Re: How old are you?
 

no
yes

:D

Re: How old are you?
 

The problem is there's no punch card reader for the N900. How am I going to input my programs?

58 and messing with computers for over 40 years.

Re: How old are you?
 

Old. Older than the maemo target audience. Old enough to be your mother, most of you.

But still young inside.

Re: How old are you?
 

57. Old enough to know how and young enough to follow through. 1st computer was a 286 running DOS 3. 1st internet provider was Compuserve. Using Linux at home for...I dunno...9-10 years, I'd have to check.

Re: How old are you?
 

Oh man I remember Compuserve, I remember Prodigy too. Those were the days. I still remember using HyperTerminal to inline chat with my only other friend with the internet when I was like 10 years old. Good times.

Re: How old are you?
 

33,5 and very happy that there was option for 26-35 instead of the usual 21-30/31-40. :D

Re: How old are you?
 

Oh yeah, I remember compuserve! Happy Days!

Re: How old are you?
 

I am starting to wish this thread would go away, I am now 37.

Maybe its time to restart this poll ;)

Re: How old are you?
 

21yearsold

Re: How old are you?
 

Off-Topic, but please tell us about what kind of computers you were using 40+ years ago. I'm a sucker for computing history and honestly interested.

Re: How old are you?
 

It's probably not a representative poll. It may be that older folk have less time for forums, or are better disciplined at not spending all their time on forums :-), or are less likely to bother with polls, etc. Who knows. What we can say for sure, though, is there is no reason to believe the poll is representative :-)

Re: How old are you?
 

The first computer I programmed was a GE mainframe on the GEISD network. I don't remember the particular model and I never got closer to it than the acoustic coupler on our school's Friden Flexowriter.

I also learned on ADP (Automated Data Processing as opposed to EDP Electronic Data Processing) equipment. My high school had an IBM 402 Accounting Machine, 082 Sorter, 087 Collator, and 029 Keypunch (I'm sure on the 402, the other model numbers I may be off on). For the youngsters here (which probably include just about everybody) you program most of these machines by plugging what look like big (1/4") headphone jacks on either end of a single wire into a big board with a bunch of holes. If you want to add up the first six columns of a deck of punched cards, you essentially plugged six of these from the input holes to the accumulator holes and then six more (or seven, you had to account for overflow yourself) from the accumulator holes to the output holes.

My last year of high school, I got to work on the school system's IBM 1401 which was a real computer with a whole freaking kilobyte of memory to work with. If your program was bigger than 1KB, you had to write it so that it would swap in and out in 1KB chunks. You programmed it in Autocoder which was a very small step up from assembler language.

In college I learned Fortran, COBOL, and ALGOL on a Burroughs mainframe. I also learned IBM 360 Assembler which ran on the Burroughs via an IBM 360 emulator. That and IBM 360 machine language so you could read a core dump (essentially a hundred plus page blue screen of death).

Re: How old are you?
 

First of all, big thanks Dave for taking the time to write that!

This just totally blows my mind:

"My high school had an IBM 402 Accounting Machine, 082 Sorter, 087 Collator, and 029 Keypunch (I'm sure on the 402, the other model numbers I may be off on)."

That there were computers in hIgh schools at the time in USA. Totally and utterly amazing. I guess that explains quite a bit about why USA became so dominant in computing. When I was in high school in late 80's/early 90's we were using about 8 year old Nokias...

Re: How old are you?
 

I can't say that it was that prevalent. The county where I went to school spent more than the average on their school system. In the late 60s each of the three high schools had a set of punch card equipment and one paper tape terminal with one account on the GE time sharing service. The school system had one IBM 1401 which they used for scheduling, grades, and such. They got the 1401 as a hand-me-down when they county government bought an IBM 360.

Then, after I got hooked on programming, I tried to find a college where I could major in it. In 1969, there was one in all of the US - Stanford University. Everywhere else Computer Science was strictly an Electrical Engineering offshoot. After Stanford rejected me, I ended up majoring in business and taking computer courses on the side.

