Was lucky enough to have a sit-down cabinet version of Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator (Sega, 1983) at a local arcade. Very comfortable with the controls built into the chair. Along with having set all the games to free play, the operator had the volume cranked on this one so Nimoy’s voice would resonate inside!

For ZSH and SSH I just speak the letters: Z-S-H, S-S-H. Sudo as “SUE-do” “SUE-doo”.

One I wonder about is xrandr. I say “EKS-rand-ur”, have heard others say “eks-R-and-R”.

edit: for sudo long vowel. Also I tend to stress the H in ZSH and SSH.

Profoundly nightmarish was mine, here are the highlights:

Go to take LSD for the first time with some friends at the seller’s house. Just about the time the effects are taking over I realize I met the guy once about ten years earlier, when as a stupid kid I accidentally shot him in the face with a pellet spring pistol.

Bit later, on top of feeling ashamed, regretful, worthless, helpless and out of my mind I’m becoming very nauseated so I go to the front porch. In a brief moment I see another guy I hadn’t seen in years walking by on the sidewalk, and reach my hand up to wave at him. As my stomach empties he freezes in his tracks, mid-wave as his smile of recognition turns to shock.

In my high school we had several of the Compact Macintosh models and I remember using them in two classes. One was English where we used a word processor. The other was more interesting: some sort of computer literacy course where we wrote HyperCard programs on the Mac.

Apart from the HyperCard stuff I found the courses and Macintosh computers quite dull. Maybe because I had been using Amiga computers for years at this point, and knew “The Fastest Apple Mac is an Amiga” (piped).

Thanks for the recommendation! Happy to learn that story arc continues.

Huh, I would have figured Wesley Crusher would feature in this. He was becoming pretty Time Lord-y by “Journey’s End”.

Lovely dithering technique on a challenging medium. Keep it up!

Very hesitant to offer any criticism (cause who the hell am I) but the hat doesn’t stand out from the background as well as you’ve done for the rest of your subject.

You’ve gained karma!

Just an old hobbyist here. Often I count myself lucky having grown up when a state-of-the-art home computer was a Commodore 64. Rightly or wrongly, I believe it’s quite possible for one human being to completely grasp what that machine is doing from the moment the power switch is turned on through to the end of running a complex self-written program. Not that it’s at the heart of your question(s) but that’s where my curiosity started. In those days any user had to know just a bit of the BASIC programming language, even if just to list the contents of a floppy disk or to load a pre-written program. I am always astounded at what people with much more dedication are able to do with a C64 to this day in the demoscene. The more generous among them make their discoveries digestible to mere mortals at sites such as codebase64.org. That’s a kind of comfort zone for me. Getting into something like a 386 PC and I start to feel overwhelmed. Maybe consider dipping back a bit into history if it sounds appealing?

As to semiconductor fabrication, I found this unconventional book by Clive Maxfield to be very helpful in clarifying some things I was curious about.

Some excellent stories from the heyday of MOS Technology in the first in this book series by Brian Bagnall. That’s the company that produced the popular 6502 family of 8-bit CPU that powered machines from Apple to Nintendo and many in between. Also where the custom chips were brought to life that formed the heart of the C64. One excerpt I often think back on were engineers laying flat on raised creepers, cutting the layout of their CPU-to-be out of huge sheets of vellum.

5 - Do we have to join Intel first or something to learn how most of the things work lol ?

May not be as far-fetched as you think. I’ve worked in Intel’s semiconductor factories, and Micron’s, and some others whose names aren’t widely known but whose products made things like the iPhone possible. Not cause I’m well-educated or have any particular talent, just that in a volatile marketplace such as this one there are ebbs and flows in demand for headcount in entry-level positions. Draft up a resume highlighting your critical thinking skills and willingness to learn and watch the recruiters from the staffing agencies fill your email inbox. I’ve had the good fortune to learn such processes as photolithography, thin-films, dry/wet etch, metrology, planarization, die sort (test), and on and on. Whether you’d like to operate the semiconductor tools, push the production metrics or maintain the equipment there just may be a need for you somewhere today.