Anyone else not give a DAMN about the NFL this year?

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I'm a shade younger (62). I've been on forums since they were dial up "message forums" (for all the youngins that was the 80's, the IBM PC clones were king, and 9600 baud over a phone line was a screaming fast data link lol). One thing you will always get from a forum is an opinion :D If you want some real fun hang out on a motorcycle forum and then go meet them in person. :D

I'm new to HP rocketry, new to the forum, and a fellow Texan. I wouldn't let this one little topic get you down. I usually steer clear of topics like this one but I really don't have a dog in this hunt. I usually have too much other stuff to do than watch TV. Actually, I never watch TV... I mostly just wanted to know if anyone knew what was accomplished. Nope...
9600 baud!? A screamer! My BBS I ran (you kiddos will have to google that) was 360 baud. Then I upgraded to a 1440 Hayes modem to run my text on an amber screen was like, whoa!, so much green text just appeared on my 8" screen.
You kids can only scratch your privates and wonder.
Thanks Michael for the positive boost. My twin brothers name is Michael. He has no patience, btw. This site would have been nuked from orbit by now. 😱
 
Ahh, those were the days. I still have a 300baud acoustic coupled modem in my historical hardware collection.

I still remember when USB came out and how amazed we were with the speed. 1.5Mbps back then.

I remember the old 8250 UART chips I used were pretty slow. Then someone (Signetics I think) came out with one that would do 115kbps. Wow. Nowadays the sky is the limit with the fancy PAM, and other, encoding techniques. My personal best is 864Mbps across standard ribbon cable about 10 years ago, although a processor PCA I designed a couple of years back is capable of up to 10Gbps per channel. Evolution in progress.
 
360 Baud... It was fun wasn't it?!

Ahh, those were the days. I still have a 300baud acoustic coupled modem in my historical hardware collection.

I still remember when USB came out and how amazed we were with the speed. 1.5Mbps back then.

I remember the old 8250 UART chips I used were pretty slow. Then someone (Signetics I think) came out with one that would do 115kbps. Wow. Nowadays the sky is the limit with the fancy PAM, and other, encoding techniques. My personal best is 864Mbps across standard ribbon cable about 10 years ago, although a processor PCA I designed a couple of years back is capable of up to 10Gbps per channel. Evolution in progress.

Times are different that's for sure. I walked into my radio room this morning, fired up the rig, listened to 17m FT8, "called" CQ (those that know the FT8 mode know that means pushing a button). Italy came back... the country, the software went through the motions and before you know it I had Italy in the log book. A few minutes later another Italian call sign popped up so I answered, the computer took over, and I logged Italy again. All on about 20W and a wire woven through the rafters of my house. Some days I'm in there for hours, clicking and logging. Some days the computer is off and I have a straight key or paddle hooked up. It's harder to make a contact but much more satisfying. When I'm on the radio I'm either using technology developed by the man that made the communication protocol that is used to talk to the Voyager spacecraft (to this day, 40 years later) or a morse code key developed well before I was born.
 
Ahh, those were the days. I still have a 300baud acoustic coupled modem in my historical hardware collection.

I still remember when USB came out and how amazed we were with the speed. 1.5Mbps back then.

I remember the old 8250 UART chips I used were pretty slow. Then someone (Signetics I think) came out with one that would do 115kbps. Wow. Nowadays the sky is the limit with the fancy PAM, and other, encoding techniques. My personal best is 864Mbps across standard ribbon cable about 10 years ago, although a processor PCA I designed a couple of years back is capable of up to 10Gbps per channel. Evolution in progress.
Re: everything you just wrote..
I thot you were dead..

Ha Ha. (had to add that because the kids would have conjured up a snowflake moment not knowing it was humour)

Hey! is that the secret here? I have to point out the obvious that's it's a joke?
Jeez,
 
Our first modem was a 14.4k, but I do remember using a Commodore with a cassette drive. I have not used them, but I know what punch cards were too. :)
 
So the thread is now about the ancient technology we learned on? You never know where these things will go. NFL, BLM, questionable jokes, rocketry bona fides, ancient technology.

I remember in about 8th grade taking a computer class which was nearly worthless due to the fact that the teacher knew less than the students, and I used most of the time In that class to do my Spanish and math homework for my next two classes. But once or twice a week you could get time on one of the two “terminals” which was a keyboard attached to a very loud printer, no CRT. So when you typed a command line, the response and prompt were printed out on paper in front of you in a clattering racket. To log into the mainframe, you dialed a phone number, and a recording would answer and say, “District Data Processing Center. Please enter ID code”. You would key a number into the phone, and a blast of obnoxious noise would come out of the earpiece. Then you’d place the phone on the modem, and off you go into the wonderful world of ”computing” your horoscope or playing choose your own adventure type story games on the noisy printer terminal thing. I have zero nostalgia for that stuff.

But it wasn’t long after that when a friend got a TRS-80 with a real CRT! Wow! And then a year or two later, I got a Commodore 64 with a color CRT and some video games on the tape drive! Awesome! And I learned BASIC and read Algorithms Plus Data Structures Equals Programs. And then my friend’s stepdad got a real IBM PC that we would mess with secretly while he was at work, which was kind of risky, because he was super touchy about his stuff. Then my other friend got a Mac with the built-in 8” screen and graphical user interface and a mouse!

Remind me again, why are we talking about this?
 
I have not used them, but I know what punch cards were too.
I used punchcards in my year 12 computer science class, on the mainframe, doing batch processing. I also still have a manual hand-punch that works like a dymo label machine. Dial up the letter, clunk. Next letter, clunk...

But it wasn’t long after that when a friend got a TRS-80 with a real CRT!
I had a Trash 80 as well. It had a 4" monitor (ex bank terminal) when I first got it going. Built PROM programmer, speech synthesiser and other assorted hardware for that.

