What's your most memorable moment related to computers?

[eyoungren]

It's also one of my earliest memories. When I was a toddler, my mom was finishing college, and she had to take a multimedia graphics course. I have this vivid memory of being sat on her lap as she completed one of the inbuilt tutorials on Macromedia Flash 4, particularly the part where you're introduced to motion guides.

Inspired by this thread, I fired up a VM and had quite a nostalgia trip. It was originally on Win95/98, but this'll do.

View attachment 944930

I remember being so amazed that my mom made the little bee move across the screen.

When I was nine, I found the Flash 4 installation disk in a drawer and taught myself a little about animation. A couple years later, I'd join a tech news forum and sometimes post stupid animations I'd made. Then I'd start working there a decade later. Small world, eh?

We picked my mom up from a class she took once. I forget where it was or how old I was, but I believe I was in my teens, so it would have been my dad and me and my sister picking her up.

The class she was taking was video graphics for broadcast television. Apparently, nothing ever came of that because she retired as a public school teacher, but I do remember it being cool that she was manipulating graphics on a TV screen.

 

[eyoungren]

Another memorable moment was not long after I started my first job in the late 80's. For a few years I would go to the local computer fair which was set up in the main hall of a local hotel. There would be tables and tables of all sorts of electronic parts and computer parts. I was in awe at all the things I saw. One of the tables was full of computer related books and one caught my eye 'How to build your own 486 computer'. I bought the book and for the next few weeks I read it intensively whilst saving up to buy the individual parts myself. With the help of that book I was able to build my own 486 computer. Your sitting there with baited breath, finger pausing over the power on button, heart beating faster and faster, scared to press the power button for fear that you have forgotten to do something but also the adrenaline pumping at the prospect that everything is OK. You press the power button, you hear fans turning, you wait to see some response from the monitor but nothing. Then dread consumes you that you have killed the motherboard or the CPU or the memory and it's money down the drain BUT you preserve, look at the motherboard manual again and realise you've set the clock speed jumpers wrong. Wipe the sweat from your brow, start the power on procedure all over again, waiting to see something on the monitor and then come the whoops of joy when you see the words MS DOS 6.2 appear on the screen.

Building your very first computer from scratch has to be up there as one of the most memorable computer moment

I built an AMD AM386 from one of those computer fairs. Was pretty happy with it. Got stolen the night my wife and I moved into our first place.

 

[eyoungren]

Oh there’s a memory from the past. It was 1993, I was a sophomore in highschool still rocking my c64 & for Christmas Pop bought me all the guts to build a 486 dos box.

Lost that box to a flooded storage unit in 2000.

I was running a BBS (AABBS by Nick Smith) on a C64 in '88, with two 1541s. Switched to a C128 in '90 and ran it until '91 with those same 1541s and two 1581s. Loads of fun those years.

 

[lowendlinux]

Compiling Gentoo for the first time

 

[Polly Mercocet]

Getting my first computer all of my own, an iBook G3, for my 9th birthday. Spent a lot of time digging around the system and learnt how things worked on it which later helped a lot when I got to setting up servers since I was already familiar with Unix. But my uncle set the laptop up so he was admin and I was a regular user on my own machine which annoyed me. He refused to make me admin and back then you couldn't just reboot and reset the OS, so I worked out how to get into verbose mode, gain root, and make myself admin. Felt like I outsmarted my uncle. Was pretty proud of myself for this at 9 years old!

More recently, about five years or so ago I had no job so volunteered for a bit. I ended up volunteering with the elderly and they'd bring in their computers and I'd teach them to do whatever it is they wanted to do. Often it was just simple stuff like removing bloat to speed it up or setting up a Facebook profile.

But the one that sticks in my head is when I had a nice old lady I'd become friends with who told me she was talking to a soldier online, but he needed money to get back to the UK, and after that they'd be together... I instantly clocked the scam of course, and deep down she did too. She asked me to check if he was legitimate before she sent money. I told her straight off this is a scam, don't send money anywhere. But she asked how I was so sure. She wanted proof.

They spoke on Skype so I found out a way to get his IP address, which allowed me to show her the guy was in Nigeria. I then reverse image searched the photos he sent and showed her they were stolen from a photographer's website. Finally I asked if they'd been texting, she said yes on WhatsApp. I looked up the area code for the number which unsurprisingly was Nigerian. She was still clinging to the possibility it could be true so I told her to phone the British Army to verify his credentials, and sure enough they said they knew nothing about him. I said this is called catfishing. It is someone pretending to be someone else, they are in Nigeria, the photos are stolen, and there is no reason to believe he is a soldier.

