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The Elderly Gentleman's Club or Old Farts

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    #61
    Humm. Good memories, many of which I have forgotten.
    Born: 1962
    First automation: metal strip screwed to a block of wood under the front door pad. Heard it ring, and opened the door to my dad's friend, holding his girlfriend and touching the pad with his toe to see what it did.
    I watched the movie collossis, and hung a monitor from my bedroom ceiling. The interface was an etched circuit board I made in high school (that my wife tried to throw away as junk -- it looked like it.) The board went into an apple II+ computer. It told me what doors were open in the house. Dad was good to let me experiment. The wires are now used for the alarm system some. . .30 years later. I had a trs-80 model I with 4k, and had to wait for it to come in because RS had it backordered. 8080A processor replaced bya z80 I believe. I placed 3rd in the state in vo-tech competition because I insisted on using a rechargeable soldering iron against my teacher's suggestions. 2 guys finished about 5 minutes before me. could have been me with those college scholarships.
    BSR was found while wandering around Sears. Late 70's I think.
    Went into Ham radio in 1983 as Tech class to use 2 meter radio only.
    Wrote a home automation program in GWBASIC, and when I first tested it in my own first house, I opened the kitchen door and it was supposed to play a tone, but it turned on the front porch light enstead. I was using a relay and transistor driver circuit from the Intel 286 6/10 Mhz computer to do that.
    Bought ECS and spent DAYS programming it and then it ran for over a year without a reboot in DOS. a couple of years later Mark (ECS Fame) quit the business and took a salary job and then came back, but rewrote it all and I lost many of my devices. So I went looking for a replacement and found HOMESEER.
    I have bought form Barclay at HAL (whatever happened to him, is he still alive?) and I have pieced hundreds of projects together. My family and I moved in with dad who has cancer (89 yrs old) and until he is gone, my Homeseer machine is cold and dark. My daughter called it "Mark" after the best man ay my wedding (because she thought he was cute when she met him years leater). She is now 11 years old.
    I did the Tandy/Radio Shack, and Heathkit stuff, and I built lots of breadboarded digital electronics, robots, and computer programming. i guess I started back when I was about 8. Dad told me that for a light to work, it needed a battery, a light, and a wire for the current to go to the light and come back. "And now, son, you know everything I know about electronics. . . "

    OH MY GOSH. I am sounding like the guys at the retirement homes I used to HAVE to listen to.

    When we moved back in to dad's, I showed my wife the tiny holes in my bedroom ceiling that held that monitor up, some . . . 27 years ago.
    A computer's attention span is as long
    as it's powercord.

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      #62
      Originally posted by mwhistle View Post
      Do you have to be male to qualify?
      Nope.

      You never got your "covered Wagon", why not ask Tink.

      Nicely of course.
      sigpic
      A founder member of "The HA Pioneer Group" otherwise known as the "Old farts club!"

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        #63
        Rupp,

        I have just had a wonderful read through this entire post, a good laugh, and smiled at how wonderful this comunity is.

        I tried to find the original post, which was something like "confused", the one where we all got it so wrong that started this topic. Could not find it. If you know where it is please place a link as I still laugh thinking about it.
        sigpic
        A founder member of "The HA Pioneer Group" otherwise known as the "Old farts club!"

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          #64
          When I was young they didn't even have X-10 filters, and I had to walk 10 miles through the snow to go to a Radio Shack to get the parts to make a filter. In fact, home automation parts were so rare, If I wanted to turn on the lawn sprinklers remotely, the only way to do it was to tell my sister to "go turn on the sprinkler."

          Comment


            #65
            Glad this thread was resurrected - missed it before.

            Lessee... born 1946, started reading "my uncle, the ham"'s ARRL handbook when I was 6, first crystal set when I was 7. One-tube radio/transmitter at 8 or so. Did the strings and pulleys thing - weird that so many of us were into that. Got into transistors late fifties - Popular Mechanics "Build a one-transistor receiver".

            Made a few bucks repairing neighbors radios and TVs (borrowing my uncle's test equipment).

            Family legend: "The year Dennis bugged the Christmas tree" (was around '59).

