Linux users?

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Ohm_Boy said:
dBase II was cool. I was actually pretty adept w/ dBase III. I think I mentioned that I wrote a maintenance management system in Clipper... 86 thousand lines of code, with custom assembler libraries.



"Back in my day, all we had were ones and zeros. And some days we couldn't even GET zeros - we had to use leftover capital 'oh's..."
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I know it well. I used to own a business called Flamingo Data Services. We did custom databases, sold databases we compiled, and maintained databases for clients that did not have computer access. Our clinets included U of M, Dade County Public Schools, and American Friends Service Committee (Quakers). We ran the thing on CP/M boxes (Apples with CP/M cards) running dBase (and we used Clipper to compile) and also on a whole bunck of Apples and Franklins (Apple clones) using a program called DB Master. All this was done from 51/4" floppies....hard drives really were not readily available and were very expensive then. If I remember correctly a 5 MEG (NOT gig) drive took up about a 2'x3' piece of desk real estate and cost abut $1000. (a FULLY stuffed Apple, i.e. 48k base memory, 80 col card, parallel card, serial card, modem, language card {16k memory expansion}, 1 or 2 disk controller cards and either 2 or 4 floppy drives {2 drives per controller card, 2 drives was bare minimum for business applications or CP/M--4 was better! Each drive was 360k if I remember correctly} was around $2500-$3000!)
We printed with a Diablo Daisy Wheel (Talk about SLOW) and Oki dot matrix (hated it) an Epson dot matrix (MX-80 II F/T--LOVED it).
We also did limited desktop publishing (with non WYSIWYG programs there was a LOT of paste up!) We published newletters for several professional organizations.
This was done with a 2 person staff, myself and my partner in the business. That was a very common business model back then. In fact, micro$oft and apple started in much the same way!

So tell me, did you ever do any hacking, cracking, or phreaking? :wink: :lol: :shock: :?:
 
So tell me, did you ever do any hacking, cracking, or phreaking?
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Wwll, kinda yes and no. I was always an electronics guy and avid hobbyist, so I played with things. A friend of mine and I used to try to find copy-protected PC Games to try and beat the protection; we reversed a lot of code in debug, and I wrote some routines to duplicate track and sector errors by accessing the floppy disk controller chips directly. We never cared about playing the games, just defeating the protection. We both gave it up once the CopyII-PC Option board came out 'cause it wasn't impossible anymore.
As for pecking about on unattended computers, I may or may not have set off some VAX alarms at work, and I did explore around some of the TSO areas of the company mainframe. And I managed to lock out a terminal on a Honeywell Level 6 at work once, too.

Oh, and while I did have a 2600 hertz sine wave generator, I never used it on a phone. It made a nice signal injector for audio work.

I really didn't have a lot of modem access until after a lot of bad press had already been generated, so I wasn't all that keen on really trying to access someone else's systems. I spent some time with a BBS, but it belonged to a friend of mine, so most of what I did constituted "admin-ing".

So, I'm not really the criminal type, but I am still prone to pressing 4231 buttons on a Coke machine as I walk by...
 
I KNEW it. I was a regular on Pirates Harbor BBS and was known to release a few cracked programs along with my boss at one small company that I worked for. We used to liberate a lot of software, mostly apple. I was more into cracking than hacking and never really phreaked but knew some folks that did.
 
schrody said:
Y'all lost me long ago. I guess that's what I get for asking who tinkers with Linux. :-D
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Your question is a loaded one and it's bound to bring out the TRUE geeks!
See, there WAS life before linux! (and it was good!)

CP/M ruled! (We don't need no steenking GUI!) 8)
 
JasonLion said:
waterbear said:
CP/M ruled! (We don't need no steenking GUI!) 8)
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Ah, CP/M, what extreme levels of luxury. When I started out we entered our programs in binary through front panel paddle switches. I learned to program on a PDP-8i, 6K of core and a 48K hard drive!
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You, Sir, are a member of Geekdom also! :bowdown:
 
You had a hard drive?

The CA LSI-II systems I worked with were machine controllers, and we loaded them via paper tape reader which we rolled on a cart to whichever machine needed to be loaded. We spooled the tape off a screwdriver shaft through the reader and onto the floor. The tapes had to be rewound by hand. And between the static charge on the paper tape and the dirt on the floor, we had a lot of "BAD READ" stops which required rewinding. They also required a lot of wiping, and more blowing than an original Nintendo cartridge slot.

And until we got autoload ROMS for the units, we had to punch in bootstrap code via HEX pad just to get them to take input from the tape reader.

The computers were also core, so we didn't often lose code outright, but they were on a factory floor, so there were lots of reloads strictly from a troubleshooting perspective.

Our later "upgraded technology" systems had 8" Shugart floppies. I'm pretty sure we got about 200K on them. Now THAT was livin'.
 
I learned programming on an IBM 360. Punch cards. How many times I went down to the basement (yes the computer center was in a basement in Houston no lees) carrying two boxes of punch cards to run them through the reader. The punch card punch machines ruined my touch typing.

I love to write programs in APL. You just can't read them. It's all greek to me! The second computer I worked on was a TI TMS9900 microprocessor system that I built myself. The basic interpter was contained in EEPROM! Now that's firmware.
 
dschlic1 said:
I learned programming on an IBM 360. Punch cards. How many times I went down to the basement (yes the computer center was in a basement in Houston no lees) carrying two boxes of punch cards to run them through the reader.
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My final project in advanced fortran was on about 1 1/2 boxes of punch cards. I was about to feed them into the reader at the computing center at U of FL when I dropped them. Talk about a meltdown! (Me, not the computer!) I still am emotionally scarred from the incident!
 

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Ohm_Boy said:
Our later "upgraded technology" systems had 8" Shugart floppies. I'm pretty sure we got about 200K on them. Now THAT was livin'.
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God, I remember those Shugarts. 200k seems about right! I had them on a commodore that I had that was based on a superpet. Don't remember the model number but it was a cash register/point of sale system.
 
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