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Leo Voisine

Leo Voisine

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5,662
Location
East Freeetown, Massachusetts
As much as I complain about computer stuff - I love my computer stuff.

I use my credit card for everything as much as I can.
I get points ----- I don't pay any interest.
I have my CC's linked to Amazon, and I have one Amazon Gift Card that I reload with the points from the CC's
I have been saving all the points for a few years.
I recently bought a drone wth a bunch of accessories 100% with points
With the left over points I ordered a second 32" monitor for my desktop I will have 2 - 32" monitors.

I don't remember when I bought my current i7 Dell computer but it is showing its age.
I like to play Age of Empires - Photoshop - Adobe Premier(videos) CAD-CAM and now 4K drone footage.
There are a couple of computer game that look interesting, but my current computer cannot run them.

I am looking at an HP workstation with some huge i9 power and all sorts of graphics and processing power.
I need to save up a big pile of money for that one. I will not finance it.

Crazy stuff
 
Mike Stafford

Mike Stafford

Member
Messages
2,133
Location
Coastal plain of North Carolina
My first interests in computers came in college. My advisor was on the curriculum committee and he knew of lots of interesting courses that would be beneficial.

He suggested I take a couple of computer science courses. During those days you could not take computer science courses through the computer science department unless you were a major in computer science. I learned that little fact from him. But he told me of some courses that I could take in School of Forestry. I was not a forestry major but that didn't matter that school opened its courses up to anyone interested. They were not a bunch of computer geeks who didn't want to share.

So I signed up for the first course and started taking it. It was identical to the CSC 101 course with the exception that all of the problems and programs included problems that a forester might encounter. I loved the course. The only thing I didn't like was that the programs we had to write had to be keypunched. There were these special little typewriters (keypunch machines) that punched rectangular holes in these special little cards that could be fed into a reader and then used by the computer as operating instructions. The computer was in a special building with special conditioning and protection. It was even linked to other mainframes in Research Triangle Park. Each line of your program had to have its own card so when you submitted even the simplest program you had a stack of cards 12-15 inches tall or more. There were even special boxes to carry your programs in.

Once you had your program keypunched and all the cards were ready and in the right order you took it to the computing center in the middle of the night. That was the only time that forestry programs could be run. If your program had no errors you would get a print out on 24" wide paper and your box of cards back. If your program had an error you would get a print out up to the point where there was an error and you box of cards back. So then you had to figure out what was wrong and do it again.

By the way this programming was done in Fortran IV. I have a funny story about that.

I ended up taking three courses in computer science through the Forestry department and those proved to be quite beneficial throughout my career.

The funny story about Fortran IV involves my son's 21st birthday. My wife was sick so I went to Raleigh to take him and his friends out to dinner at Kanki Japanese Steakhouse. We were all sitting around one of those grills that they use and the boys were conversing about computer stuff. My son is a computer geek and is so good at it he was given a signing bonus right out of school to go work for a huge consulting firm that does a lot of work with the government. He specializes in all things computer and is amazing when you see him sitting down at a keyboard. His expertise has taken him all around the world, He has lived in Japan, England, Iraq, Qatar, Egypt and visited countless countries. I am so proud of him.

Anyway I am sitting at the end of table and I hear the word Fortran. Finally something I can talk about. I mentioned that I took Fortran when I was at N.C. State. One of the boys asked, "What version?" My response was "Fortran IV; which one are you taking?' His response was "Fortran 96".

Well, I put my big fat dinosaur head under the placemat and kept my big fat dinosaur mouth shut until they were talking about something that I knew something about which wasn't much back in those days compared to a bunch 20 year old college kids who were smarter in their little finger than I was in my whole big fat dinosaur body. Sometimes it just pays to listen; you never know what you might learn. It sure did make me feel old.
 
Leo Voisine

Leo Voisine

Member
Messages
5,662
Location
East Freeetown, Massachusetts
I know a little about computer programming. A LITTLE is the key. I took BASIC for engineers back in 1987 or so. I know a little bit about logic. I took ?EPDM? logic programming back in 1993 or so. I self taught myself some HTML and made a few web pages in HTML

I am certainly NOT even close to functional in computer programming

In G-Code however I am. I hired a CNC programmer while I was at Winchester to program several CNC machines we bought and he created "family of parts" G-Code programs to cut the M70 receivers and some other parts. He knew several computer languages. I learned a lot from him. He used a lot of logic like "if-then", conditional loops, unconditional loops, macro variables and so on. It was similar to BASIC. From that point I began writing "family of parts" programs. Very efficient. Last "family" program I wrote in 2012 was for a Maier 12 axis CNC machine to run over 100 different, but similar parts with no more input than a 4 digit part number from the operator. The program was easily expandable.

