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Steve Conner

Wed Sept 12 2007, 09:47AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Discuss :D

thedatastream

Wed Sept 12 2007, 11:30AM

Registered Member #505 Joined: Sun Nov 19 2006, 06:42PM
Location: Yorkshire!
Posts: 329

Heh

My son likes to stand next to the hi fi rack and press the buttons but since he hasn't figured out how to get Cbeebies on the TV I don't think he's got The Knack.

Yet.

ragnar

Wed Sept 12 2007, 02:46PM

Registered Member #63 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:18AM
Location:
Posts: 1425

As part of our engineering faculty's "outreach program", my university asked me to go to a couple of schools to encourage students to study engineering. If there's a projector available at the school, I ALWAYS show this video as part of my talk, the kids usually get a laugh.

Hazmatt_(The Underdog)

Wed Sept 12 2007, 05:34PM

Registered Member #135 Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 12:06AM
Location: Anywhere is fine
Posts: 1735

I guess helping to build Tandy Computers at 2 years old counts doesn't it.

Avalanche

Wed Sept 12 2007, 06:01PM

Registered Member #103 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:16PM
Location: Derby, UK
Posts: 845

haha, awesome. Quite true as well! When I was yoounger, I used to take things apart...with a hammer. Not sure if that counts or not.

Capper

Wed Sept 12 2007, 07:21PM

Registered Member #914 Joined: Fri Jul 20 2007, 06:22PM
Location: South Bend, IN
Posts: 85

If you have to stop and think about which story to tell..........

It's a given.

Cprossu

Wed Sept 12 2007, 07:30PM

Registered Member #985 Joined: Thu Sept 06 2007, 04:21PM
Location: Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Posts: 12

let's see, when I was less than a year old, I liked to reverse the polarity of my toys by switching the batteries around (ei making a toy train go backwards), later I was known to cry when a complicated toy I was given actually worked (because that meant I couldn't take it apart/fix it), I got my name on the chalkboard in pre-school and for a whole week because I had written an applebasic program for the apple II, and the teacher thought I broke the computer, as if

10 PRINT "I am bored" 
20 GOTO 10

run<return>

could ruin an appleII =P

Even when I showed her that there was no problem (apple-ctrl-reset), she responded by seeking discipline and calling some tech people in the room who had wondered where I had learned how to do basic (they thought it was neat and tried to convince the teacher that it wasn't a negative thing without success).

Later on in my life, like about 5-6'ish, I started taking everything apart I could lay my hands upon....never mind getting them back together again working, that came at age 7 (objects taken apart could range from amplifiers to dishwashers, drills, to transmitters, speakers, washing machines, etc). At that time I could do practically anything I wanted with MSDOS, early MacOS, Applebasic and C64 basic, but I hadn't delved into computer hardware yet- I was told by a very nice tech guy who did volunteer work for the school I attended that the hardware end of it wasn't difficult, and I should try my hand in it, so when I was 8 I bought my first computer at a computer swap meet, an IBM PC (5150), for $42. It had an amd 8088, 640KB ram, a monochrome video card/parallel interface, monochrome monitor, an original ibm pc keyboard, 2 full height 5 1/4 360KB floppy drives, the stock PSU, and that was it. Come to think of it, I was also given dos 3.3 too. anyway, it didn't take a week before I rebuilt it and was happy when it booted right back up. within the next month I added a 25MB seagate MFM hard drive (the tech at the school showed me how to low level format those, use the right cables, and setup the touchy controller correctly), dos 6.20, a controller with 2 serial ports that I used to 'network it' to other computers to transfer files, and a CGA card with the heaviest beast of a cga IBM monitor that you can imagine (I think I still got it somewhere, I think it weighed as much as one of my 20" crt's), good times playing "gorillas" on it with my family, it took like 1-2 minutes for bananas to go across the screen!!, (and the buildings drew painfully slow at the start of each round). As people went away and teachers changed, I became the go to guy at the school for training teachers on the C64 labs we had, as well as the guy who fixed the damned 1541 disk drives whenever they went south. I think the biggest job I did was hook up a lab of 32 c64's that had been moved due to a 'new' appleIIe lab.

I built my first ever computer at age 9, it was a 'super fast' 486 which tended to overheat a lot despite how well you cooled it((damned texas instruments chip!), I even had 8mb of ram in it! (man that was expennnnnsive). I had an old copy of DR-DOS loaded on it, as well as windows 3.1 and OS/2 till my western digital 120mb hdd bit the dust.... which didn't take long =(
I also aquired a commodore 64, an appleIIe, a Mac 512K, a compaq 286 "lunchbox luggable", a deskpro 386, a Zenith data systems 8088 laptop (well.......I guess more like chairtop since it was so big and solid<21lbs!> you could sit on it).

and from there, I became skeptical whenever I saw any type of "magic box", I just had to know how it worked, just because. (doesn't matter if it's computers, electronics, transmissions, engines, motors, or anything else, if we built it, it can be understood why it works.)

Capper

Wed Sept 12 2007, 10:24PM

Registered Member #914 Joined: Fri Jul 20 2007, 06:22PM
Location: South Bend, IN
Posts: 85

I still keep a hammer in my desk at work......just in case.....

Coronafix

Wed Sept 12 2007, 10:51PM

Registered Member #160 Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 02:07AM
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 938

I knew there was a medical term for it

S***s you though that every friend or family wants to give you their little broken bit of
junk for you to fix.

Cprossu

Wed Sept 12 2007, 11:20PM

Registered Member #985 Joined: Thu Sept 06 2007, 04:21PM
Location: Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Posts: 12

wrote ...
S***s you though that every friend or family wants to give you their little broken bit of
junk for you to fix.

and it's always "Fix my wife's curling iron!" or "Fix my toaster", never anything cool like
"Fix my nuclear reactor!"

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