Any old timers?

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  1. whs
    Posts : 26,210
    Vista, Windows7, Mint Mate, Zorin, Windows 8
       #21

    Hmm, interesting to see that there are some people around who remember computers before they became PCs. When I told a kid the other day that I wrote my first program in 1958 on a Zuse Z11, he could not believe that computers were around in those days (they actually were already around 20 years earlier).
    Later (early 60's) I had my hands on IBM/650, 1401 (1200 bytes of RAM, later 4000 bytes), 1440,1460, 7070, 7090 and then IBM/360 and /370. Then they made me a manager and I lost my touch - LOL.
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  2. Posts : 567
    Stools
       #22

    Little Darwin said:
    Runckle said:
    @Little Darwin
    Your very good at keeping people enthralled! Ever thought of becoming a writer?
    It occasionally crosses my mind, but I tend to start projects and never finish them, not a good trait for getting started in a new field. Plus I always have this fear that I will write a book, and never realize that it is a book I read long ago.

    Ironically, I have always loved to read (for some reason I am not doing as much in the last few years) but I always hated English class.

    My outlet is forums. Mostly Bike Forums and now here.

    You don't have to do Fiction. Do Fact based. More interesting anyway!
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  3. Posts : 236
    Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit)
    Thread Starter
       #23

    whs said:
    When I told a kid the other day that I wrote my first program in 1958 on a Zuse Z11, he could not believe that computers were around in those days (they actually were already around 20 years earlier).
    You almost wrote your first program before I was born (1957).

    I started on IBM S360s...

    I thought my experience was ancient.

    Here is something that people who never did it wouldn't consider... Back in the old days, there wasn't enough memory to do a sort in memory and i/o was slow, so for large data entry jobs, we took the cards that the keypunch operators created, and sorted them on a card sorting machine. He had to run the cards through at least once for each column in the sort field.

    Then the sorted cards were merged with the job control language (JCL) cards which were kept in drawers and the deck was loaded in each time a job was scheduled. The schedules were maintained manually, for us it was by checking boxes on a printout that was created every morning by (any guesses?) loading another deck of cards.
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  4. whs
    Posts : 26,210
    Vista, Windows7, Mint Mate, Zorin, Windows 8
       #24

    Yeah, that's why we all grew muscles - from hauling those card boxes (with 2000 cards) around.
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  5. Posts : 236
    Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit)
    Thread Starter
       #25

    And it got more fun if you dropped some cards, since that meant resorting. :)

    And if a card got bent, either in sorting, or in the card reader then we got to recreate the card.
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  6. whs
    Posts : 26,210
    Vista, Windows7, Mint Mate, Zorin, Windows 8
       #26

    Little Darwin said:
    And it got more fun if you dropped some cards, since that meant resorting. :)

    And if a card got bent, either in sorting, or in the card reader then we got to recreate the card.
    And all of that in hexadecimal.
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  7. Posts : 17,545
    Windows 10 Pro x64 EN-GB
       #27

    I can remember how I felt when I got my first Seagate 10MB (read: Ten Megabyte, or 0.01 Gigabyte) hard drive some hundred years ago, mid 80's. It was something like a miracle, I would definitely never need a bigger HD!

    Telling this to todays teenagers is the easiest way to get laughed at. They simply do not believe it.
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  8. Posts : 1,210
    Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (XP, 98SE, 95, 3.11, DOS 7.10 on VM) + Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx
       #28

    Little Darwin said:
    whs said:
    When I told a kid the other day that I wrote my first program in 1958 on a Zuse Z11, he could not believe that computers were around in those days (they actually were already around 20 years earlier).
    You almost wrote your first program before I was born (1957).

    I started on IBM S360s...

    I thought my experience was ancient.

    Here is something that people who never did it wouldn't consider... Back in the old days, there wasn't enough memory to do a sort in memory and i/o was slow, so for large data entry jobs, we took the cards that the keypunch operators created, and sorted them on a card sorting machine. He had to run the cards through at least once for each column in the sort field.

    Then the sorted cards were merged with the job control language (JCL) cards which were kept in drawers and the deck was loaded in each time a job was scheduled. The schedules were maintained manually, for us it was by checking boxes on a printout that was created every morning by (any guesses?) loading another deck of cards.
    I've never used cards, but I guess you'll have to explain what a card is to the kids nowadays. The only cards they see nowadays aren't punched.
    Punched card - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Computer programming in the punch card era - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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  9. Posts : 6,885
    Windows 7 Ultimate x64, Mint 9
       #29

    Haha. This thread was fun to read.

    I graduate HIGH school in... May this year. (That's right, I am 18).

    I have tinkered with computers or electronics my whole life (took apart vacuum cleaners at 18 months old, and put them back together... I think they still worked).
    I don't envy the Punch cards, but I know how hard programming still is today (I took a Java class and learned I SUCK).

    I will stick to hardware

    Just imagine the stories I will tell kids in 30 or 40 years

    ~Lordbob
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  10. Posts : 3,371
    W10 Pro desktop, W11 laptop, W11 Pro tablet (all 64-bit)
       #30

    I graduated high school in 1971 and I certainly remember punch cards and BBSs. I was even a co-sysop for an IBM employee BBS for a couple of years.

    My first programming class in college used punched cards. I hated it and thought programming was stupid and couldn't see why anyone would ever want to be a computer programmer. Now 34 years later I'm a software engineer, go figure!

    At work in 1984, I was a mgr and we had 1 IBM PC to share between 3 mgrs. One of the mgrs wanted to use a new program that just came out, Lotus 1-2-3. Only problem was that it required 256K of RAM and our PC only had 128K. I went down to the parts room and got 18 64k RAM chips (1 chip for each bit + 1 for parity) then stuck them in the machine. Then I had to decipher the user manual to figure out how to set the switches to tell the machine it now had 256K (BIOSs weren't very smart back then you had to tell them everything!). I thought I did pretty good upgrading that PC considering I didn't know how to use it! After that I taught myself to use it and eventually became very proficient at Lotus 1-2-3.

    My first computer was an IBM PC in 1984. I quickly outgrew it and built my first computer a few months later, an 8Mhz "Turbo" XT clone. I paid $500 for a 20M HD!!! I didn't like the clone BIOS so I bought an EPROM programmer, copied the BIOS ROMs from an IBM XT and put them in my clone. My clone thought it was an IBM XT, right down to having cassette BASIC in ROM.

    Before I became a mgr I had worked the previous 7 years as a technician testing IBM 3350 disk drives. These were the type of drives that you would see strings of in computer rooms. A single drive contained 2 HDAs (Head Disk Assembly) referred to as "spindles". Each spindle could store 300M on it's 14 inch platters. A string consisted of 4 machines physically connected together. 4 machines x 2 spindles x 300M = 2.4G of data storage in a single string. I couldn't begin to tell you how many of those drives I tested and debugged but I know that we produced 75,000 of them over the product's lifetime.

    Sorry to be so long-winded but this thread inspired me!
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