new thread
Hi guys! I have a feeling these kind of posts have been made before, but I haven't seen them to my recollection, so I figure it's time to give it a whirl.
How did you come up with the name you use to post here? I'll admit mine, although I have a bit of shame in it. A few years ago I was pretty in to the Sex Pistols and so whenever I would post somewhere on the Internet, I usually went by the name "Sid" or "Sid Vicious." Haha, I don't even like them nearly as much anymore, and Sid was certainly not my role model for having longer hair, that's just the name I used. And no, I NEVER had a spiky haircut!
I'm interested to hear how you guys came up with your names. Ones like Luckskind, Sorted, Absalom, and others must have some cool stories!
My parents gave my name to me at birth. I think it was awfully nice of them. Though, at the time, I had a seven-year-old sister named Michelle. Those darn Odles, always seeking to transcend the bounds of originality!
hahaha!
Mine name "Sorted" is taken from a Stereotyped catch phrase of Liam Gallagher (Oasis) that has been applied pretty much to anyone from Manchester. It was stereotyped by Harry Enfield in a Kevin & Perry Sketch.
Sorted (aka David)
Ahhh, I see. Well it is a pretty cool nickname I think. And interesting to now know that you're real name is David! Mine is Chris, by the way. But I'm thinking of changing my name from Sid, just trying to come up with a better name.
Hey Sid, if you want to pick another moniker you might want to search by the meaning you are after. The "Behind the Name" site might have one that says more about you than "Sid" does. The royalty section has served me well when I needed to chose an identity elsewhere that would fit my conceit, there certainly aren't many Gormlaiths running around message boards.
Elizabeth
Cool link! I'll try that soon!
Is your name intentionally linked to Welsh? E.g David = Dewi?
No... its hebrew: David
Also as with David & Golliath etc
And I always (wrongly) guessed it might be an ironic comment on your OCD (I imagined obsessive tidying and such like) !
No I was never obsessive about tidying... much to the annoyance of my flatmate and previously my parents.
Now I live alone, in my own mess :-)
from a frank zappa tune: "zombie woof"
Dunno if any of you have heard of the MMORPG Everquest. I started playing it about 5 years ago, not long after it was released. My main character since that time has been a Ranger called 'Dinuvian Mistwalker'. I adopted Dinuvian as my online name from that :)
hehe I for sure have heard of Everquest. The Dx9 engine change put me out of the game as I have an old computer. What server do/did you play on? My character names were Sprinter, vah shir bard and Purrpaws Meowpowa, BL on quellious server :)
I'm on the Cazic-Thule server. Half-elf ranger. And loving it! :)
P.S. My character has a topknot, which I'd love to try one day!
I was in a band in the late '70s and we all came up with nicknames. Our bassist was Axe, the singer was Slasher, the guitarist Steel, and I was Rocker. Hey, we were teenagers and trying to be cool.
On a promotional flyer that some of our girlfriends made for us, they incorrectly spelled my nickname - Rokker instead of Rocker. They had something like 100 flyers printed out. Keep in mind that this was in the days before computers and fancy software stuff. It would have been time consuming and pricey to have corrected copies made. In addition, they wouldn't have been done on time.
After that, the name and the spelling stuck. Throughout high school and college, most people called me Rokker, spelling it that way as well.
So - my nickname was purely by accident.
Because it's my name. :D What, no laughs? Oh, come on! That's hilarious! Well I guess not. I'm going to go cry myself to sleep.
I started to post here as Chris, that's my real name. But after a forntnight, I felt I needed a new name. I thought long and hard, searched high and low, then it was obvious, my hobby is surfing:) (Not surfing the net)
I have borrowed my cousins surf board hundreds of times, but because I am young, still in school, no job, single parent family, I really can't afford the luxuries of even a shortboard!
Now I own 3 bodyboards, and a skimboard, I love my skimboard!:)
And that's the end of my brag.
I got so caught up with wolfeyes post that I forgot to mention how I came up with my name. It's for similar reasons. I live on one of the best surfing beaches in Sydney and need I say Y?
