Acquired skills?

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:

> 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 :-)

As do most people who eschewed assemblers, I still know msot of the 6502
opcodes and can still write straight machine code on an Apple ][
(including knowing all the pertinent calls to important ROM routines).

> - 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.

This amounts to using your extra senses to troubleshoot.  I can't say I've
ever tasted anything to see if it was working (if you don't count pressing
a 9V battery up to your tongue to see if it still has juice) but now I'll
have to find an application for this so I can claim I use all five senses
to debug.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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