I work with PHD nuclear physicist who for the most part are highly skilled both in physics, programming, & electronic and hardware design of cutting edge equipment.

But one particular PHD was the exception to the rule.

In the same shop where we had the coax wiring problems (see Wiring Issues 1) we eventually ran out of all the coax cables we had installed. Cable had been run for all existing users plus a hefty lot of extras for future expansion. The solution was to run twisted pair as it was much cheaper.

Many years ago the shop I was working in moved to a newly renovated building. It was decided to clean up the cabling mess created by the three-dozen 3274 control units used in the building. After having been in one location for a long time many of the coax cables had been re-routed and new cables were also brought in. By the time of the move the cables were a mess.

Lucky for me I'm a 20 year computer geek who only recently turned restranteur...

I walked into my restaurant office 5 days ago to discover my laptop was stolen. My clunky junky filled with years of data Dell was gone. Sitting right beside it was a brand new Studio 17 laptop. Untouched.

A server, 5 desktops and 2 laptops were also untouched. Just my personal laptop was taken.

My boss just shared a great story with me about his colleague who installed and troubleshot early computer networks in the 1970s before becoming a radio broadcast engineer.

Computerworld recently published a review of 10 operating systems time has left behind. From AmigaOS to BeOS to OS/2, they are gone but not forgotten. Some of them were actually quite good; others had annoying, but possibly endearing, quirks; still others may've made you want to put your computer through a wall. What are some of your, if not favorite, then most memorable operating systems of the past?

Let’s go back to 1994, just after the first Pentiums were out; When Microsoft was just starting to jump from the desktop into the networking world with NT 4.0. The hottest video card I remember was the Diamond Viper and SVGA was just starting into existence. Cell phones where big as bricks and everyone was on dial-up for a home internet connection.

I remember something that I saw a few years ago. I was visiting a friend's home and to my amusement his young daughter inserted into the VCR... a strawberry jam sandwich.

Guess the machine gets hungry, playing all those tapes!

In the good ol' dayze when I was first coming up my love for electronics got me on the edge of trouble several times. I was a ham radio and electronics enthusiast early on and it was hard to explain to my assistant principal on one occasion that the alligator clips in the bag of wires, etc, that they confiscated from my locker were not, as he assumed, roach clips...

Back in the day of mainframe computing our site had a dedicated print shop. A clerk would collect all the daily reports from a large printer, separate them and put them into mailboxes for collection. If the reports were not retrieved from the mailboxes by the end of the day, the clerk would feed them into a shredder and replace them with the next day's reports.