Big = 6'7" and L= Laurence
On a subliminal level I think I may have been remembering 'Big L' (Radio Luxembourg - Fab 208)! UK guys may remember this back in the 70s ...
Simple. Celtic Frost is my second favorite band. 1st being Opeth, 3rd being Summoning, 4th being Atheist, 5th being Cynic, and 6th being Pantera...
Opeth, amen. You have good taste ;)
Yeah, Opeth is really good!
I only have two of their CD's, but I want to get more.
They're also good live, although their stagepresence was a bit diminished performing after Extol.
my middle name is michael and i'll graduate in '06. i guess i'm not too creative but hey, it works.
Mine isn't really as interesting but I chose my name because I have bleached my hair to a very light blonde for almost four to five years now. So I just picked Blonde. ~Peace~ Blonde
Mine is my stage name when I do juggling/contact-juggling. Especially contact juggling, when people see it, they don't recognize it as a juggling form so instead of saying "hey, it's that juggler guy" they say "hey, it's that. . . ball guy".
Well one day I went round to this guy's house. He was a friend of a friend, and he owned a white wolf called Shinook. She was a rescue case, and very aggressive... but I love animals and, the fool that I am, insisted on going into her enclosure to pet her.
The last 3 guys to go in had bitten her and so I was told it would be my own fault when I was bitten. But when I went in, I sat down by the door and waited for her. Eventually she walked over in front of me and looked at me, so I lifted my head and looked back and she came over and sat in front of me.
My wrists were resting on my kness, which were drawn up in front of me, and she nosed my dangling hands and let me stroke her.
The guy told me it must have been cos she thought I had wolf's eyes, so for the rest of the night - yet never since - I was called wolfeyes.
I just like the memory it brings back to me.
wolfeyes
That must have been a wonderful experience, I'm almost jealous, lol. Wolves are beautiful animals.
That's a great story. You accomplished what many people can't.
Your story reminds me of my brother. As a kid, around 8-10 years old (and until he died at 19), he always had a unique ability with animals.
For example, when we were kids, he would get a bag of pecans (we were surrounded by pecan trees where we lived), and he'd go sit at the bottom of a tree. He'd tap the pecans together while just sitting there. Next thing you know, he'd be surrounded by squirrels coming down from the trees. He'd literally hand them pecans. The squirrels would take turns until all had their share then go back up the trees.
He could do these things with all sorts of wildlife. It didn't matter what the animal was, my brother would have a way of connecting with it. On a SCUBA diving trip we took together, as we were under the water, he hooked up with a porpoise and it took him all over the place.
Me? Heck, I could sit there all day and tap and none would ever show!
You certainly have a gift.
Rocker That is so cool, you meen that the squirrels actually took turns? My god humans have so much to learn from animals if only we could tune in. I guess the good people do tune in it's just the evil powers that think they be...
Really sad about your bro dude It's so tragic when a young life is cut short.
Yeah, they basically crowded around him, and one by one took mouths full of pecans. Squirrels can hold a lot of stuff in their mouths! Their cheeks poof way out. When one squirrel got his fill, another would come up and take his, then the next. The family knew that when he was doing this, we needed to stay inside or exit through a door on the other side of the house. If we were seen, they'd sprint up the trees and we'd all get the angry look from my brother.
Unfortunately, he born with a congenital heart defect. He wasn't supposed to make it to his first birthday. After he made that, they said he'd be dead before he was five. Then it was eight, since no one had lived beyond that age with his condition. Then came 10, 12, 15, 18......
Unfortunately, exactly one month after turning 19 he passed away.
Well, mine is not too interesting, but everyone is always confused by it.
I love Bugs Bunny, if you remember, there was an episode with a lion trying to catch a small bunny. Well, Bugs of course played some trick on him and got him to drink tea. Ask him how many lumps of sugar he wanted. I want a whole lot a lumps. DING, DING, DING, DING, etc..ehhhhhhhh.
How did you come up with the name you use to post here?