She reluctantly believed me and allowed me to block him on Skype, delete his emails, block him on WhatsApp and delete the number, and she never contacted him again.

I have to say, saving a lovely old lady from being scammed out of her pension was definitely a very proud moment for me. Probably the best thing I've done with my computer skills.

 

[LizKat]

We picked my mom up from a class she took once. I forget where it was or how old I was, but I believe I was in my teens, so it would have been my dad and me and my sister picking her up.

The class she was taking was video graphics for broadcast television. Apparently, nothing ever came of that because she retired as a public school teacher, but I do remember it being cool that she was manipulating graphics on a TV screen.

That is cool indeed. I was reminded, while reading your post, of another memorable experience for me at the time, although I haven't thought about it for years now. I can't right now remember which election it was, but I worked with a crew that was helping CBS program the back end for the vote tallies in one of their early versions of the live presidential broadcast election-results presentations that Dan Rather would anchor.

Totally fun, and also nervewracking on election night! Not the same sort of thing as coding some piece of a general ledger report, I must say. It was a turning point in my programming jobs, I must say: I got all fussy with my headhunter after that about never wanting another boring application area, and so ended up doing some pretty esoteric stuff for those times before software packages. Worked on some interesting custom software to handle stuff like film library contracts, magazine ad revenue, niche investment portfolios etc.

Also memorable at that CBS job though was hearing of one their own doubtless memorable experiences... somehow during the run up to that night, a very expensive TV camera was walked out of the building quite casually by someone who just showed up in a nondescript sort of maintenance uniform, carrying a clipboard: he wandered onto the studio floor, glanced at the clipboard, peered at the side of the camera as if checking a serial number or something, announced to no one in particular "yep that's the one", checked a box on the clipboard and wheeled the thing out of the room. Walked it through the lobby past the security desk, out to a white van and it was never seen again. "Those were the days" before the world wide web and online social engineering options.

 

[Apple fanboy]

Getting my first computer all of my own, an iBook G3, for my 9th birthday. Spent a lot of time digging around the system and learnt how things worked on it which later helped a lot when I got to setting up servers since I was already familiar with Unix. But my uncle set the laptop up so he was admin and I was a regular user on my own machine which annoyed me. He refused to make me admin and back then you couldn't just reboot and reset the OS, so I worked out how to get into verbose mode, gain root, and make myself admin. Felt like I outsmarted my uncle. Was pretty proud of myself for this at 9 years old!

More recently, about five years or so ago I had no job so volunteered for a bit. I ended up volunteering with the elderly and they'd bring in their computers and I'd teach them to do whatever it is they wanted to do. Often it was just simple stuff like removing bloat to speed it up or setting up a Facebook profile.

But the one that sticks in my head is when I had a nice old lady I'd become friends with who told me she was talking to a soldier online, but he needed money to get back to the UK, and after that they'd be together... I instantly clocked the scam of course, and deep down she did too. She asked me to check if he was legitimate before she sent money. I told her straight off this is a scam, don't send money anywhere. But she asked how I was so sure. She wanted proof.

They spoke on Skype so I found out a way to get his IP address, which allowed me to show her the guy was in Nigeria. I then reverse image searched the photos he sent and showed her they were stolen from a photographer's website. Finally I asked if they'd been texting, she said yes on WhatsApp. I looked up the area code for the number which unsurprisingly was Nigerian. She was still clinging to the possibility it could be true so I told her to phone the British Army to verify his credentials, and sure enough they said they knew nothing about him. I said this is called catfishing. It is someone pretending to be someone else, they are in Nigeria, the photos are stolen, and there is no reason to believe he is a soldier.

She reluctantly believed me and allowed me to block him on Skype, delete his emails, block him on WhatsApp and delete the number, and she never contacted him again.

I have to say, saving a lovely old lady from being scammed out of her pension was definitely a very proud moment for me. Probably the best thing I've done with my computer skills.

Thats a great story. Good on you.

 

[LizKat]

When i graduated with the degree in mid 90s, i knew it was up and coming industry. Now, it’s becoming somewhat of a blue-collar, where all IT departments try to ship your job to the cheapest labor. “We are follow-the-sun”, the IT dept. would say, but behind that cool jargon, it’s an excuse to find the cheapest.

It's not working all that great for anyone really, is it? That chase for cheapest labor and least investment of time ends up costing everyone. Back in the early days of computerizing business operations, ordinary employees came in the door with general arts degrees or an econ/finance concentration and learned the business alongside a mentor. Then one day when the CEO had decided to computerize, some seasoned employees got tapped on the shoulder to go get schooled on how to analyze workflow, convert it to specs and write code for the then available mainframes ran stuff like Fortran and COBOL or some form of assembler.

