@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Cool! I'd have thought you'd been wrenching all your life. What did you work on? I spent five years at Tektronix in the "small systems group" (when small meant that it would fit in a small truck and didn't have to be in a climate controlled room) and later eight years at BSDi trying to make Berkeley UNIX into a viable commercial entity, and another two at Wind River after we got acquired.
@dlu - I worked for Lockheed Martin for about three years. There I worked on VAX, SGI, and Sun servers, SGI and NetApps RAID. Then, as an independent contractor (under Lockheed Martin), worked on the same equipment for about five more years.
@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Those were interesting times, we put a lot of time into scouring our system for assumptions about the date. IIRC there were very few of them. Actually I think it was very cool that so much code survived from times when it seemed reasonable to assume that 2000 wouldn't happen within the lifetime of the code.
@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Thank goodness really. It could have been very interesting… I suspect in the COBOL world the 31st of December 1999 was a very interesting night.
@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 If you're looking to get back into computers there is a huge shortage of people to teach CS at the high school level. That's what I'm doing now and I love it, really the best job I've had. I suspect that with your knowledge of cars you could do some very cool stuff.
@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 It's amazing to me how much comes back to me when I have to go back to work on something I haven't touched in years…
@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Yes, that was a while ago :-) I think the "pull date" has past, although I was in my district tech office and they had a bunch of Grape Purple iMacs (with CRTs!) that they had just pulled out, so you never know…
ROFL. I have an Octane and an O2 server downstairs ... Ihaven't fired either of them up in about 9 years ... Got a set of IRIX OS software sitting on the shelf here for them ... great play toys, but never really did anything with them.
@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Wow! You need to open a computer museum! If you're ever near Seattle, you should check out the Living Computer Museum. They have a bunch of old machines (pretty much everything I ever worked on) running: a PDP-8, a PDP-10 (maybe a 20 too), an 11, a Vax – a real stroll down memory lane. Never worked on a Sun, Tek thought they were competitors (maybe, but I don't think we worried them)
@BobCross I'm interested in your answer. Here's a question: how did you decide that accelerating slowly to get to cruising speed is more fuel efficient that accelerating quickly?
@dlu And on this side of the pond we've got the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park - I went there on the opening day and spent ages programming an Elliot 803 - which was obsolete 20 years before I was born... :)
@NickC quite a few years ago, in one of my mid level undergrad courses, we wrote an emulator for the PDP8 (variable length opcodes!) and then had to write programs for that. Our grade was based on the functionality of that code. Hard but super nerdy fun!
@NickC I would love to visit Bletchley Park, if I ever get back to the UK that is high on my list.
@BobCross The 8 is one of my favorite machines, at least in part because it was so easy to understand – or maybe I should say because it is so easy to understand now. At the time I remember it being a bit of a struggle...
@dlu oh sure, I agree with you. It's sort of like thinking back to high school and thinking "I have no time to get my homework done!!" ... video games video games ...
@dlu The Colossus is by far the best thing there - no only the first ever programmable computer, but also the replica was built from scratch from just memories and a few scraps of diagrams and photos. I met the guy who built it (the replica) once - alas he is no longer with us...
@NickC That would be worth seeing! Heck, that would be worth organizing a trip some summer with some of my students. So cool that they could recreate it and that you got to talk with one of the creators. I hope others are carrying on for him.
What's worse than other people using the keyboards that I explicitly forbade them to type code on? Using then to type multicast networking code. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. An eternal mystery! 🔨🔨🔨🔨
Fortunately I have years of experience in diagnosing pathological insanity and gruesome maladies that are inflicted upon defenseless computers by horrible madmen.
@Zaid - I believe in most cases, exposure to oil will degrade timing belts, as well as make them more susceptible to slippage. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of belts run dry (or are supposed to be dry).
@Zaid I don't know, mano ... the biggest problem I'm having with the class is I don't understand when to use what. Doing the work isn't usually a problem. I mean I get the math.
Here's a situation I encounter far too often:
During diagnosis, I want to determine if the mass air flow sensor(s) [MAF(s)] is/are healthy.
I hook up an OBDII reader to a vehicle that I'm trying to diagnose and get access to real-time mass air flow rate.
By knowing the engine displacement a...
Here's a situation I encounter far too often:
During diagnosis, I want to determine if the mass air flow sensor(s) [MAF(s)] is/are healthy.
I hook up an OBDII reader to a vehicle that I'm trying to diagnose and get access to real-time mass air flow rate.
By knowing the engine displacement a...
The Pitstop
The Pitstop