I was fortunate to attend a seminar describing the ongoing research at Gombe Stream by Jane Goodall during my undergraduate studies in Southern California. As luck would have it, a friend of mine majoring in anthropology (emphasis in primate studies) saved me a front row seat as the anthro dept. had preferential seating. Typical for the mid 1980's, my school "uniform" consisted of a Hawaiian-print shirt, 501's and flip-flop sandals, though we called them "thongs" back then. Anyway, during the lecture I kept noticing that Ms. Goodall was staring at my feet since I was no more than 15 feet away from the podium and I commented quietly to my friend about this. She rolled her eyes, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and said that it was because I had "Gorilla feet." Oh. Seems that because I have no arch and wide feet it makes them look like a gorilla's foot. Or a Hobbit, but that is another story. Add to this fact that when he reaches maturity, a male Gorilla develops silvery grey hairs on his back and is called a "silverback." Since I have grey hair ala William (formerly Gah2danz) I thought the term was a nice fit.
. Typical for the mid 1980's, my school "uniform" consisted of a Hawaiian-print shirt, 501's and flip-flop sandals, though we called them "thongs" back then.
They've always been thongs down here!! Aussie safety boots!!
Easy no shoelaces to tie!!!
No 'mystery':
I'm an artist and...
that's my name.
Great question!
I am assuming it is obvious..(??) but perhaps not...
I love White Hair on men (my grandfather had beautiful silky white hair). Mine is turning white and I hope someday to have a decently long........White Tail !!
Great poll……I have been curious.
Love the “Wolf Eyes” and “That Ball Guy” stories.....wonder what is behind "Scaredresser" ??!! HA!
oops--- shoulda made my post here
well... as i just posted- from a frank zappa tune "zombie woof"
I play guitar and I like (love actually) Gibson guitars. And I'm a guy :)
A guy at work was always asking me questions about electrical theory, and after a while he started calling me "Elektros, God of Electricity". I have always used this name on the Internet, although I leave out the "God of Electricity" part as it makes me sound like a megalomaniac! My real name is Alun.
Well, being that I love turbochraged cars, I have 4, all chrysler fwd's from the 80's collaboration with Carrol Shelby, it seems to fit, at work, with friends, ect. So I am tommy turbo, and my email is because I have 2 88' Dodge Daytona SHELBY Z's
hope this helps.
What a great idea. OK, here's my story:
I'm from Georgia
Although, I hate to admit, it's been a very long time since I was a "boy" and I know it's stretching...but screw it
100: Well I wanted just plain georgiaboy, but that was taken. So I went down the line (georgiaboy1, 2, 3, etc.). So to save some time, I said f*@# this and picked "100"
Hence georgiaboy100
I go by the name Absalom because my hair is VERY long, almost knee length. Absalom was David's third son and he had incredibly long hair. Absalom
William is my middle name.
However, when I first started posting here, there was another poster using the name William, so I initially posted using a nickname.
The nickname "gah2dantz" (gotta dance) comes from my dancesport hobby.
Picture Purged
My name Is Tom Sansome
and my football coach when i was nine called me Sanno and it stuck now everybody i know calls me it
OH-ver-serf.
A name bestowed on me due to my (former) obsessive cumpulsion to ride waves from sunrise to sunset, often skipping essential activities such as eating and sleeping. Also known as 'wave hog.'
In my case it is obvious: I have been using Linux since 1993, I had a beer together with Linus Torvalds (in 1995) and I am a longhair...
LinuxLonghair
I have never had a "handle". Like many amateur radio operators when the Internet first appeared, I slid into the Internet hobby from the ham hobby. It was a natural transition, trading one communications hobby for another. Doing e-mail via the Internet wasn't much different than doing it via packet radio, which we'd done since the mid-1980s. To me the Internet was just another ham band, one with infinite bandwidth and open gangbusters 24/7!
Like many hams who migrated to the Internet, I brought a lot of the amateur radio culture with me. One item of that culture is that "Hams use their names; handles are for CBers." Hams have used their names since the days of Marconi. So when I slid over to the Internet, it never occurred to me NOT to just use my name. And I always have. A lot of hams have told me the same.
