Technical The internet & old cars

I can relate...We bought our daughter a computer in grade school...A guy at work, on his computer showed me all the 55 chevy projects on ebay that could be bought for a song compared to anything I had saw locally
I was hooked, and more or less used my daughters computer more than she did for a long time, getting into car forums and classifieds etc, until we got her a laptop and I was able to take over the old one

 

Ha Ha, dial up internet, many wasted hours

 

I started out with a second hand 386 running ms-dos, Windows 3.1 was in the box, never opened. I remember having to feed 5 or 6 floppy’s to install it, wow what a difference between Windows and ms-dos! This was in 1996 or so, I bought it to keep my company books on. Was probably a couple of years before we went online with a new computer I had bought. AOL dial up, if one of us wanted to use the phone, we had to get off the internet. Had a few of those “ oh shit!” Moments with porn popping up too! Quickly learned about pop up blockers!

I took one year of typing in high school, but hadn’t done any in that 20+ years out of school, so I ended up being a three or four finger typist! Wife is amazed how good I can do it that way.

My youngest son got me into looking at cars on the web. Then when I was searching for info on a certain model, I found forum boards, and ended up on several. Learned about the HAMB on one of them, been here ever since!

 

I worked for a company for 18 years that produced some of the earliest PCs around. Digital Equipment Corp. was at one time only second to IBM as far as computers go. I ended up running their prototype machine and sheetmetal shops using CNC machines and CAD/CAM for prototyping all because I showed an aptitude for it. All I had at the time was a trade school certificate. Well years later, long after the demise of DEC, after taking networking classes, I got a job at a small software company that made internet filtering software for PCs. It was for keeping children safe from the worst of the web so there were folks who sat in a room all day long and all they did was search for porn sites. ALL DAY! And they got paid very well for their effort. I did technical support for the software in their call center so that wasn't my job but needless to say all this prepared me pretty well for entry into the HAMB world!

 

Same here with not liking technology.
Vowed to never touch a computer
Kept a plain jane phone for 8 years.
Then we got a computer measuring system at work. WOW. That thing made work easier. Then checking out cats and parts online at work. Then at home.
Started working in a hot rod shop and the bossman designed chassis, cages and our CNC guy made tons of cool parts. You guys might hate computers in cars but I had a great time at work when test and tune time happened.

9 years ago I started teaching. Sent my first email. Had to take some teaching classes on PowerPoint and classroom technology. Then I got an IPhone and started texting.
I am no longer a technophobe.
I put together power point lessons, embed videos, a little photoshop, do attendance, create worksheets, show cool stuff from the HAMB with an overhead projector plus all the regular school paperwork. We look up tech sheets for paint materials, check out paint schemes. Look up engine codes and diagnostics.
It’s a great tool when used as one. It can become counter productive.
I stay away from games and adult distractions. The cars are a bad enough addiction.

An odd fact is. The reason I have a real name here is because I had no idea what a user name meant. I just filled out with my correct name. This was the first site I ever joined.
Currently doing school work. Home laptop and school laptop going and hamb on the phone. The cool thing about sites like this is I can do the school work, take a hamb brake and listen to my favorite music.

 

I got into the numbers about 20 years ago...although I had used computers in the mid 80s, and we got our own in 89.



A few chips from my collection. Notice that this only takes us into the mid 90s, the progress since then has made computers actually useful for things like photos, music, and video--which I never figured would happen, when I first got into this stuff.

Phone modems. yeah, they were fun! I still have a few of them around, too. And no phone line to connect them to, and no number to dial.

Coincidentally, just today I threw away a box of AOL discs (unopened) that I had saved long ago, for some unknown reason. they're probably worth something now? Or not!

 

Damn what a rant and waste of back up......

 

You are full of shit!

 

I wish computers and especially the HAMB had been around when I started my on car 40 years ago. My intention was always a late '50's/early '60's style. All I had to go on were my memories from the magazines I had read back in the day. My car won't be pure, but it will be closer.
Anthony, you nailed it. The computer is a tool. I hate it when I am told "The computer won't let me do it." Well then, get another tool that will do the job.
My problem with navigating on a computer is that my intuition and the procedure you need to use are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. Also, when you are having a class write papers on simple machines, DO NOT type in the word screw.

 

We used those at the collision shop I work in until about 6 years ago. Used them until they couldn't buy any new ones, pretty sure they bought the last 3 new ones that were ever on ebay

 

My intro to computers was the Apple 2 E that I had in my office in the high school auto shop. I didn't have access to the internet or what there was of it in the early 80's and it primarily got used to write my course outlines and syllabus or tests on. Those were the days of write a few pages, save to a disk write more pages and save again.
First real internet experience was a few years later when I bought a computer from some boyfriend of my daughters that wasn't much of a computer but did get me on the internet. First one I owned myself was a Toshiba Tecra laptop that I bought for 85.00 off Ebay and used on dialup at work for a long time. that thing had cost someone 8 grand when it was new.

