• dustyData@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        To correct, you have to measure them first. How else would you know how much to correct. Measure the variable to control for it is basic good practice.

  • AeronMelon@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I wrote a program in Basic on my Commodore 64 at 6.

    I didn’t know how to save my work. I typed and manually proofread code for three hours. It worked. The program was lost when I powered it down.

    • veroxii@aussie.zone
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      1 day ago

      Our Commodore VIC20 came with a big book/manual which mostly taught you how to code. Was an awesome time.

    • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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      1 day ago

      I think it was pretty common back then to have no way to save. Spectrum zx. Amstrad 464. They didn’t initially have a media to save to. Then cassette tapes could be used. Software piracy was recording the tape, like copying a song.

      • AFK BRB Chocolate (CA version)@lemmy.ca
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        24 hours ago

        Yeah, my first was a little Timex Sinclair and it didn’t have any media. But each button on the keyboard had a Basic command as an alt key, so I taught myself Basic with it. Many years later I got my BS in Computer Science, so I think it was a pretty worthwhile little computer.

    • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      I wrote basic on my Apple IIe.

      I was all Apple/Mac until 1998 when I built a Windows gaming pc with high school graduation money. Learned to code in art school, after which I switched back to Macs when they went intel, built annoying but fun flash ads and games in AS2 (ECMAscript essentially), then when the iPhone came out I switched to hand coding HTML/CSS/JS web apps and got out of advertising.

      Then learned Ruby/Sinatra/Rails/Haml/SASS and did straight web dev into the early days of both React, Angular and Vue. Then quit to do a tech startup with robots.

      Now I CAD model original designs for fabrication projects, 3D printing and custom automotive designs.

      So I’m pretty technically inclined, but I own 4 Macs, 3 Rpis, dozens of physical computing platforms, and a metric ton of salvaged sensors and ex-RadioShack components.

    • negativenull@piefed.world
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      1 day ago

      Holy crap, I did the same thing! My dad taught me the Random function (RND), which blew my mind. I tried creating a dungeon crawler text based game with random rooms. It was going to be awesome.

    • curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
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      1 day ago

      TI-99/4a for me, but after the first big loss of something that worked is when I found out there was a cassette adapter. My parents did not buy it new, it was maybe 5 or 6 years old by then, so finding a cassette adapter took some effort.

      Worth it though IMO.

    • farmgineer@nord.pub
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      1 day ago

      Heh, I was going to comment on my first being a C64 (technically a Vic 20 is the first I ever messed with, but I don’t really remember that one).

  • locahosr443@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    The windows kids know more because there was a possibility some stuff might work with the right sequence of rituals. The mac kids just knew not to try because nothing will work

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      I started on classic Mac OS and have a successful tech career. I learned to troubleshoot problems on the Mac by disabling Extensions and deleting Preferences files in the prior century. Learned to use Windows after 2000, and it has been garbage the whole time.

  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    God damnit.

    I remember toting around a Linux textbook in 7th grade, because I had just started messing with it.

    Same year I got my General and Advanced ham radio licenses.

    Does this make me autistic?

    7th grade in the US is about 12 years old.

    • Tiral@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Legitimate question, no judgment. When did you first get laid? If you have yet.

    • Snapdragon@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Hmmm… do you struggle with understanding sarcasm and figures of speech? Do you often feel like you are manually learning social norms like a robot, rather than understanding things intuitively? Does eye contact feel awkward? Do you often communicate in a literal manner and get misinterpreted as rude or blunt?

      Do you feel upset or angry when plans or routines are changed/interrupted? Do you feel like you are overly hyperfixated on any specific topics or interests that you could ramble about for hours on end? Do you have problems with reading people’s intentions or emotions? Do you feel like you are overly sensitive to touch, noise, sounds, taste, or textures?

      These are actual questions to think about. I say this as someone who’s been legitimately diagnosed since 2008. If you answered yes to all or most of these questions, it might be time to visit a doctor.

      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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        22 hours ago

        The most important question when it comes to adult autism diagnoses: can you afford to talk to a doctor? I’m pretty sure my wallet would burst into flames like a vampire entering sunlight if I walked into a psychologist’s office

      • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        No, but I do think all of those things are generally kind of stupid and annoying, and frankly, boring as hell.

        if anything if find the predictability of people’s norms and emotional reactions to be depressing as fuck. and their intentions, to be scary in how selfish they often are.

