Happy....

[bubbathegimp]

Happy National Cheeseburger Day.
Make Mine Mushroom and Swiss....

[JLA]

Happy National Cheeseburger Day.
Make Mine Mushroom and Swiss....

Sounds tasty!

[scooterbird]

I just started working full time at long time friends hardware/bicycle/lawn equipment store. He can barely operate a phone. I am now head of IT.

I just ordered the first two computers that will be entering the shop. He will actually need them... He's selling a lot of electric bikes and you need to diagnose them just like a car and the bigger saws are starting to come equipped with electronics that have a communications port for diagnosis.

It's rather astonishing that in this day and age, the store did not have any computers until now.

[Tastenplayer]

There are still some Aunt Emma shops and work-shops without computers. Even without a cash register there are still shops and restaurants in the countryside.

[thecoalman]

It's rather astonishing that in this day and age, the store did not have any computers until now.

They have a system and it works for them. His wife will use laptop when she needs too. The Father who passed a few years ago could barely spell but he definitely knew how to count and sell stuff. Wasn't a book smart man but a very smart businessman. When other small hardware stores were closing in the area because of the big box stores he was buying their stock up at much less than he would pay for it wholesale. He hit a few trends in the 80's ahead of the curve, specifically kerosene heaters and BMX bikes.

I need to ease him into this, he doesn't like change. Doesn't have a lot of choice becsue some of the electric bikes and the larger saws he sell come with electronics and require diagnostics. I'll start with some labor price lists, labels, etc. The two computers I'm getting both have Win Pro with TPM chip for security. I'm going to install second drives in RAID1 and backup to something else. Basically what I do at home, I'm not all that familiar with Windows networking in business environment but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. The other problem is I never worked in retail store so I'm not familiar with that process. Do they have excel spreadsheet or some other dataset for every order? That's a rhetorical question, these are the kinds of questions I don't the answer too but I will learn. I can't work with what I know, I need to use common software for retail so he's not left hanging in the wind if something happens to myself. I don't know what that software is though...

[scooterbird]

Sounds like a real challenge. Since I went into business for myself and stepped away from the "industry" side of things, I've been continually surprised at how little computer literacy there is in the wider world, and it does take easing people into the process. I've often told people that my job at this point is more psychological than technical...so many people have convinced themselves that they are too "stupid" to understand such things.

[bubbathegimp]

Happy National Drink Beer Day.
Where's Bertie??!!

[Tastenplayer]

24 years ago
The day the Internet came to Switzerland
Today, 29 October is considered "Internet Day". We look back on the time when the Internet conquered Switzerland.

[bikeridr]

24 years ago
The day the Internet came to Switzerland
Today, 29 October is considered "Internet Day". We look back on the time when the Internet conquered Switzerland.

Actually, I think you are in the wrong here. Internet was *invented* in Switzerland sometime in 1969 at CERN
The modern internet, made "public" by Tim Berners Lee worked at CERN in Switzerland in 1989 where the first webpage were made and released.
Norway (my birth country) entered the "net" in 1993 with the newspaper "Dagbladet" as the very first Norwegian .no TLD

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

not quite;

https://www.history.com/topics/inventio ... e-internet

robert

[bikeridr]

Hmm, I always thought the ARPA-net was between CERN and MIT.
Interesting article, though. As one can see, USSR "invented" satellite communication and Norway got "internet" in 1973.

But still; the internet we know today was invented/prepared by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland in 1989.

[thecoalman]

Speaking of the early developments in computers one of the most interesting side stories of the Apollo space program I have heard was seamstresses weaving binary code. It's just such a cool story with some of the oldest technology in the world helping to send man to the moon.

https://www.raytheon.com/news/feature/mills-moon
The seamstresses threaded their needles through one magnetic core, then looped the copper wire around the next core before routing it into another. And another.

They repeated this task thousands of times. They weren't weaving fabric; rather, they were building software. Each loop had one of two meanings; strung together, the twists formed binary language: 10110101.

Raytheon recruited women from the nearby Massachusetts mills for their exquisite manual dexterity, perfect for weaving the copper code that ran the guidance computers for the Apollo space missions of the 1960s and 1970s. It was one of the creative ways Raytheon helped to safely deliver mankind’s biggest leap.

“It was actually like a needle-and-thread kind of an operation,” said Robert Zagrodnick, a former program manager for the Apollo Guidance Computer, which was built by Raytheon. “And they had manufacturing aids to help decide exactly where to thread it and that kind of thing, because they were threading the ones and zeroes for the program.”

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

Hmm, I always thought the ARPA-net was between CERN and MIT.
Interesting article, though. As one can see, USSR "invented" satellite communication and Norway got "internet" in 1973.

But still; the internet we know today was invented/prepared by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland in 1989.

not quite, what you are talking about is the world wide web or www
that is what Lee came up with. the ability to create what we now call web pages and share them across the internet.
html and now html and css etc. etc.


robert

[Tastenplayer]

24 years ago
The day the Internet came to Switzerland
Today, 29 October is considered "Internet Day". We look back on the time when the Internet conquered Switzerland.

Actually, I think you are in the wrong here. Internet was *invented* in Switzerland sometime in 1969 at CERN
The modern internet, made "public" by Tim Berners Lee worked at CERN in Switzerland in 1989 where the first webpage were made and released.
Norway (my birth country) entered the "net" in 1993 with the newspaper "Dagbladet" as the very first Norwegian .no TLD

https://www.swisscom.ch/de/magazin/digi ... 252972241
Surfing the web was previously simply unaffordable for the average Swiss citizen

Web-surfing was a luxury

This is because on 16 September 1996 the Internet became simple and affordable. To understand this, you first need to know what it was like before that. Until then, the worldwide web was a luxury good, which was mainly afforded by freaks and companies. But the hourly rate of 5 to 10 francs and the additional monthly fee of 40 to 100 francs, which was common at that time, was not even the biggest problem.
Was the most used Swiss online medium until 1996: the cryptic videotex.

Much more important was the telephone connection, which was still indispensable for access at that time. Despite a price reduction in the summer of 1996, a long-distance call - i.e. a connection outside the country's own area code - cost 12.5 centimes (from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. and from 9 p.m.) or 25 centimes per minute (during other times). Surfing the web for an hour a day could add up to over 500 francs a month. This was particularly true for rural residents, as many Internet providers only offered access numbers in large cities.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Surfing the net was financially impossible for the general public.
Blue Window brought the affordable Internet for everyone to Switzerland, 24 years ago.

I still remember very well that several times I could hardly pay my phone bill after a major Windows update. A really cheap internet connection came much later in many places.

[thecoalman]

Here in the US "local" calls were always unlimited, local calls were perhaps in 10 mile radius at least in my area. You were only left out if you were in rural area. Long distance was expensive but that started dropping in the mid 80's after the breakup of "Ma Bell", by the time the internet came along they weren't outrageously priced.