            Had relays controlling the lights in my room in the early sixties (obligatory HA connection).

            Built a (very primitive) computer around '63, trying to win a science fair scholarship (didn't quite make it).

            Entered MIT (the only place I applied) in 64. Played with SCRs and newly developed IGMOSFETS - made a switch I could tap to turn lights on an off.

            Built a TV out of several defunct Philco chassis and a naked CRT hanging off a shelf in my dorm room - this is what I and my floor mates watched first-run Star Trek on.

            Married one of the 47 coeds in my class of 1000 in the MIT chapel (we're still together).

            tag: readers digest condensed version>

            Worked on the Apollo project.

            Got involved in a startup. Crashed. Acquired by Bendix.

            Joined a company designing people movers. Got to design hardware and software for life-size Lionel trains . Loads of fun.

            Didn't get the hoped-for government contracts, so company diversified: I designed the first commercial micromputer, based on Intel 8008 chips, and we sold a bunch of them (built into ASR-33 teletypes) as editors for numerical control machine tapes.

            Had a home computer in '71: PDP-8I bought surplus; my wife leveraged it into a succession of successful companies.

            Designed CNC stuff, did contract work designing advanced fax stuff for various governments.

            Bought a Mac in '84 to help with fax graphics design. No way to get stuff into the Mac, wrote first comm program for Mac. Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame - Time Magazine article, stuff like that. Hobnobbed with folks like Bill Gates. Worked for Steve Jobs for a year (educational, but _very_ high tuition

            Worked for Apple for a couple of years. Almost invented the Web

            Came down to earth.

            tag: /readers digest condensed version>

            Through all this, as long as X10 has been around, I've had controllable switches. Until I discovered HomeSeer, I was using Radio Shack's software (a redistribution of X10's stuff, I think). Crude, but it worked for basic timing stuff.

            The rest is (recent) history.

            - Dennis Brothers

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              #66
              Dang! I'm glad I'm not old enough to join this thread.

              Let's see;
              All the radio shack kits ever created - Yep
              Early computer - Yep. Trash-80 from the first production run
              Gazillion amateur radio units - Yep
              Early BSR modules - yep
              Remember Comp.Home Automation before it turned into sewer - Yep
              Software from some company called Keeware - yep. V1.3 IIRC
              Still crazy after all these years - Guilty
              My system is described in my profile.

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                #67
                What about Heathkit? RIP.

                Comment


                  #68
                  David,

                  What are you doing with pressure sensors in the kitchen?

                  I ask as I'm always looking for new ideas and projects to work on!

                  --Dan

                  Originally posted by dkindred View Post
                  Ha! It's so true. My cell phone vibrates all the time, and I look to see who just called my house, or I see a notification that the water heater temperature has dipped below 90 degrees, or what have you. My co-workers all look at me like I'm nuts, but these same people think it's so cool when they're over and hear the talking Caller-ID, or get a custom phone greeting when they call. Most shake their heads at the thought of having pressure gauges under the kitchen floor, a security camera in the porch light, a weather station on the roof, etc. But, I think they're about ready to hear about anything when the first thing they see when entering the house is a working 1940s mahogany phone booth.

                  Just want to clarify on my buddy Tink's post. The HAL he is talking about (Home Automation Labs) was run by Barclay Brown and is completely unrelated to the evil HAL (Home Automated Living), where we both served (seemingly life) sentences.

                  Tinkles, have you been listening to "the wireless" lately? I hear that Bob Hope is a stitch!

                  --David
                  Tasker, to a person who does Homeautomation...is like walking up to a Crack Treatment facility with a truck full of 3lb bags of crack. Then for each person that walks in and out smack them in the face with an open bag.

                  Comment


                    #69
                    Originally posted by anogee View Post
                    What about Heathkit? RIP.
                    Heathkit, that was the one you built youself from all components supplied, and then had to find a shop, as there was no iternet then, to get the missing parts was it not.

                    Built one, never got it to work well, in fact thinking about it did you not also have to build the monitor and Keyboard yourself?

