The Future of Computing 1983 Style

@Ryan S - and what the hell has that got to do with anything.

I remember those series of books. I entered some of those games in my Vic-20.

These days everyone is pro. I was hired as a general assistant to the Technology Operations department of my work. I worked with them temporarily off and on for a year while we rolled out new hosting environments in Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles. During that time I was asked to work on the VPs desktop. I was told that it had a memory error and I should try replacing the physical memory (RAM). The person giving the instruction was the full-time desktop support technician. I formatted and re-installed windows several times, tried different RAM slots and expansion cards, I even performed a full test of the physical memory using Hiren's Boot CD. Still, not working; Blue-Screen of Death error 0x0000020. I pull this little slip of paper out of a box of cds that came with the PC and one reads "Virtual Memory Error". Out of curiosity I pull up error 0x00000020 online and find it relates to swap file. So I run scandisk to check for bad sectors, found a few and the computer worked perfectly. However, the Tech wasn't happy with me, it took me a few hours and when I told him "That's because you said it was a physical memory problem, not virtual memory, and you told me to troubleshoot the RAM" he got really upset. I got let go a few days after I fixed a brand new monitor he was prepared to toss out. I fixed it by draining the capacitors - a relatively simple fix any tech should know about. I was "let go" due to incompetence. It is ironic that 3 months later they launched an internal investigation to see if I had hacked the Linux servers. Still, rumor is that I was let go for incompetence and the Tech who jerked me over is still here. I don't say anything, it's their company, their loss. But none of it will change the fact that I can fix monitors he can't and that I know the difference between physical and virtual memory. He may have won his career from me, but he's still ignorant, self-centered and deluded. Where is teh handbook on that?

Argh stop referring to 1983 as though it was concurrent with the Roman Invasion! I already feel old!

14 in 1983 here though I was stuck with a Dragon 32 (which I still have).

FYI, I put some scans of another Usborne book on my blog, if people are interested:

http://blakeyrat.com/2010/07/the-future-according-to-the-usborne-guide-to-audio-and-radio/

http://blakeyrat.com/2011/06/usborne-guide-to-audio-and-radio-radio-instructions/