Yup...

My first CD-writer was a Yamaha SCSI single speed drive, my mate got one to put his music onto CD as he had a small studio and was a singer/songwriter. I remember we used Adaptec SCSI controllers and the pain to get them working, no plug and pray.
I don't remember what I had next, no doubt some PATA drive.

I am confused, I got myself an external Blu-ray writer because the on in my PC stopped writing to Blu-rays, well I thought I would give it another go a couple of days ago and it is now working
Oh well, the external drive is useful for the MAC.

I'm so old I remember using pencil and paper.

I remember using that as well, never had computers at school, did not even have a calculator. Had to use our brains. MMmm, not sure what happened there then, because it certainly did not help me.

Anyway, it is strange how much everything changed and pretty quickly,

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

I'm so old I remember using pencil and paper.

Ah, the joys of manually extracting square roots

Ah, Heron's method. Remarkably accurate after just a few iterations. But I confess that I would prefer one of those wind-up mechanical calculators rather than just pencil and paper. Such a lovely clack-clacking sound. That brings back memories of my undergraduate days with a room full of those at full song in the numerical methods class.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Ah, Heron's method. Remarkably accurate after just a few iterations.

For some reason my main memory from school is of the digit-by-digit method that looked a bit like long division... somewhat tedious, and heaven help you if you mis-read (or wrote) a digit, but it was nice to see the answer build up in front of you

Uni was mostly slide rules, for electrical engineering they were usually close enough

I missed out on mechanical calculators, at work we went straight from slide rules/tables to the electronic jobs. And not the basic 4-function ones either, we had a beauty (for the time)... I think it was one of these.

eta- just noticed it's displaying the square root of 2

Edited by billford (Wed 18-Jun-25 14:25:02)

And numbers like 1.414, 1.728, 2.236 and 3.14159 were etched on your brain . . . .

Not so much the third one (didn't often need it), but you missed out 2.71828...

Edited by billford (Wed 18-Jun-25 16:00:17)

Definitely the most memorable, IMO, because of it’s part in Euler’s identity, surely the most beautiful of equations. Although I have a soft spot for 1.414… as the proof of its irrationality was the defining inspiration for my love of mathematics.