Hello Garry, Friday, July 2, 2004, 12:50:00 PM, you wrote:
GH> Where are we today? Who's living where? Using what hardware? GH> Running what OS? Working in what fields or on what projects? GH> It's time to get to know one another again. The list belongs GH> to you who participate. Let's stir it up. Start some trouble. GH> Pry into one another's lives. Get personal. Invite some GH> friends. GH> Enough with the "peace and quiet" already. I can go to a local GH> cemetery if I want that. GH> I want to hear some noise. Robert C wittig here. I'm only on the softcon.com list, so I guess I must miss the other half of the traffic. I've been monitoring the list for around 3 years... just about the time I got seriously interested in computer science. (I'm a painter and writer in the fine visual arts, primarily... see URL in signature line). I've got a small LAN that I built primarily out of 'throwaway boxes', and repaired with junk parts scrounged out of dead boxes, and off eBay. I also have a nice collection of vintage portables... GRiD, IBM, Tandy, early Mac, and one neat no-name box that James Miller gifted me. I've learned a lot about programming, databases, CGI scripting, hardware, networking and a bunch of other stuff in the last three years, but still have a mountain to learn. Currently, only one of the boxes on my network is pre-Pentium... an IBM 486DX2 tower. The rest of the boxes are at least MMX, up to PIII, with two dual processor machines... one, an older DEC workstation, and the other, which I built from scratch, and just assembled yesterday (still needs some major upgrading), is built on an MSI board. No sense repeating myself... here is a copy of an email I posted to another list, earlier today: -------------------------------------------- After studying computer sciences for the past three years... everything from C/C++ programming (using among other things, Steve's book), operating systems, hardware, and all points in between... I finally built my first computer from the ground up... and it runs great! I started messing with hardware about 18 months ago, using boxes that people had thrown out because of age, or component failure, and learned on the older non PnP mainboards first. I only totally smoked one computer, climbing the learning curve, and since it was was all free, made from junk parts, I only cried a little.<g> I guess my days of actually going into a store and purchasing a new computer, are a thing of the past... my little LAN is a real wonder... kludged-together parts and pieces, everything a different colour, and wires protruding from places where where wires don't usually protrude. The new box is built on an MSI mainboard, dual socket 370, currently running two PIII Coppermine 600E Flip chips ($20.00 apiece on eBay). It has onboard RAID, and can handle eight IDE devices, four of which will be my RAID array, set up in a mirror configuration... two exact copies of everything, so that when a HD goes down, nothing is lost, and all I have to do is pop in a new HD, and the array will fill in the blanks, from the other mirror. I still have to acquire the 'cool stuff'... the case is a cheapie, the CD-ROM and 3.5 floppy are alley finds, and it is bare-bones inside (I wanted to see it work, before I poured money into up-to-date hardware)... the only new stuff, are the heatsinks and fans, one 30 GIG HD, and a 64 MB NVidia graphics accelerator card... something I *really* needed, as a painter, having to produce the best possible web images, for selling my paintings on-line. Currently, I only have 256 MB SDRAM (one slot), but I will gradually be adding 3 more, so I can have 1 GIG of RAM, another thing I desperately needed, to handle the input from my older tabloid scanner (I discovered that a large format scanner produces way better images than my digital camera), and the output to my Epson 3000 tabloid printer (also purchased used, for making professional grade prints). I found out though, that without a lot of RAM, I couldn't handle the really big image files necessary for scanning and printing high end graphics. More important than the machinery and software, though, are the skills and knowledge acquired, along the way. Building, configuring and repairing it myself, is definitely the way I want to go. Setting the multiplier for my CPU's, and the timing on my SDRAM in CMOS was a real rite of passage... I had certainly done my homework, and *thought* I knew what I was doing, but when BIOS asked me if I was *sure* I *really* wanted to save my changes, and reboot my computer.... heh! I just gritted my teeth and pressed 'Y' and 'Enter', and waited to see either smoke, a long series of error messages, or a normal boot process. Happily, I saw the latter. Good Fun! Total cost, including a used hi-res monitor... $319.00. ------------------------------------------- -wittig http://www.robertwittig.com/ -weblog http://radio.weblogs.com/0128450/ If you have to lie, to sell it... don't. .
