"... so it's just normal for my age?"

And the Dragon computers were being made in the wild west of Wales in 1982 (I cheated and just looked it up as a result of a wild guess that Dragon might suggest Wales).
 
I've been a computer "user" since 1971, when I was coding input for the Pensions department here.

Got seriously involved in around 1980, with the common availability of PCs.
Did some programming of both PCs and minicomputers in the mid to late 1980s. Designed, programmed, and implemented special purpose reconciliation systems and workflow systems.

In the 1990s, I did lots of specifications, installation and user training. Then troubleshooting and was troubleshooter of last resort for a couple of Australia's biggest companies. Had a 100% success rate.
For most of the last 10 years, I've just been a user, and look after family and friends computers etc, for free. My family and friends are spread far and wide across Australia.

Thanks to Teamviewer remote access software, which they allow non-commercial use for free, which is very decent of them. Mind you, so much as checking a work email is classed as "commercial use".
They are understandably extremely strict about this!
 
Brian said:
I'm at the age where tendency for old-timers to get Far-Sighted vision is reducing the prescription for being very near-sighted since the age of 8. When asked about by-focals, progressives, etc: I explain that the first time going down stairs would kill me. I use a pair of reduced strength reading glasses and distance glasses. Distance glasses have a little ridge on the frames so I can "feel" which pair I have on.

But I have all my hair. It's mostly grey, every one earned with the passage of time.
Click to expand...
I have had 'monovision' correction for about 15 years...left eye for reading, right eye for distance. using contact lenes It has worked well for me, but I was warned that there would come a time when that would not work suitably.
I also have eyeglasses corrected for optimum distant vision in both eyes, and I have tried applying stick-on reading lens, and that was how I discovered the danger posed when the lower portion of eyeglasses are reading strength and they are used for descending stairways. So, I anticipate merely getting both eyes adjusted for distance with contact lenses, and donning inexpensive readers from the discount drugstore for reading...I do not want to find myself wakening in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.
 
Oh, geeze.

Literally on my 40th birthday presbyopia set in with a vengeance. 🤨

I had a visit shortly thereafter with the optometrist and mentioned it happened all of a sudden. He said, "well when did you think it was going to set in?" . I replied that I didn't expect it to happen literally overnight.

So, I gave up on contacts and have used no-line progressives for over 25 years now. I just ordered another pair from Zenni this morning. :)
 
CatsAreGods said:
50?!?!

Computers have been in general use for well over 30 years (not counting people like me who started messing about very early in life), so possibly either you lived a sheltered life or you're very old!
Click to expand...
Both actually - I'm 70.
I was a manual worker all my life and we were only given computers when I was around 50.
Some of my colleagues had been using home PC's for a while, but I still though they were basically calculators and hadn't a clue about word processing or any other programmes they could do.

I attended a day's course when we were given work laptops. By 3 o'clock in the afternoon the instructors hadn't managed to access mine as my boss had input incorrect passwords and I had never been issued with "user ID's".
At 4 o-clock I threatened to throw mine out of the window into the canal until they realised I was serious and gained access.
I drove home still none the wiser and spent the next three months in utter frustration and super-stressed, with my wife calling me "the cursor".
 
I'm been computer centric since the first time I laid my hands on one, circa 1976. I was taking a class in Fortran at the University of New Orleans.

Our first 4-5 projects were done using punch cards. That was fun getting two runs a day trying to debug the code.

And then one day I was in the lab and one of the Computer Science graduate students was working on an interactive terminal. It wasn't a CRT but was paper output. You would type in your commands and it would type back responses.

I was hooked!

By the end of the semester I had found the lab with real CRT's. Nirvana....

Been a geek ever since :giggle:
 
doobs said:
I'm been computer centric since the first time I laid my hands on one, circa 1976. I was taking a class in Fortran at the University of New Orleans.

Our first 4-5 projects were done using punch cards. That was fun getting two runs a day trying to debug the code.
Click to expand...

I have an extremely similar story, FORTRAN and all, except it was 10 years earlier and I was sneaking into NYU as (believe it or don't) a junior high school student. This had the added advantage of making me familiar with Greenwich Village, which came in handy a few years later 😺


doobs said:
And then one day I was in the lab and one of the Computer Science graduate students was working on an interactive terminal. It wasn't a CRT but was paper output. You would type in your commands and it would type back responses.

