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Your historic IT moments...
Ond:
ehh why not...
Started out in high school, took a class in programming, did everything on punch cards, waited a week for them to come back with a printout to see if it ran OK.
The school got the first batch of TRS-80s with tape drives, whoohoo no more punch cards!
Occasionally got access to the school's Cromemco, that could play some kind of cool space game, I forget what it was.
Next a commodore 64 and a job in a Uni, where I was busy installing Apple II E's with crappy green screens. The students could hear me plinking away in my office playing AMC on my color puter. That was a great job, all I did all day was help students - mainly females learn how to use video gear, lousy pay though.
Years whiz by largely without any IT stuff going on ( I was more interested in girls) and then an Amiga 1000, you could draw stuff with that thing, games were cool too! Sold that for cash for a motocross bike which was way more exciting.
Whiz forward more and I find myself managing a computer shop with access to everything. Good job except for idiot customers and shoplifters, still lousy pay. The boss let us test anything, games, PCs whatever. When they started selling PS1s we ‘tested’ them too. I spent most of my time there repairing PCs working with some fun doods who were always playing practical jokes either on me or each other, stuff like:
Ring up pretend to be irate customer with extreme indian accent.
Balance Styrofoam cup fall of water on top of door to the backroom so it falls on someone’s head as they walk through it.
Balance cardboard box full of packaging foam bits on top of door, so it falls on someone’s head as they walk through it.
One of the guys was this huge towering Serbian body builder – the G-Man. I usually got him to deal with the difficult customers. My favorite line the G-Man used when some smart ass know it all customer started talking techno crap was “are you asking me or are you telling me”.
We fixed anything and everything till the boss figured it wasn't profitable to have us tinkering all day when we could be selling computer games with a much better profit margin.
One day I accidently sold an obesely large woman Expert Diet instead of Expert typing. This was an easy mistake to do, the software was all kept bunched up in a filing cabinet (boxes on shelves were empty to cope with thieves). She came up to the counter clutching the Expert Typing package and I grabbed what I thought was the right disk and smilingly placed it in her carry bag. Thirty minutes later she was back in the store screaming ruddy murder at me “HOW DARE YOU EMBARRASS ME, I OPENED THIS IN FRONT OF All MY FRIENDS!!!” As I back pedalled the store 2IC started coming to my rescue, when he realized what I’d done he kept right on walking passed me and out to the back room, the woman stormed out to my “You couldn't possibly think I did that on PURPOSE madam” From the back room came the sounds of howling fits of laughter.
I got badly electrocuted in that shop through no fault of my own:
Ond climbs ladder to reach stuff on high shelves, Ond grabs metal shelving to the right of him with one hand and a metal bracket to the left of him with the other hand. Bracket screws unknown to anyone until that moment have been driven into 240v wiring inside the wall. I get 240v right across my chest, my arm muscles spasm, I let go and fall off the ladder screaming expletives at the unfair universe. Next week the owner shows me a letter from the Mall management re: complaints about the swearing in the back of the shop. I should have sued him!
Fast forward more,
Diploma Electronic Engineering course, MCSE, various jobs, IT Support, SA, Consultant, Senior Consultant, Account Manager and now Senior BA. Anyone in my field with half a brain contracts these days, I guess I’ll follow. The money is good now but my heart is elsewhere.
drventure:
Ok. I'm game.
My dad picked up an HP41C and I coded on it for a while till he finally broke down and got an appleII+
I wrote lots of silly stuff for that till one night he was talking about a problem he had at work routing wiring in a missile nose cone.
He described the problem, and I told him I thought I could probably write something that would optimize the wiring paths on the Apple.
Long story short, he had his secretary hand type all the wiring end points from the engineering drawings into text files on 3 floppies, and I wrote this app that shuffled wiring connections back and forth to find optimal routes. It took literally days to run. It was mainly based around a very special case merge sort as I recall. In the end he took the results up and months later told me they'd been able to assemble the missile with space left over because of the reduction in wire.
That got me hooked on programming.
Years later, I came across the apple floppy with that code on it (at least, it was labeled that way, the code was probably long since gone, and I don't have an apple II+ anymore anyways.
I thought "He probably just told the kid that his app worked to make him feel good" so I asked my dad what the deal really had been with the wiring app I wrote way back when.