It started that way in some companies because there was less resistance to "they're gonna computerize your job" if the people trying to get specs from workers about what their work entailed were already colleagues. There was a somewhat higher level of trust about what was going on and somewhat less fear of imminent job loss.

Later on --but not very much later on-- the early forms of a bean-counting push came along, to ditch the "how do you do your work exactly?" chats with end users. What was wanted then to move things along was a higher level of specs and so the genius beancounters figured analysts could just talk with department heads or their deputies, because "they are who give the work assignments." And so companies started wanting analysts and coders who walked in the door ready to write specs and create programs.

So... computer science degree, please. And then came consultancies, and rafts of analysts and coders you could order up the way you send for upholstery fabrics and paint chips if you're redecorating your home.

Of course in that process of moving specs away from end users, the exceptions to a manager's idea of "how it works" that translate to "how it actually works" out on the shop floor got lost. And ever since then the coders of the world forever take all the hits and slurs that properly belong in the bean-counting department.

 

[senseless]

Visicalc. After using it for the first time, I could see the world was about to change.

 

[Polly Mercocet]

Thats a great story. Good on you.

Thank you

It's not working all that great for anyone really, is it? That chase for cheapest labor and least investment of time ends up costing everyone. Back in the early days of computerizing business operations, ordinary employees came in the door with general arts degrees or an econ/finance concentration and learned the business alongside a mentor. Then one day when the CEO had decided to computerize, some seasoned employees got tapped on the shoulder to go get schooled on how to analyze workflow, convert it to specs and write code for the then available mainframes ran stuff like Fortran and COBOL or some form of assembler.

It started that way in some companies because there was less resistance to "they're gonna computerize your job" if the people trying to get specs from workers about what their work entailed were already colleagues. There was a somewhat higher level of trust about what was going on and somewhat less fear of imminent job loss.

Later on --but not very much later on-- the early forms of a bean-counting push came along, to ditch the "how do you do your work exactly?" chats with end users. What was wanted then to move things along was a higher level of specs and so the genius beancounters figured analysts could just talk with department heads or their deputies, because "they are who give the work assignments." And so companies started wanting analysts and coders who walked in the door ready to write specs and create programs.

So... computer science degree, please. And then came consultancies, and rafts of analysts and coders you could order up the way you send for upholstery fabrics and paint chips if you're redecorating your home.

Of course in that process of moving specs away from end users, the exceptions to a manager's idea of "how it works" that translate to "how it actually works" out on the shop floor got lost. And ever since then the coders of the world forever take all the hits and slurs that properly belong in the bean-counting department.

It depends on the industry, but if we're talking about actual tech companies rather than just companies with an IT department, outsourcing the core talent of their company doesn't work if they wish to remain competitive. Even outsourcing basic customer support ends up with frustrated customers and leads to a competitive disadvantage.

This I think I can say with a high level of confidence: successful companies take great care to hire talented people. The ones who take shortcuts and hire cheap labour are unlikely to get the best talent. This is why Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc don't outsource all their coders, but instead pay high salaries for the most talented ones and use unconventional methods to find talented people.

Many companies in many industries have also learnt that most fresh graduates may know a lot on paper but have no clue what they're actually doing in the job. Within IT specifically, experience tends to be valued highly, although certs and degrees obviously don't hurt. As a result I've seen more employers focus on things like apprenticeships and internships to train people up themselves and hire them full time once they know they can do the job well.

And let's not forget that tech jobs, or at least the right specialities, are still very high paying professions and they're considered skilled labour. "Cloud architects" can make a killing for instance. I'd certainly advise anyone wanting to get a tech job to get AWS certified because plenty of companies suddenly find themselves reliant on those cloud services but have a shortage of people who are proficient in working with them.

How things will change post-covid is an interesting one though. We'll be in uncharted waters there. I imagine if the culture shifts more towards working from home, salaries may decrease as people don't need to live in expensive cities or commute anymore. But at the same time the gain is in work-life balance and reduced living costs. I still think serious companies will hire the most talented people they can regardless.

 

[Huntn]

Getting the freaking expensive Apple IIe in the 1983 time frame, so I could have my own word processor. I remember a fellow student officer in flight training who had one of the build it yourself computers maybe Radio Shack but I think it was another company, maybe started with an S (?), that seemed like an expensive gadget without a lot of practical uses. The first time I saw a word processor was 1981ish at my squadron which impressed the heck out of me.