                    You are going back a long time Sir.
                    sigpic
                    A founder member of "The HA Pioneer Group" otherwise known as the "Old farts club!"

                    Comment


                      #70
                      We really are a pretty strange lot, heh?

                      My memory has already faded considerably. Soon after I graduated with my BS in EE & CS (in 1980), I did my first "automation" project, although I didn't think of it as automation. The house I was in had a detatched garage. One of the first things I did was put in a micro switch and a relay to turn on the light in the garage whenever the door was open. That worked fine, but about a week later we were getting calls late at night from one of our neighbors. I guess we had a nasty habit of leaving the garage door open, but it didn't bother the neighbor until the light was staying on all night. So, I added a circuit to buzz a buzzer in the house some time (I think around 20 minutes) after the door opened. I then had a button on the workbench in the garage to reset the timer if I was going to be there for a while. This all was when my girlfriend (who is now my wife) came to realize how irritating life with me was going to be... Especially when I'd forget to push the button and the buzzer would keep going off!

                      I started using the BSR X10 stuff early, but I can't remember when it was. Sometime in the 80's. I was using the CP290 for years (just threw it out finally about 3 months ago), and for a long time I was using a cool little program that Dave Houston wrote (I can't remember the name though). That was where I also first started write scripts.

                      Geez... I wonder how many hours of my life I've spent on this stuff!

                      Steve

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                        #71

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                          #72
                          OK I'm in.

                          I won't say how old I am but 1946 was a banner year.

                          My first computer commands were "Press Play on Tape" and then eventually graduated to load "PacMan",8,1.

                          I remember spending hours typing in numbers from a book named "ComPute!" (and no numeric key pad) only to find it didn't work anyway.

                          Vic 20 was about $250 but I can't remember what year that was !

                          70's or 80's I think.

                          C64 was a big step forward and then the Amiga.

                          Automation was some x10 stuff and the progressed to Keware - might have been version 1.2 or something like that.

                          Keware(now HomeSeer) was around $30 when I signed up.

                          Still enjoy the automation hobby in my spare time.

                          Neil
                          Neil
                          Newmarket Ontario

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                            #73
                            That was a CP290 controller.

                            I wrote what I believe was the first Windows program (XtenWIN) for the CP290 to replace the DOS program distributed with it. I think this was around 1990.

                            Ed Tenholder
                            Originally posted by dhk View Post
                            I started with the BSR X-10 before it could do HA, just remote control. That was in the late 60s or early 70s.

                            Can't recall whether my first computer program for HA ran on CP/M before MS-DOS even was thought of. With MS-DOS used a CP-260 (?) which really impressed me at the time. Think the software was called SmartHouse.

                            Started with HomeSeer way back when - - -

                            Well, it was so long ago that when one phoned in to report bugs it was Rich himself that answered the 'phone!
                            .
                            tenholde

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                              #74
                              You've all spoke of things from your past.

                              I can relate to them, except that I'm not "old". In my past I've done the string light switch thing. I've also done "remote" TV but splicing a switch into an extension cable for a TV. So the extension cable allowed power to the TV, which was next to the power outlet, only when I turned it on from across the room (I was 10 or so).

                              The next thing I did was destroy a few remote controlled cars trying to see how well they worked. They...well, never made it back together.

                              This was all pre-1990, post 1980.

                              So I'm not really an old timer, but you all seem to have similar experiences that I had. So, if it's ok with everyone, I'd like to think I fit in with your crowd...even though I'm not even 30 yet (however I am a senior engineer designing thermal imaging camera electronics).

                              --Dan
                              Tasker, to a person who does Homeautomation...is like walking up to a Crack Treatment facility with a truck full of 3lb bags of crack. Then for each person that walks in and out smack them in the face with an open bag.

                              Comment


                                #75
                                Well... I am not worthy (or old enough ) for the "Elderly Gentleman's Club or Old Farts" however I am subscribed to the thread and get email notifications that are announced verbally and via BetaBrite sign. I still have a young-un' (8 year old girl) who still finds potty humor inlcuding farting funny. She immediately relays information to the entire family when an email comes in and mentions "old farts" .
                                Jim Doolittle

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