AI for those above 50 years of age

Hello all, this is Sunday Yahaya. I’m very excited to be in this community. I’m here to learn about AI especially as it affects those of us above 50 years old. I have worked on comouters for the last 35 years from FOTRAN punch cards, to DOS to Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and into the internet age as well as web 2.0. However, AI seems to have moved so fast that I now find many in my generation playing catch up. Will like to be ahead in AI and Machine learning. Just getting formally started with this course.

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Didn’t punchcarding die in the late 70s as everyone switched to tape? :thinking: Oldest I worked on for a short time was some machine with MVS on VM but even that had a tape drive :joy:

I think “AI” (so-called) has moved fast for everyone, by sheer coincidence actually.

Nobody would have guessed that throwing transformers at reams of text would yield the current crop of LLM.

And we are still using absolutely inadequate programming languages, too. :joy:

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Thank you very much @dtonhofer, if I add my undergraduate days, that was when we used punchcards. I also used reel tapes as well as disk tapes before the floppy disk. We worked on systems like Data General and Sun Microsystems. So to suddenly find yourself almost out of place in your own industry is a little worrisome.
I agree with you that AI has moved very fast and for someone of my age, my objective is to be able to skip the whole noise and go directly to areas that benefit my line of work. I look forward to more of such constructive engagements.

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I’m 63 dude. I didn’t start working with computers until the early 90s and it was all about DOS and edlin. Good luck to both of us! RIchard

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Ah yes.. My first NN was on a Sun 3/60 with a Motorola 68020 at 20 MHz. It was neither fast nor deep. :joy: Good times.

Also, the book from back then, stolen from ebay.

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My birth announcement was on a punch-card, I recall my dad working with punched-tape, and I had some 8-inch floppies, but I really started with cheap cassettes, 5 1/4" discs and a hole-punch. The only thing that makes me feel old is 1) my left knee and 2) my daughter saying “Who’s David Bowie?” at dinner last night.

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My first year as an undergrad, was the last one in which the folks in computer programming classes could be identified by the box of punchcards they carried everywhere around campus. The next year we switched over to room full of timeshared terminals hooked up to an IBM 370 mainframe.

There was a big red unguarded button on the wall in the computer room.

Do not push the button.

Turns out that’s the fire alarm and emergency shutdown.

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Thank you very much @MrRichardRyan. Someone once said, the day you stop learning is the day you stop living. We will continue to learn even as the world of what our generation used to know as ‘computing’ evolves. At least we will still be able to communicate with our kids and grandkids. :grinning_face:

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Thanks again @dtonhofer, can’t remember the configuration of our Sun Microsystem server, howver, it reduced what was known as ‘processing time’ for data so significantly that we thought, it could not get better. Sun Microsystem brought GUI to the character user interface we were used to. Those were the days when people in ‘computer operations’ slept in offices while data was processing. Good old days.

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Thank you very much @MichaelPaulukonis. The world has really evolved, however some of the things AI is doing these days is so unreal. That’s the reason I want to ensure I’m not left behind and maybe will have the opportunity to carry some from my generation along this journey.

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Thank you very much @TMosh. I only took a computer course as an elective way back in 1990. When I was leaving high school for University, one of my classmates wanted me to read computer science and that is the future. As time evolved, I realised I needed to be abreast with happenings around the computer world and took that elective course.
We also used time shared terminals hooked to amainframe. Wow! Those were good old days. Let’s see how we can translate some of that legacy knowledge into AI.

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Hello everyone in the community. I am new to learning about AI, Chatbox and Pyhthon. At my age of 69, I see this an exciting new way to perhaps earn some good extra money in this technology. Looking forward to it.

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Welcome @adanyeva5202, I appreciate your desire to learn new skills and even earn from it. Let’s go as we continue to share our experiences.

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Rock it, man. Age is just a number!

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