He said it was kind of a big story around the shop for a while that a 13 year old had been able to optimize the wiring of that missile and it all actually worked in the end. He may still be yanking my chain, but I don't think so.
Still coding. But web stuff just isn't as much fun for me. So I hack addins for Mala :)
shmokes:
When I was young I loved computers, but we were way too poor to have one. When I was twelve (this would have been about 1990) my oldest brother moved back to Utah to attend college. His school was about an hour away, and he said that if I would let him share my bedroom on the weekends (during the week he lived out of the camper on his pickup truck, near his school), I could use his computer whenever I wanted. It was a 286 with a CGA monitor. The computer had the awesome Norton Commander on it, which gave me a sense of directory structure and file extensions, among other things. Eventually I was able to eschew NC for DOS.
I've never been very risk averse, so I was always tinkering with things, making changes just to see what would happen, or fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys files, trying to get games and such to run. Invariably I would make some change and restart the computer, only to find that it no longer booted to a dos prompt, at which point my heart would sink and I'd start sweating. At that point, I had until Friday evening to think about what I had done, understand it, and reverse it before my brother got home. I had some close calls--a couple of times I got the system sorted just minutes before he got back from school. But he never caught me. Not once.
I got my A+ certification while I was still in high school, and got a job doing phone tech support for Packard Bell, which paid like $8.50/hour, which was an incredibly high wage back in like 1995. They were also open 24/7/365, but had paid holidays for all employees. Holidays were staffed on a purely volunteer basis, at double-time-and-a-half, so I could work 4th of July, make over $20/hr all day, and still be home before any of the festivities started. Awesome.
Anyway, moved away to college, partied till I dropped out, got a job as a network admin for a government agency, went back to school and did both full-time, was getting bored of computers so I majored in completely unrelated subjects (though still minored in information systems). Went off and spent 3 years earning a non-IT professional degree. And now I find myself 100% back in IT, albeit in a legal/business capacity now (though I wouldn't have got the job if I didn't have the IT background too).
And so on . . .
Gray_Area:
Now them is what I call moments. Carry on......
MD Draco:
--- Quote from: Ond on March 25, 2013, 09:06:03 pm ---
I got badly electrocuted in that shop through no fault of my own:
Ond climbs ladder to reach stuff on high shelves, Ond grabs metal shelving to the right of him with one hand and a metal bracket to the left of him with the other hand. Bracket screws unknown to anyone until that moment have been driven into 240v wiring inside the wall. I get 240v right across my chest, my arm muscles spasm, I let go and fall off the ladder screaming expletives at the unfair universe. Next week the owner shows me a letter from the Mall management re: complaints about the swearing in the back of the shop. I should have sued him!
--- End quote ---
Oh now that brings back painful memories of my own! Twice have I been badly electrocuted, both times I will fully admit ... my own fault for employing stupidness as my driver rather than being an intelligent person and using my brain!! First time was in the forces, and I got thrown across the room... well, more accurately launched across the room at maximum velocity! I don't even know what the voltage really was, all I know was it F*ing hurt and I left a dent in a cabinet!! My own fault; I hadn't powered down a rack, reached in to check the cabling to one of the security devices, and found out the hard way what happens if someone hasn't grounded the gear properly!! Grrr! ... Needless to say; I always turned things off after that to avoid the same again, so I learned my lesson!!
The second and more painful one was the first installation I did when I used to do a bit of "work on the side" ... All taxable and whatnot, I registered!! But anyway, I was testing a UPS, so pulled the plug out of the wall to make sure the UPS would keep going... All good, I hear you say; except that I'd setup the plug in an unbelievably convoluted place to stop people pulling it out to plug in the vacuum cleaner (yes, it has happened, took us ages to find out why the power kept going off almost like clockwork, until I stayed behind one night and watched as the cleaner pulled my DO NOT TURN OFF plug out of the wall... I fitted a lock box over the lock in the end, but anyway, I digress...) so, I had to crawl under and between two desks, and still had to reach and twist, so the plug twisted in my hand, and I got a feedback shock from the UPS trying to detect if there was mains electricity!! THAT also hurt... for about 3 days afterwards!!!
Moral of the story... Don't play with electric, and just because it's off (Monitor's, power caps, UPS etc etc) doesn't mean they won't hurt you!!
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