I was never mistaken for a nerd. Sports, military, gym, ladies (younger days), and even though my career was with high tech companies, I wasn't a techie. However, with retirement and disabilities, it seems like I am a nerd. All day long, after checking on world news and sports update and morning gym, I play online chess, and online Sudoku for a break, until I watch soccer practice. So I feel like a boring nerd. It is what it is. Any other nerds out there?
I'm positive many of us spend quite a bit of time online these days Pat. I might qualify as a nerd "avant la lettre" myself in some ways, having bought my first computer in 1982, a ZX Spectrum from Sinclair. View attachment upload_2023-7-19_16-38-0.png It had 48 Kb memory, and you had to use a cassette recorder to load and save software and data; for the time it was totally awesome. Many computers later I now run a pretty fast desktop with a 32" screen, and while I'm at home it is rarely turned off.
This one will be hard to beat. My first job was actually a techie programming a teleprocessing assembler language program on an IBM 360/20 4K card system in 1968.
I never had a computer till 2007, but before that I had a wind up grammaphone does that count ? I thought mega bites was a large Mc Donalds burger! Seriously the computer has opened up the world to me , if there's something I need to ask I get the answer....AI eat your heart out
Vint Cerf, born June 23, 1943, designed the TCP/IP protocols and the internet architecture with his co-designer Robert E. Kahn. Known as the “Father of the Internet”, Cerf began work at the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1973 at the request of Kahn.
I was with high tech (semiconductors) companies as well but I guess I was a bit of a tech guy, although analog rather than digital. I built my own first computer, from producing the PCB's to assembly of the components. There was a series of editorials in an electronic magazine providing all the "how to" and the PCB layouts! All built on Motorola 6808/6809. To be honest, I did not use it for anything particular. I was'nt really interested until Windows were released and not fully hooked until Microsoft released Excel for Windows. Then I became a nerd, an Excel nerd! That program has helped paid my wages in almost 20 years!
Around 1979/80 my employer at the time bought a couple of Wang mini computers (basically mainframes), mainly to link a bunch of word processing terminals and printers, and a little later to run the financial administration. Pretty soon thereafter though I managed to get the first stand-alone PC in the office, with Lotus 123 enabling me to get rid of a whole bunch of paper spreadsheets. Obviously Lotus 123 lost out against Excel eventually. Those were the days of the 5.25" floppy disks, holding 360KB of data each.
