I would imagine many of us have acquired skills along the way during our
hobby/career/life with old computers. I'm curious; what acquired skill are you
proud (or ashamed) of? I'll start:
I am proud of:
- Memorizing at least half of most POST beeps of early PCs (unfortunately for
me, mostly the fatal ones :-)
- Being able to take off up to 1/3rd of an inch of tractor feed in a single
swipe (none of this "tear-move-tear-move" stuff: I fold it once one way, then
the other, then I move all the way down with a quick "schrrrrrip!" and it's off)
- Being able to land most screws on a single quick lunge of a NON-magnetized
screwdriver (of course, the 1% of the time I miss, it's a PITA to hunt for the
missing screw with little wire claws)
I am "ashamed" of:
- Running a badly-shielded sound card inside a PC at full volume (or an AM
radio tuned to static) so that I can "hear" what the PC is doing (hey, I was
able to troubleshoot something many times this way!)
- Resting my finger lightly on a drive (hard, floppy, tape) to sense what it is
doing, again during a troubleshooting operation.
Others?
--
Jim Leonard (trixter_at_oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
Received on Wed Feb 02 2005 - 16:20:53 GMT