http://www.michaelv.org/

What's this ?

Its a wayback machine

Yeah a reminder of the bad old days.

For some they have found that with the ipad. Much to my amusement.

What's this ?

It's like a ID-check to see if we can let you in to the old people forum.

Good grief, how old do I feel now!

Don't laugh, last year my last copy of '98SE (I used to use this, as it was the last real DOS platform, for some old DOS engineering and CNC programs I sometimes used to use) got wiped by a virus program.

A virus lying undetected and dormant for over 10 years!

Sheer nostalgia.........

Win 3.1 was my intro into REAL poota work..

Started with First Choice, a great little learning programme..... LOL

First poota was a "Sinclair 48K".

Once the most popular computer in the UK, outsold everything.

Still have WIN 3.1 setup floppies.

DOS 3, from recollection - was a late convert to Win, and those early Win versions are certainly not missed...

Gawd!! Don't remind me of those days - I was a sometime planner in te construction industry and the big contracts all demanded Primavera as the base.

In those days (late 80s / early 90s) PPP did not have a direct on-screen visual of the Gantt chart (or anything else, for that matter) and one ad to punch-in on a database like DB3 and then flick over to an add-on called Penguin to see if things looked OK.

Now for a power plant or petro-chem installation there may be 10,000 individual tasks to schedule, which require linking in about 500 separate groups of activities, all of which must be coordinated. So at the start you bring out of your back pocket the previous project that you planned, then adapt it to current circumstances. This is fine until one of the sub-contractors comes in one day and tells you that he's quitting because his labour has gone to another project, or the Project Director comes in and says he's just agreed to a more stringent penalty clause and needs to have an extra ten days in hand to protect the investment.

Lots of overtime, sleepless nights, bottles of siddiqi, headaches, shouting and eventual success with no thanks from anyone. And I wasn't even trained as a planner!

And with Bilfinger + Berger, in Libya, I had no computer. This was crazy and I told the Director for North Africa so. He was not a happy bunny, but he found that there were three XP computers in the stores, unused and supposedly destined for stores record-keeping. But no one to programme them. So I offered to do the programming and keep one for myself. Worked out a programme from first principles for the stores, goods received, goods issued, rate of consumption, number needed in stock, number actually in stock, so on and so forth. And the bloody thing worked! And I had no training again!

Gosh, I was good! This was in the eighties, when the world was young.

But I cannot believe what we could do if we had to. It's why the expat engineer got big bucks. But my pay twenty years later was around the same number of dollars, 'cos we're not needed nearly so much now.

(Doesn't explain why the expat banker gets paid big bucks - he's never been needed)

On the box it even asked you if you like to register this copy. None of this activation stuff they trusted you then.