It was … 7 years ago, I was at a summer program in Oxford taking a molecular medicine course and we were talking about DNA sequencing, gene therapy and PCR.
I was struck with how cutting edge all of those techniques were.
Now I’m sitting here, surfing the SDMB as I wait for the tech to come in and fix one of our 3 (!) thermocyclers (PCR machines) while I’m waiting for my genetically engineered SIV virus to anneal (spelling? ya know where the cut ends of the plasmid reattach).
Lord, making cookies is harder than doing most of this.
I remember seeing my first computer at my drafting job in 1985. We all drafted on the board then. We had a program that would let us do electrical schematics. I started trying to draft mechanical objects with it. Then we got AutoCad!!! It was a miracle! You could actually draw things with it. Our first project was almost flawless with the thing. The computers had 2k storage capacity. LOL! We had to store all our drawings on 5-1/4" floppies. The beginning of the CAD/CAM era for me. Now I model 3-D objects with Pro-Engineer. Amazing.
It was at my Uncle’s wedding, down in Brackettville, Texas, I don’t quite remember when; I was young, maybe 5 or 6. My dad and an unremembered relative found my brother and I playing with the other kids and told us “Come with usw–you’ve got to see this!” We left with them to a dark hallway in the church, where the relative showed us his blank watch… pushed a button… and lo! There was the time, in bright, red, blocky numbers! I was simply stunned and amazed; I still remember the moment like it was yesterday.
Networked PCs. I went to a little Montana college in '86 and got a part time job cleaning up the computer lab. They had 22 IBM PC-AT computers. 6-MHz 80286 processors with a full 16 bit data path and a whopping 640kb of RAM. Twenty with dual floppy drives and two with 30mb hard drives plus three Diablo daisy wheel printers, one with a terminal keyboard. IBM had included token ring lan cards and connected everything but no one could figure out how to make it work. I spent some spare afternoons with the manuals then got the software installed for file and printer sharing. At the demonstration I used one of the floppy only machines to edit a file on one of the hard drives then printed it on one of the Diablos connected to a third PC. The printer roared to life sounding like a piccolo machine gun and jaws dropped in awe of my technincal prowess. I was in nerdvana.
1979 - late at night in the dungeons of the Computer Science department - we ( myself and a bunch of other nocturnal nerds) found a sheet of paper lying in a research workroom with the words DO NOT LEAVE THIS LYING AROUND on it. 15 minutes later, thanks to the explicit instructions on it, we were logging in as visitors on to a computer at MIT ( half a world away). Oh the bliss of the ARPAnet (BTW when did they change the name?)
My dad was an industrial engineer, and so gave his ~7 year-old son an LED watch. Cooool. No other kids I knew had one.
Of course, I threw it up in the air in celebration of something in P.E. at school, missed it coming down, and it broke. He wasn’t pleased.
He also used to let me play with the LED calculator he brought home. I must have been in 1st grade or so, as I knew what subtraction and addition were. I would just punch in really big numbers to see the number of digits change as I added or subtracted. But that darn button with the line and the two dots, that one made it hard to get all the numbers back off the little screen. Arrggh.
(It was giving me decimal points, so the screen was filled until the numbers got relatively small.)
I remember my first encounter with a microwave, it was probably in the late seventies and we thought it was cool that my parents bought something that could cook a roast in 30 minutes or bake a cake in a fraction of the time. Now believe me we tried that and the results left quite a bit to be desired…the roast was a rather pale colour and we had to paint it with a bottle of brown stuff that came with the microwave to add the necessary colour to make the foods look appetizing.
The first thing I tried cooking in the microwave was defrosting a bun, we had no idea how long it would take so I put it on high and let it cook for a minute and a half, lets just say if I had a few thousand more buns I could have built a rather sturdy and permanent brick wall…
Another calculator story. Dad had one at work (back in the days when they were still rare as hens teeth). We begged and pleaded for him to bring it home so we could see this magical machine. When it finaly arrived home we marveled at how amazingly clever it was. But then he showed us if you pushed just the right numbers and turned it upside down you had made the word “shelloil”. We spent the whole night making words on the calculator and feeling very clever.
Sadly I never got over that thrill and still feel the urge to write “shelloil” everytime I pick up a calulator.
Another digital watch story, with the glowing red block numbers mentioned previously.
This would have been the early-to-mid 70’s, probably about 1974. My mother gave me this amazingly cool toy one morning, and then shlepped me and my brother down to the laundromat. I couldn’t take my eyes off my wrist: a huge blocky silver thing, press a button, the time blinks on. Cooooooooooool.
I was running around, showing my watch to everybody at the laundromat, when it slipped off my wrist and went TINK on the floor. That killed it.
I seem to remember crying about it for about the same number of hours that I’d actually owned it. And it was way pricey, so no way I was getting another one.
I had a whole book of those things! To get “shelloil”, you had to add, sub, mult and divide the number of oil companies, Arab nations, and drilling crews involved in a dispute. “shelloil” emerged victorious.
I can only remember the simple ones:
What do 55 snakes in a 14 foot square pit do?
“hiss”
Two brothers, one aged 3, the other 4, are standing in front of the shards of Mom’s Ming vase. What does each of them say?
“he” did it
A goodlooking single man lives in apartment 808. 14 different women greet him on his way in the building. What do they all say?
“hi bob”
I’d give anything to have that book again. But, like everything else, it probably went in the auction.