749 replies to this topic

[AllseeingEye]

I think I upgraded that machine to a Pentium 166. Does that make sense? Then the next one was an AMD of some kind which I overdrived by pencilling in some lines between something or other.

 

Yup the 166-class was next in the processing speed pentium hierarchy after the 133's. AMD overdrive was a utility that vendor provided for overclocking the processor by optimizing performance and chipset speed. Long since discontinued these days with the advent of far more powerful and capable processors.

[lanforod]

Oh shoot! I started with a 486, not a 386! Mine had the windows that precedes 95. Windows 3.6 I think it was, on a 486 machine.

 

Windows 3.1.

 

That was my first computer as well, a 486 running MS Dos / Win 3.1.

[lanforod]

I’m not. I found ski goggles irritating skiing. If it was a full face mask where I could project a face that could look interested and even respond with my own personal AI then maybe. That way I could spend all my time trolling VV, even during business meetings!

 

From what I saw of the marketing material, this is exactly what a Vision Pro is capable of doing - though the projection you're talking about is in software, not like a hologram in front of the goggles in real life (the screen does show your eyes/face and that's actually a projection, not a see through glass thing.

 

The biggest issue with the Vision Pro is something most have already talked about. The price. Its never going to catch on when it costs nearly $5k CAD.

[Mike K.]

That's it! A 486 with Windows 3.1.

 

And yes, ASE, thank you. I meant overclock! Back then it was possible to add more juice to your processor, but you'd better have had a way to keep it cool. 

[lanforod]

That's it! A 486 with Windows 3.1.

 

And yes, ASE, thank you. I meant overclock! Back then it was possible to add more juice to your processor, but you'd better have had a way to keep it cool. 

 

Overclocking is still very much a thing today . People even overclock their GPUs. 

[Victoria Watcher]

Maybe Ike this and $1000 it’ll work.

[Mike K.]

Wow, I figured processing is so fast and cheap now that you wouldn't need to.

[dasmo]

From what I saw of the marketing material, this is exactly what a Vision Pro is capable of doing - though the projection you're talking about is in software, not like a hologram in front of the goggles in real life (the screen does show your eyes/face and that's actually a projection, not a see through glass thing.

The biggest issue with the Vision Pro is something most have already talked about. The price. It’s never going to catch on when it costs nearly $5k CAD.

it isn’t your eyes it’s a generated set of eyes. They should have had them as glowing reptilian eyes. That would be cooler.

[dasmo]

Well, generated from yours. Like the FaceTime avatar.

[lanforod]

it isn’t your eyes it’s a generated set of eyes. They should have had them as glowing reptilian eyes. That would be cooler.

 

Like I said, its a projection, based on a combination of whats generated from your face in advance, plus what you're actually doing to show your actual expression, blinks etc. I wonder if its good enough to show a wink.

[lanforod]

I'm sure reptilian eyes is a paid feature .

[dasmo]

Like I said, its a projection, based on a combination of whats generated from your face in advance, plus what you're actually doing to show your actual expression, blinks etc. I wonder if its good enough to show a wink.

I caught that. I was just following along. :-) I'm not a fan of wearables so I hope there is some effort towards fixing these archaic interfaces without having to wear a thing on my face. 

[dasmo]

I'm more excited by what "AI" tools are giving me. 

[Matt R.]

My first computer was a 386!

We started with an XT, those were the days! Eventually we had a 1200bps modem to connect to the VREB BBS.

Edited by Matt R., 08 June 2023 - 11:19 AM.

[Victoria Watcher]

[AllseeingEye]

screenshot-twitter.com-2023.06.09-02_24_39.png

 

I'll take what's behind (or in) Picture # 2 for $1000 please Alex.....

[AllseeingEye]

You know you're at the retirement precipice re: tech when you look back to consider back in the day when I was using SCO/UNIX one of the very first commands after system boot up that I would issue was "scologin disable" on SCO-UNIX versions that installed a GUI by default; bus architecture and chip-set performance especially 30+ years ago was sufficiently inadequate that launching the GUI would result in woefully sluggish performance. Anything I needed or wanted to do from an admin standpoint was invariably, infinitely faster from the command line interface.

 

Fortunately eventually desktop platform hardware evolved to run GUI's quick enough that I was able to eventually wean myself off the command line environment - long live the 'startx' command!*

 

*That's the one that provided the user with a GUI environment on demand

[Victoria Watcher]

I recall programming my C64 in BASIC, and also the high school computers (mostly Apple II+ I think, but there were also some Commodore Super Pets I think).

 

University was Pascal on the mainframes via terminal.  Seemed like a step down, TBH.    

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 08 June 2023 - 11:21 PM.

[AllseeingEye]

/\  I love mainframe environments and certain middle tiers that run on them; in a sense that is real computing - no GUI, 1001 operations and keyboard commands that you have to learn and master in order to do anything productive, or even do anything at all.

 

Practically bulletproof compared to a win OS in terms of crashing or freezing - which is not to say a mainframe doesn't crash, it can in its parlance experience an ABEND (literally an "ABnormal END"); and less susceptible to viruses than Windows, although again not impervious to them - because of the command line interface I find CICS / mainframe computing interesting and challenging on a personal level because it really taxes the grey matter. CICS (acronym for Customer Information Control System) is actually middleware that sits between the z/OS IBM mainframe and your business applications such as financial and other operational business modules..

 

For the HIBC contract we have access to the BCG TSO/CICS environment in order to work certain customer financial adjustment requests, usually from the ministry. Requires us to go back and forth between CICS and the SAP financial module, which if nothing else mandates that you be sufficiently amped up on several cups of coffee in advance. Merely creating and staging such an adjustment file in CICS takes at a minimum an hour, sometimes two depending on the complexity of the request and how much information we need to physically gather and stage in the file.

[Victoria Watcher]