I no longer have need to write G-Code programs, but if I need to I can.

As to computers, I am a used, not a programmer. I use CAD and CAM and post process the G-Code for my G-Code programming needs now.

One BIG reason for my computer upgrades is so I can use Solidworks. It is POWER hungry.
Currently I cannot on my current computer.
My internet gateway was too slow and my computer processing capability is too slow.
I recently upgraded my connection.
I have used SOLIDWORKS for years and I am functional with it.
Dassault which is the provider of SOLIDWORKS has a maker edition which is really similar and there is also access to full SOLIDWORKS
They also have a CAM module.
I cannot run them - and I really do want to.

Even in the workplace my computer was a real powerhouse because I used all that engineering stuff.

I don't need a full blown "engineering" XEON processor. I cannot get the money for that.

The HP I configured will do the job nicely.
 
Ryan Mooney

Ryan Mooney

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7,938
Location
The Gorge Area, Oregon
Mike Stafford said:
Anyway I am sitting at the end of table and I hear the word Fortran. Finally something I can talk about. I mentioned that I took Fortran when I was at N.C. State. One of the boys asked, "What version?" My response was "Fortran IV; which one are you taking?' His response was "Fortran 96".
Click to expand...

There was a decent jump in functionality change from Fortran IV to 66 but they'd have looked "familiar" I think. There was another decent jump in functionality to Fortran 90 (plus GASP lower case letters in instructions!!!), the 2000 series is almost another language entirely. A rather large percentage of scientific computing programs I worked with in the late 90's to early 2000's were still written in Fortran 77 which would have had a few changes from what you worked with, but I think would have looked at least pretty familiar.

The CAD/CAM stuff is it's whole thing. I wouldn't put it below other programming by any stretch, it's just a different kind in a different way.

Looking forward to what you end up doing with the new workstation!
 
Vaughn McMillan

Vaughn McMillan

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35,786
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ABQ NM
My high school was the first in town to have computer classes. This was in the early to mid '70s. You could easily spot the kids on campus who were taking the computer classes because they were the ones walking around with a box full of punch cards. Of course the only kids taking the class were the uber-geeks and ultra-nerds. They're probably all retired now and living the good life after making boatloads of money in the '80s and '90s. :)

I didn't really start to learn computers (and a bit of programming) until the mid '80s. My parents were early computer adopters, buying a Xerox CPM computer in the late '70s/early '80s, and I learned a few basics like booting the computer (off 5 1/4" floppy disks) and creating documents with a word processor. Around the same time I became pretty proficient in programming HP scientific calculators. When I became a construction inspector/project admin on a large project in the mid '80s, I kind of ended up becoming the "computer guy" in the office. I was the guy the secretaries would call when they were having trouble with their DOS machines and Wordstar. Eventually the bosses put an early model IBM PC on my desk and gave me a box of floppies containing Twin, a clone of Lotus 1-2-3. (Twin was eventually sued by Lotus, and they ceased to exist.) I was tasked with creating spreadsheets to track pay estimates and change orders, and I spent many late nights at the office teaching myself how to use Twin. By the end of the job I had automated the whole pay estimate/change order process and made it so that a monthly task that would normally take hours could be done in a few minutes.
 
Leo Voisine

Leo Voisine

Member
Messages
5,662
Location
East Freeetown, Massachusetts
Ryan Mooney said:
There was a decent jump in functionality change from Fortran IV to 66 but they'd have looked "familiar" I think. There was another decent jump in functionality to Fortran 90 (plus GASP lower case letters in instructions!!!), the 2000 series is almost another language entirely. A rather large percentage of scientific computing programs I worked with in the late 90's to early 2000's were still written in Fortran 77 which would have had a few changes from what you worked with, but I think would have looked at least pretty familiar.

The CAD/CAM stuff is it's whole thing. I wouldn't put it below other programming by any stretch, it's just a different kind in a different way.

Looking forward to what you end up doing with the new workstation!
Click to expand...

This is the configuration right now. By the time I save enough money the configuration will likely change some.