Some of the other aspects of the amateur radio culture that have come along with us for the ride are that one always strives to increase one's technical competence, always helps newcomers to the hobby, and always puts back into it to the extent of one's abilities. Once I learned how to make web pages, I actually felt guilty not making my own so I could share with the community what *I* have expertise with. After all, if I was reading others' pages, it would be selfish, I truly felt, to not reciprocate.
Amateur radio is non-commercial by law, so the commercialization of the Internet will always be something that makes me cringe more than a bit. I got so fed up with spam that I set my mail server to reject mail from people I don't know, and that got rid of all of it. Most people wouldn't bother, but to a ham, if want it you build it. [big grin through hair]
Bill, K9AT
Bill,
Ham radio you need a license, and there appears to be a strong amount of self discipline and good manners employed. The internet can be accessed by anyone including low life stalkers and identity theives.
Although I applaud folks who post their emails, faces and real names (it does make the place friendlier), I think I'll hide my identity as much as possible. :-(
And anyone can buy and turn on a radio receiver. The Internet provides much less anonymity in reality, because despite what many newbies think, every transmission is logged. In a criminal situation one may have to go to court to get it, but it's available. It sure isn't with radio. The difference in how many regard the Internet is merely one of public mis-perception.
Yeah, that makes me sad too.
After forty years of revealing my identity every time I threw a transmission out into the ether and no harm ever coming of it, I feel little need to change that behavior. The government issued us all callsigns, and anyone on the planet could listen in, and they could buy a "callbook" that listed all our names and addresses. Sure, "being public" was forced upon us by international treaties, but you know, while following that road, along the way we learned there was no harm in that.
I guess another factor in my background is I grew up in a small town in the Ozarks where everyone knew everyone else's business, and growing up with that, I never saw any harm in that either. When a man grows up in that environment, one grows up with the concept that one actually has such a thing as a "reputation". One comes to most admire and respect non-anonymous people, because non-anonymous people tend to not misbehave, and they tend to really be themselves. Why? Because they wish to PROTECT their reputation. Anonymous people raise questions such as, "What is he hiding from?", "What is he ashamed of?", and "Which version of him is the real one?"
As far as showing my face goes, any day I go downtown a thousand strangers see my face. I sure the hell don't get that many hits in a day to my personal web page. [grin] I'm not gonna go crawl under a rock; I'll walk proudly down the street. If criminals come along, that is what the cops are for.
Five years ago, I walked across New England and half way across New York State, all on back roads. You wouldn't believe all the gasps this endeavor drew from friends. What if this? What if that? Well, what happened is I saw some beautiful country and I met all kinds of nice and interesting people along the way. Including SEVERAL longhairs.
But if you judge safety to be the paramount consideration in life you should never, under any circumstances, go on long hikes alone. Don't take short hikes alone either--or, for that matter, go anywhere alone. And avoid at all costs such foolhardy activities as driving, falling in love or inhaling air that is almost certainly riddled with deadly germs. Wear wool next to the skin. Insure every good and chattel you possess against every conceivable contingency the future might bring, even if the premiums half-cripple the present. Never cross an intersection against a red light, even when you can see that all roads are clear for miles. And never, of course, explore the guts of an idea that seems as if it might threaten one of your more cherished beliefs. In your wisdom you will probably live to a ripe old age. But you may discover, just before you die, that you have been dead for a long, long time.
--Colin Fletcher
I see others on here are talking about self-defense exercises such as karate. Oh, my, but you could get HURT! And the surfers, my goodness! There are sharks out there! Well, if they can surf at Ocean Beach, I sure the hell can surf the Internet.
Bill
All good points, Bill. Thanks for the reply, you are very eloquent! :-)
FITness and MUSic.
Mine is really simple, Extol is my favourite band, and they have an EP called Mesmerized. I like the way it sounds, also.
High!
As some of you here around might know, I'm quite hooked on Afghanistan... and all that started quite early, at the age of 14, which is now 20 years ago. So even back in 1983/84, I already used Afghan (or at least Afghan-sounding, back then I had hardly any notion of Persian or Pashto) nicknames, such as Hafiz-i-Afghan or (somewhat later on, in the C 64 scene) Nadir Pashtun; people of the back then-emerging German BBS scene (years before the Internet even was heard about in Germany) remember me as Afghani (in fact, even back then I referred to myself as "data surfer Afghani"!), Nadir, occasionally also Coolhead or Gayman.
