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[MendedWall12]

Thank you to everyone that told us they were working on it, and to all the silent many that won't get name recognition, but worked on fixing this nonetheless. You rock Paizo!

[Tarondor]

Thank you for getting right to this!

[ericthecleric]

Try signing out and signing back in. Worked for me!

[Philo Pharynx]

Three cheers for the fix!

[Hayato Ken]

Awesome. Thanks for making an important advanced escapism feature work again.

[John Napier 698]

Cole Deschain wrote:

The arcane sorcery of the tech team sustains us for yet another day...

Beautifully done!

"It's magic only if you don't know how it works."

[JohnF]

John Napier 698 wrote:

I wouldn't trade my Visual Studio compilers for anything in the world.

This is the second thread I've seen today where old geeks are reminiscing about earlier days!

I've been using Visual Studio since before it was called Visual Studio (and was a beta tester for the first 32-bit version), generally provided by whoever I was working for at the time. Even when I was doing multi-platform C/C++ development for Windows and Unix I much preferred to do my debugging on my Windows box. I wasn't looking forward to giving that environment up when I left my last job, but was very pleasantly surprised to find that Microsoft now had a version of Visual Studio that was free for personal use (which is what I wanted it for). Not only that - it had several new features compared to the version I had been using (VS 2012 or 2013, IIRC). The last time I had looked, the free version (Visual Studio Express?) had lacked some of the more useful features of the commercial version, but nowadays the Community Edition is a full-featured product.

[John Napier 698]

You mean Visual C++, right? The first version of that that I purchased was 1.5, which was bundled with 4.0. Then I bought second-hand versions 5.0 and 6.0. Then I got Visual Studio 2008 Express and 2010 Express. You are correct about the Express versions being "hobbled." You can't package your programs for distribution, and you can't use MFC. Among other things.

The very first C Compiler that I owned was Small-C 2.2, which came with the source code for the compiler and library. The first Full-C compiler I had was Mix Corporation's Power C. And I was able to get Open Watcom's Version 1.9 toolset.

[Treppa]

These are middle-aged geek reminiscences. Old geeks reminisce about Basic, FORTRAN, and COBOL. And punch cards. And wiring sorter boards.

[John Napier 698]

True. I didn't start learning C until sometime in 1990, when I came home from the Army.

[Skeld]

Treppa wrote:

These are middle-aged geek reminiscences. Old geeks reminisce about Basic, FORTRAN, and COBOL. And punch cards. And wiring sorter boards.

I was just fondly remembering VAX FORTRAN.....

-Skeld

[JohnF]

Treppa wrote:

These are middle-aged geek reminiscences. Old geeks reminisce about Basic, FORTRAN, and COBOL. And punch cards. And wiring sorter boards.

The first computer I programmed had 2k words of memory.

Not that new-fangled Core stuff - drum memory.

Basic, FORTRAN and COBOL? I programmed mostly in assembler (or autocode). And while the only boards I programmed were plugboards for the analog section of a hybrid computer (the digital part was a PDP-10), I did use paper tape and punch cards (which made it easier to edit your program).

Skeld wrote:

I was just fondly remembering VAX FORTRAN.....

I did use FORTRAN (IV) on an IBM 1130.

My main experience with VAX FORTRAN was as one of the target languages for the VAX Debugger - a project I worked on for a few years.

[Tacticslion]

Thank you all so much! You guys rock! XD

[JohnF]

You're an old geek if you can remember when computers mostly got cheaper, smaller, and more accessible, rather than simply getting faster.

For the first few decades of my computer experience, I had access to a roughly comparable amount of computing power - it just got more and more convenient. Of course compute speed isn't everything - memory access speed is important, too - but most of the time the things I wanted to do were CPU-bound.

I'll start with the computer(s) I used at university. The main computer (which served the entire computer laboratory) was an Atlas II - a supercomputer (albeit with less than a megabyte of memory), with a high-speed cache (when it was working) using tunnel diodes, magtapes, high-speed paper tape readers, and 32 timesharing terminals. Around 2 o'clock in the morning I could usually get onto one of the terminals and generally only have to share the machine with one or two other diehards. This machine took up the whole of a large room. I also had some access to an IBM 360/44, but only using batch mode (RJE).

After graduating, I took a job working in a small department (at a different educational establishment) which had a PDP-10; a machine with comparable power, but only servicing a few dozen users. Hardly anybody used the machine after around 7 at night, so I could get the entire machine to myself. This machine took up maybe 15-20 feet of 6' tall cabinets.

A few years later I ended up working for DEC, working on VAX Debug. There we had a dedicated VAX 11/780 (again, a machine of roughly the same power) for a group of four or five programmers, and which was less than half the size of the PDP-10.

After DEC I worked at Apollo Computer, who made graphics workstations based on the Motorola 68000. This meant I had a similar amount of compute power in a machine intended to be used by a single user, and which fitted inside a cabinet which was roughly a 30" cube.

