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- Hacker News
- "We will examine this movement by looking at Toronto, the only city in Canada"by mewse-hn
- I mean, it gets worse. When I first moved to Toronto and became born again and in love with that city, I was even more of a snob and wouldn't even deign to consider as civilized any area that was north of Bloor.
Ok I live just outside Hamilton now, I'm reformed.
- I'm in Toronto and I can confirm.by armanj
- Everyone in my tiny village of Victoria, BC dreams of one day visiting the city of Canada commonly referred to as Toronto
- Had the title and focus been on ''Ontario'' or ''Toronto'', all would have been better.by cf100clunk
- Can confirm. I live in a small farming hamlet with a population of about 42,000 one hour outside Toronto and Canada Revenue Agency considers me "rural Canada" for tax purposes.by Waterluvian
- I've lived my entire life just "down the road" from Toronto in Canada's 10th largest city. Always in the shadow of Toronto and the butt of many jokes.
Back when I worked in Toronto, people would always ask when I'd be moving there - because why would you want to live anywhere else?
I also remember, circa 2000, when the marketing people at the company I worked at were talking about advertising - they didn't see the point of spending on advertising outside of Toronto.
It's a very different mindset, that's for sure.
by harwoodr - If Canada historically has a complex around his relative relationship to the USA, the same holds outside of central Canada, maybe with the exception of pockets that punch above their weight in terms of representation (like PEI). This is both funny (TSN: Toronto Sports Network) and concerning (current AB and SK alienation). Personally I'm first a Canadian and second a proud Albertan, and find it maddening that like the British Empire treated it colony Canada, so does the country treats us, and the resulting brinksmanship is scary & dangerous.by skeeter2020
- I wonder if anyone remembers the long running computer club that met at the Forest Hill Collegiate on Eglinton Ave in Toronto?
And there was another one in the basement of the old Toronto School Board building (where the new TDSB building now stands) beside Mel Lastman Sq. in Willowdale.
by canada_dry - Toronto still has a Pet User Group (TPUG) which runs the World of Commodore conference every year. https://www.tpug.ca/
It might be the closest thing remaining; though unfortunately I was too young to participate in the hay-day of computer hobby clubs.
by TheCycoONE - All of this was so very inaccessible from North Western Canada. (mind, still is, but Internet makes vast gulfs of space seem so much smaller)
When I could get there, Heathkit (~1200km south) or Radio Shack (wow do I ever miss them carrying electronics!) were go-tos. These days, it's order online or ... nothing, really.
by teunispeters - Heathkit had physical locations? I had only ever seen magazine ads for mail order kits in 73 & QSL etc. A Heathkit store would probably blow my mind. :)
- I didn't grow up in Canada, but I miss these days where the universe of knowledge about computer tech and hardware wasn't impossibly large. It was possible to meet with people in meatspace and have real discussions with them. It's possible now, but it doesn't have the same vibe.by Yhippa
- Also the hardware and software are so complicated, that probably no single person on this earth can carry any 64-bit CPU into his brain -- unlike back in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, good programmers NEED to do that. I think the year 2,000 was sort of the thresh line.
- I got a VIC-20 when I was about 12? Jim Butterfield loomed impossibly large over all things Commodore at that time. One of the first things I typed in on it was his TINYMON, a <1kbyte “monitor” (for some reason resident debuggers were frequently called monitors in early microcomputing) before I had any idea what it was.by buescher
- The "monitor" term is not from early microcomputing but from early computing. I believe that "monitor" referring to a display monitor, and referring to a machine language debugger all have the same origin: they date back to directly monitoring the electrical signals from equipment to observe its workings. The use of "monitoring" in profiling (e.g. gprof and its gmon.out file, etc) is also the same.by kazinator
- for some reason resident debuggers were frequently called monitors in early microcomputing
I think it's more like "for some reason, monitors are called debuggers in later microcomputing."
by reaperducer - I didn't realize he was Canadian - as a child I got so much mileage out of Machine Language for the Commodore 64[0]. I used to think of my program, get out sheets of graph paper and flip through a table of opcodes I wanted to use, get their decimal rep, and write out the list of numbers in a long column, then go to my computer and POKE them into place and watch a spite come to life, or the screen change colour. So much fun had with that book.
[0] https://archive.org/details/Machine_Language_for_the_Commodo...
by bch - Sad that there is no mention or depiction of Canada's own magazine of that era, ''Electron''. It was commonly found alongside the big U.S. electronics periodicals like those shown here. Electron was a mainstay right up to the mid-1970s when it suddenly transitioned to ''Audio Scene Canada'', laden with glossy ads and a tight focus upon HiFi music products but no longer catering to the hobbyist or general electronics fields. I cancelled my subscription.by cf100clunk
- For a close second here's a 1985 issue of the TPUG Magazine [1], from the Toronto PET Users Group. I attended a few meetings of the Niagara Commodore Users Group and spent all of my paper-route and fruit-picking income on arcade games and my C64 system.
[1] https://www.tpug.ca/tpug-media/tpugmag/TPUG_Issue_15_1985_Ju...
by foofoo55