Later on, at about 21, I found that it was the time for a new nickname, and somewhere from an obscure corner of my mind, the word "Yadgar" dawned on me... as I swallowed countless books on Afghanistan and its neighboring countries, probably the Pakistani border town of Peshawar and its famous-infamous Chowk Yadgar (meaning "Monument Square" - it is an outstandingly ugly modernist monument erected somewhen in the 1960s, if you search with Google, you might find several pictures of it) inspired me sub-conciously.
Yadgar is, as I learned a little bit later, the Persian word for "monument", but also for "souvenir"; it consists of "yad", ("memory") and "gar", ("maker" in compounds). Correctly, it should be translated as Yâdgâr, because both a's are pronounced like "awe", but usually I refrain from this, as it would make my nickname even more enigmatic (and on some OSes even unreadable).
See you in Khyberspace!
Yadgar
So you go way back before the Internet, too. Cool! BBSs hit San Francisco about 1980, and I helped write the drivers for one that I ended up using. It ran an 8080 2-megahertz processor. The machine had 16k of memory. My home machine back then, an Imsai 8080 still sits in the back room, though I've trashed all the computers that have come and gone my way since. By 1984 my partner and I were on packet radio, and by 1986 we had the San Francisco BBS running in the room where I now sit. It was in a network (!!!) and it had "messages" (!!!), what would several years later come to be called "e-mail". A few months before we turned it off in 1999, someone over here saw that old machine scrolling text over in the corner, and they asked, "What the hell is that?" My reply, "You are looking at San Francisco's first ISP." That BBS's most shining hours were after the 1989 quake. It handled over 2200 health and welfare messages while the telephone system was still down.
Yeah, the underlying protocols that power the Internet were all designed in the 1980s, when there was little thought that it would ever extend beyond the United States. RFC-822, which still handles all e-mail, was written in 1982. It is based on 7-bit ASCII, which has no umlauts, accents, etc., and to this day that code set is the Internet's lingua franca. Any other characters outside of that are likely to be translated into and out of that at some point along the way, and in the process you never know for sure what will come out on the other end.
Hello Bill!
Nice to hear from you once again!
It started in September 1986, when I bought my first accoustic coupler - a simple white-painted pressboard thingy running at 300 bit/s, of course without German Bundespost technical compliance certificate, so its use in Germany was a criminal offence, which could result in up to five years in jail!
Real modems back then in fact were absolutely off limits - you could not even buy them, one had to rent them from the Bundespost, very expensive...
I then plugged it into the Centronix port of my Commodore 64 and was ready to dial into BBSes (in German Pidgin called "mailboxes" - it's a weird dialect which also produced such strange words like "handy" (cell phone) and "dressman" (male model)) in and around Cologne...
In Germany, the very first BBS was set up in mid-1984, probably on a Commodore 64
Around 1986/1987, most BBSes in Germany ran in fact on Commodore 64s, some also on C 128s (which had the advantage that it could use up to 640k memory and also display 80 characters per line), and very few already used Amigas - IBM compatibles, as we used to call "real PCs" back in those days, were way too expensive.
What kind of machine was the Imsai 8080? Did it run on CP/M?
Cool, you were the sysop? Back then, I also frequently dreamed of an own BBS (which would have put me, under those anachronistic German anti-telecommunications laws, still closer to jail... there were even rumors of prosecution of sysops by the German domestic intelligence service), but school took its time toll, so it never became true. In early 1989, my parents (who complained a lot about the soaring phone bills since I went online every evening...) bought another telephone, which mouth- and earpieces didn't fit anymore into the accoustic coupler's rubber sockets, so I happened to be cut off from cyberspace for almost 6 years... until I finally discovered the Internet!
Yes, during 1987, also in the Cologne area the first BBS networks were formed, and also public boards and private messages existed yet... but data transfer was so slow that you almost could read in realtime the text trickling in!
