I went to the great retailer from which I had originally purchased it and they handled my return quickly and gracefully.
The sales staff then quickly fixed me up with a replacement system which was perfect and functions great, if not even better than the last one. I am very grateful for the service offered by the store, the diversity of its employees which made it like the United Nations of computer stores.
Before I finish this post of thanks, I'd like to talk a little bit about memory, recognition and situation. Sometimes in some situations it is better not to address people you know or recognize from the past not because of any issues between you but to preserve the safety of their situation and I mean in regard to stalking by some people. When you've known people in an industry you tend to remember their faces and yesterday I encountered a few such faces which I thought I'd say hello to in a sort of directly hidden context.
Years ago during the dawn of microcomputing, I worked for a distributor (first in the warehouse as an order picker then as a junior technician). In that day and age, the fastest machine on the PC side of the fence was the 386 DX25 which ran at 25 Mhz and had a built in math coprocessor and was roughly around $3000 to $5000 dollars for a nice machine with all the fixings. The consumer level machine was the 386 SX16 (16 Mhz) and without the math coprocessor meaning anything with floating point calculations would take a bit longer (avoid running large spreadsheets on Lotus 123 or Quattro). Memory was purchased as DIPPs which were the chips that look like little bugs with a variety of contacts that look like legs. You needed to buy them in multiples of 8 and if your machine required parity, then you had to buy a ninth chip. It was around $300 for 256k or memory and most PCs at that time were still under 1 MB at 640k (because the Dos and ROM Bios memory space was allocated in the top 384k portion of the system). Some machines like the higher end one might have had 2 MB more either allocated as EMS or XMS depending on what you were running application wise. Windows at that time was still in prerelease, shipping as a scaled down version with desktop packages like Aldus Pagemaker because it was not finished being developed. It all ran on top of a 16 bit Dos, and even Windows at that time was a 16 bit GUI (not a full operating system). You needed to be concerned with mouse drivers for Dos too. So there was a lot going on at that time.
The VGA/MCGA card had just come out allowing your PC to produce onscreen a whopping 256 colours from a palette of 16.7M colours.
Working where I had been working, I was on the forefront of this wave which heralded the mark of its entry into portable and home computing. The networking technology at the time was all based in Novell's IPX/SPX and Novell certified network techs were an important part of any computer team. Of course universities had been using Unix based systems with X Windows for graphical interface and TCP/IP but most businesses were operating on either ethernet or token ring based network topologies which required test tools like BNC loopback connectors and BNC terminators. Much different than the RJ-45 based Cat-5 and 6E network cabling most common nowadays. Fibre optics was completely not available for networks unless you were in the military or rocket science.
I was trained as a programmer by the Government (after prematurely dropping out of school). The Government picked up the ball and sent me away to learn about the mechanics of technology and programming before arriving to work for the distributor, I had been using technology since my early childhood as my parents were musicians and my father a keyboard player. I had a natural affinity for such technology and my father used to let me write synth patches for his onstage performances. My parents became the highest paid bar and lounge act in the country. All that after coming from the absolute bottom (my single mother raised two boys from low income housing), eventually working her way up to buying their first home with my father when I was 8 or 9. So I have always been around persistence, creativity and technology.
At the distributor I worked for, I worked with a great team of people, both in the warehouse and then again when I was promoted to technician. The staff were very knowledgeable and the sales team were highly trained and just as knowledgeable especially in application of the technology for their customers needs. So it was a pretty awesome time to be around with lots of opportunity.
I loved my job so much that on my lunch hours, I wrote graphics demos to show off the new vga cards features (which the demos were then added to the showroom PCs thanks to the sales staff who saw them). After working in the warehouse, I'd recognized an area where potential product identification discrepancies could occur (the system was great as was the MIS department head Pierre as were the warehouse manager Chris, the senior picker Rob, and the receiver Darrell, all of whom I collaborated with voluntarily on an idea to improve the means of accurately being able to identify products during the picking process). So I wrote a database application that interfaced with the VAX mainframe (non-invasively) to access the product codes and descriptions (which ran and managed the whole country's product inventory and accounting system), which would then print a label for each of the products during the receiving process that synchronized the vendor's product identification with that of our internal product codes. This resulted in a forty percent improvement of product picking errors and around a 10% improvement of inventory discrepancies during audits.
Anyway, thanks for the good service at the computer shop and it was great to see those old friends again and maybe if the future holds it right, we'll see each other again under much better and more ideal circumstances.
As far as the stories are concerned, I am trying to sturdy myself up to work on them because when I do, there will be a great deal of attack from the members of this cult as I do. So they will be coming soon. So new chapters for Butterfly Dragon and A Lady's Prerogative very soon. I'm trying to sneak them in but the local stalkers watch me very closely and whenever I do, they're on me like a pack of wolves.
Stay Safe And Be Well
I am Brian Joseph Johns and this is http://poetryandfiction.blogspot.ca.
Copyright © 2015 Brian Joseph Johns
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