Kids these days

[advenas]

Well, I have no social media connections. Waste of time. I might have a blog if I start full-timing to keep my siblings up to date on where to find me. Honestly, I try and stay off my phone as much as possible and even more so when out traveling. Just in case work tries to contact me. I'd much rather watch the birds fly or the clouds float by than look at a computer screen. Maybe read a book or do some writing in my journal. Although I do see the advantage to being connected to the internet for a short time when camping so I can find my next cool place to boondock.

[lepitwg]

Originally Posted by Mike Lewis

For background-- I'm not around young people very much, and haven't been since I left college decades ago. Trends come and go without my notice; I'm oblivious as they blow right by me. So I was puzzled by the following experience:

I visited WSU's art museum on campus in Pullman, Washington. I got on the elevator from the parking garage and was followed by three coeds (are they still called that?) wearing earbuds connected to cellphones that they were staring at. One gal was tapping on her phone's screen, the others were just staring silently. They all continued to look down at their phones, they never looked up or at each other, or at me. The elevator stopped at another floor and a fourth young woman got on. She was wearing earbuds and staring down at her phone. At this point I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. When I got off the elevator and went outside I saw that all of the girls and most of the guys were walking around campus doing the same thing. Some of the guys were on skateboards, which apparently requires too much balancing to also do the cellphone thing.

So-- what are they doing? What are they looking at? What are they listening to? I guess they are reading and sending text messages, but all the time, really? Someone please enlighten me.

They are responding to Escape Trailer Forum questions

[Mike Lewis]

Snapchat and to a lesser extend Facebook would explain the constant attention to the phones. I don't use either so I'm not familiar with the attention they require.

On another occasion I saw a young lady typing away rapidly on her phone using her thumbs. I was amazed at how fast she could go.

[Greg A]

Kids and millennials abandoned Facebook years ago. Not cool.
They taught their parents how to use it and then their parents were checking up on them. Bye Bye. They use quite a few different apps now, but no to Facebook.

[Marry]

Driving through Okotoks one day. Had to stop for traffic lights. Schools just out. Elementary kids walking the the cross walk. Not one of them paying attention to traffic. Not one of them in conversation. Not one of them enjoying their surroundings. Not one of them interacting.
You wonder what the future will be, but it sure gave me the creeps.
Where does loneliness start? By not being able to talk and express your emotions. With the result becoming depressed.
I am glad our kids grew up playing outside with friends, chatting on the way to and from school, enjoying their surroundings, enjoying life. Which gave them a foundation for the rest of their lives. I might be "old", but grateful we and our kids grew up in a "different world".

[Mike Lewis]

Originally Posted by Marry

You wonder what the future will be, but it sure gave me the creeps.

This is a thoughtful post. But I'm a bit more sanguine about the situation. People, especially kids, are really adapable. They will adapt to the technology in their young lives as we did in ours when we were growing up.

As a farm kid I grew up outside, and I don't recall it as being a particularly happy time. For one thing, I was pretty isolated. Then I spent much of my childhood wading knee-deep in cow poop. This does not build character or make one sociable.

[StarvingHyena]

Originally Posted by advenas

I see this a lot. Many people young and old alike seem to tune out the real world via earbuds and their cell phone. Some people are listening to music, podcasts, videos. Some are texting or emailing. The brave ones are doing business on their phones. A typical smart phone today as something like several times the processing power than the computers that got us to the moon and back. It's truly amazing and scary at the same time. I use my cell phone to call folks, send the occasional text or email, map a location and note my appointments. And it is off when I'm driving. When I am on vacation I am usually someplace without cell phone reception so I can enjoy nature. That's why I got my Escape.

Rick,
What got us to the Moon and back were really before computers .... up to Apollo 13 ( I could be corrected on this) we, meaning NASA, had whole room / building computers. They relied on punch cards to program them but they weren't reliable and re-programing took a very long time and thus they weren't trusted. What got Apollo 13 up and back were slide rules. Before 13 ... it was slide rules. Amazing ... I still have mine ... complete with my belt holster and pocket protector. I admit it .;... I was partially a nerd.

I have recovered though. Just wait until the power grid goes down ... Slide Rules will rule again and the teenagers will come to us adults and ask what to do.?

Ya right!

Tom
I'm so glad I have my Escape!

[rbryan4]

Speaking of the computers on Apollo, the LEM used to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon had a state of the art (for that time) guidance computer, made by Raytheon. Today's average smart phone has thousands and thousands of times more processor power and memory.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

[Santiago]

Originally Posted by StarvingHyena

What got Apollo 13 up and back were slide rules. Before 13 ... it was slide rules. Amazing ... I still have mine ... complete with my belt holster and pocket protector. I admit it .;... I was partially a nerd.

I have recovered though. Just wait until the power grid goes down ... Slide Rules will rule again and the teenagers will come to us adults and ask what to do.?