Click on edit - configure


 
Jim DeLaney

Jim DeLaney

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6,869
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Austintown, Ohio
Vaughn McMillan said:
My high school was the first in town to have computer classes. This was in the early to mid '70s. You could easily spot the kids on campus who were taking the computer classes because they were the ones walking around with a box full of punch cards. Of course the only kids taking the class were the uber-geeks and ultra-nerds. They're probably all retired now and living the good life after making boatloads of money in the '80s and '90s. :)

I didn't really start to learn computers (and a bit of programming) until the mid '80s. My parents were early computer adopters, buying a Xerox CPM computer in the late '70s/early '80s, and I learned a few basics like booting the computer (off 5 1/4" floppy disks) and creating documents with a word processor. Around the same time I became pretty proficient in programming HP scientific calculators. When I became a construction inspector/project admin on a large project in the mid '80s, I kind of ended up becoming the "computer guy" in the office. I was the guy the secretaries would call when they were having trouble with their DOS machines and Wordstar. Eventually the bosses put an early model IBM PC on my desk and gave me a box of floppies containing Twin, a clone of Lotus 1-2-3. (Twin was eventually sued by Lotus, and they ceased to exist.) I was tasked with creating spreadsheets to track pay estimates and change orders, and I spent many late nights at the office teaching myself how to use Twin. By the end of the job I had automated the whole pay estimate/change order process and made it so that a monthly task that would normally take hours could be done in a few minutes.
Click to expand...
Sorta similar to my early computer experiences, except I was thrown into it when I was an Avionics tech in the Marine Corps. Had to learn some low level programming (FORTRAN) for an Inertial Nav simulator, then learned DOS. First civilian job I got immersed in DOS (5.0 by then) and later Windows (3.0), WordPerfect, Lotus 123, et al. Became a WordPerfect 'guru' that everyone else came to with their problems/screw-ups.
Still halfway proficient, computer-wise, but WAY outta date.
 
Jay Caughron

Jay Caughron

Member
Messages
5,234
Location
Billings Missouri near Springfield Mo
Leo Voisine said:
This is the configuration right now. By the time I save enough money the configuration will likely change some.

Click on edit - configure


Click to expand...
Link just goes to your shopping cart nothing in it :huh:
 
J

John Bartley

Member
Messages
889
Mike Stafford said:
Well, I put my big fat dinosaur head under the placemat and kept my big fat dinosaur mouth shut until they were talking about something that I knew something about which wasn't much back in those days compared to a bunch 20 year old college kids who were smarter in their little finger than I was in my whole big fat dinosaur body. Sometimes it just pays to listen; you never know what you might learn. It sure did make me feel old.
Click to expand...
Mike,
The world needs more dinosaurs who have your track record. The reason your son has the skills and life he has is because you enabled it. I look at what my son has done ... started his own computer building business, registered for taxes with the gov't at age of 15. Ran it out of his bedroom for a year or so, then got bored ("I can do that") and closed it. He was doing open source Japanese anime prgramming on on line with a global group of like minded enthusiasts when he was barely 12 or 13 years old. How did that come to be? It wasn't his mom or me. We didn't know what anime was until he educated us. We realised early on that he had a grip on computers, the programming and (as importantly), the hardware. We fed it to him with hardware, with software, with access to internet etc. We enabled his self-education. I remember him leaving for a computer conference in Toronto, all by himself when he was about 15. He bought his own train ticket and we reserved a hotel room for him because he was too young to have a credit card. We lived in Ottawa about four hours away. He had a blast at the conference and came home with a pile of contacts! He did it all on his own. I couldn't help him academically ... I have grade 11 and I fixed chainsaws for a living, not computers, but I could pave his way a bit, same as you did. Now he lives in Japan, is a CEO of the company he works for and he's just bought a house. He's 40 now and I'm the dinosaur and I'm ok with that. His mom and I did good, just like you.
 
