was 20 years ago and it all has worked out beautifully.... sign up for my newsletter :-)

Not X, but so very close in age and thought I must be X; I'm one of the last? trained on the internals of the actual DoD-scale Burroughs mainframes in the Wiki history... leveraged that through the PC revolution to train thousands, taking them from carbon paper to Wordperfect/Harvard Graphics/cc:Mail, onto Word/Excel, and creating corporate IT compute and net infrastructure when there was almost literally no such thing. 3Com, Vines, Netware, IBM and MS OS/2 and Lan Man and NT, NetBIOS to NETBEUI to TCP/IP, Amiga, Atari, SGI and SUN UNIXes. Along with all the apps, from UUCP, FTP, USENET, onto the very first browsers on the web. Yes, we did make it all work, if this is what you meant. And surely a wild ride.

Not X, but so very close in age and thought I must be X; I'm one of the last? trained on the internals of the actual DoD scale Burroughs mainframes in the Wiki history... leveraged that through the PC revolution to train thousands, taking them from carbon paper to Wordperfect/Harvard Graphics/cc:Mail, onto Word/Excel, and creating corporate IT compute and net infrastructure when there was almost literally no such thing. 3Com, Vines, Netware, IBM and MS OS/2 and Lan Man and NT, NetBIOS to NETBEUI to TCP/IP, Amiga, Atari, SGI and SUN UNIXes. Along with all the apps, from UUCP , FTP, USENET, onto the very first browsers on the web. Yes, we did make it all work, if this is what you meant. And surely a wild ride, for sure.

I got my first big boy adult paying job at 19. It was my boss, ten years my senior, seeing that our computer corp was starting pay freezes, switching to 401ks, and advised me to get a Fidelity brokerage account, to buy CDs where then you got 9% and free air tickets anywhere in the US. All this set me off to a good future. My parents useless with money. Him, he is still with us and I just recently called him and thanked warmly and profusely.

That is so cool. I know, right? Just one of those indescribable things that helped define the (wonderful to me) 80s.

I do; an remember the visually stunning rendition by 3-D, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxhnLj4TJEg

Cap'n Crunch and Quisp!!! Until that Mikey bastard made mom get Life...

I know, right? Look at my short ID here on Reddit. I came here directly from Digg, before then SlashDot. And not sure if its unique, but my email at aim.com (aol.com) is my last name; thats it. I've been involved from before there was a web, having brought over 10000 corporate people from IBM Selectrics to MS Word and into the email universe from corp memos in the early 1990s, and demo'd their firstcorp web server.

Not that anyone would care, I bought one so early they sent you five free CDs since there were so very few in the stores.

Nope; learned machine language on mainframe and M6800 before PCs were even a thing. Datacomm was twisted pair, coax, leased line, teletype current loop, acoustic modems eventually, so many arcane standards. NFS, AFS, DECnet, Bang! email addressing, uucp, ftp, usenet, gopher, xmodem, ymodem, Compuserve, Tymshare?, PARNet, SerialNet, 3COM, Banyan Vines, Netware, *ALL* before the web. So sure I missed so many others.

Same for me; but didnt save the package. quit in 1984; Winston Lights after reds starting at 16. Luckily no cancer. Where the hell has all the time gone.

Yes! But look at that fancy colors! just a bit earlier, late 60s, the colors were solid red, green, and white maybe. And a 4 opposing person foot pumped merry go round that would become unbalanced and would go wildly out of control... And Im not really sure when/if they were popular before then as I never recall seeing anything older than ours...

..I won't take it further, but it did occur to me right off the start his little concern for others, as disease (as is all life on this planet) is of shared dependence. aka his bodily rights overrides the risk to everyone else's lives.

Isn't the answer even more abstract? At some point if Rust developers demand its use in a kernel and are rebuffed, the recourse has always been what open source has always been about, how others do it, and why linux exists to begin with -- fork it, start from scratch, but build their own. In parallel, have at it, people can choose. Too hard? too bad, so was linux and building the entire ecosystem. And to present and view such a rebuff in a "they vs them" in such a philosophical but especially political way shows that clear angry conservative brain rot has set in.

Glorious Christmas times, I longed for one of these as well, as that was my favorite parts of the Sears and Wards catalogs. I have that very set, still, mostly, including the box. The lap timer springs have tired, a bit. As retirement hobby, I have collected over three decades many other Tyco and Aurora sets and cars, including the newer "Giant" AFX raceway. But the true love is the 1960s/70s Aurora Thunderjets; the little pancake motors can be tuned and rebuilt, and are still going strong as people are creating new cars and parts.

hadta be a Meijer? (not Meijers?, or maybe Meijer's if it is meant "the establishment owned by Meijer"... Michiganders...) If so, Hendrick Meijer has a museum at the Corp headquarters with a (an original?) Sandy, and one in the museum in the town where he started his store, after a being a barber. My wife met Lena and Fred, his son who built the empire. And if not Meijer, sorry for the waste of your time :-), Sandy has been part of children for a very long time! hahaha

Same; friend's fam owned a gas station at south edge of Traverse City, and their employees couldn't make it in. Since school was closed I walked/sledded 1.5 miles into town (down Rennie hill, impassable by car but shielded enough) and pumped gas all day; into snowmobiles, 4 wheel drives, heavy plow trucks. Our house was where the mall parking lot is with a full south exposure and the snow all the way to roof.

Same; friend's fam owned a gas station in Traverse City, and their employees couldn't make it in. Since school was closed I walked two miles into town and pumped gas all day; into snowmobiles, 4 wheel drives, heavy plow trucks. Our house was where the mall parking lot is with a full south exposure and the snow all the way to roof.