Back in the day when I was a SysOp of a BBS, upgrading from a 300 baud modem to a zippy 1200 was quite a jump.
Khz vs Mhz vs Kc vs Mc
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mikethedruid
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LOL ! Yup. I remember the days very well, dialup internet, with the series of hideous tones before the SHHHHHH of the connection. And you're right, 1200 baud was 4 times the speed. Then came cable internet, and now fiber optic and megabyte transfer rates, not to mention wifi and woreless. We;ve come a LONG way. After the Navy, when I was in college, I took computer programming to meet my math requirement, studied the old IBM BASIC... before gosub and return... beck when every line had a number, and subroutines came after the end command line, and one used goto and the line number to go to subroutines. At the end of the subroutine was another goto line, or a series of goto lines with an if statement... "355 if V=1 then goto 125" where V was a variable set at the first goto to let the subroutine know where to return.' We did our work in basic using terminals which looked like selectric typewriters... no monitor... everything just printed out on green and white tractor paper... For FORTRAN we had to put our programs on punch cards, hand them in to the computer ops, have them run, and get them back and see where it failed, then try to figure what went wrong, and type out a corrected version onto cards, and resubmit it.... GREAT FUN ! (I hated FORTRAN)
Oh yeah. Good old days. Ran a BBS for a few years. Bumping up modems for faster speeds was always a joy. Then the internet killed it. Life goes on.
Yup 56K was the fastest allowed by law for a long time on the POTS (plain old telephone system), In high school we had to take the maths before we were allowed to take any programming class (except COBOL), (shoe-boxes were the perfect size for holding cards but I was just a little too late to deal with them), later in the military, everything that I dealt with was FORTRAN IV. As it turned out, there are now some jobs becoming available for COBOL programmers, maybe there is a lesson to be learned about picking up education on things that might be obsolete soon (my brothers child was amazed when he needed to bypass windows and just use some basic DOS commands to get something done).
There is stuff that may go out of date soon, could be useful in the future.
Thanks
Joel
You're just making my point
Yeah, and I took it as a light hearted attempt to reinforce the idea that there's room for everyone in the radio hobby. Some of the antique radio guys like to use Kilocycles and Megacycles because that's what it says on the dials of the radios they restore.
And, after all, we're all in the radio hobby for fun, right?
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Sorry but I am not. Kelvin Hertz is actually units for measuring thermal noise in a bandwidth (relevant for microwave receivers). It slows reading for some of us and why do that when trying to communicate? Why not use the 60 year old accepted new terminology rather than being a Ludite. Fun is being both accurate and up-to-date. I guess for some, fun is being old fashioned and stubborn. And you need remember, we are mentoring new people to the hobby and not doing things right or up-to-date hurts/confuses them. With that, I will no longer comment here.
mikethedruid
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Don't you just LOVE when the very creatures you were describing in an earlier post to the thread " picky, smug, and critical ", and " ill bred, lacking in social skills, self righteous, and devoid of a knowledge or appreciation for the development of the field ", crawl out of the woodwork and make your point for you?
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Sorry but contrary to what you think: I am 69 years old, worked in a government electronics lab for over 25 years after being a college professor for 10 years smf published in major magazines in the hobby area (where some know me by my real name before they personally meet me) going back 40 years . Of course you will call this "smug". Crawl out of the wood work? Check my posts into RR. Devoid of knowledge or appreciation of the field? Hardly. Anyway, I had to correct the above. I can assure you my social skills and breeding are fine. I will concede to being "picky" and will always be. RR need to close this thread.
mikethedruid
Member
AND... they keep on digging the hole. Now that they have been called out, they make a self righteous, self gratuitous post, and they want the thread closed... only making my point clearer and clearer. This would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Don't worry man, I'm not taking it personal. Most radio hobby guys probably wouldn't know the difference between Khz and kHz. I certainly didn't. Peace.
Token
Member
People using a less common or archaic technical term does not bother me in the least. kc vs kHz, mc vs MHz, etc. If you are familiar with the terms, even if they are not in common use, it is easy to make the transition and understand what they mean.
But, people using the wrong term, knowingly or unknowingly, sometimes does bother me, even if only a little bit. For example, many people write MHz as mhz, or sometime mHz. The problem is, MHz and mHz are actually different things. Of course taking the writing as a whole, and the use in context, it is normally possible to understand what they mean, but when I see or read mHz, or mhz, my mind, correctly and automatically, interprets that as "millihertz", because that is what those letters mean (at least the correctly capitalized version, mHz). Small "m" means milli, capital "M" means Mega, and that is what my mind tells me when I read it. I actually have to mentally pause and say to myself "oh, they mean MHz", if I don't do that my mind will be thinking millihertz the entire time. Reading someones use of the term "db" or "DB" when, contextually, they mean "dBm" (or dBW, or dBi, or dBd, or whatever they specifically mean other than a defined ratio, unless they actually meant just a ratio, as dB) requires the reader to interpret what they mean. Anything that is left to interpretation is subject to error. That is why correct terms exist, to remove that ambiguity.
So, for me, less common or archaic terms are not generally a problem (as I said earlier, sometimes I use them myself, either accidentally or to mess with someone), but terms that actually mean something else can be.
T!
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