Re: How old are you?
 

I'm from the 70's :D

Re: How old are you?
 

Amen. :)

Re: How old are you?
 

I'm only 21 and still my first comp was a ~10 mhz Macintosh Classic :p which I used quite a lot

Re: How old are you?
 

It both suprises and makes me happy to see that about 10% of users in relatively technical forum are under 18. Good for Maemo in the long run, I think.

Re: How old are you?
 

Hahaha.

If any of my friends know I stare at maemo.org sites for hours on end, they'd throw me into the "other" crowd (except one friend, who's actually heading a new linux distro. :eek: ).

I've been 14 for 15 days as of this post. :D

Got my first NIT (N800) when I just turned 13, and moved up to a N900 with all my savings. :p

I don't see how much further I can be from mainstream at this point...

Well. Just to show that not all kids go for iPods!

(And yes, I am actually doing some programming.)

Re: How old are you?
 

From the 90s :)

Re: How old are you?
 

nice try troll.

Re: How old are you?
 

21
(10 char).

Re: How old are you?
 

As of an hour ago, 28 :D

Re: How old are you?
 

Not entirely true; the University of Central Florida offered a pure CS degree in 1969 out of their College of Natural Sciences (I was an entering freshman then). You're right that there were precious few universities offering CS then, whether affiliated with their engineering colleges or not.

In 1969 we coded Fortran programs, keypunched them on IBM 026 keypunches, submitted them for one day turnaround (overnight) batch execution on the university's Honeywell 1200 "mainframe" - which had a whopping 48K characters of memory. IBM 360 assembly language programs we keypunched and had sent via courier to Gainesville to run on the University of Florida's 360-65. Two day turnaround for those. You learned to desk-check your programs carefully.

Later on we got an IBM 1130 to play with: 8K 16-bit words of memory and a 1MB disk cartridge (might have been half a meg, I don't remember well anymore). I was hacking Conway's Game of Life on that 1130 then, at the same time as Gosper and Woods et al were hacking GoL at MIT. (We did a fair job of keeping up with them... for awhile. But Bill Gosper is a genius, with more IQ points than we had among us, and with vastly more computer resource. We were eventually humbled by Gosper's Glider Gun, as well as Woods' Atavist backtracking program.)

At around the same time we got remote-job-entry access to computers at other universities, a primitive internet of sorts. We ran APL, ALGOL, BASIC, COBOL, PL/I, SNOBOL and other alphabet soup on IBM and CDC systems around the state. A few ne'er-do-wells of my acquaintance worked out how to break IBM security (what Linux people would nowadays call a local root exploit) which resulted in some laughs... and suspensions.

Graduation saw gainful employment in the S/370 world, which I never left. IBM large systems are hairy and complex, bureaucratic and layered, arcane and stodgy in many ways... but they also solved problems long ago that the small server world is still grappling with. IBM's been doing virtualization for over 40 years kids - about as long as Unix has been around.

Many applications written 40 years ago for IBM mainframes can still be run today. I'm talking object code, not requiring source recompilation. The mainframe culture demands rock solid stability. That's a two-edged sword, for while the corporate investment in its code base is potentially safe for decades, it also means that the platform is slow to adapt to change.

That's kind of frustrating for some of us s390 gunslingers who watch the beehive of activity in the free software world with more than a little envy.

It also doesn't help that IBM closed their operating system to scrutiny about 20 years ago. IBM's "Object Code Only" policy destroyed the ability of the user community to contribute code changes back to the IBM OS.

So I still do mainframe stuff, which pays well, though it isn't all that much fun. Gotta tell you that all the fun is out there in the Linux world, where the code and ideas are all free.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this N900.

Re: How old are you?
 

18, 19 in 15 days.

Re: How old are you?
 

28 years here. Since the 4th of May.

Re: How old are you?
 

18!
how truthful do you think everyone's answers are :P