        • Snapdragon@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          I was a 4-year-old still only learning how to properly communicate on an age-appropriate level, so I needed specialised therapy. I had ABA therapy to teach me facial expressions, communication, and other things. I’m also legally disabled.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      no, it makes you an insufferable nerd though. especially if you went around telling everyone about how cool it was.

  • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 day ago

    Counter argument: boomers who needed to type commands and swap disks to get a word processor loaded, who knew all the hotkeys required to issue commands and the alt-codes for special characters, who today cannot figure out where the file they were working on saved to.

        • Infinite@lemmy.zip
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          19 hours ago

          Same. My dad worked as a call-out PC technician (among other things) and now can’t grasp cloud storage.

          “I don’t want to save it somewhere else, I want to save it on my computer, but all my computers.”

          • dustyData@lemmy.world
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            18 hours ago

            I agree with your dad. Everything saved to the cloud is a privacy and usability nightmare. Many people have lost data forever because cloud services misplaced their files.

    • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      I’m GenX but this is me. I hate modern computing and the cloud in particular. SharePoint is a close second. I think the last excellent word processor was WordPerfect 5.1. Everything since then is worse than the version before it.

      • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 day ago

        I do have sympathy for people who are trying to figure out SharePoint or mobile OS file systems which just arbitrarily change the rules.

        • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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          22 hours ago

          The arbitrary rule changes! I have six different folders labelled “android sucks” because different apps are like “I can’t access any directory in your filesystem that I didn’t personally create.” Motherfucker this machine belongs to me. I created that directory. If I tell an app to access a directory, it should do as I command.

          When I first got Tasker, it was life changing. Now I can’t even tell it to turn off my damn Bluetooth. I hate google with every fiber of my being.

        • Dr. Bob@lemmy.ca
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          22 hours ago

          SharePoint was tolerable when I could mount library as a drive. I could use it how I wanted, and the SP people could do what they wanted. But they removed that functionality and we’re trapped in an endless cycle of where-the-fuck-is-it and how-come-i-cant-search-for-it.

  • Jayjader@jlai.lu
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    23 hours ago

    If we’re talking post-year-2k macs, you’re de-facto going to skew the results as those were less affordable than budget family windows boxes.

  • Magister@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I started in 1981 at 11yo with a ZX81 writing games in BASIC. In 1984 at 14yo I was cracking games on Amstrad CPC6128, Z80 assembly. At 18 in 1988 it was on PC in DOS (8086). Yes I installed Linux 0.99 on my 486 PC in 1992 or something.

    Never touched an Apple device.

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Same, except for having played a bit with Apple 2s. I’ve had a windows partition on and off to run steam, but it never held any data. Nowadays it wouldn’t serve any purpose of course.

  • benjiro@lemmy.zip
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    22 hours ago

    When I was 10, I installed BackTrack (now Kali Linux) because I liked its background and theme and thought it would look cool to show my classmates

  • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I started on mac computers in school because Apple supplied them. It was the 80’s. By time got to high school they were all PCs.

  • NullPointerException@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    I can provide an anecdotal evidence of someone who started in MSX-DOS, then PC MS-DOS, went to Windows, then Unix, back to Windows, then Linux, and now is on Mac.

  • osanna@lemmy.vg
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    1 day ago

    lol. Linux didn’t even exist when I was 12 I think or it was very very young

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      Yeah. I started with DOS. Windows existed, but I had an older used computer with no mouse and a 5 1\4 floppy and leisure suit Larry.

      • Tonava@sopuli.xyz
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        11 hours ago

        Yeah, I was using DOS when I couldn’t even read. My father worked in IT and made a simple script for us kids on an old machine he got from work, so we could choose games and launch them with very simple commands (stuff like the commander keens and a racing game, and that one skiing game). Then there was no talk of screen time, when people got worried about it in the 2000s my mother got scared too, but at that point it was too late as I grew up with computers lmao. Maybe surprisingly I didn’t turn out as a that huge machine nerd though, I leaned more towards books later on