How could this be? Did it use a different cable network which was less prone to mechanical damage?
So it would be better to transliterate the Persian pronounciation of my nickname as "Yaadgaar"!
And Persian is a language still easy to transliterate to 7-bit ASCII, don't try this with Pashto (the other main Afghan language), it's really ugly with all its schwas and retroflexes and accents... although a friend of mine, a really seasoned Afghanaut who roams the "land of the free and the strong" since the late 1960s, in fact developed an 7-bit ASCII transliteration system for Pashto!
See you in Khyberspace!
Yadgar
An 8080 processor (2 megahertz) of course, on an S-100 bus. It had 44k of memory and one 250k 8-inch floppy disk. No hard disk. For today's computers you can multiply those numbers by a thousand, or more, of course! But man, to have my own computer was awesome. I was writing letters home on a word processor when at work we were still handwriting letters to give to secretaries who had typewriters.
Many guys with that computer did run CP/M. By the time I had heard such a thing existed, I had already written my own OS. So I never installed CP/M. By the time I retired the computer in 1986, I had written a word processing program, a database program, a modem program (for accessing the BBSs), and a program that would send and receive Morse code, among others. All were in 8080 machine code. VERY hands on.
Yep! My partner and I together were. By the time we got the BBS we were running an IBM AT, later upgraded to a 386.
Here the phone company was not owned by the government, so you only risked pissing off a corporation with a telephone-based BBS. The police had better things to do than arrest young men who were hooking unauthorized equipment to a phone line. If you actually damaged the line, or if you evaded toll charges, yeah, then they'd take notice.
That's too bad, man. By the mid-1980s we were on packet radio, so we weren't concerned with the telephone system after that. The packet radio system bridged us from the early BBS period until the Internet arrived. The beauty of the packet system, too, was there were no phone charges. We could send e-mails to Europe if we wanted, and they were free.
Yes! The packet system went at 1200 baud, but with acknowledgemnts it was more like 600. We could sit here and watch the messages come in. Or pass through, if that was what they were doing. The government actually required that we be able to do that, in case there were obscenities or other criminal violations in the messages. That would be a laughable requirement nowadays, with the speed of the Internet. Talk about "speed reading"!
Yeah, "the ether". [grin] Indestructible. (All the data went out through an array of antennas on our roof. Our system talked to other systems by radio. And users logged on by radio.) We had the whole thing powered by 12v auto batteries in case the power went out. After the quake, it certainly did.
My partner wrote the "Bible" on packet radio, published in the tens of thousands of copies and distributed worldwide. You can read it at the link. If you do, you will be very thankful for the simplicity of today's Internet. [big grin]
Bill
High!
Coooooooooooooooooool, I wish I was such a nerd and could write my own OS for a nowadays' PC... or even more nerdish, design and build an entirely unique computer from scratch (such as a 32-processor 80286 transputer) and then program all necessary software for it! WHEW!!!
So I never installed CP/M. By the time I retired the computer in 1986, I had written a word processing program, a database program, a modem program (for accessing the BBSs), and a program that would send and receive Morse code, among others. All were in 8080 machine code. VERY hands on.
Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool!!!
And this was legal?!?
See you in Khyberspace!
Yadgar
Well, it was very bare-bones compared to today's OSs. Primarily it got files from disk, saved files to disk, and jumped to execute a program. But it got the job done.
When I got the computer in the 1970s, you did not go to the store and buy one assembled. It came as bags of parts, and you faced about 3000 solder connections. Just about everyone who had one was an amateur radio operator. Nobody else knew how to solder good enough. The local computer club in Chicago, where I lived at the time, had a blank for your ham radio callsign along with the usual blanks for street address, etc., on the form when you joined. And there was only one store where you could buy floppy disks in all of Chicago.
You had to. In the "which came first, the chicken or the egg" game, I can assure you that hardware came before software. Only after guys got their computers assembled, did they begin to concern themselves about what they could actually get them to do. There simply WAS no software at first. If you wanted it, you wrote it. As for "programming all necessary software for it",
at some point people realized they would never live long enough to write all the cool software they wanted. Then the software industry really took off.
