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Suddenly there are no stories showing on the front page and when I log in, there is nothing under 'My Stories'.
I have tried it with 3 different browsers on 2 systems.
Where has everything gone?
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Everything's back now.
Servers needed resync
The servers fell out of sync. Looks like they resynced automatically after five minutes and then fell out again. I have forced a resync and all seems fine now. Traffic spikes sometimes cause this. We are going to get new hardware to hopefully solve this problem as soon as Piper has time to work on it.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Sure...
just go ahead and blame the server....
Love, Andrea Lena
Why are you...
...holding my steak with your hand?
- I don't want it to fall on the floor again!
(Sorry, stupid spellchecker error... Steak as in a piece of grilled meat is a word... Stake as in sharpened piece of wood to hunt the vampires is also a word...)
Funny thing is...
... Just seen this joke yesterday for the first time... (not in English)...
And it happened to be just right for today...
Thanks Erin
I sort of freaked out with none of my stories and posts from 2003/2004.
Samantha
You absolutely need to have a backup!
Remember Tuck saga: no recent backup means double rate on any computer reapair or data recovery!
It's Just a Reminder
We don't think about or appreciate all this techno stuff when it works. When it doesn't work, it's all disappointment. We're left out in the cold and wondering how to get back in. I appreciate that this is here, twenty-four, seven.
There was a time
I actually lived through the age when websites would only appear on certain times of day. I remember when I was 12 that there was this website that would only be accessible between 10pm to 4am. Other times it would show error. Technology is great.
Needing a separate boot floppy disk
Remember the old "Compuserve", no graphics at all and a connect rate of 100bps
110baud and all that
Was the norm back in the early to mid 1970's. You dialled a number on your phone and listened for the tone. Then you put the handset into an 'Acoustic Coupler' and if everything went well, you were connected to some great beast of a machine out there somewhere.
There was life before AOL and Compuserve. I'll be going to a presentation on the PDP-8[1] at the UK National Museum of Computing in January. (next to Bletchley Park).
[1] A 12 bit computer that could run a pretty decent Word Processor.
Walking down memory lane
The first computer I saw was an IBM 7090. I remember that it was huge. Of course, at the time I was about a meter tall.
Modern Computers Suffer from "Could It Do"
Years ago computers could do pretty much everything the average person could want from such an elegant machine. This was done with a limited amount of memory and a small number of glitches.
Then some nerd said "Could it do?" setting off a never ending series of not necessary needs and increased complexity.
The best car I ever had was a '57 Chevy. When you opened the hood you knew exactly what every part did and it was fun to work on. Then some gear head said "Could it Do?" and the engineers in Detroit made things "much better."
No - I don't want to go back to the days of Compuserve although I miss that connection sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Sad thing is that nerds were mostly content...
...with using computers in the old fashioned way... There were some people on the "demo scene" who were doing interesting things with pseudo graphics and graphics, and producing high quality sound with basic speaker... But again, those demos used like 1k of memory...
So, nerds and geeks are completely innocent!
But somwhere around 1985 the (as rumor have it father of the one of the owners of the) company that should not be named came up with the idea to hire marketing people from one of the biggest FMCG companies... At about the same time someone from the same company came up with the idea that customers have to pay for the privilege of testing pre-alpha versions of their software...
Now just memories...
Perhaps some here are old enough to have the operator change shift happen and finding their line disconnected in the middle of their 13 hour down load. (One of the joys of having real live operators VS switching circuits.)
OR perhaps they placed the mike from the PA system to the speaker of their UNIVAC I to so the shop could listen to computer generated Christmas carols. (The UNIVAC speaker could be connected to the execution bus to aid troubleshooting code. Different types of loops executed at different speeds; resulted in different pitches.)
computing 101 in college
My first computer interface was through punch cards. Being inquisitive and not knowing much about computers I submitted a deck of randomly punched cards with no instructions at all on them. When I picked up the fan fold computer paper output the next day I was shocked to find organized rows and columns of instructions and data. I inquired at the desk if they had given me the wrong output. They said they substituted my output to see if I was dumb enough not to notice, and never ever do that again...! I often wonder how many pages of error codes the printer spit out before they noticed and shut the job down.
I had one lab...
...where I had to submit program to be punched into the cards and to be run on the IBM 360 clone... But punch card machine died on our class lab and there were no spares available anymore for repairs... So I had never got any of my programs on the punch cards... Anyways, it was like year 1990, all of the computers had terminals and some kind of drive on them by the time!
But I still remember a quest to reach the room where we were to submit our programs... Go to the 2nd floor, go across the building, go down to the 1St floor, go across the building in the opposite direction, go to the 3Rd floor, go across the lobby, go down back to the ground floor (but on another side of the canteen), go through a maze corridor, go up to the 9th floor (no elevator provided)... There, behind the room of (wonder of wonders!) the CAD workstations with 21" professional hi-res screens, was a small window in the wall into the realm of punch cards!.. Had dreams of that maze for couple of years after graduation... But it was a real quest. As our teacher just instructed us: "go to the 9th floor, submit your programms for punching and execution there." Our class spent 3 days to discover whole route... (before that lab all of us were sure that that building was just 5 storeys high...)
CATS say: All your stories
CATS say: All your stories are belong to us.
Kris
{I leave a trail of Kudos as I browse the site. Be careful where you step!}
my 1st computer
used octal light input paper tape and magnet film that had to have a physical
shiny end of file or it spewed fan folds till the cows came home
ed
ed
Some of us are younger than others...
I had only met this kind of tape in "CNC" lathe in the middle of the 80th... There were some funny incidents and I now know reasons for protective screens tnat cover CNC machines' work area. In my case it once happened that malfunction in one of the boards caused machine to interpret "-" in direction as "+" in some random instances... And lathe tried to move the cutter through the part it worked on... There were some metal pieces flying around. Good thing that protective screen was closed (not a usual occurence at the time) and no one was hurt.
But we were trained to be "operators", so had nothing to do with programs or punching tapes. Just using dials to adjust coordinates for operations if the parts produced were getting close to the tolerance treshhold.
finding a community
BC obviously has its own community. I remember trans chat rooms from years back that provided room for dialog and some helpful information in a very closeted sense. It was a breath of fresh air that was important to me at the time. I wonder about their need today.
Remember that programming was a terminal disease in the 70s.
It was sad to see how many bright young people got sucked into that terrible addiction.
Oh how ancient we all are...
started with the JR code, punching cards for the class's IBM accounting machine. Dusty decks with lines of Cobal code that were taken by the programming class to the mainframe on the base to debug and run. Saying good morning to our little part of the world by starting up a PDP-8m rackmount and launching the broadcast day for WKVO AM and FM, and having to reload the code from 8 bit mylar tape through a mechanical Teletype machine when lightening would strike too close to the station and scramble the computer's memory. Fun times indeed.
Our manuals were put on the latest cutting edge...
Our manuals were put on the latest cutting edge space age equipment for the aircraft we flew in the military. Everything was on this HUGE roll of microfiche hidden inside this reader machine the size and weight of a coke machine...LOL
No kidding you can't make that stuff up!
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We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Oh goddess
I forgot about those things. I hope I never have to use or see one again.
Enjoy CnoledgeCola!
:-)