Tom, you just brought back happy memories.
Coding on punch cards, high speed printers as output (don't need no stinking CRT) and the best of all slide rulers. I still have four of them - well worn. Am ready to survive the power grid failure ; > )

[tractors1]

Originally Posted by rbryan4

Speaking of the computers on Apollo, the LEM used to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon had a state of the art (for that time) guidance computer, made by Raytheon. Today's average smart phone has thousands and thousands of times more processor power and memory.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Yup, I get funny looks when I tell folks I built my first computer in 1975 based on a Kim-1 processor with 1K of memory (which had a Rockwell 6502 cpu that later became the Apple 1) and there was no video, just a hexadecimal keyboard. Few remember was hex was/is this days. Storage was a casette tape.

[Mike Lewis]

The cellphone you're holding in your hand is faster than the earliest supercomputers. The benchmark used to evaluate high performance computers is called Linpack. It's a linear algebra program and you can download it as an app for your phone. The Cray 1 in 1977 would give 14 MFLOPS (million floating point operations per second) running Linpack. I just ran Linpack on my cheap Android phone and got 133 MFLOPS. Try it and see.

[Donna D.]

Originally Posted by tractors1

Few remember was hex was/is this days. Storage was a casette tape.

Hexadecimal is still used for colors I used to be able to run punch tape between my pointer finger and thumb and could read it. A programmers version of braille. I have a two terabyte external hard drive hooked up to my laptop. It's less than half the size of a pack of smokes.

[War Eagle]

I still have some IBM munch cards laying around here somewhere. And last time I pulled it out of the closet, my old Osborne "luggable" computer would still booted up using CP/M. Two 5.25" single-side floppy disk drives and ahead-of-its-time dial-up modem, all for just under $1,000 new at the time (1981?). Still have the original WordStar, SuperCalc, Personable Pearl and Basic program disks. And I have an unopened box of 10 single-sided 5.25" floppy disks for it. I wonder what they'd bring on eBay these days?

[Mike Lewis]

I believe that floppies are still being made. You can still buy 5.25 inch floppies online, new. You can still buy eight-inch floppies; they were used in industry but never made it to the home market.

[War Eagle]

Fun fact: Back in the early 1950's when the federal government decided it wouldn't harm national security to sell computer technology to the private sector, the first privately owned computer (if I recall, a hand-me-down from Stanford?) was purchased by a group of dairy farmers located around Provo, Utah, to enter, keep and analyse their dairy cow production records for genetic performance testing purposes. The first dairy record processing center director at Provo was Bliss Crandall. I heard him give a presentation in the early 1980s, and he showed the audience a Casio Data Bank calculator wrist watch that had more CPU power than that first room-filling computer.

[Mike Lewis]

I'm gonna get into trouble for this, but I can't resist--

In the mid-80s I used a Xerox Star workstation that utilized eight-inch floppies. The Star was Xerox' belated attempt to commericialize its mouse pointer and GUI technology that Steve Jobs "appropriated" for his MacIntosh after his famous visit to Xerox PARC. Anyway, I wrote a report on the Star, saved it to an eight-inch floppy, and kept the floppy with me as I moved from office to office at my agency.

About fifteen years later I had two young coworkers right out of college whom I'll call John and Mary. I was going through my desk and found the big floppy. I thought "I bet John has never seen one of these" and I showed it to him. Sure enough, he hadn't.

Right then Mary walked into the room. I said, "Hey Mary, would you like to see my eight-inch floppy?" Her eyes got big and she ran from the room.

[War Eagle]

Originally Posted by Mike Lewis

I believe that floppies are still being made. You can still buy 5.25 inch floppies online, new. You can still buy eight-inch floppies; they were used in industry but never made it to the home market.

Just did a quick Google search and was surprised to find there are a few single-side (1S) advertised for sale out there vs. the later and much more common double side( 2S), but most I came across are the more "advanced" double density (2D) or even the high density (HD). I guess I'm not the only one out here who hates to clean out my closets. Now what is this thread supposed to be about again?

[War Eagle]

Originally Posted by Mike Lewis

... You can still buy eight-inch floppies; they were used in industry but never made it to the home market.

Didn't the commercially-available RadioShack/Tandy TRS 80 (aka - the "Trash 80") use 8" floppy disks?

[rbryan4]

Originally Posted by War Eagle

Didn't the commercially-available RadioShack/Tandy TRS 80 (aka - the "Trash 80") use 8" floppy disks?

I used to have a trash 80. It had an external 5 1/4" floppy drive. Same size as the one for the Commodore 64. It was a nice computer for the time.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

[StarvingHyena]

Progress ... ain't it great! ..... or is it? I love this thread as I have lived through it all in my working career (computer evolution). Its been an amazing ride. I can't help but hope and believe that Moores Law will win. Except:

OK Scotty ... have my Escape Trailer delivered to the Glacier National Park Lodge, Montana in a week when I'll arrive by a self driving helicopter.

Sigh .... not exactly what I had in mind ...

Tom

"I'm glad I'm too old to die young ..."