My next big change was to the Windows environment. I bought myself my first PC (a 386/25, 2MB of memory and a 20Mb hard drive). That, yet again, had about the same amount of CPU power, but fitted in a 5" high case. And instead of the tens of thousands (or more) that a graphics workstation could cost, this machine only cost a couple of thousand $$.

Since then, though, computers have got amazingly faster. The notebook I'm typing this on (a quad core Intel i7 system with 16GB of memory, a SSD main drive, and a 2TB second hard drive) quite possibly has more processing power, memory, and disk capacity than existed worldwide when I first got hooked on computer programming, but still cost less than my 386 (and it comes with a 4K display and an nVidia graphics processor with 1280 pipelines!)

[John Napier 698]

Yeah, it's a sure sign of progress when you can carry the equivalent of a 1970's supercomputer in a hand or two.

[John Napier 698]

The first computer I owned was a 4K TRS-80 model 1 that I received as a graduation gift in 1987. In that 4K of RAM, using BASIC, I wrote a Z80 disassembler. I also discovered a flaw in the TRS-80 Blackjack game. If you enter a negative value for the bet, and deliberately lose, you get that negative value subtracted from your pool. I.e. p - (-v) = p+v. Meaning that when you lose, you gain money. WTF? :)

[Sissyl]

VIC-20. It rocked.

[John Napier 698]

When I was in Germany, I bought a Commodore 128 at the PX. It was a dual processor computer, 6502 and Z80, meaning that it could run the CP/M OS. It got lost in shipment home, so I bought a Tandy 1000 HX.

[thejeff]

John Napier 698 wrote:

The first computer I owned was a 4K TRS-80 model 1 that I received as a graduation gift in 1987. In that 4K of RAM, using BASIC, I wrote a Z80 disassembler. I also discovered a flaw in the TRS-80 Blackjack game. If you enter a negative value for the bet, and deliberately lose, you get that negative value subtracted from your pool. I.e. p - (-v) = p+v. Meaning that when you lose, you gain money. WTF? :)

I had one of those. With the tape drive. :)

We still do some work on a VAX. And probably still have a couple of the old VT terminals we used to use to connect to it stashed in the back room.

[John Napier 698]

I downloaded the SimH series of simulators, including everything from DEC. I also got the Hercules simulator for the IBM 360/390/Z-xxxx.

[JohnF]

I just have to mention how appropriate it seems for somebody named John Napier to be discussing computer hardware :-)

[CrystalSeas]

John Woodford wrote:

I found the same thing, but if I navigate to the subforum instead of Online Campaigns or Messageboard I can still hide threads.

I tried that and I can't seem to get it to work.

I went to the Recruitment subforum, and tried to hide this thread using the 'hide' icon.

Corsario's Korvosa's Dark Champions - Curse of the Crimson Throne with Level 7 Vigilantes

I get the same behavior on the Recruitment subform page as I do on the main message board page: It momentarily hides the thread title, but as soon as the page refreshes, the thread is back.

[John Napier 698]

JohnF wrote:

I just have to mention how appropriate it seems for somebody named John Napier to be discussing computer hardware :-)

Yes, I know about my ancestor's mathematical accomplishment. :)

[CrystalSeas]

Even more frustrating: You can no longer hide subforums.

Instead of hiding individual recruitment threads, I tried hiding the whole Recruitment subforum by clicking the null icon.

It won't go away. My page is being overrun by recruitment threads that I can't hide and I can no longer hide the subforum itself.

ETA
Interestingly, I seem to be able to hide entire forums, but not the individual subforums or threads.

[Ed Reppert]

"My" first computer had 32K RAM, a five MB hard drive, and cost $100,000 a month to run. IIRC, the purchase price was $10,000,000.

"My" in quotes because I didn't own it - Cornell University did. :-)

[John Napier 698]

Ed Reppert wrote:

"My" first computer had 32K RAM, a five MB hard drive, and cost $100,000 a month to run. IIRC, the purchase price was $10,000,000.

"My" in quotes because I didn't own it - Cornell University did. :-)

Let me guess. An IBM 360, right?

[Ed Reppert]

Yep.

[John Napier 698]

It was the cost of the machine that gave it away. :) I read the book by Hennesey and Patterson.

[John Woodford]

CrystalSeas wrote:

John Woodford wrote:

I found the same thing, but if I navigate to the subforum instead of Online Campaigns or Messageboard I can still hide threads.

I tried that and I can't seem to get it to work.

I went to the Recruitment subforum, and tried to hide this thread using the 'hide' icon.

Corsario's Korvosa's Dark Champions - Curse of the Crimson Throne with Level 7 Vigilantes

I get the same behavior on the Recruitment subform page as I do on the main message board page: It momentarily hides the thread title, but as soon as the page refreshes, the thread is back.

After I'd posted, I also found the same thing--it'd worked before, but now hiding at the subforum level failed the same way as at other levels. Frustrating, but OTOH not as bad as not showing the new posts indication.