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Old Newbie

leviset

Just joined this community. I’m a retired Pure Mathematician aged 70. I started my first IT job in 1979, programming an HP-97 Desktop Programmable Calculator and then in 1982 I was in the very vanguard of the PC Revolution working on a Sirius 1 computer running under CP/M 80 & 86 with an Intel 8088 & 8086 architecture.

Since retiring early in 2004 I’ve gone back to my early vintage programmable days using calculators like the HP-41CX, TI-59, Sharp PC-1500/A etc.

I’m fine on the Pure Mathematics and Algorithms side but rubbish on the application side of electronics - the main reason I’ve joined is to try and improve my overall EE skills

  • Hi Dennis,

     

    I am a pretty mediocre amateur at electronics and programming.  And my pure math is to put it kindly rusty.  But fortunately this is a very supportive community and you will find lots of knowledgeable members offering help and support for your projects.  Welcome!

     

    Frank

  • Hi Dennis,

     

    Welcome to the forum. I am confident your math skills will be useful and appreciated here. You will also find there is a large range of electronic blogs and information to satisfy you desire to learn more electronics.

     

    John

  • Hi Dennis,

     

    Welcome to the group. I think you will find the mathematics side more important that ever currently. Many systems are digitising the analogue data and from there it is processed using Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques. You will find many interesting projects on this community that have very little electronics design - instead they focus on the software...and very impressive they are too. You'll see projects running various boards from the Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Beagleboard ranges - with a few external modules added the rest is software.

     

    I'm sure your existing skills will be very welcome addition to the community and hopefully you can learn from us and vice-versa.

     

    If there is anything you want to know, just start a discussion.

     

    Rod

  • Welcome Dennis.

    What is old is new again as you explore new options.

    You will find a bunch of us old farts hanging around element 14, so look around get comfortable and then join in the fun.

     

    DAB

  • Welcome to the element14 community.  There are a lot of interesting project to use as learning exercises and plenty of experience engineers that can assist in filing in any of the gaps that you might find in trying to understand these project or as you create your own.

     

    Welcome and enjoy!

     

    Gene

  • Another warm welcome to the element14 community. Plenty here for you to get involved in and learn at your own pace.

     

    Kind regards.

  • Welcome. My tree rings do not exceed your count but the year you started IT was just shy by two years of when I started a career in electronics. I built my first pirated apple IIe not long after.

     

    Your Ti calculator reference caused me to remember my Ti-66. That sucker saved my bacon in the high arctic by doing 2 cycle analysis on RF waveform readings avoiding the painstaking task of performing the math manually.

     

    I do recall a civil engineering friend of mine playing a game on a calculator similar to yours. The game was to land a space ship on a planet by entering rates of fuel burn. You had to adjust the fuel burn to reduce the vertical velocity of the space craft. Hit the planet to hard and the ship was destroyed. No graphics provided just changing numbers on a calculator screen. I never ever successfully landed but my friend got very good at it. Evne to this day, not much of a gamer.

     

    Thank you for triggering a core refresh of brain cells I thought had atrophied.

     

    Sean

  • I remember the Sirius 1! A very impressive machine for its time. If I remember correctly it used to change the rotational speed of the 5.25" floppies to get more sectors on the outer tracks, and that made it possible to play tunes on the drives.