I also have a 10MB hard drive platter in the cupboard. it is about 16" diameter. Circa 1970s.
 
no such thing as an equal or Fair competition, and all of the grandstanding and dancing routines from those extremely overpaid guys in the end field make me want to physically puke,
 
no such thing as an equal or Fair competition
Mind explaining what you mean by that? I think the salary cap and draft order has done a lot to create parity. Now, some owners/organizations are a lot better at dealing and drafting than others, the playing field is level.
 
Yes, but did any of the beagles, cats, tortoises, or retired neighbors like to watch NFL?

Sorry, I didn't mean to leave out the avians and Cindy. The question also applies to the parrots and Cindy (the pre-school girl).

The pets were mostly indifferent to sports. When the Super Bowl is on, my wife likes to watch the Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet, and maybe some of the pets might have found that interesting.

I lost track of Cindy (the girl) when I went to kindergarten, so I never found out how she felt about sports. Do I have regrets? Sure. But honestly, I'm not sure it would have worked out. I didn't have the emotional maturity then that I do now.

I learned a lot about girls that year. We used to have recess time on a little playground every day, and then after recess, we would go back inside for juice and cookies, and two kids would be selected to pour the juice and hand out cookies, which was a real honor. There was this one girl, Diane, who convinced me one day that when recess time was over, we should hide inside this giant tire that was on the playground, and that way we could keep playing after all the kids went in. So we hid in the tire, and the teachers had to do a search to find the missing kids, which really didn't take them that long to catch us. So when we got back to the classroom, and it was time for juice and cookies, the teacher told me in front of the entire class that it was supposed to be my day to pour the juice, but because I hid in the tire, she was going to let someone else do it. So that's when I learned girls are trouble.
 
Ok, I’ll add my little computer knowledge here. My college GF was getting a degree in Numerical Control. Her junior year, the dean of whatever came to her and told her they were stopping the NC program because CNC had just started being the norm. She had spent 3 years learning punch card programming and now had nothing... She convinced them to let her finish her degree. Then got on the job training for CNC.
 
Remind me again, why are we talking about this?

Virtue signaling.

Virtue+Signaling+Everywhere.jpg
 
I attended a memorial service for a late 60's Marine Vietnam combat vet yesterday, my eyes welled up when the Marine guard fired the salute followed by taps.People like Roy best represent the giving heart and dedication to this country and the freedoms it offers, not those who play schoolyard games for stupid amounts of money.
I support peaceful public protest and demonstrations, and that is different than when you're a captive audience in a sporting venue that you might have paid $100 or more to enter.
 
I attended a memorial service for a late 60's Marine Vietnam combat vet yesterday, my eyes welled up when the Marine guard fired the salute followed by taps.People like Roy best represent the giving heart and dedication to this country and the freedoms it offers, not those who play schoolyard games for stupid amounts of money.
I support peaceful public protest and demonstrations, and that is different than when you're a captive audience in a sporting venue that you might have paid $100 or more to enter.
Like, like,like,likety,like like like
 
I have also emerged from the smog of the phone modem days.

In grade school, I played "Oregon Trail" on a teletype computer that sounded like a machine gun. It spit out letters onto an endless roll of yellow paper and it had no screen. Then someone brought a VERY early Mac computer into my 5th grade class, again to play "Oregon Trail." Soon after, I began programming BASIC on Commodore PET computers and my parents bought a Commodore 64 for home use, which I continued to program. Not too long after, an uncle, whose future wife worked for Microsoft in the early days (yes, she cashed out her stock for a hefty sum), bought me a phone modem that I used to call into local BBSes, but it would hog up the analog phone line with the classic high-pitched screech known to anyone who owned a modem in those days. Anyone who called would get a busy signal. I wish I could remember the model of that life-changing modem. I met a lot of people through that medium, a few of which I still talk to occasionally to this day. The early internet was awesome, an open, wild and uninhabited frontier waiting for someone to fill it up. I built my first website, with JavaScript, in 1997 for a small business that I worked for. Back then, image rollovers were about the coolest things imaginable and my site had them. Just having a website proved noteworthy and the company's email account and phone lines would come in with questions such as "who built your website?" All I did was read "HTML in 24 Hours" and "JavaScript Goodies." It wasn't nearly as difficult as advertised. Those were very fun, and now very gone, days.
 
Back then, image rollovers were about the coolest things imaginable
You could also embed a midi file so your website had background music. Not appropriate for most applications, but I had a music scene "weblog" in those days. When flash came around and irritated every user with a flash into screen, I made a script to stream an MP3 from a directory abusing how the browsers loaded flash a little at a time to be able to stream music on a 56k dialup with no buffering.
 
Speaking of football, it was our AFL Grand Final last Saturday. While I did keep a bit of an eye on the scores I didn't even watch any of it on the TV. They changed it to a night game this year, with a 7:30pm start. Most fans want it back to the afternoon game so they can celebrate longer after the game.
 
Man of brittle spirit (MBS) - evert your eyes, this joy is not for you.

The rest of us - what an awesome weekend we've just had. Two back-to-back games, each setting all-time NFL career touchdowns records.
One after the other.
First Drew Brees throws 2 TDs and sets the mark at 558, and wins home game by three.
Next Brady throws for 4 TDs, and re-sets the mark at 559, and Bucs take down Raiders 45-20 on the road.
4 TDs to 4 separate receivers, one to Gronk.

I had the second game DVRed, and just watched it. Loved it.
Highlights here: https://www.nfl.com/videos/tom-brady-s-best-throws-from-4-td-game-week-7

Next week, I'm DVR-ing both Bucs and Saints games, even though I normally don't follow either team!

a

P.S.: For those of you unfamiliar with MBS term, enjoy:
 
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