Geek Wisdom

Today is Sunday Jan 24th, 1992 So my "interview" went AWESOME!. Joe was a pretty cool guy for an older adult. He let me record the whole thing on audio tape. The first few 15 minutes or so were pretty awkward, I asked my prepared questions. I think he could tell how nervous I was. Then he starting showing me some stuff on his computer, I pretty much when 'off script' after that. He connects to 'BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems) all the time. That is what you do with your modem, basically he has numbers of dial up sites that you can connect to and do all sorts of stuff, like chat, play games, and even download other games and files. He doesn't se the COM2COM program he uses one called TELIX and he made a copy of it form  on a floppy disk that i can use myself.  He also gave me the phone numbers of a few BBS's, he said the best is called 'C-LINK SYD' but it is a subscription service and it costs $11/month, you can get the first 30 days for free ...

Today is January 20th, 1992 , Okay so I figured in Word Perfect I can record quick 'macros'. So I don' have to manually type the date each time. It is 'sort of' like programming. Anyway - my mom spoke to my aunt, who has a friend Joe, and Joe agreed to let me interview him. So i decided that I would do the interview as a tape recording and then type up the results on my computer here and print them on my dot matrix printer. Plus, as a bonus, I learned that he is into computers too, and has his own 80486, so my interview is going to be about computers, obviously, though I'm as nervous as hell, I don't even know this guy and I am basically being dropped off at his house this Saturday morning. so I better get my questions ready. In other news, our school library got it's first "real" computer too, I'm not sure what model it is yet, but my typing teacher said that I could take a do a few of my 'typing' class at the library if I ...

Today is Monday, Jan 18th, 1992 So school sucked pretty bad today, we were told for English class we have to conduct our own interview. It has to be an adult with a job. We are not allowed to interview someone in our family, though it can be on any topic we have to write a report up on what we learned. I have no idea who I am going to interview!, The whole thought of it makes me nervous inside, speaking to someone I don't even know.  I think a lot of the other kids are going to interview their friends parents. I could hear them talking about it..but as usual I don't have anyone. I basically only have the one friend in my grade, and he's not even in my same English class. We walk together most lunch times though. We basically became friends at the beginning of the year. Friends have always been tricky for me. Mostly what I call the '3 friend problem' Say you have 2 friends that you hang out with "A" and "B". and they are both fiends with e...

Okay so, this week I figured out how to write my own programs on this computer.  It does have a version of basic on it called 'QBASIC'. It runs the same commands pretty much that I learned on my old commodore with my dad When i was about 8, I got my first computer, it was a commodore 16 and it hooked up to the TV screen with a game switch like the atari uses, the whole machine was 'built' into the keyboard, not like this 386 which has its own CPU box, plus it's own monitor and keyboard. I remember my dad and I would spend hours typing away at the keyboard writing programs from Byte magazine, just to run them to make the screen change colors.  We could only save to a cassette tape, and running the programs again from the tape would take forever to load. Still my dad would read the program and i would type away his commands. Shortly after i started writing my own programs for myself, nothing too fancy. I remember i did one that basically asked multiple choice ...

Today is Saturday Jan 8, 1992 Been playing with the modem a bit, the computer came with a program called 'COM2COM'. When you start it up, it brings up a settings screen and you have to pick the settings for your modem Took me a while to figure out what the settings were, basically you have to pick a 'COM Port' a parity, stop bits. Whe, you put it in it seems to summarize it at the bottom of the screen 24008N1. Every time I got the setting wrong, the app would just freeze saying 'Initializing Modem' and I'd have to restart the computer eventually after trying all the settings I could think of it finally started up. It shows a long message AT [bunch of other letters] and then ends with 'OK" on its own line. Need to play around with the commands. Back to school in 2 days...not looking forward to it at all

Today is Jan 2, 1992 Happy New Year! Been playing around with Microsoft Windows 3.1, after the machine turns on, you just type 'win' to run it. It's really nice graphics compared to the DOSSHELL program, there seems to be no sounds though other then a 'beep' that comes from the speaker when you click on something. I don't think this machine has its own sound card. Windows has other programs that come installed with it, one is a solitaire game, their is a MS-DOS prompt, and a game called minesweeper. It doesn't have a lot of stuff installed on it..Showed it to my friend Mark who was over today, we played it on it for most of the day.