 

First time I googled my name, it found a guy in Kentucky on a site called "Hearts behind Bars". Dayum!

 

In high school, our computer course was still about programming using cards, and the computer took up an entire climate controlled room, but it was the last year of that in my final year (mid 80s) and so I didn't take the course. Later that fall in my first year of engineering, we had a computer programming class using the latest personal computers. It was a total shock for me as I had never even touched a computer, let alone programmed anything. Let's just say it didn't go over well, but by third year, we were writing complicated programs for math class and a computer graphics class. And yes, before the Internet, there were the infamous bulletin board services (BBS). Lol. Times have changed...

 

Before I had a computer I was working on a 65 Chevelle that was quite rusty. A friend offered to help me find a better body on that new fangled internet thing. So he dialed up the internet, and was searching Chevelle bodies. All was fine. After looking at a bunch of those he tells me that you will find different content with different search words. So we search Malibu bodies. Well we found different content! Women must not wear clothes in Malibu!

 

When we first got a PC at the office (we are a health service regulator) a member of staff wanted to research Asian models of health care. So he typed in Asian Models..... I don't think we ever got all the filth off of that computer.

Sent from my moto g(6) play using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

There was a time when keyboards had fan belts, ( also known as typewriter ribbons ), and they were all manual shift, not automatic, the addition of a bell told you when it was time to shift !

 

When I was in high school, they got a PDP-11/34, which was a rather nice mini computer, and it had both teletype and video terminals. I never messed with it, but my twin brother sure did.

In college in 1981, I took one of the last punch card programming classes offered (FORTRAN) before they switched to video terminals. It took a few more years until they went to individual computers, though.

I was playing with one of my older computers, it has the Dragstrip Plus program still running on it...so of course I put in the numbers for Plan II. Then I realized I don't have a printer that I can use to get the results out--although maybe I do, I'll have to check. These old DOS programs only send the output to the parallel port, so they can't easily be used on modern computers with USB only or network printers.

The funny thing about all this stuff is that, like old cars, the old computers still work and do what they were designed to do. The problem is that what they can do is about a million times slower/less capable than what a modern computer can do. Old cars, on the other hand, still do what they were designed to do, and it's basically the same thing that modern cars do, perhaps twice as well.

Traditional hot rods are worth while, but traditional computers are really not. And yes, I still have some of them...

 

Danny you just made me spit out my coffee because I was laughing picturing you typing in boobiville. Today will be a good day cause it started with a good belly laugh.

 

Back in the day of dial up, It seemingly took forever & we have come a long way since then. HRP

 

I FOR ONE AM GLAD YOU STUCK AROUND!

 

Hey H R Primer, I'm still trying to figure out how my 10 year old granddaughter got my password. Ain't technology great ? Thank goodness us senior citizens lived long enough to enjoy all the pluses to the internet. ie : global access, etc. Keep surfin'!

 

She probably found the yellow sticky that you wrote the password on, so you could remember it.

Sent from my Trimline

 

that was a really good one !

 

YEP !

 

hey squirrel, you happen to know my friend Squeeg there in Sierra Vista ?

 

yeah, saw him last night at a restaurant.

 

I got lucky. Not only did I take typing in high school (to get out of gym class), but in the late 70s my housemate noticed my gift of logic when diagnosing his chronic car troubles and remarked to me that I would make an excellent computer programmer. I took a very few classes (using card decks as input) and another friend was in a position to hire a night shift computer operator, so I quit my construction job and went to work there. Within three years I was running the programming department. As others have said, you didn't need a degree then, you just had to demonstrate ability. So now I'm sitting here making good money and not breaking my back every day. It's not the sweet gig it used to be, for sure, but it beats manual labor.

The internet is wonderful. My first job out of high school was driving a parts truck for a local car dealer. One of my jobs was to go through a list of obsolete parts sent to us by FoMoCo, locate them and throw them in the dumpster. Brand new parts. I ... just ... couldn't. I put most of them in the trunk of my car and started piling them underneath my mom's basement stairs. After as while I had a huge pile of NOS parts, including a new distributor for a flathead Ford. But there was no internet so the only way to sell anything was an ad in the paper or a magazine, and that cost money, which I didn't have. Mom threw them out at some point. But if there had been an internet I could have made a tidy sum.

 

"HRP - UNPLUG YOUR COMPUTER!"

I can see this being typed a time or two on the HAMB... hahaha. Man, picturing you doing that cracked me up. Great story, HRP.

 

I found out if you need to buy a winch, don't spell it "WENCH".

 

It's funny now, but when the computer was plugged back up there was Bonnie Ville with the biggest boobs I had ever seen!

Thankfully, the pop up's are not as common as they once were and filters and antivirus programs help prevent unwanted embarrassing content. HRP