Your age rounded to the nearest decade

[gunhilltrain]

I learned Fortran 4 and SCATRE on an IBM computer the size of a small house. I think I remember it being a 7094. Endless hours on a keypunch machine in the wee hours of the morning because that was the only time you could get on a machine.

I remember when there still horsecars around, although they were starting to be replaced. The elevated trains had steam locomotives. The tallest building in New York was probably the World Building on Park Row.

Women had these cute bloomers that opened up in the back. But you almost certainly had to marry them in order to see those. Of course, there were plenty of hookers around. Many of them were in brothels in The Tenderloin. Today that overlaps with the Flatiron District and what's left of The Garment District. The nickname came from the cops, who made a lot of graft from brothel payoffs.

Some people still believed that masturbation caused blindness, but I never fell for that.

 

[Blind_Justice]

50, and I have a white goatee to prove it.

 

[HordHolm]

Old

 

[gunhilltrain]

I’m human, not an automaton. We’ll sort of, I’m really a blonde version of…

https://live.staticflickr.com/3198/2955769996_0c8598baa5.jpg

How come the female terminators never look like the girl next door? Or even the woman next door? But have you seen what Schwarzenegger looks like lately?

 

[gunhilltrain]

Rounded down - 70.

My earliest memories - looking out my Gran's bedroom window and watching the milkman doing his deliveries using a horse and cart, and the lamplighter with his pole going from street gaslight to gaslight switching them off/on.

I just did this gimmick today! Except I went into a lot more detail.

 

[mantonrichards]

50.

 

[TheRedChamber]

How come the female terminators never look like the girl next door? Or even the woman next door? But have you seen what Schwarzenegger looks like lately?

Male Engineers: This model needs more boob.

Also Male Engineers: This model needs more muscles. No, even more...

 

[XerXesXu]

Except I went into a lot more detail.

Oh, really!

 

[gunhilltrain]

Oh, really!

Yeah, read post #181. I get into the sexual mores of the 1890's as I understand them. The bit about cops taking bribes from brothels is based on stories from my great-grandfather, who was in the NYPD back then. He was very disillusioned about what he saw. I never met him - he died around 1915 - but I heard about them from my grandfather and mother.

 

[axelwritesonline]

30 rounded up

 

[dmallord]

As I told someone earlier, I remember installing Linux from floppy disks...

I worked with punch cards behind glass-enclosed windows and no keyboards. I remember Radio Shack 12" floppies, 400K and 800K, two bay drives - one boot, one data, and then that 4 bay expansion drive was really for massive storage needs.

And 80 rounded down

 

[colddiesel]

It's almost 75 years since I first used to use a slide rule and I am now just closer to 90 rounded up. If I could get my sisters to join that would be two closest to 3 figures

 

[Sx4u]

As I told someone earlier, I remember installing Linux from floppy disks...

8, 5.25, or 3.5 inch disks?

 

[onehitwanda]

Lol. So close to the big 30 that i hit it this year, soon.

You're aging just fine

 

[AlinaX]

8, 5.25, or 3.5 inch disks?

3.5", of course. The 1.44MB 3.5" disks were in common use by... it must have been early 1993 that I was downloading Linux (Yggdrasil), although I thought it was earlier. I had a 486 (with on-chip FPU, yay) and the Pentium came out in 1993, and honestly can't remember using Windows (3.1 - ooh...) on the computer, but probably did.

I certainly remember using 5.25" disks, but not for Linux, and I never used 8" at all.

 

[MajorRewrite]

8, 5.25, or 3.5 inch disks?

Someone always brings the discussion around to disk size.

 

[onehitwanda]

3.5", of course. The 1.44MB 3.5" disks were in common use by... it must have been early 1993 that I was downloading Linux (Yggdrasil), although I thought it was earlier. I had a 486 (with on-chip FPU, yay) and the Pentium came out in 1993, and honestly can't remember using Windows (3.1 - ooh...) on the computer, but probably did.

I certainly remember using 5.25" disks, but not for Linux, and I never used 8" at all.

FreeBSD was my gateway drug in 1997.

 

[AlinaX]

I tried NetBSD at some point. Not sure about FreeBSD.

 

[stickygirl]

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1d/14/dc/1d14dc87060b176c6040ed1c02ee74fa.jpg

 

[yowser]

I'm a hundred rounded to the nearest century.

 

[NotWise]

FreeBSD was my gateway drug in 1997.

I used BSD for the first time in 1985 or 1986. It ran a vax-like computer on a full-sized expansion card inside an IBM AT dos box. Whatever software I had to install came on 5.25-inch floppies. That's all the AT supported.

My intro to Gnu software was sometime in the early 90's when I was using OS/2 v 2 and 3 with little other third party support. My first Linux experience was online in July, 1995, and my first home installation (Slackware) was at the end of 1995. It used a Linux v 1.x kernel and came on a CD with a book of instructions. As I recall, you started installation by assembling the C compiler. Everything else was compiled from source. Hard to remember, but I think it took most of a day to get a minimal system running.

My first linux installation for work was Caldera Linux in 1997 or '98, and it eventually died when I installed software for a DSL modem that included a trojan horse -- a kernel module that took the security system apart to the point that (over a period of a couple days) the computer became useless.

Floppies were never involved. My last installation from CD was some SuSE Linux distribution. Now it's all done online: create a bootable thumbdrive, load it with the downloaded system image, boot the image and answer a few questions. An hour or so later, viola! a working, full-capability system.

I like that way better.

 

[AlinaX]

I remember compiling gcc (the C compiler), but only because it was recommended in the early years to recompile the latest kernel with options to suit your hardware, and the kernel often needed a bleeding edge version of gcc.

Thinking back, I think I was trying to use Minix in 1992 before Linux took over.

 

[Codoc24]

I learned Fortran 4 and SCATRE on an IBM computer the size of a small house. I think I remember it being a 7094. Endless hours on a keypunch machine in the wee hours of the morning because that was the only time you could get on a machine.

Same here. It was always nice when the card reader ate one of your cards.

 

[Codoc24]

60

 

[DayDreaming2407]

40