What's the i in your computer at work?

Work was mostly MacOS for productivity and management and Linux for production services and development - either Intel XEON or AMD Opterons depending on the bids to spec. tens of thousands of science number crunching cores and hundreds of Petabytes of distributed storage of scientific data,. I worked on all of these, so...

Now all of that is behind me

Haydon said:

OK, but for the purposes of this poll, please don't game at the office

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Part of the job description of my previous job included playing games. I was a hardware tester of used electronics. It's difficult to test a gaming console or a PC with a good GPU if you don't try out some real world scenarios.

barman58 said:

I've never played games on any computer I've owned except for an occasional game of solitaire or mahjong

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When we got our first PC my boss at the time used to play solitaire.. or what he called mouse exercise.

I spent twenty plus years at one company, ostensibly as IT support which was a mis naming I was fully responsible for the Internal company IT but was also often seconded to the engineering department where I would design GUIs for control systems and program (in all sort of bespoke operating systems), set up the systems and be responsible for networking and Comms - a bit different from normal cat5 etc ethernet as it went from micro-cable Fibre optics to industrial ethernet, ( multi core Steel wire armoured that could reach over two inches in diameter)

Happy days though sat at a console watching the effluent output into the local river rise and rise approaching the point when it would shut down the plant costing a minimum of two days to restart @ £20K per hour - I just dived into the code and manually trimmed the parameters for an hour or so and managed to keep things going - Who needs games when you have the real thing The best thing with the effluent control system was that there was a divert function that would allow time to correct the issues - did not work as the Mechanical crew had forgotten to install the ****ing valves

I didn't vote as I'm retired. Our first "PC" (we had IBM 360 Mainframes) at work was a 80286 machine.

My current desktop/recording studio system is an i9 9900K.

fireberd said:

I didn't vote as I'm retired. Our first "PC" (we had IBM 360 Mainframes) at work was a 80286 machine.

My current desktop/recording studio system is an i9 9900K.

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My first first computer was an HP 2000E.. that was at my High-school back in the late 70's
Then In college I used a IBM 360 and a DEC PDP and the school tried using Tandy PC's but they broke so much they tossed them in favor of the DEC. The intro to programming was then using the DEC.

BunnyJ said:

My first first computer was an HP 2000E.. that was at my High-school back in the late 70's
Then In college I used a IBM 360 and a DEC PDP and the school tried using Tandy PC's but they broke so much they tossed them in favor of the DEC. The intro to programming was then using the DEC.

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Memory overlays

geneo said:

Memory overlays

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I loved using the DEC.. the error messages were really cryptic and the manual,, was useless.But I still loved it. I used it for two classes.. distributed programming(basic) an Pascal.

BunnyJ said:

I loved using the DEC.. the error messages were really cryptic and the manual,, was useless.But I still loved it. I used it for two classes.. distributed programming(basic) an Pascal.

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I wrote a distributed data acquisition system software for DEC computers , PDP-11 and VAX, and some device drivers (in assembler) on them. That 16 bit address user space on the PDP and having to carefully plan your memory usage and manually swap routines in and out of memory - have come a long way.

geneo said:

I wrote a distributed data acquisition system doftware for DEC computers , PDP-11 and VAX, and some device drivers (in assembler) on them. That 16 bit address user space on the PDP and having to carefully plan your memory usage and manually swap routines in and out of memory - have come a long way.

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I painfully recall COBOL had alter statements to do memory swaps. God,, I hate the alter statement.,

The following may represent basic configurations of business computers (beware of the 'up to' in the link below) 1 of the 4 models has an i3, 2 have an i5, and 1 has an i7. The business market offering appears to center on i5.


TV ads that are targeted to the residential market have centered on the i5 also, since long. So, Bring-Your-Own-Device workers are likely to center on i5, too.

The poll for work computers stands at 0 votes for i3, 3 votes for i5, 10 votes for i7 (showing a clear tendency for higher than i5 processors) and 9 votes for 'other' (also showing a clear tendency towards higher end processors)

Is that because we are enthusiasts responding with what we have in our hobby machines? Any other explanations?

I have a hard time believing that a real estate law office that uses Outlook, MS Word, Edge, and little else, need i5 machines. I think they can do their work on Pentiums with processor capacity to spare. SSDs may increase productivity, but not more processing power. Well, a big real estate law office would need a server, too.

Voted. But I'm retired last January.
Used to work with core i3. For meeting I have tablet and Macbook with Core i5.
Almost all around 400 input terminals in the hospital I used to work are core i3 with 4gb RAM.

Work?

A Guy

A Guy said:

Work?

A Guy

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Yes, Bill.

barman58 said:

I've never played games on any computer I've owned except for an occasional game of solitaire or mahjong

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Well, I'll be danged! I thought I was the only surviving member of the NO-GAMES-ON-MY-COMPUTERS club.

I recall installing and playing a chess game a couple of times in the mid-90s, but nothing since.

When my friends and or relatives come by with their kids, the kids think I must be lying when I tell them there are no games on my computers.

I have to pick other. I work from home and my main PC is in my profile. A Ryzen 7 5700G.

I'm retired so no work computer buy my main computer I use at home has an i7.

N/A

Mine is all about the "Y", not the "i"

I don't actually use a computer where I work but when I go to MPTC for school I use my trusty HP with a Ryzen 5 in it.

That's the "Y" I was talking about lol.