Mike Stafford

Mike Stafford

Member
Messages
2,133
Location
Coastal plain of North Carolina
John Bartley said:
Mike,
The world needs more dinosaurs who have your track record. The reason your son has the skills and life he has is because you enabled it. I look at what my son has done ... started his own computer building business, registered for taxes with the gov't at age of 15. Ran it out of his bedroom for a year or so, then got bored ("I can do that") and closed it. He was doing open source Japanese anime prgramming on on line with a global group of like minded enthusiasts when he was barely 12 or 13 years old. How did that come to be? It wasn't his mom or me. We didn't know what anime was until he educated us. We realised early on that he had a grip on computers, the programming and (as importantly), the hardware. We fed it to him with hardware, with software, with access to internet etc. We enabled his self-education. I remember him leaving for a computer conference in Toronto, all by himself when he was about 15. He bought his own train ticket and we reserved a hotel room for him because he was too young to have a credit card. We lived in Ottawa about four hours away. He had a blast at the conference and came home with a pile of contacts! He did it all on his own. I couldn't help him academically ... I have grade 11 and I fixed chainsaws for a living, not computers, but I could pave his way a bit, same as you did. Now he lives in Japan, is a CEO of the company he works for and he's just bought a house. He's 40 now and I'm the dinosaur and I'm ok with that. His mom and I did good, just like you.
Click to expand...
Thank you John. I agree with every word you said but there is only so much we as parents can do. We can lead the proverbial horse to water but we can't make him drink.
I have pictures of my son on the Commodore 64 when he was three years old. At that time we subscribed to a magazine that specialized in programs for Commodore 64 machines. You could type them in, save them on a floppy and use them that way. The internal memory was 64K so you couldn't store much on the machine.
From there we always had a computer or computers in the house. He became proficient in many languages....not just Fortran IV. :giggle: He built his own computers with daddy's money but I figure that was money well spent.
He was accepted into the N.C. School of Science and Math where he did marvelous work in math, physics and computer science. One of my most proud moments was when he built a laser for his senior project with another student. I attended "show and tell" day and my heart nearly burst when that laser fired up. It was something to see. I will never forget that.
He is an exceptionally bright young man and he got it honestly from his mother who is a mathematics professor. He was doing trigonometry in the 5th grade and was calculating the altitude of his model rockets for his science project. He was so bright he challenged classes and only took the final exam to get credit without a single day in the class. That was amazing to us.
My grandfather once told me after my son was born that if I didn't leave my son as a productive citizen who contributes to society that I would have wasted my entire life.
 
Last edited:
Vaughn McMillan

Vaughn McMillan

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ABQ NM
Mike Stafford said:
I have seen smart dogs like that.

I do have one question when you ask for his right foot or his left foot to shake do you shake with the correct hand?:p
Click to expand...
I always hold out my right hand. When he first learned to shake, he always offered his left paw. It took a while to get him to use the other foot. He's actually pretty good at knowing the "gimme your left foot" or "gimme your right foot" commands, but now that he's mostly deaf, I suspect he gets other clues from my body language.
 
Leo Voisine

Leo Voisine

Member
Messages
5,662
Location
East Freeetown, Massachusetts
Well I order it this morning

I was trying to do some stuff with PS and I could not get it to work as it was supposed to. I searched online and found other peeps having the same issue with automatic object selection and the consensus was to do with older computers and graphics cards and stuff like that. Every time I start PS I get a message that my graphics card is incompatible. I can buy a new graphics card and put it into an older computer, but I have several issuse with it. I don't know when I bought this one but I do know I customized it to be a powerful machine - in its day.

So, my new machine is

OMEN by HP 45L Gaming Desktop PC
Product number: 6N0B3AV
•BU RCTO OMEN Z790 45L ArticOC US
•Front Bezel Black Glass with RGB liquid cooler and 800 W 80 Plus Gold certified ATX power supply
•CKIT HP OMEN 22C2 CTO US
•22C2 Cycle AV
•NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (10 GB GDDR6X dedicated) with LHR, Display Connectors: HDMI*1, DP*3
•1 TB WD Black PCIe 4x4 NVMe TLC M.2 SSD
•No HDD
•No Included Keyboard
•McAfee Livesafe (30 day)
•Kingston FURY 64 GB DDR5-5200 MHz XMP RGB Heatsink RAM (4 x 16 GB)
•Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 (2x2) and Bluetooth 5.2 combo (Supporting Gigabit data rate)
•No Additional Office Software
•Windows 11 Professional High End
•OSLOC US
•Intel Core i9-13900K (up to 5.8 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost Technology, 36 MB L3 cache, 24 cores, 32 threads)
•FLAG EPEAT
•FLAG ENERGY STAR Qualified
•XBOX Game Pass DA ULT 1M
•MISC HEVC MEDIA EXTENSION HP
•WARR 1/1/0 US
 
Leo Voisine

Leo Voisine

Member
Messages
5,662
Location
East Freeetown, Massachusetts
The only option that was not on the configuration list was a wired network connection. I find the wired connection to be better, at least with my currect computer. Maybe the new computer will have a better wireless connection. I am currently uploading the Part 1 of the Thistle Cottage video. So far I am looking at around 1 hour to upload with a wired connection.
 
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