Things you may not know that Google knows about you

[bill70j]

I grew up coding BASIC in the 80s.

Cards, IBM1130, and best of all, Fortran with WATFOR

 

[Adventurous Traveler]

Welcome to the 21st Century. You can't hide from it, so why bother?

 

[UTTransplant]

Cards, IBM1130, and best of all, Fortran with WATFOR

I started with cassette tapes and paper tapes, then went to cards, then keyboards. As a teaching assistant in grad school, we had to have first-week-of-school tutoring sessions for the Computer Science undergrads to teach them how to use the keyboards and monitors. We only had to do that for 2 semesters, because after that all the students came in with the skill. And one of my infamous claims to fame was to bring down the entire academic computing IBM 360 due to an erroneous program. I had been using a debug version of some language (Fortran? PL/1?) to develop applications for the university testing center. I changed the final run to the non-debug version only to discover one of the utilities I used had a bug that ran an infinite recursion loop in privileged mode! Wrote through the entire RAM! Oops! The recursion issue was mine, but the privileged mode error was IBMs. All programmers eventually make some pretty spectacular errors, and I was lucky enough to learn humility at an early age

 

[Larry N.]

My first programming training was on the DEC PDP-11 front panel keys, very simple octal numbers for certain maintenance operations. It was during a school on maintenance when we first got those machines in the central office (long distance stuff). In 1978 I got a TRS-80 Model I and started learning Basic. But there was an editor/assembler available for it (Z-80 chip) and the assembly language was very similar to that of the PDP-11, so a friend (also with the TRS-80) and I delved into that and developed several interesting pieces of code, along with being able to read sections of the TRS-DOS code. Very enlightening indeed.

My C language experience came later, along with Unix.

In 1986 I got an Amiga 1000 and Unix (and C) was a big help in understanding that wonderful machine.

 

[garyb1st]

I think we're well beyond the point of trying to protect ourselves from the likes of Google or any Governmental agency that is looking for personal information. That said, this morning I had to convince Google I'm not a child, (83 next month) by taking a photo of myself so I could Search on my phone. I guess they haven't figured out that our youngest generation of users are way ahead of Google when it comes to out maneuvering them.