I was hooked!
Click to expand...

I suspect it was one of these. They were quite the thing back in the day!
 
When my parents were in their 80s they took part in something called the Trans Age Project. They went to a local school to tell the kids what it was like to live in London during the Blitz and to help them with reading practice, in return for which they could attend classes on modern things like computers and the Internet.

My dad took a home computer user's course, which taught him the rudiments of using a word processor, how to send email etc. At the end of the course they sent him a certificate through the post. The accompanying letter said, "Keep this certificate safely, you may need to show it to an employer in the future". I think he was about 85 at the time.

-R
 
I was using punch cards for years. I became so good at typing with an IBM 029 card punch that I was all at sea when I switched to other keyboards with the special characters etc. in different places. Using a hand card punch wasn't as simple (or fast) but we used them. I don't think punch cards went away from places I worked until the 1980s.

The great thing about punch cards - well, the two great things, depending on sense of humour or lack thereof - was the "negative holes" or chads, the bits that were punched out and, it was said, were used as confetti by computer types at weddings. The second was that punch cards could be dropped and picked up out of sequence. Once upon a time (1974) I worked for an American oil company that shall remain nameless. Punch cards were used, and every six month or so all the source decks had to be trundled into the computer room to be backed up on tape. Why we were using punch cards every time we wanted to compile a program I don't know - my previous place of employment only used punch cards to get the program onto tape, and not afterwards. Possibly because my first job used Honeywell computers and this was IBM, and IBM made card punches *. Anyway, this oil company stuck with cards. And then one day they decided that program listings were too valuable to be left with the peasants programmers, and were removed to the computer room (access forbidden to peasants) for safety. One day a main update program for one system needed to be changed. The listing of the program couldn't be found (never happened when the peasants controlled them), and at some point someone had obviously dropped (or slightly rearranged) the cards, and when an attempt was made to compile the program to get a listing.... As far as I know this was never resolved. We presumably had all the right cards, just not in the right order. And before anyone asks why the backup wasn't used - I have no idea.

* this should have been a smiley, but smilies aren't loading for me at the moment.
 
Richard said:
When my parents were in their 80s they took part in something called the Trans Age Project. They went to a local school to tell the kids what it was like to live in London during the Blitz and to help them with reading practice, in return for which they could attend classes on modern things like computers and the Internet.

My dad took a home computer user's course, which taught him the rudiments of using a word processor, how to send email etc. At the end of the course they sent him a certificate through the post. The accompanying letter said, "Keep this certificate safely, you may need to show it to an employer in the future". I think he was about 85 at the time.

-R
Click to expand...
The way it's going these days with pensions etc we might need that certificate when we are 85!
 
I never trusted a computer where you couldn't reach round the back and switch it off in a crisis. Using a terminal connected to a big computer in another building always made me feel uncomfortable. Much happier with a little Apple II with a floppy disc drive and a thermal printer - you could see and hear what it was doing!

-R
 
Stephen wrote 'I was using punch cards for years. I became so good at typing with an IBM 029 card punch"

I used to repair those and there were about 50 in the punch room in the refinery at Shell Carrington, Manchester in the late 1970s. I was an IBM hardware for 18 years and when I went in to that punch room I had to be VERY carefull or it was possible to get 'debagged' by those women :eek:

Lister Petter Diesels in Dursley, Gloucestershire was my main customer when I moved to the IBM Bristol branch and they were still using punch cards for every engine they made. They were a 'fan fold' with 4000 to a box and when they got rid of the punch machines in the mid 1980s I got a box of them. They make superb note pads and I still have a load of them.

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As far as being normal for your age? §How old do you feel

My average age is about 53. I get to that by taking my age from the neck up + 16, from the neck down + 90, add the 2 together and divide by 2 and I have my average. My physical age is almost 10 years past the 4 score and 10 :crying:
 
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My latest PC is more powerful than Telstra's biggest mainframe was in 1986, has more RAM, more on-line disk storage, and doesn't need a small power station to run it.

It doesn't have as much on-line tape storage though ... ;) :rofl: .

And yeah, I remember using punch cards a lot, and programming using Fortran and SPSS.
 

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