Yes, it went under the umbrella of amateur radio, which was legalized by international treaties many years before. The main obstacle was getting governments to accept that ASCII was not exactly a secret. Treaties prohibited encryption. For several years we wrote software to convert everything to Morse code, which was very cumbersome so it never really took off. With the approval of ASCII, it did.
A few years ago I went into the local Radio Shack to buy a connector. The salesman, a guy about 18, said to me, "You have to be able to SOLDER to use this connector, do you know how to DO THAT?" I told him that, yeah, when I first got into computers we had to solder ALL of our cables, and we had to solder all the connections in our computers, too. He was dumbfounded. [grin]
Bill
Oh, one reason I did not dwell on the OS was there were way cool more things to do. The coolest thing I did back then was to get my word processor to hyphenate words at the right margin. Writing the algorithm to get that done involved converting linguistic research into programming decisions, and that was a lot of fun. I never got it to work beyond 95% accuracy, though, because English is too quirky. Without a dictionary, and I didn't have the memory for one, there was no way to tell it to divide the "othe" in "bother" in a different place than the "othe" in "pothead". Don't ask me why I was writing somebody with the word "pothead". [grin]
High!
Yes, I also remember the Sinclair ZX-80 ads back in 1980/81... originally, this famous early home computer also wasn't a readily assembled device, it was sold as construction kit (back then, there were also synthesizers and electronic organs offered this way)...
Just about everyone who had one was an amateur radio operator. Nobody else knew how to solder good enough. The local computer club in Chicago, where I lived at the time, had a blank for your ham radio callsign along with the usual blanks for street address, etc., on the form when you joined. And there was only one store where you could buy floppy disks in all of Chicago.
Yes, years ago, I collected old computer magazines, and I owned several 1978/79 issues of CHIP (a famous German computer magazine) - and I was amazed about single-board computers with 512 bytes or 1k RAM costing about 3.500 deutschmarks, and yes, in those early magazines there where a lot of construction plans for embryonic computers!
But which tools did you use to write software for just a bunch of naked hardware - how did you enter the code? I presume you just wrote pure machine code, so you did not need any compiler...
Had there ever been repression against HAMmers?
Oh yeah, I'm also a lousy solderer, though I grew up in the C 64 era... a friend of mine, who got his first computer at about the same time as me, very quickly got deep into assembler programming, EPROM burning, and soon his C 64 harbored several operating systems... while I tried programming its built-in 3-timbral synthesizer and was quite soon frustrated about the clumsy "Commodore BASIC V 2.0" (by the way, a Micro$oft BASIC), and finally I got lost in the maze of computer games for years... simply daddling away the chance of becoming a programming whizkid...
But soldering... isn't there any risk to get chronically poisoned by the lead vapors over the years?
See you in Khyberspace!
Yadgar
You started entering code with the front panel switches and getting your output on the front panel LEDs. To enter an "A" for example, which is 01000001 in ASCII, you'd flip the second and eighth switch up. I assure you, one of the first programs you write is one to save stuff to disk, and one of the ones right after that is to teach it to take input from the keyboard and output data to the screen. [grin] Then you could just type in code like this: C3 E0 00
Hams were all put off the air during the two World Wars. Other than that, they've usually done quite well because most government radio engineers are hams, and a lot of the military are hams. Hams tend to have a very good relationship with public safety agencies such as the police. Sometimes hams made governments who owned their phone companies nervous, because they saw hams as evading long distance phone bills.
They worry about that now. No one ever said anything about it back then. Of course, no one ever talked about smoking then, either. Ham radio is a hobby many men stay with for life, though, and I know a lot of really old guys who've been in it since they were in high school, and I know of no one to have lead problems. So I doubt the problem is substantial. Getting fat is probably a far worse hazard of the hobby. Hams tend to sit on their butts way too much. Of course, about gamers one can say the same.
Of course, I have no idea what lead might do to your HAIR! Hey, maybe that is why my hair is getting solder-colored!
Bill
