How long have you been a member?

Joined in 2011 (April). Noticed a few individuals posting here that I knew from elsewhere, including cluelusshusbund. It was due to the latter bringing some Moon debate (Ken Dine was the antagonist?) -- from a different forum -- to over here, that we first became aware of the place a few years earlier than that. But I never joined at that time.
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Now we have clocked in our years I think it's ok to say what brought me to the site. DaveC426913 mentioned the site on Physics forums so I visited. I don't do Facebook and the only other site I was on at that point was PF, ten years.
 
Creationism was/is still big in my local community, I was looking for spaces where people understood how the scientific method works. Where I was not weird because I understood evolution :/ I found this forum in those searches.
 
w1z4rd said:
First time I used a computer was in school (i was moved to a specialized class), they were ZX spectrums. The tape loaded ones. Only application I remember was making this tortoise walk in a straight line (and it leaves a line behind it), then you would program in a new set of co-ordinates and it would make a line to that point. We had to try draw pictures and shapes with it.
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Logo?
 
18 years for me. Wow.

It would seem there is a "core" of people that have been here over a decade - the place used to be "hopping." I think the decline in activity is mostly (98%) due to the proliferation of social media, which I abhor. Personally, I think "socmed" is is the primary catalyst for the decline in critical thinking - undermining objective reasoning and ushering in the age of Trumpism and "fake news."

Since we are also comparing computer experiences, my first PC was a Kaypro II - ran CPM, with 8" floppy disks (they were actually "floppy" - lol). I used it to log into "bulletin boards" through a dial up modem, coded in Basic, wrote papers in Wordstar and juggled numbers in VisiCalc (a rudimentary spreadsheet) .

Prior to that, I learned on punch cards in college - Fortran, Cobol, SAS. Ever drop a stack of 5,000 cards? Technology has certainly come a long way in a short time...
 
DaveC426913 said:
My first computer was a Commodore CBM black-and-green monitor that my father brought home from school for the summer for my brother and I (we shared a room with bunk beds).
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Mine was the original PET with the horrible keyboard. But at least it had a tape drive!
 
Randwolf said:
18 years for me. Wow.

It would seem there is a "core" of people that have been here over a decade - the place used to be "hopping." I think the decline in activity is mostly (98%) due to the proliferation of social media, which I abhor. Personally, I think "socmed" is is the primary catalyst for the decline in critical thinking - undermining objective reasoning and ushering in the age of Trumpism and "fake news."

Since we are also comparing computer experiences, my first PC was a Kaypro II - ran CPM, with 8" floppy disks (they were actually "floppy" - lol). I used it to log into "bulletin boards" through a dial up modem, coded in Basic, wrote papers in Wordstar and juggled numbers in VisiCalc (a rudimentary spreadsheet) .

Prior to that, I learned on punch cards in college - Fortran, Cobol, SAS. Ever drop a stack of 5,000 cards? Technology has certainly come a long way in a short time...
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Did you even start to punch the cards and then realize the "print" or "text" switch wasn't on? You ended up with cards that you couldn't identify.
 
First computer at school was a Commodore Pet, and then some Acorn BBCs. At home we got the mighty Commodore 64!! My friend had a VIC20, so, yeah, I was smug. ;). The floppy disk drive of the C64 made an awful racket, though.
 
Sarkus said:
First computer at school was a Commodore Pet, and then some Acorn BBCs. At home we got the mighty Commodore 64!! My friend had a VIC20, so, yeah, I was smug. ;). The floppy disk drive of the C64 made an awful racket, though.
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It was also (almost) the size of a toaster.
 
12 years, 6 months, 3 days

...........
I used to visit another "science" site, but discovered that the least moderate posters were the "moderators"
alternately
The inmates were running the asylum.
 
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"You seem stressed, Dave."

Funnily, as much computer access as I had in various institutional settings, none of us had a home computer. First at-home device was an IBM PS/2, around 1989. It was the first model with the less floppy 3.5 disks. The spouse and I had both returned to university for graduate programs. We would write up papers on it at home, then take a disk down to a campus computer lab to print it out. It felt very leading edge, late eighties, to be able to stroll about with hundreds of pages in a shirt pocket.

Now I can attach 85 millions pages of word documents to my keychain!
 
TheVat said:
"You seem stressed, Dave."
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During that same summer, I learned a lot of BASIC programming, and set my sights on writing my own verson of the ELIZA program. (The grandmother of what we now call chatbots). It responded to input with things like "That's interesting, Dave. Tell me more." and "I see. How do you feel about that?"

At one point I was running it through its paces and debugging. I Ctrl-BREAK'd out of the program's run mode back the prompt. And typed a command to start debugging.

Instead of executing my command, it responded with "What are you doing, Dave?"

EXCEPT I WAS OUTSIDE THE PROGRAM.

All the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I paued for a brief moment, and then, without making any sudden threatening moves, I reached down and switched off the power.

Then I went outside and stood in the sunshine for a while and smelled the sweet, sweet air.



As God is my witness this is a true story.
 
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